Holy Spirit, Vishnu

(11)   Birth announced by pleasing Vishnu Purana, p. 502
sounds from the sky

(12)   Born in an abject and humilia-Hist. Hind., II., 311
ting state in a Cave (Inn, Farm)

(13 Cave filled with light

(14) Angels sang at night

Cox Aryan Myths, II.,
p. 133.

Higgins Anacal., I., 130.
Vishna Finance, 502.
Vishna Purana Tran.

G. H. H. Wilson.

(15)   Spoke to his Mother immediately Hist. Hind., II., 311.
on Birth

(16)   Adored by Cowherds and
Shepherds

Luke i. 28-29, and
Mary Apoc. Gospel,
vii.

Matt. ii. 2.

Mary

Holy Spirit, God
Jehovah.

Lukeii. 13.

Cave still shown at
Bethlehem Apoc.
Gospels   sacred

Cavern. Farrar’s Life
of Christ, 38.

Apoc. Gos. Plot-
evangelicon, Ch. xii.
and xiii.

Luke ii. 8-15.
Shepherds watched
flocks by night.

" Infancy," Apoc.
Gos.

Luke ii. 8-9.

(17)   Magi Guided by Stars

(18)   Earthly Father Carpenter

" Infancy " Apoc.
Gos.

Matt. ii. 2

Matt. xiii. 55.
Markvi. 3.

Matt. ii. 2.

Higgins' Annual, VI.,

129, 130.

Hist, Hind., II.. 256,257.

317, also Vishna Purana.

Wise men examine his
star.

Chas. Morris, Aryan Sun
Myths.

(19)   Costly jewels, precious sub-Sandal Wood & Perfumes,
stances given to him by Magi or Amberley’s Analysis, 177.

Wise Men   Bunsen's Angel-Messiah,

36.

(20)   Bom poor, but of Royal Descent Asiatic Researches, I., 259. Matt, and Luke,

Hist. Hind., II., 310.

(21)   Father away from home paying Vishnu Purana, V., ch. iii. Luke,
tribute or taxes

(22)   Shown in a Manger   Asiatic Researches, I., 259. Luke ii. 7.

(23)   Mother on a journey at an Inn Aryan Sun Myths.

(24)   Preceded by a Forerunner Rama.

Hist. Hind., II.. 316.

(25)   Ruler sought Fore-runner's life Kanza

(34) King slays Fore-runner

(26)   Stayed at Mutarea or Mattura

Hist. Hind., II., 318.
Savery, Egypt, I., 126
Apoc. Infancy.
Higgins Ana., I., 130
Ana., I.. 129.

Mathura is Christina's
Birthplace.

Luke ii. 7.

John Baptist.
Herod.

Matt. xiv.

Markvi. 14.

Farrar's   Life of

Chriet, p. 58. Apoc.
Infancy. Higgins
Anac.%   I.,   130.

Savery's Travels in
Egypt, 1., 126. Hist.
Hind., II., 318.
 282

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

REFERENCES.

IDENTICAL INCIDENTS.   CHRISTNA, CHRISHNA.   CHRIST OR

OR KRISHNA. 800 b.c.   KRISTOS.

(35) Babe*s life preserved

(27)   Very learned when young Hist. Hind.. II.. 321.

(28)   Chosen King by boy companions Hist. Hind., II., 321.

(291 Son of Father’s old age   Vishnu Purana.

(30) Father warned in a dream that J. C. Gangooly, Life and
King or Ruler sought to kill Religion of the Hindoos,
Babe   p. 134.

(311 King   Kansa.

(32)   Father   and   Mother fled   Asiatic Researches, I„

233. 259.

(33)   Slaughter of Innocents, so as to Gangooly, p. 134. Sculp-

include Divine Babe   ture in Caves of Elephanta

(very old).

Co*. II.. 134.

Hist. Hind.. II., 331

(361 Made   Fish   Ponds   No mention of this.

(37)   Struck dead a boy who broke ..   „   ., ,,

Fish Pond

(38)   Miracles. These are of little Hist. Hind., II., 319
interest, as all Gods, Demi-gods, Raised the dead, etc.
Apostles, Prophets, and even

Witches and Sorcerers, did all
kinds of miracles, but Chrishna
and Christ perform the same
nature of miracles, one of the
first of which is curing a Leper.

The only radical difference is the
mention of fish in the case of
Jesus, and not in that of Krishna

(39)   Beginning of Religious Life. Moncure D. Conway,

Fasted.   Siamese Life of Buddha,

p. 44. 172, and 173. Fo
Heng of Prof. S.

(40)   Tempted of the Devil. Offered Bunsen’s Angel Messiah,

Empire of the world.   38, 39 ; Beal Hardy, and

others.

(41)   Reproves Satan   Ditto

(42)   Anointed by poor woman Hist. Hind., II., 320

Li

!431 Twelve Apostles or Disciples   Aryan Sun Myths.

44) Chose two Fishers (Simon and No fish or Fishers
Andrew)   mentioned.

(45) Chose two Fishers (Jpmes and Ditto
John)

(461 Two Ships   Ditto

(47) Chooses Simon, James, and Ditto
John, fishers

(48) Miraculous draft of   Fishes   Ditto

(491 Fishers (Apostles)   Ditto

(50)   Feeds 5,000 men besides women
and children on five loaves and
two fishes   Ditto

(51)   Tribute money from   Fishes   Ditto

mouth

(52)   Fed 4,000—seven loaves and Small cakes—no Fish,
few small fishes   Aryan Sun Myths.

Infancy Apoc., Ch.

Infancy Apoc., Ch.
*viii.

Gospels.

Matt. ii. 13.

Herod.
Matt. ii. 13.

Matt. ii. 16.

Matt, ii., etc.
Gospels
Apoc. Infancy.

Matt. viii. 2
Raised the dead, etc.

Matt. iv. 1-11.

Matt, iv., Luke i. 12,
Luke iv.

Ditto

Matt. xxvi. 6, Mark
xiv. 3, Luke vii. 37,
John xii., 3.

All Gospels.

Matt. iv. 18

Matt. iv. 21, John i.
42.   ” Simon, Son

of Jona."

Luke vi. 14

Luke v. 6, John xxi.
6.

Matt. iv. 18, Mark i.
16, Luke v., John
xxi. 7.

Matt. xiv. 15, xv. 32.
Matt, xvii. 27.

Matt. xv. 34.
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

283

REFERENCES.

IDENTICAL INCIDENTS.   CHRISTNA, CHRISHNA,

OR KRISHNA. 800 b.c.

(53) Bruiting Head of Serpent   Asiatic Researches. I.

Higgins Anac.. II.

Bunsen's Angel Messiah.

(54)   Transfigured before Disciples ^Williams* Hinduism.

p. 215.

(55)   Meekest and best-tempered of Monier Williams’

beings   Hinduism, p. 144.

(56) Alpha and Omega   Geeta Lect.. X.. p. 85

(57)   Crucified with arms extended ; Moor's Hindu Pantheon
marks on hands, feet, and side. Inman's Ancient Faiths.

Vol. I., p 411.

(58)   Sun darkened at Crucifixion ; Prog. Relig. Ideas, I., 71
consoled thief and hunter

(59)   Pierced   Arrow. Vish. Pur., p. 162.

(60) Descended into Hell   Bonwick's Egyptian Belief,

168. Indian Antiquities.
II.. 85.

(61)   Rose from the Dead

(62)   Ascended into Heaven

Dupui's Origin of Reli-
gious Beliefs, 240. Hig-
gins* Ana. II.. 142, 145.
Bonwick's Egyptian Belief,
168. Asiatic He., I.. 259.

261.

CHRIST OR
KRISTOS.

Corinthians Revela-
tions, etc.

Matt, xvii., Mark ix.
2, Luke ix. 29, John
i. 14. 2 Peter 1. 16
John xiii.

Rev. i. 8-11, xxii. 13
xxi. 6.

Gospels.

Matt. xxii.

Matt, xxviii. Creed.
Mark xvi., Luke
xxiv., John xx.

Mark xvi. 9, Luke
xxiv. 51, Acts i. 9.

(63)   Many saw him ascend   Hist. Hind., II.. 466-473. Gospels.

Prog. Rel. Ideas. I., 172.

(64)   Come again ; Warrior on White Hist. Hind., I., 497, 503. Revelations vi. 2.
Horse ; Sun and Moon will be Williams' Hinduism, 108.

darkened ; Stars will fall from Prog. Rel. Ideas, I.. 75.

Firmament

(65)   Judge on Last Day   Oriental Religions,   Matt. xxiv. 31.

p. 504.   Romans xiv. 10.

(66)   Had a Beloved Disciple. Arjuna Arjuna, Bhagavat.   John.

was both the cousin and beloved   John xiii. 23.

Apostle of Chrishna ; but Jesus These two names are really identical,
had two Johns, John the Baptist
his cousin, and John the Beloved
Apostle

(67) Creator of all things   Gheeta, p. 52.

(68)   Transfigured shining light bright Williams' Hinduism,

cloud   p. 215.

(69)   Second person in Trinity Ancient of Days, Brama

Eternal one far off.

God on Earth Chrishna

John i. 3, I. Cor. viii.
6, Eph. iii. 9.

Matt. xvii. 1-6.

Ancient of Days,
Father Eternal one
far off.

Son Christ. God on
Earth.

Vishnu, Fertile principle.
Female symbol Dove.

(70)   After Resurrection eats Fried No fish reference,
or Broiled Fish

(71)   After Resurrection causes Ditto
miraculous draft of Fishes

(72)   Light of the World   Williams' Hinduism,

p. 213.

(73) Predicts his own Death   Hist. Hindostan, II., 275.

(74) Walking over a river or sea   Hist. Hindostan, II., 331.

Holy Ghost Ruach,
Fertile principle,
Female symbol Dove
Luke xxiv. 42-43.
John xxi. 13.

John xxi. 6.

John viii. 12.

Gospels.

Matt. xiv. 25-27.
 284   CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

1 might have put at the head of this table the name of the Indian
god as sometimes spelled Christna. It is quite possible that the
name applied to Jesus, viz.: Christ was derived from the Indian
name, or that both descend from a common source.

In dealing with the life of Krishna, Chrishna, or Christna, all
Christian writers are prepared to admit that it is simply a sun myth.
The young babe born from the virgin dawn, Maya, in a cave—
the dark East before sunrise, his struggles with the enemies of
winter—cruel winter (personified by Kanza and Herod), which kills
so many innocents by cold every year, of Royal descent—son of
the sun, as were all Eastern monarchs, birth announced by a star—
Venus before sunrise,—adored by agriculturists who are dependent
on the sun for their crops, performs miracles, raises the dead—all
life depends on the sun, makes the blind see—the sun is the light
of the world—and is darkened at his death, eclipse, or sunset,
descended into hades (night), or winter, rose again every morning
or annually at the solstice,—is passed over or crossed over, or
crossified, or crucified over the equator to bring paradise or the
garden of summer, to save mankind, as, without the summer’s sun,
man would perish,—Saviour of the world; for without the sun
universal death would reign. As the facts in the life of Jesus are
identical, his life is also the sun myth.

Jesus was, in the gospels, slain, as the Lamb of God, at the
Jews’ equinoctial feast of the pass-over, which had nothing to do
with their apocryphal sojourn in Egypt and the slaughter of the
first bom, but purely Babylonian, the word Pascha is Akkadian
(p. 304) or Chaldean. (“ Catholic Dictionary,” Addis and Arnold.)
The feast was held, as all spring festivals were, to celebrate the
coming of summer by the pass-over of the sun over the equator
from the winter coldness to summer warmth at the Spring Equinox.
This slaying of the lamb, or ram, was performed because, at the
Spring Equinox, the sun was in Aries, the Constellation of the
Lamb, which was thus obliterated, or sacrificed, or burnt up in the
sun’s rays, as, of course, the stars are invisible by day—hence,
” burnt ” offerings.

The pass-over referred to the sun’s passing the equator to make
a paradise, or garden, to all nations in the Northern Hemisphere,
where all such religions had their rise, and to save mankind from
the eternal death which would ensue by a perpetual winter. This
was called the crossing over or crucifying of the Saviour, long before
the time of Jesus.

The term ” Christ,” the anointed one, applied to all kings, high
priests, and to anyone to whom anointing by the ” Chrism ” or
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

285

holy oil was applied, may have been a Greek work derived from
Chrinoi, to anoint, used instead of Messiah, or it may be Christna
minus the last syllable. By translating Messiah literally, as
son of Jah, an effete tribal god, the Christian position would
have been rendered ridiculous in the eyes of all the world, except
the Jews, so he was referred to as ** the anointed one,** or a later
Christna.

The Jewish God, Jah, or Iah, which we call Jehovah or Yahweh,
was enshrined in the very core and fibre of the Jewish nature, as
we see by the hundreds of names in the Old Testament ending in
Iah. We have very early Eli-jah ; or Eli is Iah, or Ale-im is
Yahweh, Elohim is Jehovah—or, if we follow the Bible mis-transla-
tion, God is our Lord. We pronounce this word Elijah, El-eye-jah,
instead of Eli-yah, the i short as in ” pin.** Then there is Baal-jah,
Baal is Jah, Isa-iah, or Isa is Jah, whom we erroneously call
Eye-say-ah, instead of Eesah-yah, its true pronunciation. This was
at one time an almost universal rule in making names, as shown
by the crowd of Old Testament names—Ahaz-iah, Azar-iah,
Hanan-iah, Asa-iah, Yeda-iah, Hesek-iah, Jerem-iah, etc., all
** lovers,** servants, or followers of Iah, Jah, or Jehovah. But
the Son of God, the Saviour, who was to descend from heaven
and found the universal Jewish Kingdom, was the actual son really
born of lah the Mess-iah.

This word Mess was universal all over Western Asia, as mean-
ing 44 son of,” 44 out of,” or 44 out of the middle of,*’ or merely
44 in the middle of,” as in Mesopotamia, 4‘in the middle of the
rivers/4 from the Greek form Mesos.

In Egypt this word was used in the sense of 44 out of,” meaning
44 born of,” as we still say in the pedigree of horses, etc., and was

derived from a very old hieroglyphic or ideogram   which

originally was a picture of a woman standing, and being delivered
of a child. The Egyptian Thet, or Buckle, showing bi-sexual pro-
duction of life, is parallel to this.

This symbol Mess is invariably used when Egyptian Kings claim
to be the son of the supreme god, as when Raineses is written
Ra-Mes; the second “es” is not always in the name, and the
Egyptians had a habit of emphasising an important word by
doubling it. So Raineses should be Ramess, son of Ra the Sun, or
Supreme God. Even the Greek Ptolemy seems to have had his
name corrupted (the Greeks were great sinners in this respect, often
rendering names unrecognisable) from Ptah-mess or Son of Ptah,
then supreme god of Egypt, to Ptolemy.

The doubling of the “ s ” is a common practice in all languages.
 266

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

There is no rule ; the single or double is quite arbitrary. It is even
tripled in some cases—reading Ra-mes-es-es and sometimes

omitted, Ra 0 ^ mes giving Ra-mes, and Ra-messu. When

used with Thoth or Tehuti or Aah it is often doubled, but never
pronounced. We have simply Thoth-mes, Tehuti-mes, Aah-mes
(son of the moon), son of Thoth, Tehuti, or Aah. The corrupt
popular pronunciation of Ramess as Rameses is no doubt due to
Greek transmission, as the Greeks were great corruptors of names.

The word Mess, meaning out of the middle of,” has also a
meaning of the ” divider ” or opener, just as Eden might be
described as dividing the rivers, instead of ” between ” or ” in
the midst of the rivers,” and we find that the Phallic Baal, so much
worshipped by the Hebrews, bears the Phallic meaning of the
opener or the Phallus. The great Phallic Greek and Roman gods
were all called ” openers of the womb.” Pylades and Orestes took
their god for a witness Mesitis ” in the middle ”—the same method
of swearing as used by Abraham. So the Mess-jah was the actual
son begotten of Yahweh.

Bishop Hawes admits " that God should in some extraordinary
manner visit and dwell with man is an idea which, as we read the
writings of ancient heathens, meets us in a thousand different
forms.” Not only were Messiahs expected by the old nations, as
Bunsen showed in his "Angel Messiah,” but the ignorant of
modem nations still hold the idea, as we see from the Times of
13th December, 1910, where, writing of the popular hero, Premier
of Greece, M. Venezelos, the correspondent says:—" He is wel-
comed as the Saviour or Regenerator of Greece, and has even been
compared with the long expected Messiah.”

Celestial origins, through immaculate conception, were attri-
buted to anyone who distinguished himself in some striking manner,
or were claimed by anyone who sat on a throne. Greek and
Roman Kings who sat on the throne of Egypt, such as the Greek
Ptolemy Soter, “ Son of God the Saviour,” or the Latin Autokrator
Kisares, the Autocratic Lord of the earth, the Kaisar of the
Germans.

But even the word Auto-krator makes the divine Claim, as it is
derived from Autos ” self ” and Kratos ” strength,” or even
” life,” really meaning ” self created,” that is, a God. “ Krator,”
a vase, was the symbol of the womb—the creator of all life (see
Figs. 38, <39 and 90 (PP. 63, 101).

That the New Testament was composed and edited by a sect
who wished to make a clear break off from the Old Testament, is
evident from the total change of language, and especially of
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

287

names. It was not written in Jerusalem, but in Greek
countries, Alexandria, and Asia Minor, or Latin Rome, and the
Jah of the Hebrews would have been treated with contempt there,
so he is never mentioned. Even the word Messiah, " Son of Iah,”
or Yahweh is rendered *' Christ,” so as to cut the connection. In-
stead of names ending in Iah, or Baal, or Bosheth, we have neutral
names, like those of the twelve apostles, which contain only the
Akkadian God, Johannes, John, and the beloved Tammuz, as
Thomas ; but no Jahs.

We have Latin terminations, like Lazarus, Theophilus,
Cornelius, Crispus, Nicodemus; or Graeco-Egyptians like
Sosthenes, the chief of the Synagogue, Aquilla, Priscilla, and
Sceva, James, Stephen, Paul, Barnabas, Simevu ; but no Iah. This
suggests a concocted document, not national history.

and earth, the final destruction of evil and abolition of hell; yet
none of these have impressed Western nations as have the Hebrew
prophets. This was probably because they were ignorant of any
writings but those imposed on them by the Romans, who, when
they ceased to be military masters of Europe, always remained
our masters in letters and religion.

The Romans, in their guidance of the formation of the Christian
cult, adopted into its practices all the old feasts, superstitions, and
godlets, or saints, already existing in Europe, and they were for-
tunate in finding 44 Hesus ’* or 44 Jesus the Mighty’4 installed from
remote times as the Druidical god all over Europe and in Britain ; so
they appeared to teach every man his own religion in a more clearly
defined form.

The great cause, however, lay in the mirologue of the Christians
established by Jerome, that they brought to man the official book
of religion—every word of which was directly written by thd%ternal
God and was his message to mankind. Once the divine origin of
these crude writings was set up, the mirophily of the people found
the food on which the superstitious side of man’s mind lives.

But, five hundred years before Jesus, the humanising teaching
of Prince Siddartha, the Gottama or Buddha, had sunk deep into
the Indian mind, and rapidly spread east and west until finally it
reached Judea.

As Dr. Carpenter puts it: 44 When Ezra and his helpers com-
piled and published the Law and wrote the 4 Eye for an eye, tooth
for tooth ’ maxim, and incorporated it in the Levitical Code, as
4 he who has caused a blemish in a man so shall it be rendered unto
him,* the Indian sage had a generation before written:

44 Let a man leave anger, let him forsake pride, let him over-
come all bondage. He who holds back rising anger like a rolling
chariot, him 1 call a real driver.

44 Let a man overcome anger by love ; let him overcome evil
by good, let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by
truth.

44 He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me ;
in those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease. For
hatred does not cease by hatred at any time, hatred ceases by
love.**

It took many hundred years for this philosophy to penetrate into
Judea, and to be reproduced by Jesus, and introduced into the
New Testament.
 PART III

Ancient Cults in the New Testament

CHAPTER I

THE NEW TESTAMENT EXAMINED.

PHALLIC AND ASTRONOMICAL SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN

TEACHING

In comparing the New Testament with the Old we are met with
a totally different sort of literature. In the old we had a rough
history of an old, uncivilised people, written with the view of show-
ing that they were under the personal guidance of their own tribal
God, who won their battles for them. Him they honestly trapped
out with all the usual savage attributes and thunderings, to make
him “ terrible.*’ In fact, we have here the full expression of the
early religions of all savages, a pure, unadulterated ** reign of
terror ” or religion of “ fear.” This religion was that inculcated by
the priests, to keep the people in subjection.

But the people heard of other Gods, really the mirrored re-
flections of their own happy nature, when not overshadowed by
the great God of Fear and Trembling,—and the Old Testa-
ment is in great part employed in showing us the terrible
sin of these poor people, preferring to worship love, instead
of fear or hatred, just as George Eliot imagines Cain doing,
when the Terrible One accepted Abel’s sacrifice of blood and
death, and rejected Cain’s offering of beauty and sunshine, em-
bodied in the fruits and flowers, of which the Man of Sorrow said,
” Solomon in aU his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
 CHRISTIANITY

271

When Cain had fled from Yahweh,

” Who walks unseen but leaves a track of pain.

Pale Death his footprint is, and he will come again ;

He sought some fair strand,

Ruled by kind Gods who asked no offerings,

Save pure field fruits, as aromatic things,

To feed the subtler sense of frames divine.

That lived on fragrance for their food and wine;

With joyous Gods who winked at faults and folly.

And could be pitiful and melancholy.

He never had a doubt that such Gods were;

He looked within and saw them mirrored there.”

The New Testament is such a curious mixture of the oIcTjewish
idea of the necessity of some innocent person’s death, to obtain
forgiveness for sins, the awful Yahweh’s requiring a draught of
blood, like an African savage’s Ju Ju, and the gentle teaching of
the prince, who threw up a kingdom to try to ameliorate the lot of
the poor and suffering that it is extremely difficult to extract
and reconstruct the teaching of the gentle Ebionite or Essene,
Jesus, the far-off echo of Siddartha (Gotama) from the debris of
the ancient Jewish cults on the one hand, and the poisonous
sophistry of the creators of the official Christianity, which grew
up during the three centuries after the Galilean teacher had
delivered his anti-Javistic message of humanity and gentleness.

The mental development of the two men followed, however,
exactly contrary courses. Siddartha was born a prince, and began
as a high ascetic, but became gradually humanized, and taught,
at last, pure kindness, pity, and humanity. Jesus, on the other
hand, began lowly, with gentle teaching, but became convinced
that he was destined to re-establish the Jewish Kingdom, and would
be physically aided by angels sent from heaven to overturn the
Romans by supernatural means. He would be the new King, dis-
pensing with Royal hand his bounties to those who had belived in
him and encouraged him.

, See how, in Markka., when Peter, in verse 28, told how much
he had sacrificed in worldly position to follow Jesus, he answered,
29-30, " Verify I say unto you, there is no man that hath left house
or brethren or sisters, or father or mother, or wife or children, or
lands for my sake (and the gospels) but shall receive an hundred-
 272

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

fold now in this time houses and brethren and sisters and mothers
and lands,” some later hand adducing ” with persecutions; and
in the world to come eternal life.” Note the words, “ and the
Gospelsfor the Gospels were written centuries later. These last
words are an attempt to turn a would-be emancipator’s promises
to his followers—of rewards, land, and houses, ” Now, in this
time ”—into a Mullah’s promises of the rewards in Paradise. The
” with persecution ” and ” eternal life ” phrases are especially
typical, and are apparendy placed there to spiritualise the promise
of ” houses ” and ” land,” the invariable gifts of all successful
emancipators to their patriotic friends and helpers. (See also Luke
xviii. 28-30.) As this meant throwing off the Roman yoke, it is no
wonder that the Romans suppressed him.

In spite of the refusal by the Bishops to grant the prayer of a
petition of two thousand of the best of the Church of England
Clergy, asking that the same freedom of criticism might be applied
to the New Testament as had so clearly elucidated the true char-
acter of the Old, the criticism of the New Testament, once taboo,
is gaining ground. The old dogma is dying, even amongst the
parsons, and they are falling back on the old Roman Catholic line
of defence of an infallible church.

The Rev. S. Baring Gould says: ” The claims of the Pentateuch
rest on tradition that springs out of the conjectures of certain
obscure lawyers of the third century B.C., whose very names are
forgotten,” but he still claims, without proof, that these incom-
petent scribes " performed their task on the authority of a church
animated by the Holy Ghost.” This view is pure popery, and all
other Scriptures can make the equally valid claim.

Sir Robert Anderson, one of the few whose robust orthodoxy
is still proof against any and all reasoning in these domains, justly
states the position of the ” Lux Mundi ” school as follows:—

” The Bible is not infallible, but the Church is infallible, and
upon the authority of the Church our faith can find a sure founda-
tion. But how do we know that the Church is to be trusted?
The ready answer is, we know it upon the authority of the Bible.
That is to say, we trust the Bible on the authority of the Church,
and we trust the Church on the authority of the Bible. It is a bad
case of the confidence trick.” (” The Silence of God,” 1898, p. 92.)

At the time when the teaching of Siddartha had reached Pales-
tine, through the Ebionites or Essenes, and had been combined by
Jesus with the idea of a Jewish Messiah, who would establish the
rule of Yahweh all over the earth, the Jews received the blow which
shattered their great dream, expelled them from their holy-land.
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

273

and finally crushed their ideas of an earthly kingdom (see p. 147).
All their writers then turned to the consolation of the new idea of
a glorious resurrection, and of a new Zion beyond the skies. That
which was now hopelessly unattainable in the ruins of the old Jeru-
salem, with its Temple destroyed, its Holy Scriptures removed, and
its inhabitants in bondage, was to be realised in the New Jeru-
salem, to and from which Jesus and the angels so easily ascended
and descended, and to which the “ saints ” were to be caught up,
as promised by Paul. At first this idea was a hybrid one, namely,
a New Zion on earth, though in a future time. In the twinkling of
an eye all was to be changed. The hated Romans would disappear
or turn to Yahweh worship, and the new Kingdom would be a
reconstruction as a Garden of Eden, an earthly paradise or garden.
The earliest books of Apologetic Christianity all inculcate this idea ;
but gradually it is abandoned, and the final dogma of spiritual
salvation through faith in Jesus, now called the Christ or
“ anointed one,** is set up.

There were two main causes of this change. The one was the
death of the promised Messiah, the Crucifixion of the **King of
the Jews ** shattering the hopes of an immediate Kingdom; and
the second was the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and
the deportation of the Jewish population by the Romans. This
took place in A.D. 70, just when Jesus had been long enough dead
for his memory to begin to be encrusted with miracles, and his
teaching to become sacred, as we have seen in the case of
Mahommed!

The earthly Messiah idea had received a rude blow by the
death of Jesus, but his return as a conqueror, with his Father's
heavenly hosts, was beginning to be looked for. This immediate
second earthly advent, with its idea of a New Jewish Kingdom,
received its death-blow, when the Romans under Titus Kaisar
(paesar) in A.D. 70, utterly destroyed the Temple in the second year
of. Vespasian's reign. Subsequently Hadrian drew a plough-share
over the sacred ground, as a sign of perpetual injunction.

Titus carried away the Ark of the Covenants and Golden Candle-
sticks, and Josephus, we know, sent all the sacred books to Rome.
The whole race was banished from Palestine, and many were de-
ported to Rome, where they were treated as slaves, and built the
Coliseum and the Pyramid of Caius Sextus, both of which were
constructed by forced Jewish labour. It is even told that the
Coliseum was decorated with spoil from the Temple of Jerusalem,

Constantine later put the Ark, and the Golden Candlestick with
its seven lamps, in the Church now called St. John Lateran.
(*# Rome and its Story,** p. 89.)

T
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CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

But what I wish to convey is that at the psychological moment,
when the story of Jesus’ teachings was beginning to take form,
and when a true account might have been written, the whole
Jewish nation was dispersed and driven all over the Levant and
Mediterranean towns; and it was not for several years after this
event that fragments of stories about Jesus began to be written
down, and “ epistles ” composed, explaining what the writers
understood as the real teaching of Jesus.

In the “Conflict of Religion in the early Roman Empire,” Mr.
Glover says that “ Towards the end of the First Century of our
era there began to appear a number of little books, written in the
ordinary Greek of every-day life—the language which the common
people used in conversation and correspondence. It was not
literary dialect, not intended for a lettered public; but for plain
people who wanted a plain story.”

These little books appeared in a sporadic manner, as the writers
were the expelled Jews—wanderers in alien countries or returned
to a changed Judea.

The tale they tell is, on the whole, a simple one of the teaching
of this essene or ebionite, beginning already to become encrusted
with miracle, but still holding the old Jewish idea of the God’s
abode as in the days of Jacob, when he saw the ” Yahue of the
A16-im ” of Abraham, and Ale-im of Isaac standing at the top
of a ladder which reached up to a ” hole in the sky ” (Sho’r ha
Shamim), and the angels (or Chiefs, as Malakim would be properly
translated) going up and down the ladder.

This Heaven was the dread abode of the wrathful Yahweh, and
no Queen of Heaven shared his throne. The Christian Jews, in
giving Jesus the companionship of Mary Magdalene (p. 297), intro-
duced the pagan idea of the Goddess of Love—” she has much
loved.” But the Christian Church was still dominated by the curse
of Eden idea, a curse supposed to be caused by woman, and so.it
remained the only Church which did not set up a Trinity of Father,
Mother, and Son, but modified the female part of it into a dove or
Holy Ghost, or Ark (still feminine). The puritan protestant revival
of the time of Milton was saturated with the stern condemnation
of woman. In Milton’s heaven there is no mention of woman.
The dove was invariably the symbol of^Melitta, Aphrodite, and
Venus, the great Goddesses of Love and Fertility, and as the dove
was often represented as a tie between the Father and Son (the
only possible tie being the Mother, p. 167) the dogmatic trinity was
only a symbolic modification of the universal Anthropological
Trinity of Father, Mother, and Son.
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

275

All nations seem to have imagined a sole creator of the uni-
verse, then, finding him lonely, to have given him a wife and son
(Budge). So all Gods had a female counterpart, her name being
obtained in Babylonian, Egyptian, and other Eastern nations, by
adding the female affix " at *' or simply '* t " to the name of the
Male God. Dr. Wallis Budge, head of the Egyptian section of the
British Museum, says in his 44 Gods of the Egyptians," that 44 Ra "
and 44 Amen94 and other gods possessed female counterparts,
44 Rat99 and "Ament,9* rarely mentioned in the texts. 44 Man
always has fashioned his gods in his own image, and has always
given to his Gods wives and offspring." So, at last, in the myth
built round Jesus, under Greek and Egyptian influence, the great
Yahweh was provided with a wife and son, but the new idea was
hampered by the Old Testament despisal of women, and for long
the Virgin Mary was not recognised as belonging to the Heavenly
Hierarchy, and is not yet, by severe protestants, though the
Mariolatry of the Roman Catholic Church is gradually restoring
the ancient happy and natural Trinity.

Cardinal Wiseman gave his name to a certain 44 Golden Manual,"
and, on page 649, he gives the following versicle and response:
44 V. The God himself created her in the Holy Ghost and poured
her out among all his works. V.O. Our Lady hear,99 etc.; so
that the Virgin Mary is the Holy Ghost and the third person of the
Trinity, and the only difference between Roman Catholicism and
all pagan religions has been removed.

Cardinal Newman also pointed out that the question of the
inclusion of Mary in the Trinity was not settled at the Nicene Con-
ference (see p. 321), and pleads for her recognition.

The Roman Catholic Church has re-established the old Queen
of Heaven of Asia, by decreeing that their doctrine is that
the Virgin Mary saw no corruption, i.e., did not die, but was
carried up to Heaven, body and soul, and is now invested with all
power in Heaven and in earth. (Exit El Shadai, Yahveh, Aleim,
etc. The “ ancient of days ” has finally faded away. Even Jesus
takes second place.) The Roman Catholic Church took over all
the myths and godlets and feasts of the Pagan, and even adver-
tised the Phallic organ of worship on the doors of St. Peter’s.
Payne Knight, p. 186, says: ”Hence the obscene figures observ-
able on many of the Gothic Churches, and particularly upon the

If UK WITH STOLE.

Fig. 116

ancient doors of St. Peter’s at Rome, where there are some groups
which rival the devices on the Lesbian medals” (see p. 88).

All the Church vestments, symbols, altars, bells, and towers,
are Phallic.

Mr. Stadisland Wake, in the ’’Anthropological Journal” of
July, 1870, p. 286, says: ” The fundamental basis of Christianity
is more purely Phallic than that of any other religion now existing,
and its emotional nature shows how intimately it was related to the
older faiths which had a Phallic basis,” and ” the Phallic is the
only foundation on which an emotional religion can be based.”

We have looked into the case of the Pallium.

The priests wear the ” stole,” which is the name of the Roman

S
 258

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

Matron’s gown; so the man becomes bi-sexual, or symbolical of
the Lingam-Yoni combination. The Priests' petticoats are usually
decorated with costly lace, a chief distinction of women’s garments.

All the subordinates in Church worship are clothed with frocks,
or surplices, the double sex thus produced being symbolical of the
Creative God, as all early religions taught that two sexes were re-
quired for creation (see p. 173).

The pyx is a vessel shaped like a Phallus containing oil (fertility),
and is, indeed, the Phallus as shown by its name and Hardy’s poem
(p. 56). Combined with the Monstrance, the almond-shaped female
symbol, they form the usual bi-sexual symbol of eternal life (pp. 61
and 215).

The Pyx was kissed by the people in the time of Richard II.
(1380) like the Pope’s “toe.” Anyone touching it except at wor-
ship was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered,—a penalty similar to
that imposed for looking into the Hebrew ark (p. 219). The Mon-
strance was also very sacred, and was the receptacle for the Host—
a portion of the body of Jesus (male like the pyx) and so the Mon-
strance was female, the two forming a bisexual creative symbol or
emblem.

The Pyx is used for extreme unction (or oiling) at death by
dropping oil on the dying to insure their soul’s life.

In India the pyx has the actual form of the phallus and the Mon-
strance, which contains it, is a dove mother of God, Venus, Militta,
Mary, etc.

Just as the Hebrews and all other nations, such as the Hindus
to-day, dropped oil on their stone phalli to symbolise its power to
implant the seeds of life, like living phalli, so the Pyx is a phallus
used to drop oil or soma on the dying man to implant the seeds of
eternal life in his departing soul.

Both were emblems of God in his highest function, and hence
extremely holy. They are also extremely valuable when designed,
as they often were, by great masters. Recently, July 1912, a mon-
strance described as a Pyx but formed of a dove in a battlemented
heaven with a lid on its back, hence a female emblem (“ Tabernacle
of God,’’ and house of the masculine Pyx), designed by Leonardi da
Vinci, in copper gilt, was sold at Christie’s for £3255.—-“111. London
News,” 6th July, 1912.

The candles represent Phalli, the flame representing sexual fire
(Fig. 30, p. 59), but they have another descent from Persian fire
worship, as temple symbol of the great life-giver the sun.

The spire is the Phallus. In Roman Catholic countries it was
not a “ glorified roof,’’ as Ruskin calls it, and it Stood not on the
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

259

church, but beside it, as we see in Florence, Venice, and other
Cathedrals, as a bell tower or campanile. It was the Church’s
“ Ishi,” or husband; as the Church is the “Ark of God,” the
delphic “Queen of Heaven,” and is always feminine. The dome
on the other types of Church is the om, womb, nave, navis, ship, or
ark of life, always symbolical of Isis, or the womb, and the central
mast or spire is the Phallus, or erect one, so the finished structure
is the Lingam-Yoni altar of India.

The High Church clergy who delight in “ The Mysteries,” and
go into the Rhapsodies, as Cardinal Newman does on the Virgin,
” the Mother of Fair Love,” are those who wish to introduce the
confessional for young girls with its libidinous questionary into the
Church of England (p. 327).

The * ’ Three-in-one, ” “ Incomprehensible Mystery ’ * of the
Creed, referred to at pp. 24 and 155, is, like the Fleur-de-lys, a
common feature in the coats of arms of old families all over Christen-
dom. Fig. 117 shows the common form. Here we have the
female Ark floating on the waters of fertWty (see Fig. % on p. 162),
and the phallic symbol of male fertility, the triple crossed dagger,
producing life. The Three-in-one is the most sacred “ mystery ”
of the Christians and is the modern “ Pyx and Monstrance,” or
“ Ark and Testimony ” of the past, for touching which the punish-
ment was death. As a family talisman, it means good fortune,
numerous children, and eternal bliss. The triple cross is the same
as the trident of the Greeks and Romans, the Ivy leaf of Bacchus,
the Trisool of the Hindus, or the Fleur-de-lys of France and the
Broad Arrow of Britain (pp. 23, 24, 162, 238).

Fig. 117

This figure shows the phallic significance of the Christian Cross.
It is often shown as a cross in the heavens representing the sun
fertilising the earth as a crescent, barque, or corackle, hence it
is the same as the Broad Arrow with the “Logos” (p. 155), or
“message of Hernies ” descending, bringing life from heaven to
earth. It is the reverse of the phallus in Fig. 2, p. 30 on
grave stones, which represents the spirit or soul ascending.
The Christians adopted the Cross from the male-worshipping Jews,
with the sun as their God-day, while the Mohamadans adopted
the female crescent and their God-day is Jumah, or Venus’s day

(p. 108).
 CHAPTER IV

SUN WORSHIP IN THE OLD TESTAMENT.

MeLCHISIDEK is a Sun-God, and his life is the year or one round
of the sun. He lives 365 years (days), is without father or mother,
and without descent, knowing neither beginning of days nor end of
life, ” Does not die,” but was translated and begins another year.

He was a sage,—the inventor of astronomy, astrology, arith-
metic, and writing. He represents the year, is keeper of the time
and seasons, or dates. His life is the number of 365 days in the
year, expressed as years.

The Hebrew Patriarch, Enoch, did not die like the others at
600 or 900 years, but was translated, or disappeared, ” for God
took him ” when he was 365 years old. He is the year, or a Sun-
God, an echo of Melchizedek. That Jesus was a priest ” after the
order of Melchizedek ” is emphasised by the apparently useless
repetition of the phrase seven times in Hebrews. This repetition
was to emphasise a secret announcement to the initiated that Jesus
was a sun-god (p. 314). Samson, Job, Daniel, and many others are
fragments of the sun myth.

The Rev. Sir George Cox, in his great work on the " Life of
Colenso,” tells us that, ” In Josiah’s temple stood vessels made for
the Sun and Moon, Baal and Asherah, and for the Host of Heaven.”
Thus we see that Solar and Phallic faiths went hand in hand, but
Phallic was the elder and beloved by the people, being a faith
they could understand, while Solar worship came only at a higher
state of development, and, although it became the Official Priestly
religion in many countries, it never replaced the Phallic cult with
the common people. We will now briefly touch on the Solar
religion as revealed in Holy writ.

As astronomers, the Babylonians (p. 119), from whom the
Hebrews got most of their religious ideas, were the wonder of
surrounding nations, and kept accurate data of the motions of the
moon and planets. In India also astronomy had reached a fairly
high standard, and so also in Egypt, but the rude Highland clan
of Hebrews knew nothing of these things, and mutilated all astro-
nomical myths till they are scarcely recognisable. I need not go
into the facts of the widespread nature of Solar worship, as 1 have
 CHRISTIANITY

261

already done that (pp. 104, 137; alao p. 178), but the Bible itself shows
that it was not only Kings like Manasseh who worshipped sun,
moon, and all the host of Heaven, as we have the statement re-
peated very often in the prophets* scoldings. It is curious to read
that even the reforming Josiah had to erect vessels and symbols for
sun and moon, Baal and Ashtaroth, after condemning all these
things and having them destroyed. As we read in 2 Kings xxiii.
after taking a Phallic oath, by standing by a 44 pillar,” he
commanded Hilkiah to bring forth out of the Temple of Yahweh
44 all the vessels made for all the host of Heaven, and he burned
them.'* They seem to have been of wood.

44 And he put down the idolatrous priests *’ (or really caused
Chemarim worship to cease), *4 that burnt incense unto Baal, to the
sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of
Heaven.** But the custom was too strong for him, so he had to
make some concession in the temple to sun worshippers.

The worship is condemned in Deut. iv. 19, 44 And when thou
seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of
Heaven shouldst be driven to worship them and serve them.**
Deut. xvii. 3, 44 And hath gone and served other gods and wor-
shipped them either the sun or moon or any of the host of
Heaven which 1 have not commanded,**—such a one shall be put
to death by stoning.

There must have been a perfect anthropological museum of
religions in Jerusalem, as we are told, in 2 Kings xvii. and xxi. that
44 they built themselves high places ** (places for religious prostitutes)
in all their cities from the Town of the watchmen to the fenced City,
and they set up images and 4 groves * in every hill and under every
high tree, and they burned incense in all the high places. And
made them molten images, even two calves, and made a 4 grove *
and worshipped all the host of Heaven and served Baal. And they
caused their sons and daughters to pass through this fire (Sun
worship and human sacrifices), and used divination and enchant-
ments and sold themselves (Kadeshah) to the evil** (p. 225). In fact,
so bad were they that Yahveh made the Assyrians enslave them, and
removed them to Assyria, and to the Cities of the Medes and
Assyrians (2 Kings xxv.). Manasseh, who was only a boy of
twelve, and therefore under the control of his mother, and the
priests 44 again built up the high places,4* reared up altars for Baal,
and made a grove and 44 worshipped all the host of Heaven and
served them.44 And he built altars for all the host of Heaven in
the two courts of 44 the House of Yahweh.** And later he made his
son to pass 44through the fire4* (Sun worship) 44 and observed
 262

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

tidaes (astrology) and used enchantments and dealt with familiar
spirits and wizards, and he set a graven image of the ‘ grove ’ that
he had made in the house of Yahweh " ; and in Jeremiah xix., 13,
“And the houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the Kings of
Judah shall be defiled as the place of Tophet because of all the
houses upon whose roof they have burnt incense to all the host
of Heaven “ ; or, in Zephaniah xiv., 5, “ 1 will cut off men from
the land and them that worship the host of Heaven upon the
house tops.”

Many other texts show that their worship of the hosts of
Heaven was universal.

It is difficult, at first glance, to understand who were the pro-
testing prophets. They could not have been the High Priests, or
they would not have allowed Lingam and sun worship in the temple,
but would have carried on the orthodox temple worshippings under
the “ Law.” They would certainly have had command during
the minority of Manasseh. They could not have been the Baby-
lonian priests, sent to re-establish the temple practices so often
destroyed and forgotten, as the “ Host of Heaven ” was a part of
Babylonian worship. They must have been Mullahs, or Yogis,
ascetics, like John the Baptist, called Nabis, living severe lives in
the desert places, and, by their fasting and scourgings, gaining a
great reputation for sanctity ; men to whom a King now and then
listened, but whose message had only a temporary effect, as there
is no doubt that these practices constituted the regular religion of
the mass of the Hebrew people.

As much of the scolding was directed against the defilement of
the temple by such practices, it cannot have been uttered by the
Jewish priests, as it was owing to their laxity, or even their en-
couragement of the popular practices, that such defilement could
take place. The temple furniture was phallic and solar (p. 332).

. A view has sometimes presented itself to me, that sex worship
and that of the Queen and the Host of Heaven were the actual
official religion of the Hebrews, as they were practised universally,
” at every street corner,” ” in all high places,” ” under* every
green tree,” and in the Temple, and therefore encouraged by the
Magistrates and Priests, and only condemned by those excitable
ascetics, the Nabis or Nazarehea, who were trying to introduce
a monotheistic creed of the cruel Yahweh, like the Scotch High-
landers, the Irish Orange-men, or the Swiss, represented by mascu-
line symbols, and that the exhortations were a purely literary
creation of a late date to create the idea of a nobler religion.

We are driven then to place die authorship of this type of
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

263

were unknown. Colenso has shown that the whole tale is the
myth of a scribe. Large beams were in great demand, and were
often conveyed, at enormous expense, from foreign lands, for
Egyptian and Assyrian buildings, so the Hebrews would have had
to buy them, and to contract to get them transported to the
wilderness.

The “ Encyclopaedia Biblica ” sums up the latest opinions on
this subject in an article by Dr. Isaac Benzinger, who concludes
this subject in an article by Dr. Isaac Benzinger, who concludes
that the whole account is apocryphal. Although the tabernacle,
and the practices said to have been carried out in it, may be
Phallic and Solar worship as was, and still is rampant in Eastern
nations, that I believe the tabernacle story to be the work of a
foreign priest trying to bring in a more modern religion, and dating
it back, in order to give it authority, to the time of the supposed
wanderings in the wilderness. It is a “ looking backward ” written
copy of the Temple of Jerusalem. Dr. Driver says of Joshua and
Judges, that they are not historical, but mere " idealification ”;
and I believe the Tabernacle to be such an idealization of the
crude tent temple, that it is nearly all the work of imagination.
Still we can learn from the priest’s story something of these ideas
of religion.

Let us see what the scribe, who evolved this impossible structure
from his inner consciousness, tells us was its principal use. In the
first place, the important materials used in its covering were
entirely symbolical, and arranged to represent the heavens, and
the annual birth of the sun from the womb of the “ Virgin of
Israel.”

There was an enclosure or yard 100 cubits, 60 yards, long and
50 cubits, 30 yards, wide.

The only entrance to this open court was at the East end.
Except at this doorway, the court was fenced in by a network
of linen 9 feet 9 inches, or 5 cubits high. The entrance left at the
East end was 26 feet 3 inches wide, taking the cubit of 21 inches.
This entrance was hung with hangings of blue, purple, and scarlet,
with a fine linen network “wrought with needles” covering it.

These brilliant hangings were held up by four pillars which
rose to a height of 15 cubits, or about 30 feet, above the fence
by which the space was inclosed. This was the ” court.” In
the middle of this “court” a building was constructed of those
impossible “boards”—huge beams, really-decorated with gold
and various draperies and. skins, forming a tabernacle 30 cubits
by 10 cubits.
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

245

This building had two entrances, one at the East end, and the
other at the West end. The interior was divided into two unequal
parts by a " great veil."

The Western room, called the Holy place, was the larger,
and was 20 cubits, 35 feet long, by 10 cubits, or 17 feet 6 inches,
wide, and the smaller at the East end was called the Holy of
Holies, or Most Holy place (Josephus), and was 10 cubits square ;
an ordinary room of 17 feet 6 inches square.

The Holy place was open to the priests for daily sacrifices,
but no human being, except the High Priest, and he only once
a year, dare enter the Holy of Holies, He entered it on the
great day of Atonement, at the Autumn Equinox, through the
Western room, and crept under the veil. Josephus calls the Holy
of Holies the "secret end," and, again, "the most secret end."

The Western entrance was protected by another gorgeous
curtain or veil, which did not reach to the ground but left a space,
through which the priests, by stooping, crept in and out of the
Holy place. The entrance was thus like modern Christian
Churches from the West; the worshipper on entering faces the
East. Inside the Holy place stood the golden altar for the daily
burning of incense ; and as the God dwelt in the Holy of Holies,
and liked to smell a "sweet savour," incense was burnt on this
altar, so that it might percolate through the veil, and please the
god in the "most secret end," the "Holy of Holies."

There were the golden candlesticks (p. 332), with seven branches
for lamps, symbolising the seven planets, seven days of the week,
or other holy sevens. Then there was the table with twelve
loaves, symbolising the twelve months or signs of the Zodiac.

The great veil of sky blue, purple, and scarlet, with Cherubim
(signs of the Zodiac) woven into the fabric, was embroidered with
beautiful flowers, and finally covered with a net of " twined linen
wrought with needlework." This is the veil of the Temple which
was said to be rent on the death of Jesus, when " the sun was
darkened and graves opened and the earth did quake," and many
rose " from the dead."

In the centre was a small coffer, the Ark of Testimony, on
which rests a gold plate, 53 inches by 33 inches. On this stood
two winged figures, with their wings raised towards each other, and
a mysterious something, called the Shechinah or Eduth (p. 254),
stood between the faces of the two winged figures. This Shechina
is never described, but we are told vaguely that it shines "with
strength." Most Biblical scholars are of opinion that this was a
Phallus which, combined with the feminine Ark, gave a symbol
 246

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

like the Ankh, Buckle, Lingam-Yoni, or double-sex emblem,
” covenant,” or ” witness ” of eternal life.

The Egyptians had an altar exactly the same here illustrated
[Fig. 114] with the two identical Cherubim protecting the Phallus
with their wings and adoring it (Forlong).

It is also represented in hundreds of hieroglyphic texts in Egypt
as a pillar protected by the four wings of one Cherub. This pillar
is often replaced by the ithyphallic Osiris between the Cherubim
exactly as Yahweh was placed, so Yahweh was an Osiris. Some-
times he is replaced by a Dad (pp. 73-74) his symbol, just as
Yahweh was replaced by the Eduth or Shechina which were Lingam
stones as was the Tat, or Dad. This symbolism was evidently
brought with them when the Hebrews were expelled from Egypt.

It is strange to hear the Scotch Presbyterians singing “Shine

forth, oh thou that dost between the cherubims abide ” (Psalm
lxxx. 1). Would they still sing it if they knew what the words
mean?

Now as to the covering of the building.

There were first ten curtains of fine twined linen—Hue, purple,
and scarlet—with Cherubims, signs of the Zodiac, “of crowning
work,” each 28 cubits long. Now the building was only 10 cubits
wide,.so there were 9 cubits left hanging on each side, or only
21 inches from the ground. Then each of the curtains is 4 cubits
wide, making 40 cubits, and as the building was only 30 cubits
long there were 10 cubits hanging down, to cover the door, of the
Holy of Holies at die East end, and to give an overlap at the joins.
Then came another set of roof curtains, eleven of them this time,
of goats’ hair, “ long and silky,” four cubits broad, and 30 cubits
long; so that, when stretched over the roof from side to side of
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

247

the Tabernacle, they would cover it over, and come to the ground
at each side* By having eleven widths there was a long piece left
at the East end, where it is to be looped up in the centre* Over this
was to be a covering of rams9 skins dyed red (ram means coition),
and another of 9 dolphins 9 skins—Delphys Womb. (The authorised
Version gives badgers9 skins, but the Revised Version gives the
true reading, dolphins' skins.)

These are considered so important that these instructions are
repeated four times (Exodus xxv., 5, xxiv., 14, xxxvi., 19,
xxxix., 34); and, contrary to most repetitions, there is no blun-
dering or contradictions ; all four are very exact to give the same
skins with same order* This indicates that the description is the care-
ful creation of a scribe as separate accounts of folk-lore always
differ.

There was an old, world-wide tradition that all life came from
water, and the Eastern nations had a mother of all, called Der
Ketos, or the Druidical Ced, or Ked, or the Whale ; but as
Dolphins are much more common in the Mediterranean, and as
they suckle their young, later races adopted that fish as the univer-
sal womb, and called it Delpheus. It is Venus’s fish, and is
adopted into the Catholic calendar as St. Delphin on 24th
December, as the sun was supposed to be born of a Dolphin*

As the long over-plus of these curtains was looped up at the
Eastern end, they would form a slit of the womb, viz., dolphins*
skins surrounded by imitation flesh (rams' skins dyed red), and with
an outer line of goats’ hair forming the vulva of Der Ketos from
which all life emerged,—poetically the “ womb of Time.”

The Miracle play I am about to explain was that taught on
Greek coins of the annual death and re-birth of the sun in winter,
which they symbolised on their coins by the images of Bacchus,
who was the reigning sun-god for the moment. One side showed
the aged, decrepit Bacchus, bald and toothless, falling into the
sea, All descents of the sun in Greece, Palestine, and Phoenicia,
were descents into the sea, owing to their geographical position.

On the other side was a Dolphin, out of whose mouth came a
glorious babe with a nimbus of glory round his head—the young
Sun-god Bacchus, re-born for another glorious journey round the
year.

Hus drama or miracle play was supposed to be enacted annually
by the High Priest. '

, As I have explained elsewhere, the Jewish New Year's Day
being founded on a lunar year, wandered, as it does now, all round
the year, but they could not allow the feasts to wander in this way.
 248

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

as they were connected with some seasonal phenomenon, such as
Spring time (Passover), and Harvest, or Midsummer (Pentecost),
or Autumn (Tabernacles), and so, at some period, this great miracle
play got anchored to a given date, the Autumn equinox, and for
several reasons.

It was followed by rejoicing,—the Feast of Tabernacles, which
we saw (p. 220) was a Phallic feast, and was very merry with
wine and revelry. No time could be better than the temperate,
yet balmy, Autumn for that.

But 1 believe that it was an astronomical fact which fixed the
period. Both Equinoxes were observed by the Hebrews.

The Spring festival was the Passover, the ” Blood of the Lamb,”
as the sun rose in Aries, the lamb or ram, obliterating it or slaying
it, but at the Autumn Equinox the sun rose in Virgo, and Aries
was opposite, or at the Western horizon at the sun-rise. It is
necessary to remember this.

Now what did the High Priest do? The Bible and Josephus
both give us many details of dress, furniture, and ceremony, but
the meaning of the ceremony is never touched upon, after all the
elaborate preparation of the coverings of the tabernacle and its
symbolical womb, and the elaborate grave clothes, prepared for
the ceremony.

However, we do know that the High Priest appeared at first in
all his brilliant robes fringed with golden pomegranates and bells.
The pomegranate signifies the fruitful womb, in every Eastern
country. For instance, the famous Nana placed a pomegranate
in her bosom, and she became with child, so the fruit became
the symbol of the graVid uterus (p. 255).

The bell, with its clapper, is always treated as a Lingam-Yoni
symbol, or symbol of eternal life. The bell being the Yoni, and
the tongue the Phallus. That is the origin of its use at Altar Service
in the Catholic Church.

It is equally used in India, both in the Temple practice, and
in the private practice of Linga-puja, when the little bell is rung
at intervals to scare away evil spirits. The idea still exists among
educated people in Britain (see p. 14).

There are supposed to be evil spirits, inimical to life, hovering
about, trying to undo the good work of the priests, but an exhibi-
tion of the organs of reproduction, especially when the presence
is emphasised by sound or the God’s voice, defeats their object, just
as their exhibition on the Church porches in Ireland averted the
Evil Eye.

This was in use centuries before Christianity was evolved.
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

249

The word Bell is very probably the Babylonian Bel, the
*'Beautiful God," as it is bisexual, and is the only altar symbol which
has a voice. The greatest Bel of the Euphrates valley was Ninus,
the mighty Hunter, literally hunter of women, not animals (see
Riven of Life, II., p. 33). The wall-sculptures in the British
Museum show how hunting became a Royal or God-like occupation.

Ninus, says Genesis x., founded Babylon, Accad, and Nineveh,
amongst other great cities, the last, named after himself, and he
has drifted over to Europe as St. Ninian, who names so many
" Hunters’ Wells " in Britain.

We have a famous St. Ninian’s bell in Scotland (where Baby-
lonian words still linger (pp. 121-122), and this bell is not only a
double-sexed creative symbol owing to its Bell and Tongue, but
it has curious decorations which repeat the natural Lingam-Yoni
symbols of all gods (see Forlong).

The derivation of the word Bell is unknown, because, although
Skeat supposes it comes from Bhels to " resound " the noun or
substantive usually precedes, or is the origin of all the other parts
of speech, so Bhels is more likely to be derived from the resounding
representation of the Creative Bel. We find Bell used in the
English sense by the " Celtic fringe" (where Babylonian words
linger), in old Gaelic and Erse, and also in Norway, Denmark, and
Sweden, where Bell is Bjaelde and Bjalla. Probably the French
Bel and Italian Bello, the “ Beautiful One ” are derived from Bel,
as all these gods were " beautiful ones." " He cometh forth as a
bridegroom." Bel in French becomes Beau, a common transforma-
tion, giving beaute, our beauty. So Ninus, Bel, and Beauty are
linked in our language.

The Hindus call the Lingam-Yoni altar the Maha-Deva (the
Great God) and so the bell, being exactly the same symbol, may
well have been called the Bel or the Great God of Babylon or
Nineveh and may still represent him in the Roman service. Bell
and Balance (pp. 79, 140) are linked in the Italian word Campana,
Bell, " applied also to a sort of Balance." (Chamber's Etym. Diet.)

Thus we have the Chief Priest clothed in the symbols of the
first commandment, " be fruitful ” ; the emblems of the continuity
of life entering the Holy Place at the setting of the sun of the old
year, 4 p.m. of 20th December. The old sun has now died, and
the High Priest puts on his grave clothes, and not only has he
a face-cloth of linen, and his arms tied to his body, like a mummy
as Osiris had, but had his private parts bound up as the Hebrews
actually did with dead men, a special binding for the " Flesh of
the Nakedness," and in this way he entered the Holy of Holies.
 250

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

Now this was a small room without a window, quite dark, except
for the supposed shining of the Shechina, and it represented the
grave, the Pit, Sheol, Hades, or Erebus, and there the High Priest
may have been supposed to lie over the solstice in the original
service, when that was held at the astronomically correct New
Year. This solstice, like the lying of Jonah in the whale’s belly,
or of Jesus in the tomb, lasts 40 hours; in the case of Jesus from
Friday at 4 p.m. when the sun sets till Sunday at 8 a.m., or in early
times from Thursday till Saturday, when Saturn was the God.
Then it rises, to begin its ascent into the Paradise or garden half of
the year (hence, the holy number 40).

The High Priest laid aside the grave clothes, and evidently
re-appeared in his ” robes of life ” again.

But the writer never finished the account of the miracle play,
or part may have been lost, like other parts of the Bible, or later
prophets may have deleted it, as savouring too much of nature
worship and sabeanism, or the much-condemned worship of the
host of heaven. After the 40 hours, that is on the second morning
after the High Priest acted the death of the old sun, he, no doubt,
pushed his way out of the loop of rams’ skins dyed red (flesh),
dolphins’ skins (womb), surrounded by hair—(they were terribly
literal these old Jews), the Vulva of Der Ketos, or Dolphin, and
was born again of the Virgin of Israel, as Bacchus was bom again
of the dolphin.

The reason that this New-Year play, when it had drifted away
(owing to the Hebrew lunar year) from the real New Year in winter,
finally got anchored down to the Autumn Equinox, was astro-
nomical. When the High Priest pushed himself out of the
“ delphys ” or womb, he was facing the Sun and Virgo, in which
the sun was at that time, and he was thus brought forth by the
** Virgin of Israel.” This is referred to in the mystic language in
Isaiah vii., 14: ” Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”
” Butter and honey shall he eat ” ; that is to say, the sun shall
need to be re-bom before the summer, with its butter and honey,
can return. This ” Virgin of Israel ” is referred to several times
in the Old Testament.

worship in the Succoth Benoth (Tabernacles of Venus). These, no
doubt, were epidemics of venereal disease. Syphilis must have
been common, with such promiscuity.

Another proof that the existence of some contagious disease,
such as syphilis, was common, is shown in making the sexual act
the cause of great trouble to mankind, and making the serpent the
symbol of sensual passion, especially the deadly cobra. The
tortoise is as good a symbol (Fig. I, p. 18), in fact, it was the earliest
symbol in India, where the “ world rests on a tortoise,” and its
name Testudo is connected with the words testament and testimony,
connected with “swearing,” “witness,” “covenant,” etc., which
amongst the Eastern nations were Phallic. But the serpent has two
r£Ies; it not only erects itself, but it bites. It is the universal
symbol of sexual passion and love, yet always accompanied by
horror and fear (see p. 17). This is wide-spread over all the world,
and must have some special significance. The cobra's poison
and syphilis were then both fatal. We know of no disease
which will “ visit the sins of the father upon the children to the
third and fourth generation,” except syphilis, and very probably
the custom of circumcision found acceptance as a sanitary measure,
in a community having such customs as are described to us so
minutely in the Hebrew Scriptures. Medical men of the present
day recommend circumcision as a healthy, sanitary measure.

In Deut. iv., 3, we have : “ Your eyes have seen what the Lord
did because of Baal-peor—for all the men that followed Baal-peor,
the Lord thy God hath destroyed them from among you.” Thus,
those who had engaged in the sacred prostitution died. Baal-peor
is Lingam-Yoni, Ish-lshi, Om-Phale, or Man-Woman.

In Numbers xxxi., 16, there is an account of such a plague, in
consequence of consorting with the Midianite women, as Moses
said: “Behold these [the women they had ‘ saved ’ for * their own
use,* p. 213] caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of
Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor
(Yoni), and there was a plague among the congregation of the
Lord.” That it was venereal disease is shown by Moses telling
them “ to kill every woman who had known man by lying with
him.” The mysterious disease of “ emerods ” was an outbreak of
the same kind.

Here is an example of the exercise of Milton’s “ insulse rule.”
No such word as emerods exists in the English language ; the trans-
lators may have disguised the word Haemorrhoids, as being con-
sidered germaine to venereal disease, or created a new one to hide
the meaning of the passage. They did not leave die original word
untranslated, as its meaning was fairly apparent to scholars.
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

231

The word in the original is Ophelim, and, although Calmet says
that interpreters are not agreed as to its signification, the translators
might have given its obvious meaning. We see it on p. 18, in the
construction of the bisexual word Omphale. The female is as often
represented by a circle O as by Om, the Yoni (pp. 23, 45), and
Phelim is simply Phalim, a plural of Phallus ; so Ophelim was a
disease which needed the two sexes or sexual organs for its pro-
pagation ; and when they made five golden “emerods,** or
44 Ophelim/’ they simply constructed five Lingam-Yoni altars, which
were so prevalent all over the East. They hoped that, by a worship
of the symbol of life in the form of copies of the injured parts, the
disease would disappear, a superstition common to all nations—
like cures like.

The Golden Emerods, or Ophelim, were modelled on the organ
of the seat of the disease, and as that was bi-sexual we know
what disease it was.

It is curious to see the disease and the charm for its cure called
by the same name.

They called it woman-man disease, or bi-sexual disease : we,
more politely, veil it under the name of 44 love disease/* in the
adjective venereal, from the Latin Venus, or the noun Syphilis,
from the Greek Syn or Sy with, and Philia love.

Many have argued that this is a modern disease, but careful
study has shown that it was known and described in China before
2367 B.C., when Emperor Hoang-ti collected the medical writings
of the Empire, and they knew all about its hereditary transmission
to the third and fourth generations. It was known in India
1000 B.C., and the description in the Old Testament could be
applied to no other disease.

The Hebrews seem to have been liable to disease caused by
want of cleanliness. Yahweh threatens to smite them, for dis-
obedience, “with the Botch of Egypt and with the Emerods
(Ophelim, or sexual disease) and with the scab and with the itch
of which thou canst not be healed** (Deut. xxviii., 27). Not a
very enticing state of affairs ; in fact, they were so afflicted that
they could not perform the sexual act, as in consequence of
Ophelim, 44 thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie
with her/* and historians tell us it was for these diseases they
were chased out of Egypt. Mention of Egypt in the above text,
and in verse 60, sliows that the tradition of the true cause of their
expulsion was still extant (see p. 208).

Jehoram (2 Chron., xxi.) made 44 high places,** and caused the
inhabitants of Jerusalem to commit fornication,** so that he prac-
tised phallic worship with its attendant religious prostitution.
 232

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

“ Behold a great plague shall smite thy people and their
children and thy wives, and thou shalt have a great sickness by
disease of thy bowels until the bowels fall out by reason of the
sickness ” (2 Chron. xxi., 13-15).   '* The Lord smote him with an

incurable disease .   .   . his bowels fell out; so he died of sore

diseases ” (plural).

Again, we read in the famous trial of jealousy chapter of
Numbers v., 22-27, that if a woman had lain with some man instead
of her husband, then the curse and a bitter water shall cause her
belly to swell and her ” thigh ” to rot,—a pretty good definition
of Syphilis, just as the phrase “ to the third and fourth generation ”
in the commandment, is a good definition of its results.

Belphegor, Baal-peor, or Priapus, son of Bacchus and
Venus (Lingam and Yoni), was another Phallic God whose
legends speak of venereal disease. He was sent by Venus
to Lampsacus to be educated, and he became the dread of
husbands ; but, on his banishment, the people were afflicted with
a distemper of the secret parts, and they recalled him, and built
a temple, and worshipped a Phallus in his honour.

In I Samuel, vi., 6-10, we read that as a punishment for keeping
the Hebrew ark, and for looking into it, the Philistines were
smitten with “ emerods " in their “ secret parts," so the trouble
could not have been Heemorroids (p. 230), and there was very great
destruction. As a penance, they had to make five golden
“ Emerods,” one for each Lord of the Philistines ; so the practice
of Phallic worship by the Philistines was indigenous. After
contact with this fatal ark, which symbolised the female member,
the men of Beth-Shemesh died to the number of fifty thousand
three score and ten men. This story is, no doubt, introduced to
account for Syphilis, looking into the Ark being a euphemism for
sexual intercourse, but the number of fifty thousand is probably a
Hebrew exaggeration. The Ark and Peor were evidently the
same.

Disease of the private organs is often mentioned in pagan ”
writings, and Aristophanes incidentally mentions it in his explana-
tion of die beginning of Phallic worship. Statues of Bacchus were
brought to Athens by one Pegasus, a native of Cleutheris in Bceotia,
but he was treated with ridicule. The deity, in revenge for this
insult, sent a terrible disease which attacked them in the private
organs, and the oracle said the only way to get rid of this disease
was by adopting Bacchus as their God, and the Phallus as a symbol
of his worship, in memory of the affected organ.

Then, again, in India, die tale is told of certain ascetic devotees.
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

233

whom Siva exposed, because they pretended to be ascetics while
jd'.ey retained beautiful women.

To be revenged on him, they produced a great tiger by incan-
tations to devour Siva, but he killed it with a blow. They tried
deadly serpents, which also failed. They then used the true Indian
method. Yogis hold that by austerities holy men may gain great
power, even power dangerous to Gods, and may accumulate this
wealth of power to an almost infinite extent.

Their great God himself gains power by this method. Accord-
ing to the Christian dogma, the Jewish God could not get the power
to wipe out man’s sin till he had wounded himself in the flesh of
his earthly counterpart, the co-eternal portion of the Trinity, called
the “Son.”

Fig. 109

These devotees collected all their prayers, fastings, charities,
and penances, and, so to speak, sold them, or exchanged them,
for one great blow at Siva, and purchased a great consuming fire
to destroy his genitals.

Siva turned this malady against the human race, and all the race
would have been destroyed by a disease which consumed the
genitals, had not Vishnu intervened and pacified him. But it was
ordained that the parts they had impiously tried to destroy should
in future be the chief emblem of their worship, the Lingam-Yoni
altar. All these stories tell us of a sexual malady which agrees
with the symptoms of modern Syphilis.

The serpent and death-from-disease symbol is well expressed
by the virgin and child statue shown in Hislop’s work, page 19,
 234

cHRisnANiTVs t^aouftw*

which I give here. It will be seeii that the Virgin nt> tinder the
Tree of Life and on a lion, die symbol of Salaciousnes* or Phallic
energy, with the divine babe on her knee, thus representing eternal
life by three emblems, but the organ of reproduction is represented
by a skull signifying death [Fig. 110}, just as the same idea is
represented by the poison of the deadly cobra.

Mary Magdalene, who had loved much and who is the New
Testament Venus, and was probably a temple woman, is repre-
sented with a Book, Liber, Liberty, and a Skull, death, or deadly
disease like the Indian virgin and child. The Liber and the Skull
are placed together to indicate that ” freedom ” or liberty in a
woman is associated with death [Fig. 111].

In the Saxon countries we find the same idea. Friday is Fria’s
or Freia’s day, and in German Freitag is literally Free day, or

Fig. no

the day of the free (liber) one, Loose one, Luz, Venus, or Fteia,
Even the ancient Gauls adopted the symbol, as is seen in this
from Maurice’s “Indian Antiquities” [Fig. 109].

Ezekiel v., 24, translated by the Westminster ” divines,” says,
“ Thou hastalso built unto thee an eminent place, and thou hast
made thee a high place in every street,” which is carefully trans-
lated (by Milton’s ”insulse rule”) to convey nothing; but the
more accurate Douay Bible, perhaps too crassly, says: " Thou
didst also build thee a common stew and madest thee a brothel
house in vysty street ”—the real meaning of the words no doubt;
but, to the people who considered the sexual act the great sacrifice,
the meaning of the words lay between these two translations.

The primary cause of the Hebrews’ ecclesiastical debasement of
 
 
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

235

women was no doubt the Eden theory, but the prevalence of
Syphilis, which we have seen was caused by religious prostitution,
must have been a terrible scourge to the nation, and afforded a
strong cause for increasing their condemnation of woman. Other
nations blamed man and introduced castration. (See pp. 184-186.)

It is curious to find the " every street ” phrase, used so often
in the Bible about the setting up of Phallic worship, used also of
the once terribly savage Kingdom of Dahomey. Mr. R., after-
wards Sir Robert Burton tells us, in the “ Journal of the Anthropo-
logical Society," Vol. I., No. 10, "Amongst all barbarians whose
primal want is progeny we observe a greater or a less development
of the Phallic worship. In Dahomey it is uncomfortably prominent;
every street from Wydah to the capital is adorned with the symbol,
huge Phalli."

The self esteem of the Jewish race, as the chosen of God, is
illustrated in Amos iii., 2, " You only have 1 known of all the
families of the earth,” and in a hundred similar passages, made
them think that their customs—however " vile " as is said of
David—were quite right. Nudity to the nation, such as the
Egyptians on the Nile, or Akkadians in the lower Euphrates Valley,
was a natural condition, and Phallism brought no shame.

The climate was such that no clothing was necessary, and
nudity was the natural state.

But, to a highland tribe like the Hebrews, where the winds are
cold, and snow common, warm clothing was a necessity; hence
grew up a sense of the identity of " nakedness " and " shame.”

This may make a religious people, but does not necessarily
make a moral race. Religion and conventional morality have
nothing in common; — witness the illegitimacy in Scotland or
Rome, where "religion" is rampant (pp. 259, 338).

In fact, as we shall see in the course of our examination of facts,
all " religions " had Phallism as a basis, and therefore religion
and our so-called immorality were synonymous terms with the early
races.

Unfortunately we couple sins, such as “theft,” "murder,"
" bearing false witness," or other breaches of the laws necessary
to hold the community together, with " immorality," or the exercise
of the sexual act; except when performed under the priestly
sanction.

In Germany, where there still lingers the very severe Nabi ideas,
the sex instinct and crime are linked in the words Schlecht, bad,
wicked, and Geachlechtlich, sexual.

But the scdhial act,is a natural act and not an act against the
 236

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

community. Wives were then purchased, as we see by Jacob giving
a high price (seven years* labour). Even David purchased his wife
Mical from Saul, not by money it is true, but by foreskins, as told
in Samuel xviii., 27, ** Wherefore David arose and went he and
his men and slew of the Philistines two hundred men,** and David
brought their foreskins and “they gave them in full tale to the
King, that he might be the King’s son-in-law, and Saul gave him
Mical his daughter to wife."

The manner in which wives were exchanged then was very
free, as we see that David took other wives, and Saul gave “ Mical
his daughter, David’s wife to Phalti, the son of Laish.*' But he
recovered his property, as we read in 2 Samuel, iii., when he makes
a bargain with Abner for her recovery, mentioning again the price
he had paid for her (stating only one hundred foreskins this time).
She seems to have left a loving husband for a masterful one, as
poor Phalti goes weeping behind her for his loss of a loved one.
We find her as David’s principal Queen, after her father’s death,
when she rebuked him for his Phallic dance. This dance is
exactly the same as is performed to-day all over the world, even
in Sicily (p. 95), when an ark, or relic, or even banner, but
especially an ark, which signifies the womb, is paraded in any
town (see Phallism in India and in Europe). The “ Ark ’’ or box
held the Yahweh, Eduth, Shechina, “Testimony” or “significant
thing” on which the Hebrews swore their oaths; here we have
the old, old Lingam-Yoni combination.

When David brought this Ark into the “City of David,” to
consolidate his power, he went “ dancing and leaping ” before
the Ark or “ before the Lord,” as our version has it, clad only in
a linen ephod, and exposing himself, “ leaping and dancing ’’ being
a euphemism for a Phallic exhibition of himself. Mical saw this,
and said sarcastically: “ How glorious was the King of Israel to-
day, who uncovered himself to-day, in the eyes of the handmaids
of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth
himself ” (as in India to-day). David persists that, as he has been
chosen ruler over Israel: “ Therefore I will play before the Lord.”
We remember the children of Israel “playing” naked before the
Golden Calf (pp. 224 and 238). He threatens, ‘ ‘I will yet be more vile
than this, and will be base in my own sight, and of the maid servants
which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour ”
2 Samuel, vi.

The truth probably is that Saul’s household was of an aristocratic
type, which would never think of joining in the vulgar exhibition
of the crowd, which we see still practised in India, while David was
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

237

the whole organ as being the root of all evil as dealt with on p. 184
et seq.

In any case it is symbolically, and indeed practically, an example
of the great central idea of all Jewish belief and practice, that all
transgressions, whether against God or man, could only be wiped
out, and the deity or enemy appeased, by a spilling of blood, as in
the dogma of the death of Jesus.

This tale has every indication of being one of the most ancient
fables of Judaism, and Dr. Cheyne, in the Encyclopaedias Biblica
and Britannica, expressed the opinion that it is of Arabian origin,
Arabia having been the home of the Israelites before they came
north.

Circumcision may be a useful sanitary measure, as argued by
some, or it may have been found to be an aphrodisiac to increase
sexual pleasure, as argued by others, and so retained by the highly
sensual Jewish race. It may increase the fecundity of the race,
whose God’s first commandment was, “ Be fruitful and multiply ” ;
but, as it was imposed on the whole nation under penalty of death,
and was especially necessary to priesthood, it must have been a
religious rite.

We find the penalty of death common to the infringement of
religious rites, and incurred even by accidentally looking into the
ark (1 Sam. vi. 6-10, men of Bethshemesh). This seems barbarous,
but in merry England anyone touching the Pyx was to be hanged,
drawn, and quartered, and burnt to ashes, as late as the
reign of Richard II., about 1400 A.D. The ark was the
^ftii, and the stone in it the Phallus, so it was the double-sexed
symbol of life universally worshipped all over the world, but, the
priests did not want the ignorant to know the real nature of their
God, or later editors have modified the words (pp. 41 and 232). Yet
it is a strange thing that there is no record of Moses having seen
that the sacred rite of Circumcision was carried out in the forty
years* wandering in the wilderness, so that Joshua would have re-
quired (if the numbers of the Jews wandering is correctly related)
to circumcise personally over a million males at Gilgal. Circum-
cision is practised by tribes in parts of the world where communica-
tion with Jews in early times was impossible, but the tribes who
practise it are of a low grade. Seeing that it was so obligatory on
the priesthood, it was probably a substitution of a mild rite for the
barbarous emasculation by which the priests of Cybele (or Kubele)
were initiated into the office (compare pp. 184-185). The worship
of Cybele was at one time universal all over Western-Asia, and the
Jews may have adopted circumcised priests, instead of Eunuchs, in
 220

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES'

their ritual. That it was considered by the Jews to increase the
virility of the men so treated, is shown by the statement in Genesis
xxxiv., 14, that ” One who is uncircumcised is as a woman to us.”
Thus, as we shall see, the Jewish Nabi’s religion was a strongly right-
handed cult, worshiping only the male emblem, considering the
temptation of the feminine organ as the origin of all evil, and deny-
ing to women even the possession of a soul; while surrounding
nations emasculated their priests or made them wear women’s
dress, so as to imitate the double sex of the Creator, just as is done
at the present day by making the priests of Rome wear a woman’s
” frock,” after taking their vows of celibacy. We talk of ” unfrock-
ing ” a priest; the clergy of other reformed Churches still wear a
” gown,” and the choir boys and subordinate clergy surplices, all
feminine, whereas, the Jewish clergy wore masculine breeches,
and it was, as usual, death to any priest officiating without
them. The curious phrase, a “ bloody bridegroom,” is still retained
by the Jews, who call their newly-circumcised children “ bride-
grooms of blood.”

It is probably very ancient; even before the age of iron, as it
was performed by a flint knife, and not by a metal one.

In Polynesia the rite is propitiatory, not only for the person
operated upon, but for others ; and when a member of a family is
seriously ill, youths of the family of any age may be called to the
Temple of the God, to deliver up their foreskins, as an offering for
the recovery of the patient. (Joum. Anthrop. Inst., August, 1884.)
The rite is followed by indescribable revelry—men and women array
themselves in all manner of fantastic garbs—general license is
allowed, and relationship is no bar—an exact description of the
fetes of Cybele, Maternalia, and the Hilaria, Saturnalia, Bacchanalia,
Phallic feasts or fetes (pp. 87-92).

Dr. J. G. Frazer, in his ” Golden Bough,” Vol. II., pp. 52, 53,
quoting Plutarch, deals with the subject, and says the Jewish Feast
of Tabernacles ” is exactly agreeable to the holy rites of Bacchus,”
of the Greeks and Romans, and practised by early peoples all over
the world.

Circumcision is imperative in Islam, and is called a ” Divine in-
stitution ” descended from Abraham. It is very necessary, in study-
ing the religious practices of a people, to arrive at a clear concep-
tion of the meaning of the words they employ, and we will see, by
an examination, of words and names, that the Phallicjcnlt saturated
all the religious practices of the Hebrews.

The word ’’Bosheth,” translated “shameful thing” (Phallus)
or ” shame,” is especially, as Dr. Donaldson points out, “ sexual
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

221

•h&me,” as in Genesis ii., 25. The substantive meaning as Phallus
is made clear in Micah i., I I, “ having thy Bosheth naked,” or in
Hosea ix., 10, where he says, “they went to Baal-peor and con*
secrated themselves to Bosheth ” (the shameful thing, the Phallus),
” and became abominable like that they loved/’ or in Jeremiah xi.,
13, “ For according to the number of thy cities were thy Gods, O
Judah, and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem have
ye set up altars to Bosheth, altars to burn incense to Baal.” Note
the connection between Bosheth and Baal.

The Phallic altar of all nations was an upright pillar, as we have
seen in pp. 15*103, and its anointing was the principal act of worship.

The Bible record is, in great part, taken up with this subject,
and yet not a word of this has leaked through to the general public.
Is it right that a book which is the most intensely Phallic record
known, should be entirely misrepresented by false translation? I
am glad to see the reticence is breaking down, as shown by this
quotation from the paper of Sir Geo. Birdwood that I quoted at

p. 160.

” When Jacob took the stone (Genesis xxviii., 18*19) on which
he slept on his way from Beersheba to Haran, and set it up on
end for a pillar, and poured oil on the top of it, and called it
*Beth>el,* ‘the house of God,’ he performed a distinct act of
Phallic worship, such as may still be witnessed every day, at
every turn, in India.” (See p. 51.)

Sir George refers all through his paper to the wide-spread practice
of Phallism, and in a later paper, Royal Society of Arts, 1st Dec.,
1911, referring to the gross, or Phallic names applied to some of
our English plants, he says:—While the universal prevalence of
such objectionable names in the vernacular languages of India,
without the slightest idea among the Hindus, or any but Moslems
and our English folk, of there being anything improper in them,
would seem to indicate that their existence in England is but a
survival of the pagan period of Europe when every natural object
of the remotest phallic suggestiveness, in colour, form, etc., was
accepted as an apocalyptic symbol of the Almighty Creator of all
the material existences through which He is first apprehended by
mankind. Like the polygamy, the harim, and the ” seraglio,” of
Islam, these, to us, prurient names, have, at least in India, an
obvious hieropsychic origin, and are there everywhere still of sacro-
sanct significance.' The people of the historical East have always
looked the Cosmos full in the face, and ingenuously yielded them-
selves to its every genial impulse as of divine ordination; and as
for die opinion of others.—Horn soft qui mal y penae.
 222

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

From the texts above quoted, it is clear that Baal was the
Bosheth or Priapus, and Baal-peor was the bisexual symbol; we
have the connection of the two specially handed down to us in
several passages. In the Septuagint version of Kings xviii., 25, the
prophets of Baal are called the “ prophets of that shame
* Bosheth.* ’* Baal was of uncertain sex (see p. 325), or probably
bisexual. Arnobius says his votaries invoked him saying, Hear
us whether thou are a God or Goddess,** and the reason for the twin
sexed or Hermaphroditic God was to express his self-contained
power of generation. We know that Bosheth means the “ shameful
thing ** as it is always so translated, and we find the two, Baal and
Bosheth, were equivalent and used indifferently in names. Thus
we have Jerub-baal, Judges vi., 32, and I Samuel ii., II., called
Jerub-bosheth in 2 Samuel xi., 21, and Esh-baal in 1 Chron. viii., 33,
called Ish-bosheth in 2 Samuel iv., 8 and 10. We find the connection
carried into the very heart of the Jewish religion, in the Eli, to whom
Jesus appealed on the Cross, in calling Baal-jada, in 1 Chron. xiv. 7,
Eli-ada in 2 Samuel v. 16, so that Baal is Eli, or Elohim, or
Ale-im, or the Gods. The other Hebrew God Jehovah, Yah-
weh, or simply Iah, is linked up with Baal in 1 Chron. xii., 5, in the
name of one of David's heroes Baaljah, “ Baal is Jah ** (Jehovah).

In fact, we find that Larousse, in his “ Grande Dictionnaire
Universelle,’* says: “The Herbraic Phallus was during nine
hundred years the rival of the victorious Jehovah/* They were
more probably only nominally rivals, being merely two names for
the same idea (see p. 254).

There is another word intentionally mis-translated in the Bible,
“Grove** or “Groves,** so often mentioned, and its worship so
constantly condemned as “ shameful,** by all the prophets or Nabis,
that we must conclude it was the ineradicable worship of the entire
Jewish race.

The word mis-translated “Grove,** is Ashera, sometimes
Asherim (plural), and Astaroth, as is shown by the authorised
version saving in Judges iii., 7, they “served ‘Baalim* (plural of
Baal) and the Groves,** whereas the revised version says, “served
Baalim and the Astheroth ’*—the Babylonian Love Goddess.

In Bagster*s Bible, the Grove which King Manasseh set up is,
in the margin, stated in Latin to be a wooden image of Astarte
(Venus).

Then we have Astaret, Astara, Oester (our Easter), Ister, Aster,
Star, and Stefta, our word star and the Latin Stella (exchanging
the R for L, identical letters) are derived from the star symbol of
the Venus of Babylon worshipped all over the middle East, even
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

223

in Egypt, where she is Astrt. She was represented by the brightest
fixed star in the firmament Sirius, as well as by the brightest wander-
ing star or planet we call Venus, and the Pleiades was her habita-
tion, hence the “ Sweet influences of the Pleiades ” of Job.
Babylon impressed its religious ideas on all the nations of the earth.

Aster is a pole, tree, stem, or other erect object, like the *' noble
pillar “ of the Egyptians (p. 61), and is the Hebrew Yashar, Bashar,
or Bosheth, or the Phallus. Astarte is the feminine form.

This word runs through many languages ; in Arabia and in
Phoenician is Oshr and Osir, a husband or lord, the plural being
Ostharim or Asharim of the Bible, probably the Egyptian Uaser or
Asar, and Greek form of that name Osiris.

Ashre, Ashera, Ashira, are feminine forms of Ashr, Assyrian
Ashrat, where the “ t ” is the feminine determinative as in the
Assyrian and Egyptian languages. Ashl is simply Ashr, as “1'*
and “ r ” are the same letter in most early Asiatic languages, as seen
in our lamb and ram, which were once identical.

Ashl is a tree, tamarisk, terebinth, oak, or any thing firm and
strong, both in Hebrew and Arabic.

Ashruth or Asharoth is the regularly formed Hebrew feminine
plural or Ashr or Baal, and was the Goddess of Good Fortune, or
the Yoni, exhibited so often in nude figures at church doors, to
give good fortune, and was the Jewish Aphrodite or Venus (p. 96).

Astarte was the Phoenician form, and the Greeks used that
name for Diana.

In Babylonian she is sometimes called Ishtara or Istar—and the
name Israel is very probably named from Ishra-el, the people with
the Phallic god or worshippers of the Grove or Yoni.

Ashr and Ashire, or Asherah, are translated “ groves ” thirty-
nine times in the Old Testament.

Asherim may include male or female, Baalim; the Revised
Version says, ‘ ‘served Baalim and the Asheroth,” and no translation
of Asheroth is given, though Baal and Ashtaroth are common phrases
for the Phallic worship so often denounced as “ shameful ” by the
Hebrew prophets, nabis, or fanatics.

Solomon also “went after Ashtoreth ” (I Kings xi., 5), and he
builded the mount of corruption for that “ abomination of the
Zidonians “ (2 Kings, xxiii., 13).

A tree or grove could never be an abomination, and that the
Asherah was no tree, except symbolically as the “ Tree of Life ”
(Phallus), is shown by the statement in 2 Kings xxiii., 6, that Josiah
•“ brought out the Grove from the house of the Lord.” Other refer-
ences speak of breaking the shameful thing in pieces and stamping
 224

CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

it to powder (2 Kings xxiii.' 6), “made dust of them" (2
Chronicles miv. 4). No tree can be stamped to powder; it
was a clay or stone Phallus. The practices which were carried
on round the “ Grove “ altars are well shown by the verse 7 of the
same chapter, where the writer says: “ He broke down the houses
of the Sodomites that were by the house of the Lord where the
women wove hangings for the Grove.”

So the Grove worshippers were Sodomites.

According to the Revised Version as above, it was in the house
of the Lord where the women wove hangings for the Asherah
(Grove).

The “ Grove ” worship had 400 priests under Queen Jezebel
(I Kings xviii. 19).

These 400 prophets of the Ashera (phallus) spoke in the name
of IhVh, so IhVh and the phallus were the same I Kings, xxii. 6).

We know that the Asherah, Asherim, Asheroth, and Ashteroth
were the Ashteroth of the Babylonians, their Venus, whose worship
was carried on in the Succoth-Benoth, or Tents of Venus, and
was accompanied by orgies similar to the Liberalia of Rome, and
that was the worship against which the Hebrew nabis or prophets
protested.

We find this idea of nakedness and shame linked indissolubly
in the Hebrew text and always in connection with worship.

The Hebrews had two writers, each giving a different history,
and, as usual, directly contradicting each other. For a full account
of their contradictions, and the impossibility of the whole tale, the
reader must consult Colenso, or Howarth’s book '* The Mammoth
and the Flood.”

The Tower of Babel story, one of the most interesting pieces of
folk-lore in the Bible, shows the Hebrew god as a big man who
needs to “go down ” to see what the people are doing.

Colenso also examines this story, and his demolition of it is a
clever piece of analysis. It seems to have been based, as many
myths are, on a philological error,—the similarity between two
words “ Babyl ” (Gate of God), the name of the Assyrian capital,
and ” Balbal ” to confound. Hence, it is really, as shown in many
works, such as “ Myths and Myth Makers,” p. 72, or the Encyc.
Brit., 10th Ed., Art Babel,—a purely philological myth, as so many
myths are.

Many nations, like the Hindus, Armenians, Australians, Mexi-
cans, had a similar story of the confusion of tongues.

Dr. Kalisch, in his “Commentary on Old Testament,” says:
” Most of the ancient nations possessed myths concerning impious
giants who attempted to storm heaven, either to share it with the
immortal gods or to expel them from it. In some of these fables
the confusion of tongues is represented as the punishment inflicted
by the deities for such wickedness.”

The Exodus incidents have been mercilessly riddled by Colenso,
in a masterly analysis, showing that the whole story is impossible,
and simply the outcome of Hebrew pride and exaggeration.

Colenso’s great work, to which no Churchman has attempted a
real answer, is embodied in seven volumes, and is a monument of
careful reading and criticism. The history of this work is a fine
illustration of the difficulty that Christians,—owing to their early
training, and the terribly complicated and fragmentary character
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CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

of the Bible, find in really reading the Scriputres. Besides these
difficulties, the Hebrew is such a terribly elastic language that its
meaning is often quite unknowable. This was not accidental, but
was created by the scribes, in trying to give to purely sexual physical
words, a spiritual meaning.

Colenso, like every Churchman, had studied his Bible from the
ordinary religious man’s standpoint, but, when he began to trans-
late it for the African natives, he wakened up from his dream and
found that the book which he had seen through the spectacles of
" faith," was not at all the same book when examined openly with
a view to translation. The questions of the natives troubled him,
and he found many ideas untranslateable ; also, when attempting
to put Biblical language into clear statements, he found there was
no clearness in them. He then threw himself into a new study of
the Hebrew Scriptures, which led to his masterly work.

Every student of Christianity ought to read Colenso’s work, as
it is quite unbiassed, and he remained a Christian after rejecting
the Old Testament records. I have availed myself of much of
Colenso’s work, and was tempted to quote largely from him, but
his work is too long and too valuable to bear condensation.

I cannot, however, pass on without giving a sample of his method,
in the hope that others, who have not read him, may be tempted
to look into his volumes.

He found, in trying to translate the Exodus story, that, as there
were 603,550 warriors, there must have been a population of over
two millions (a very moderate calculation ; others say two and a-half
to three millions). Kurtz, How, and Kalisch corroborate this.

Jahweh said, ‘-‘Gather the congregation unto the door of the
Tabernacle.”

The word '* congregation ’’ he proves to mean the whole body
of the people. The door of the tabernacle was within a small court
(1 give all dimensions pp. 244-245). Tabernacle was 17ft. 6in. by
52ft. or thereby. Giving 2ft. for each person, only nine people
could stand in front of the tabernacle, so that the crowd would
reach back for 20 miles. The whole court, packed solid with
people, could not hold 5,000, and the warriors alone numbered over

600,000.   How could Aaron’s voice reach the ears of 2 millions, in
a 20 mile column.

If there were ten people in each tent, there would require to be

200,000   tents? How did they get these? They did not have them
in Egypt, as ' door posts " and " lintels" showed they lived in
houses.

How did'they carry the tents? Their shoulders were already
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207

occupied with their clothes and arms for an army of 600,000, and
their kneading troughs and food, for the manna did not fall in the
Wilderness of Sin. They would require 200,000 oxen. Then we
find the 603,550 warriors were all armed. How did Pharaoh allow
.such an army to get arms? (It was nine times Wellington’s army
at Waterloo; and the whole Egyptians’ army, in any historical- ac-
count, was never more than 160,000; so the Hebrews, instead of
being expelled, could easily have conquered Egypt.)

The Hebrew warriors would have made an army column 68
miles long.

Then they held the passover. This sacrifice would require

200.000   lambs—male lambs in their first year ; so that would mean

400.000   lambs of both sexes (even if they killed every male Iamb and
let the stock become extinct) or two million sheep.

These figures are necessary corollaries from the statements in
Numbers i., 3, and ii., 32,—600,000 able to go forth to war in Israel.

Colenso goes on with his relentless arithmetic (he was an
enthusiastic arithmetician long before, and wrote the best school-
books of arithmetic in his day), and shows us that there would be,
in this two million people, 264 births every day, or one every five
minutes, day and night, and yet they all left Egypt in one day. and
left not one behind (not even a ” hoof.”—Exodus x., 26).

They, and their flocks, which would have required the whole
Delta of Egypt to sustain them, went out in one day.

These two million sheep (necessarily many more of these lambs—

200.000   male lambs had to be provided for the annual festival) and
much cattle and two millions of men, women, children, and help-
less babes, lived in a ” waste howling wilderness,” a ” desert land ”
without grass, grain, or water ; for no manna was sent for the cattle.
And this went on for forty years.

Then Colenso goes on figuring that there were 22,273 first born,
or only one in every 42 children; so every mother had 42 sons.
But the average, calculated out of the records of families in Exodus,
was only three children in each family.

Then, out of the 70 people who went down into Egypt (other
accounts say only 66) there could only have been 1,377 fighting men
in the fourth generation, instead of 600,000. It would take 46
children by each woman—without allowing for deaths—to get the

600.000   fighting men.

Sayce, in his ” Higher Criticism,” p. 463, notices this constant
boasting of the Hebrews as to their numbers, and he says that,
during die war between' Ahaz and the kings of Damascus and
Samaria, 120,000 fighting men are said to have fallen in one day;
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CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

and the army of Uzziah is said to have consisted of 300,750 men
and 2,600 generals.   ,

But Ahab could only raise, 10,000 men, and Damascus 20,000 ;
and Shalmaneser does not claim to have slain over 14,000 out of all
his enemies. In fact, to show the petty natures of the tribal strife,
Assar-Nanr-pal boasts when he has slain of 50 and 172 of the enemy
in different battles.

When Sennacherib over-ran the whole country except Jerusalem,
and sent all the inhabitants, men, women, and children into
captivity, he gives the number of all the Israelites as 200,150, all
told ; and he was not likely to understate his captives ; moreover,
the counting was done by official numberers.

Therefore, the whole country did not contain over 30,000 men
capable of bearing arms.

The Samaritans who were led into captivity were only 27,280,
and yet Samaria was a more powerful state than Jerusalem.

Yet Zerah of Egypt came against Asa with a thousand thousand
(a million) soldiers ! ! !   (2 Chronicles xiv. 9.)

Colenso’s work must be read to enable the student to appreciate
his thoroughness and moderation.

The historical truth about the Exodus, as narrated by Justin
in his “Historium Judseorum,” is, that a band of leprous and sexually
diseased Jewish slaves were driven out of the Delta of Egypt into
the desert, as the oracle of the god Amen had declined these in-
sanitary slaves to haye been the cause of a pestilential disease which
had spread all ovei^Egypt (see p. 231).

Lysimachus, Diodorus Siculus, Tacitus, and Manetho all agree
in this account, and the Hebrew Bible narrative admits the truth
of the historians’ account, in Deut. xxviii. 27, by remembering the
“ Botch of Egypt and Emerods ” (syphilis, etc.), *•’ of which thou
canst not be healed.”

The story of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart, and then punishing
the innocent Egyptian labourers must also be dismissed as a
medicine-man tale.

I have tried to give the reader a view of the conclusions arrived
at by all sorts of scholars, unanimously inimical to the claim made
by the Christians, that the Jewish writings are the actual, personal
word of God to man.

It is often claimed that these writings give such an exalted picture
of a god that they are valuable, and even ” divine,” for that reason
alone.

We may ask what picture of a god does the Old Testament paint
for us? Not only is he far more short-sighted than man as every-
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

209

thing he “ plans ” fails, and does he again and again repent him of
his blunders, and visit the punishment for his own blunders on
innocent people, but he is not even a jovial god of human build like
Jupiter, but absolutely maleficent. Where could one find a more
complete picture of the embodiment of evil than in this picture of
the Hebrew Yahweh irae, taken from his own sacred record?
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CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

GOD OF THE HEBREW BIBLE.

AFTER all the thousands of volumes by “ divines,” praising the
“ wonderful ” God revealed by himself to us in the Jewish Scrip-
tures, it has always puzzled me to understand through what
spectacles these men have read their Bible. I suppose they only
seek for texts or parts of texts which will bolster up the great system
to which they belong, and that they are really capable of under-
standing plain English as it is written in the Bible. Every man who
has, like Colenso, translated the Scriptures, has had borne in upon
him irresistibly the true character of the Hebrew Jhvh. Most people
have heard of Thomas Paine ; and many of those who have never
read his book hold up their hands in pious horror at the mention
of it. Yet such men as he and Colonel Ingersoll were only doing
what Colenso, a bishop of the Church, did, in reading the Bible,
and telling us what it really contains. Most parsons have to refer
to Bible dictionaries when they want to be accurate in their state-
ments, but do they ever tell their congregation what they find in
these Bible dictionaries ? Not one word of the information in Hast-
ing's, Cheyne’s, or other Bible dictionaries is spoken from the
pulpit. I will not waste the reader’s time by quoting the great army
of Doctors of Divinity who, as parsons and professors, have written
down the true account of what they have found in their Bible ; but
it may be admirably summed up in a few paragraphs mostly taken
from Forlong.

All Ale, including Yahve, are spoken of as partial, hating, loving
and jealous ; as creators they were pleased and then displeased with
their work. All Elohim repent alike of their good and evil inten-
tions (Genesis i. 31, vi. 6, viii. 21 ; Jonah iii. 10) they associate with
lying and deceitful spirits and are often unjust and ignorant, and
visit the sins of the parents upon innocent children, a cruelty
Christianity has virtually accepted in her leading dogmas. The
Elohim required bloody sacrifices, human and bestial; innocent and
cherished victims, even the first-born of man and beast. They
gloried in creating evil as well as good (Isaiah xlv., 7; Amos iii., 6).
and so loved savoury food and the burning odours of sacrifices that
these were called ” the food of the Elohim.” They were seen in
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

211

the ravings ol madmen and the discourses of prophets, and as a
rule were demoniacal, jealous, wrathful, and terrible.

Our liturgies truly say that it is a fearful thing to fall into Yahve’a
hands. He “ abhorred ” even his chosen people, and was like a
fire which burns to the lowest hell, and consumes the earth and all
its increase ; he delights in heaping mischief upon them, and dart*
ing arrows at them; in burning them with hunger, and devouring
them with heat and bitter destruction. He sits in heaven throw*
ing stones at the Amorites (Joshua x. 11). He sends upon them the
teeth of beasts, and the poison of serpents. He sends the sword
without, and the terror within, to destroy the young man and the
virgin, the suckling and him with grey hairs. Yahveh is to “Whet
a glittering sword and arrows which shall devour flesh and be drunk
with the blood of the slain “ (Deut. xxxii., 41-42). He sets snares
for his erring children, to provoke them to wrath, so that they may
be destroyed and consumed with fire and everlasting burnings.
Yahveh was also the sun-god of the Phoenicians, says the Rev. Sir
Geo. Cox, who demanded hecatombs of human burnt offerings, and
the Israelites were not to be out-done in feeding his altars with
human blood. The “ passing through “ of children meant the burn-
ing of their sons and daughters in the fires of the high places of
Tophet and Baal, and this as late as the days of Josiah. Ahaz,
King of Judah, burnt his children in the fire (2 Chron. xxviii., 3).
The children of Judah built the high place of Tophet, which is in
the valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and daughters
in the fire (2 Chron. xxxiii., 6).

Nor, say Bishop Colenso and the Rev. Sir Geo. Cox, had these
matters much improved in the captivity or middle of the 6th century
B.C., as Ezekiel charges Israelites with sacrificing their sons and
daughters to be devoured (Ezek. xvi., 20-21 ; xxiii., 37-39), and with
slaying their children to their idols and coming red-handed to the
sanctuary, the courts of which were filled with the blood of inno-
cents. Kings Ahaz and Manasseh set the example by burning their
own sons to their Jehovah—and Cox describes the popular and
national religion of the Jews as a gross, sensual, and cruel idolatry.
Their God’s symbols were very savage, monsters of the deep,
crocodiles, dragons, the Phallic Bahamath of Job, his Elehiun,
“ worm of the rivers ’’ with serpents’ poles, and sacred pillars. He
needs the spilling of blood for remission of sins, and that the just
must die for the unjust.

The Hebrew Jehovah was similar to Chemos of the Samaritans,
and afforded no impediment, nay, encouraged murder, vice, and
violence. Yahveh was essentially a local Baal, caring only for
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CHRISTIANITY: THE SOURCES

his own little portion of Palestine, and his followers firmly
believed that he delighted in human sacrifice like Chemos,
and therefore did the Yahvists at once fall back from their
siege of Mesa's fort, when they saw the King offer up his son to
Chemos burnt alive (2 Kings iii. 27). Yahweh was always cruel
and implacable, no mercy or quarter could be shown, neither age nor
sex was respected. He gloried in man's ignorance, and a thirst for
knowledge disturbed and irritated him. “ Every step in the develop-
ment of humanity was made in defiance of this God’s Will. He
invented * original sin,’ and the doctrines regarding man's innate
corruption, which Paul amplified into the most terrible instrument
of persecution man has ever seen." (Here Forlong speaks wisely.)
The world has not yet recognised the untold blood and misery which
many of his quasi commands have wrought as that one " thou shall
not suffer a sorceress to live." Yet a sorceress, Huldah the Weasel,
was employed to identify his holy Scriptures (p. 144).

His ferocity found a fitting echo in the words of " Saint"
Jerome (who firmly set up Paul’s Fetish of " Faith ”), and who
wrote : “ If thy father and mother be lifeless and naked across the
threshold trample on them, yea, on the bosom which suckled thee."

We now see that the original form of the creation, current
amongst the old Jewish prophets or poets, was identical with the
Babylonian myth. But the first chapter of Genesis was written at
a very late date, probably about 300 or 400 B-.C., and the ideas of the
Jews were too far advanced to admit of them attributing creation
to a foreign God slaying a dragon, and so the writer cut out all the
first part, and had it not been for the references in the poets’
writings, in Psalms, etc., we should never have known from internal
evidence that the Jews obtained their religious account of creation
direct from the Babylonians.

The exact agreement may be summarised as follows:—

It begins with the mysterious second verse of Genesis i., by a
description of the world as water and darkness, Tohuwa-Bohu, the
words conveying an idea of storm and stress, called Tehom, and
tells us that Ruach brooded on the abysmal waters. Hie clay
tablets tell an identical story. But Tihamat was the mother of the
Gods, and we find that Ruach was the wife or mother of the Gods,
and we know that in all mythologies the wife and mother are one
(see p. 136)*'

But let us continue the summary. The feminine Tihamat be-
comes masculine Tehom by dropping the feminine affix, but,
although Tehom is used to mean the primeval ocean, it is used as a
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

193

proper name without the article, as was Tihamat, and represented
a mythological being.

Both myths represent the monster as dragon-like. Both myths
have variants implying that she had several heads.

She has seven heads in the Babylonian myth and in '* Revela-

. «   M

Pons.

Both myths have auxiliary monsters.

Both say the dragqn was against the Gods (plural).

Both make the dragon and her helpers rebels,,

In both, the dragon claims dominion over the world, and in both
this is indicated to be an insolent rebellion.

Marduk (Babylonian) and Yahweh (Hebrew) both go forth armed
with weapons.

Both slay the dragon with a sword.

The helpers are more leniently dealt with in both stories, dis-
persed, conquered, and made prisoners.

In both myths, the dividing of the deep Tehom into the water
above and beneath, preludes the creation of heaven and earth.

In both myths the creation of heaven and earth immediately
follow the destruction of the monsters.

The differences in details, and the changes in sex and nomen-
clature, are exactly what one would expect from the racial ideas
of the nation which adopted the Babylonian myth, but the details
are so similar that it shows that, either the myth had not long been
transplanted, or that the Hebrews were still under the tuition of
their Babylonian conquerors—which we have seen to have been fre-
quently the case (pp. 145-146). I have already pointed out that the
story of Chaos and the waters could only have arisen on Babylonian
soil, and was, as we now know, extant in Babylon long before the
Hebrews inhabited Jerusalem. The Babylonians had a story of
how eternal life was lost to man, as all nations have ; but it differed
somewhat from the Eden myth. Instead of the Gods resolutely
denying eternal life to man, they freely offered it to Adapa, the first
man. The story is that Adapa's boat was sunk by the sudden fury
of the South wind, and in revenge he broke the wings of the South
wind. Anu, the God of Heaven, summoned him to account for his
action. Ea, Adapa’s father, warned him that “ Bread of Death ”
and *' Water of Death ” would be offered to him, pnd he must
refuse them or *•* Thou^shalt surely die ” (like Yahweh’s threat to
Adam). But the God Anu commanded ” Food of Life ” to be
brought to him; he refused it, owing to the warning of Ea, and
' Water of Life ” also. Anu was amazed at a mortal refusing
immortality, and cried, **Oh! Adapa, wherefore hast thou not
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eaten, wherefore hast thou not drunken? So also shall thou not
live. Take him back to his home on earth/'

A much more loveable God was Anu, sorry for the man's folly,
compared with jealous Yahweh, who punished man for the blunders
of the Gods.

But the Garden of Eden was only brought down to earth in late
times; like the Heaven Adapa visited, it was originally far away
in the sky, and, just as we have fragments of the Yahweh-Tehom
myth in the older poetic books, so we have glimpses of the early
Eden in Ezekiel and Revelation.

Ezekiel, in a rhapsody on the beauty of the land of the Assyrian,
chapter mi., 3-9, says, of the Assyrian trees fostered by irrigation,
“ The cedars in the garden of God could not hide him ; the fir trees
were not like his boughs, and the chestnut trees were not like his
branches; nor any tree in the garden of God was like unto him in
his beauty.

“ 1 have made him fair by the multitude of his branches; so
that all the trees of Eden, that were in the garden of God, envied
him.”—Ezekiel xxxi., 8-9.

This is a part of the usual ” prophecy ” written after the event.
The Scythians (Skuthians) had destroyed Babylon, and had
plundered the Pharaoh’s tombs in Egypt. They left the tombs in
the chaotic state we now find them, taking a rich plunder of gold
and precious stones, crowns, necklets, rings, etc., in which the kings
and queens had been buried.

They destroyed the irrigation canals of Babylon so completely
that it became the desert which it is to this day.

Ezekiel writes a “ prophecy,” solemnly warning the King of
Egypt that ” therefore, because thou hast lifted up thyself in height,
and he (the Assyrian) hath his top (in pride) 1 haoe therefore de-
livered him into the mighty one of the heathen (Skuthians), and he
shall deal with him.” Note that the future and past, turn about,
trying to make a prophecy of what had already happened.

So we see that all the trees in the Garden of God (Eden), even
the Tree of Life, and that of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,
envied the Assyrians. No wonder they placed their- Eden there.

Our St. George and the Dragon is die Western version of the
Babylonian fable. Marduk was a ” Gee Urge,” Earth Maker, and
slew a Dragon.
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195

THE FLOOD.

The Babylonians had also a deluge story as had all other nations,
as floods are such incontrollable disasters, and always superstitiously
considered to be specially sent as a punishment. The Babylonians
had an excuse, as they had a flood every winter, occasionally a very
destructive one, by typhoons driving up the sea in the Persian Gulf
(see pp. 204-205).

But it is of little use to go over all these myths, for myths they
undoubtedly are. One has only to ask ; is there water enough
available on the world to cover the mountains, to And, on calcula-
tion, that, if all the water were extracted from the air, leaving it
chemically dry, and put into the ocean, it would not raise the
level of the sea more than 10 inches, an amount absolutely invisible
to savage man, in view of the tides and the rise and fall by winds.
Of course a rainfall of ten inches often takes place locally, but
that is the water deposited from a vast volume of air constantly
changing, entering an area of low pressure, and depositing rain,
then passing on to be replaced by more moist air ready to yield up
its moisture in turn, a continuous process. Then the rain over a
large area is concentrated into a narrow valley, and causes floods,
which become exaggerated by the excitement caused by the disaster,
into a flood of the whole world—in fact, the flood was over the
*' whole world ** of the inhabitants of the valley.

In the case of the flood, we have again two contradictory stories.
One gives the flood at forty days and nights, and the other,
a part of a year, a whole year, and anothet a part of a
year. The Babylonian flood lasted only two weeks, but the
cause of the flood and the results were the same, while the minutely
detailed sending out of birds is very similar in both cases, even
down to the sacrifice, and the Gods " smelling a sweet savour.1*

From early times the Zodiacal signs governed the symbols under
which the sun should be worshipped, but the Hebrews were very
ignorant (they had no'astronomers when Babylon had advanced
scientific astronomers), and they clung to the old Phallic worship
and necromancy. But their Bible was written very late, about 400
to 200 B.C., in a highly astronomical period ; so the Babylonian or
Persian priests, Nehemiah and Ezra, who re-composed their Scrip-
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tures, may have given (hem an astronomical turn. For instance, we
see the number 40 linked with all Jewish mirologues. Now the
death and re-birth of the sun is the subject of nearly all the folk-lore
of the Bible ; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are shown by Goldziher
to be Sun Gods. Samson, Job, Esther, and Mordecai, and Daniel,
are all dim reflections of sun myths, while their great miracle play
in the tabernacle, once a year, represented the death and re-birth of
the sun from the Virgin of Israel.

The three days and three nights of Jonah’s incarceration in the
whale’s belly, and of Jesus in the tomb, were, as we know from
the latter, 40 hours,—from Friday afternoon till Sunday morning,
or Thursday till Saturday (pp. 109 and 333).

This represented the time the sun was supposed to be dead
on the winter Solstice ; from 4 p.m. on the 20th of December
(or equivalent on other calendars) till 8 a.m. on the 22nd December,
the 21st being the “lying dead’’ or “standing still” of the sun
(Solstice).

This makes part of a day, a whole day, and part of a day or
forty hours, and the two accounts of the flood were evidently
written by two scribes regarding this same solar period from two
points of view, viz. :—The first as part of a year, a whole year, and
part of a year, and the second as forty days, part of a month, a
whole month, and part of a month, one scribe calling the days of the
Solstice years, and the other calling the days months, or the forty
hours forty days. The flood and the Solstice both refer to the
absence of the sun, or its weak power or death at the winter solstice,
and the use of the words hours, days, and years, was quite
promiscuous ; “ And the days of his years are three score years
and ten.”

These Babylonian accounts, having become fixed by being
written, and having formed part of the liturgy of the
Babylonians, had become widely disseminated over the East
a thousand years before the Hebrews, or Jews, or Israel-
ites, or Judeans, or Canaanites (they have so many names),
had settled in Palestine. Copies of these myths were used
in 1400 B.C. at Tel El Amarna as exercises in writing in the time of
Akhnaton (Flinders Petrie, Tel el Amarna Tablets.). Cuneiform
writing was used for all official correspondence, even in Egypt,
where they had the priestly hieroglyphics, but the Babylonians were
a trading*people, and had developed a more practical language and
writing.

Hence, when the Hebrews either arrived, pr arose, in Palestine,
they would find all these legends current, and they formed the
originals of the Bible folk-lore.
 OF ITS TEACHING AND SYMBOLISM

197

We have preserved for us a great many of the Babylonian
legends, and much of its litany, exactly as it was written, owing
to the imperishable nature of the burnt brick tablets on which it was
written. They were buried by the destruction of all the great
Babylonion cities by the Scythians or Skuthians in the ruthless
invasion which caused the great Song of Fear of Ezekiel
(see Dr. Duff's translation of Prof. Duhm’s poetic analysis of
Ezekiel in Duff's “Old Testament Criticism.*’) These tablets
show us the Babylonian literature of 3,000 to 4,000 years
ago without any change or modernization, whereas the Hebrew
Biblical narrative has been the subject of profound alteration, due
to incessant editing, necessitated by the changes of religious ideas
and beliefs, which are inevitable in any living religion. The
Hebrews gradually evolved their “law,” each prophet or high
priest adding or altering the details to suit the ideas of the day,
and statements about miracles and the ancient history of the race
were inserted or altered by the priestly caste in order to give
authority to their precepts and practices. Thus, all the old Baby-
lonian folk-lore was altered so as to debase woman, and Carpenter
tells us (p. 141), “ In the priestly code much important legislation is
conveyed in the form of a narrative leading to a difficulty, a question
and a decision.”

In other words it is full of “ cases ’’ elaborately designed as pre-
cedents. They are legal fictions by which fresh rules are made
binding, and permanent enactments were evolved out of hypo-
thetical incidents in the wilderness (p. 116). Early races always
require some authority to make their laws enforceable, hence the
“ inspiration ” theory so dear to mirophilists, or the " legal fiction.”

That astronomical facts were the basis of the majority of feasts
and religious rites and of the tales of their gods we have much
evidence.

A large proportion of the cuneiform tables was devoted to
astronomical information and tables, and a further large proportion
devoted to the more popular and superstitious side of astronomy,
viz.: Astrology, showing that the broad facts of astronomy had
filtered down in a distorted form into the general population.

” Babyloif was really the cradle of astronomical observation,”
and ” the astronomy of the Babylonians has been celebrated by
'many Greek and Latin authors.”   (Sayce, “ Hibbert Lectures

p. 229.)

Even the bitter tongued Isaiah, bewailing the heavy yoke Babylon
had laid upon his people, and telling her that although she has said,
" I shall be a lady for ever ” (Isaiah xlvii., 7), yet should desolation
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come upon her, sarcastically calls out (Isaiah xlvii., 13), “ Let now
die astrologers, the star gazers, and the monthly prognosticators
stand up and save thee.”

But the ignorant and superstitious Hebrew poet only knew the
degraded side of Babylonian knowledge, the “ enchantments,” the
” multitude of the sorceries,” and could not appreciate the laborious
and accurate work of the astronomers in mapping the heavens,
naming the stars, and recording the motions and eclipses of sun and
moon, and keeping correct dates by practical astronomy, as Green'
wich does by more refined methods to-day.

They had mapped the limits of the wanderings of the planets
and the apparent course of the sun amongst the stars (a combination
of observation and reasoning beyond the powers of even the
majority of educated Europeans in the 20th century), and divided
the ecliptic belt, called the Zodiac, into twelve signs or ” houses of
the sun,” as far back as 4700 B.C., or nearly 7,000 years ago, when
the sun in the Spring equinox was in Tammuz, The Twins, our
Gemini. Their signs of the Zodiac were founded on Phallism and
the Totem names of the ancient Accadian religion, and as they
started their Zodiac at the Spring Equinox and made their first sign
the strong bull ploughing a straight course through the heavens,
directing the course of the year, we can calculate that this arrange-
ment must have come into existence about B.c. 4700   (Sayce,

**Hibbert Lectures”)

” Astronomical science underlies the whole Babylonian religion.”
” The cuneiform determinative for a deity is an eight-rayed star ”
(Sayce). In fact, the very word star is said to be derived from the
Babylonian Venus Istar, as is the Church word Easter.

We have seen that while the main story of the creation is Baby-
lonian, and based on the conditions peculiar to the Euphrates
Valley, there is another story with an atmosphere much more suit-
able to the Arid highlands round Jerusalem. These two narratives
use different names for their gods and are mixed up with curious
fragments derived from neither.