The Jesus-legend is Egyptian, but it was at first without the dogma of historic personality. We have now to follow it in the circuit of precession, where it might be traced back to a beginning with the sign of Virgo. But for the present purpose, the birthplace of the virgin’s child was in the sign of Leo when the vernal equinox was resting in the lion constellation.

The Messu, or the Messianic prince of peace, was born into the world at Memphis in the cult of Ptah as the Egyptian Jesus, with the title of Iu-em-hetep, he who comes with peace or plenty and good fortune as the type of an eternal youth. Here we may note in passing that this divine Child, Iu-em-hetep, as the image of immortal youth, the little Hero of all later legend, the Kamite Herakles, had been one of the eight great gods of Egypt who were in existence twenty thousand years ago (Herodotus, 2, 43). This wondrous child, who is the figure of ever-coming and of perennial renewal in the elements of life, was also known by name as Kheper, Horus, Aten, Tum or Nefer-Atum according to the cult. He was continued at On or Annu. The title likewise was repeated in the new religion, when Iu-em-hetep became the representative of Atum-Ra. His mother’s name at On was Iusãas, she who was great (as) with Iusa or Iusu, the ever-coming child, the Messiah of the inundation.

Such doctrine, however, did not originate as uterine or come the human way, although it might be expressed in human terminology.

We have now to track the ever-coming child Iusa, Iusu or Jesus in the sphere of time as the son of Iusãas and of Atum, who was Ra in his first sovereignty; not merely in the round of the lesser year, but in the movement of precession as determined by the changing equinox or by the shifting position of the pole. As we have shown, the Zodiacal signs were set in heaven according to the seasons of the Egyptian year and in the annual circuit of the sun. The birthplace of the Inundation and the Grapes was figured in or near the sign of Virgo or the Virgin, the mother of the child who brought the new life to the land in water as Ichthus the fish and in food as Horus on his papyrus. But Horus the traveller of eternity has to be tracked and followed in the movement of Precession. And thus the new beginning for the present quest is in the sign of Leo.

The priests of On attributed a new creation of the world, or the heavens, to Atum-Ra. This was the cultivated enclosure or garden of a new beginning. And this garden of a new beginning or creation was visibly featured in the southern heaven. There ran the river Nile as the one water from its hidden source, as it flowed in the starry stream Eridanus, and meandered through the Aarru-garden that was [Page 729] made for Atum, in the likeness of which the future paradise was represented in Amenta (Rit., ch. 150, Vignette). According to the Osirian rendering, the later Aarru-field is the garden of the grape (Rit., Vignettes). The typical tree of life in an Egypto-Greek planisphere is the grape-vine. This is the tree still represented by the female vine-dresser and the male grape-gatherer in the Decans of Virgo (Higgins, W. H., Arabic Names of the Stars). Orion rose up when the grapes were ripe to represent the Deliverer, who was coming “full of wine”. The goblet or “mixing-bowl” in which the drink was brewed to hugely celebrate the Uaka-festival of the Inundation is constellated in the sign of “Krater”. The ancient enemy of man, the evil dragon of Drought, is imaged in the form of “Hydra”, waiting to devour the Virgin’s child the moment it is born.

At one time the birthplace in the stellar mythos was where Sothis rose as opener of the year and herald of the Inundation. This was the star of Hathor and her Messu or Messianic babe who came to make war on the dragon and to bruise the serpent’s head. And Iusãas was a form of Hathor. The fulfilment of the primitive promises of the coming child as bringer of all good things was annual in the astronomical mythology. The babe, the birth, the birthplace and the bringer to birth, were all continued in the solar cult, from this, the starting-point, with Sothis now as the announcer of the Inundation, and the life of vegetation figured as the young deliverer Horus on his papyrus, or the later Atum-Horus issuing from the lotus on the day of “come thou to me”, the first day of the Egyptian year or new creation.

Time in the old year of the Great Bear and the Inundation had not been subject to the changes in Precession. In this year there was but one birthplace for the typical child who originated in Horus of the Inundation as the figure of food and bringer of the water, and therefore of salvation. Also there was but one date for the birthday of the child, namely, the first of the month Tekki (or Thoth) which we equate with July 25, when the five dies non are also counted in the reckoning of the year. If Ra had not discovered the co-partnery of the Great Mother and Sebek-Horus the Fish of the Inundation, and substituted the time of the sun, the birthplace of the babe might have remained for ever fixed in heaven. Time in the ordinary year was always kept and reckoned by the recurring seasons; firstly by the Inundation. In the great year this time was rectified by the retrocession of the equinoxes and the changing position of the pole. Thus time was kept by double entry. And when the birthplace of the Messianic child was made zodiacal it travelled round the backward circuit of precession to fulfil a course of six-and-twenty thousand years. The great year might have gone its way unrecognized but for this change of pole-stars or the backward lapsing of the equinoxes being observed and registered by the astronomers. It was solar time, which had to be continually revised and readjusted by means of the stars. The Inundation was a fixture in relation to the earth, and a primary factor in the year of the Great Bear, the end and re-beginning of which were memorized by means of the “Sut-Heb” or “festival of the tail” — that is, the tail of the Great Bear as pointer at its southernmost longitude, [Page 730] which was dependent on the revolution of the sphere. The Great Bear, hippopotamus or crocodile, was then the Stellar bringer-forth to Horus of the Inundation. But with Horus, born of Virgo in the Zodiac, the birthplace of the babe was figured in the vernal equinox, and thus became subject to the changes in precession. It parted company with the lesser year of the Inundation to travel from sign to sign around the circuit of the world’s great year.

Fourteen thousand years ago the vernal equinox coincided with the sign of Virgo and the autumn equinox with the sign of Pisces. And here the learned writer Eratosthenes has a word to say upon this point. He is a most unimpeachable witness for the Egyptians; a better could not be subpoenaed. He was born in the year 276 B.C. He was keeper of the great Alexandrian library and the most learned Greek in Egypt at the time. Amongst other subjects he wrote on was astronomy, and he testifies to the fact that the festival of Isis, which was celebrated in his time at the autumn equinox, had been celebrated when the Easter equinox was in Virgo. This perfectly agrees with the position of Isis, the Virgin Mother in the Zodiac. During those six months in the great year=six signs, the child as periodic fulfiller of time and season in the Zodiac, together with the birth and birthplace, was receding through the six signs in precession, from Virgo to Pisces. Thirteen thousand years later the autumn equinox coincided once more with the sign of Virgo. Now there is no meeting-point of the mythology with the astronomy more obvious than in these two signs of the Zodiac. But it is impossible that this imagery should have been constellated in the planisphere the last time the equinoxes entered them, which was about the year 255 B.C., where they still linger at the present moment. And the time before that, in round numbers, was 26,000 years previously.

It is a fixed fundamental fact that the death and rebirth of the year were commemorated at this time from the 20th to the 25th of July, when the birth of Horus was announced by the star Sothis or the Bennu=Phoenix. It is equally a fact that when the solar Horus had entered the Zodiac the birthplace was shifted from sign to sign, according to the movement in precession, from Virgo to Leo, from Cancer to the Gemini, from Taurus to Aries, from Aries to Pisces. The pathway of eternity was now depicted in the circle of precession. In this the sonship of Horus was continued after the fatherhood of God had been established, and Horus became the manifestor for the eternal in the sphere of solar time. Hence the sayings of Horus in the Ritual. “I am Horus, the prince of eternity”. “Witness of Eternity is my name” (ch. 42). He calls himself “the persistent traveller on the highways of heaven”, which he surveys as “the everlasting one”. “I am Horus”, he says, “who steppeth onwards through eternity” — without stopping or ever standing still. This was Horus, otherwise the Egyptian Jesus, as the ever-coming son (Iu-sa) in all the years of time that culminated in the all-inclusive cycle of precession. Horus as the shoot, or the later wheat-ear (spica), had been brought forth when the birthplace was in Virgo. If we look on this as a sign in precession, the next birthplace in the backward course is in the sign of Leo, in which Horus was the lion of the solar power that was doubled in the vernal equinox. When the Osiris comes to witness [Page 731] the judgment on the mount of glory (Rit., ch. 136 B), he sees “the lion forms” called the Kherufu, which are three in number. Two of these are figures of the Double Force, as shown in the vignette to ch. 18, and the one in the centre is the lion of the double lions=the double force, as the lion or as the solar disk. Now Atum is this solar lion on the mount which is in the equinox, and which can be thus identified with the lion-sign or sign of the lions in the Zodiac. Atum is the god with the lion’s face, who is also called the man-faced lion. He is said to lay the foundations of the eternal house (Rit., ch. 17). That is, in building the new heaven which was based upon the equinoxes in the circuit of precession, at a certain starting-point, including all the previous foundations laid by Ptah and Taht, Shu and Sut, and by the first great Mother in the Heptanomis.

It is a tradition common to the Quichés, the Aztecs, the Bushmen, the Australian aborigines and other ancient races that their ancestors existed before the creation of the sun. The Bushmen say that the sun did not shine on their country in the beginning. It was only when the children of the first Bushmen had been sent up to the summit of the Mount that the sun was launched to give light to the South African world (Bleek, Bushmen Folk-Lore, p. 9). So in Egypt it might be said there was no sun before the creation of Ra, when Atum issued from the lotus on the day of “Come thou to me”. It is stated in the texts that light began with this new creation, when the sun-god rose up from the lotus; that is, the solar light which followed the lunar and the starlight which preceded day in accordance with the mythical representation. Atum-Horus sinks at evening in the waters as the closer of day, with the lotus on his head. At dawn he rises from the lotus, the opening flower of dawn. But, instead of commencing with the sign of Virgo, the present writer traces this new beginning in the solar mythos to the time when the vernal equinox was in the sign of Leo, now some 13,000 to 15,000 years ago, according to the reckoning in the greater year. By this, however, it is not meant that equal day and night were then coincident with the birth of the Inundation or the heliacal rising of the dog-star on the 25th of July. The position of the equinox has to be made out according to the precessional year, not by the lesser year. This difference constitutes the difficulty of the reckoning. The time of equinox was determined in the lesser year by the recurrence of equal day and night, but the position of the equinoxes in the annus magnus was determined by the risings of the herald stars. Amongst other figures of the god Atum, he is portrayed standing on a lion, in others he is accompanied by his mother the lioness, Sekhet or Bast. The annual resurrection of the solar god was always in the Easter equinox, and when the funeral couch is figured in the lion-form, and the rising of the dead is from the lion-bier, the fact is registered in the eschatological phase of the astronomical mythology. It is said in the Ritual (ch. 64), “He who lulleth me to rest is the god in lion-form”. Another note of this zodiacal beginning with the birthplace in the sign of the lion is recognizable in the arrangement of the twelve signs as double houses for the seven planets. In ancient astrology five of the planets had each one a house on either side of the Zodiac excepting the sun and moon; these had but one house between the two — that is, in the [Page 732] lion-sign; or rather, the lion-sign was the only double house of the Zodiac, and this was of necessity founded at the place of the equinox. The double house of the astrologers is identical with the great hall of Mati, the place where the balance was always set up in whichever sign the equinox occurred for the time being. The place of the equinox was the hall of Mati, or rather the double equinoxes formed the double house of Mati.

The Egyptian founders of astronomical science did not begin with mathematical calculations. They had to verify everything by observation through all the range of periodic time, and this was the only method that was fundamental or practical at first. It was by direct observation, not by calculation, that the wise men of Egypt and Meroë attained their knowledge of precession. By ages on ages of watching and registering they perceived that the backward movement of the equinox, as immense in time as it is slow in motion, had to be reckoned with as a factor of vast magnitude; and that this long hand on the face of the eternal horologe was a determinative of the hugest cycle of all, so far as they could measure periodic time. By imperceptible degrees the movement itself had become apparent, and the point of equal day and night was observed to be passing out of one group of stars upon the ecliptic into another; which sometimes coincided with a change of polestars.

We have now to trace the vernal equinox in precession, from the sign of the lion through the signs of the crab, the twins, the bull, the ram, until it entered the sign of the fishes, about 255 B.C. For 2,155 years Atum-Horus manifested, as Iu-sa, the coming son in the vernal equinox, or as the lion of the double force, when this was in the constellation Leo. The next sign in precession is the crab, the Kamite original of which was the beetle, and the beetle was an emblem of Ptah and Atum as a type of the God who came into being as his own son, that is Iu-sa, the child of Iusãas. When the equinox had receded from the lion-sign to the house of the beetle — our crab — the young Jesus of the Zodiac was there brought forth as Kheper the beetle, the “good scarabaeus”, which type and title he retained until the Christian era. In this sign of the beetle we find the crib or manger of the infant figured in an early form. The star called “El Nethra” by the Arabs, and “Proesepe” by the Greeks, which is in the eighth lunar mansion, is the crib or manger by name. In Cancer, then, the Horus of the Zodiac was reborn in his solar character as the beetle of the Nile, the reproducer of himself by transformation. Thus Horus had been born in his solar character as a young lion in the sign of Leo, in the month of the lions; and reborn 2,155 years later as a beetle, see Hor-Apollo, I, 10). Also the ass, another zootype of Iu, is figured in this sign of the beetle or crab. Here, then, we find the crib, or manger, of Iu, the ass, in the sign which was the birthplace in the vernal equinox from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, and therefore the original birthplace of the divine infant that was born in a manger or a stable, and was attended by the ass of Atum and the bullock of Iu.

When the equinox entered the sign of the Twins, it no longer coincided by a month in the great year with the birthplace in the crab; and there was now a difference of two months betwixt the day [Page 733] of the equinox in the twins and the opening day of the sacred year, on the 25th of July, at the time when the equinox was in the sign of the lion. And two months in the great year are equivalent to 4,310 lesser years. Next Iusa, the coming son, the second Atum, was born of Hathor-Iusãas, the cow-headed goddess, in the sign of the bull where the equinox rested from the year 6,465 to the year 4,310 B.C. In this sign the divine child was brought forth in the stable as a calf or a bullock. The lunar cow was in the stable of the solar bull, where the young babe was born and laid in a manger now as Horus or Iu, the calf. Mother and child might be and were portrayed in human form, but it is the cow that gives the name of “Meri”, and but for the cow-headed Hathor-Meri there would have been no human Mary as a virgin-mother in the Jesus-legend. Hathor-Meri was the mother of Horus, the Su in the “house of a thousand years”, born in the stable or the manger of the bull. He had been brought forth as a young lion in the house of the lions, as a scarabaeus in the sign of the beetles, and now was manifested as the calf in the sign of the bull. And it was as the lunar cow in the “house of a thousand years” that the mother brought forth her child as a calf in the stable which was rebuilt for the oxen, that is, for the bull, the cow and calf, when the birthplace passed into the zodiacal house, stable, or byre of Taurus. In re-erecting the house of heaven on earth when it was going to ruin, or, at the end of the period, King Har-si-Atef says he has built the stable for oxen in the temple. (Stele of King Har-si-Atef, left side”.Records, v. 6, p. 90.) In this stable of the temple the mystery of the birthplace was sacredly performed, and the child born in a manger (the Apt) was exhibited to the worshippers every year. The ox and the ass that were present at the birth of the Divine child in the stable at Bethlehem were extant in this sign. The ass had been present without the ox when the birthplace was in the sign of the lion; and again when the birthplace was in the sign of the crab. The manger in which the little Jesus lay is figured in the sign of cancer, and the birth of the babe in that sign with the manger for his cradle had occurred 8,875 years B.C. Also the ass on which the child Iusa rode is standing by the manger in the stable. The ass in the birthplace is a representative of the sun-god Atum-Iu, and when the ass and ox are found together in the stable the birthplace is in the sign of the bull.

Horus or Iusa in the “house of a thousand years” was the bringer of the millennium, which was renewed in the following cycle. Sut or Satan was loosed for a little while, seven days at most, during the Saturnalia; then he was bound in chains for another cycle of time, whilst Horus took possession of the house once more on a lease of a thousand years to establish his reign of peace, plenty and good luck in the domain of time and law, justice and right by the inauguration of another millennium. The Divine mother and child had been humanized in the Egyptian religion when the stone monuments begin for us, at least ten thousand years ago, but the zootypes were still continued as data in sign-language. This was the knowledge that was in possession of the Wise Men, the Magi, the Zoroastrians, Jews, Gnostics, Essenes and others who kept the reckoning, read the signs, and knew the time at which the advent was to occur, once every fourteen lifetimes (14x71-2 years), in the “house of a thousand [Page 734] years”, or once every 2,155 years, when the prince of peace was to be reborn as the lamb in the sign of the ram, or as Ichthus the fish in the sign of Pisces. He had been born as a calf in the sign of the bull; as the beetle in cancer; as the lion in Leo; as the red shoot of the vine in Virgo; as lord of the balance in the Scales. And when the Easter equinox had moved round slowly into the sign of the ram, the coming fulfiller of the cycle was Jesus or Horus, that “Lamb of God”, who is supposed to have become historical 2,410 years later to take away the sins of the Christian world.

Before passing on to follow the vernal equinox into the sign of the fishes (we may add the corn, of which this also was the sign on account of the harvest in Egypt), we must glance back for a moment to the birthplace and the beginning with the Inundation, which was the source of so much astronomical mythology that necessitated continued readjustment of the reckoning in precession. The fish, a figure of plenty brought by the Inundation, was continued as a symbol of Atum-Horus. The type might be changed from the crocodile of Sebek to the silurus or electric eel of Atum, but the fish remained as an emblem of Ichthus, or of Ichthon, that saviour of the world who came to it first in Africa by water as the fish. We have already seen that the mystical emblem called the “Vesica Pisces”, as a frame and aureole for the virgin and her child, is a living witness to the birth of Jesus from the fish’s mouth, as it was in the beginning for Iusa or Horus of the Inundation. This will also explain why Ichthus, the fish, is a title of Jesus in Rome; why the Christian religion was founded on the fish; why the primitive Christians were called Pisciculi, and why the fish is still eaten as the sacrificial food on Friday and at Easter. There is evidence to show the impossibility of this sign having been founded in the year 255 B.C. as the sign of the vernal equinox, either in relation to Horus the fish or Horus the bread of life, or Iu the Su (son) of Atum-Ra. For instance, the wheat-harvest in Egypt coincides with the Easter equinox, and always has done so since wheat was grown and time correctly kept. In the Alexandrian year the month Parmuti, the month of the mother of corn, begins on the 27th of March, or about the time of the equinox when this had entered the sign of Pisces. According to the table of the months at Edfu and the Ramesseum, Parmuti was the very ancient goddess of vegetation, Rannut. Rannut was the goddess of harvest and also of the eighth month in the year, which opened with the month Tekki or Thoth. From Thoth, the first month, to Rannut-Parmuti, the eighth month, is eight months of the Egyptian year, equivalent to two tetramenes in the year of three seasons.

When Horus had fulfilled the period of 2,155 years with the Easter equinox in the sign of Aries, the birthplace passed into the sign of Pisces, where the ever-coming one, the Renewer as the eternal child who had been brought forth as a lion in Leo, a beetle in cancer, as one of the twins in the sign of the Gemini, as a calf in the sign of the bull, and as a lamb in the sign of the ram, was destined to manifest as the fish, born of a fish-mother, in the zodiacal sign of the fishes. The rebirth of Atum-Horus or Jesus as the fish of Iusãas and the bread of Nephthys was astronomically dated to occur and appointed to take place in Bethlehem of the Zodiac about the year 255 B.C., at the time [Page 735] when the Easter equinox entered the sign of Pisces, the house of corn and bread; the corn that was brought forth by the gestator Rannut in the eighth month of the Egyptian year, and was reaped in the month named from Parmuti the Corn-Mother; and the bread that was kneaded by Nephthys in the house of bread.

Horus, or Jesus, the fulfiller of time and law, the saviour who came by water, by blood and in the spirit, Horus the fish and the bread of life, was due according to precession in the sign of the fishes about the year 255 B.C. A new point of departure for the religion of Ichthus in Rome is indicated astronomically when Jesus or Horus was portrayed with the sign of the fish upon his head, and the crocodile beneath his feet (fig. p. 343). This would be about the year 255 B.C. (so-called). But the perverters of the Jesus-legend, in concocting the Christian “history”, had falsified the time in heaven that the Egyptians kept so sacredly on earth during the ages on ages through which they zealously sought to discern the true way to the infinite through every avenue of the finite, and to track the Eternal by following the footprints of the typical fulfiller through all the cycles and epicycles of renewing time.

The type of sacrifice once eaten in the totemic or mortuary meal, as the fish, is still partaken of on Good Friday as the image of Ichthus; the same in Rome at present as in Heliopolis or Annu in the past. The type was changed from sign to sign, from age to age in the course of precession. The commemorative customs light us back as far at least as the sign of the Gemini, when twin turtle-doves, two goats, or twin children were sacrificed. Indeed, there is some evidence extant to show that the ass, a figure of Atum-Iu, which may be found constellated in the decans of cancer, was at one time the type of sacrifice, and which, to judge from its position, was of course anterior to the “twins”. (Petrie, Egyptian Tales, p. 90.) The ass has been obscured by the lion and other sacred animals, but it was at one time great in glory, particularly in the cult of Atum-Iu, the ass-headed or ass-eared divinity. The ass has been badly abused and evilly treated as a type of Sut-Typhon, whereas it was expressly a figure of the solar-god, the swift goer who was Iu the Sa of Atum; and Iu-Sa is the coming son or the Egyptian Jesus on the ass. Mythically rendered, he made his advent as a lion, or it might be said that he came riding on an ass. Horus, the sacrificial victim, as the calf, was an especial type in the Osirian cult. The lamb is heard of as expressly Jewish; the lamb that was roasted on the cruciform spit to image the Crucified upon the cross at Easter, when the lamb was yet the typical victim. When the equinox passed into the ram-sign Horus or Iusa became the lamb “son of a sheep”, who as son of the father was the son of God, an especial type with the Sebek-heteps. When the vernal equinox entered once more into the sign of the “fishes” the time had come for the type to change back again to the fish which had been eaten as a typical sacrifice thousands of years before when the crocodile was eaten once a year as the zootype of Sebek-Horus, “the almighty fish in Kamurit” (Rit., ch. 88), the bringer of plenty in the inundation of the Nile.

The advent of a Jewish Jesus, as the fish Ichthus, was dependent on the Messu or Messiah-son being incarnated when the vernal equinox [Page 736] was entering Pisces in the circuit of precession, where the female bringer-forth was figured as the mother-fish, instead of the sheep, the cow or the lioness.

The astronomers knew and foretold that the Divine babe was to be born in the sign of the fishes, the sign of the Messiah Dag, of An, of Oan or Jonah. It is probable that the name of Rome was derived from an Egyptian name for the fish, and that Roma was the fish-goddess. Rem, Rum, or Rome signifies the fish in Egyptian. Be this as it may, the fish-man (or woman?) rules in Rome. The ring with which the Pope is invested, his seal-ring, has on it the sign of the fish, and Ichthon the Saviour was brought on in Rome as Ichthus the fish, or otherwise personified as the “historical Jesus”. This is illustrated in the Catacombs, where the fish emaning Jonah from its mouth has been supposed by Christians to represent the resurrection of an historical Jew. The name of the Piscina given to the baptismal font likewise shows the cult of the fish. Those who were baptized in the Piscina as primitive Christians were known by name as the Pisciculi. “Ichthus” also was the secret password and sign of salutation betwixt the Christian Pisciculi.

Bryant copied from an ancient Maltese coin the figure of Horus, who carries the crook and fan in his hands and wears a fish-mitre on his head. This was Horus of the Inundation, who was emaned from the water as a fish and by the fish, but who is here portrayed in a human form with the fish’s mouth for a mitre on his head. (Bryant, v. 5, p. 384.) The wearer of the os tincae on his head is not only the fish-man in survival, the petticoated Pope is likewise a figure of the ancient fish-woman; she who sat upon the waters and on the seven hills of the celestial Heptanomis as a water-cow, who brought forth from the mystical mouth of the fish. The Pope is dressed in the likeness of both sexes. The “os tincae’ of the papal mitre, equally with the star Fomalhaut in Piscis Australis of the planisphere, and the mouthpiece of the divine Word, is still the same antique as when the ancient Wisdom was first figured as the female fish, the crocodile, and the male fish was a likeness of the Saviour who came by water in the Inundation before Horus could come by boat, or float on the papyrus-plant in human form; so long has the fish been a zootype of emaning source in the Egyptian eschatology. The Pope impersonates the mouthpiece, the fish’s mouthpiece of the Word, and, as the imagery shows, the Word, or Logos, is the same that was uttered of old as a fish by the ancient mother-fish with the os tincae or mouth of utterance from which a child is born; so that the mother-church in Rome, as represented by the Pope, is still the living likeness of the fish-mother, who brought forth Horus of the Inundation as her fish in the Zodiac, at least some 12,000 or 13,000 years ago, and had never ceased to do so annually up to the time of rebirth in the sign of the fishes, when Papal Rome took up the parable but suppressed or omitted the explanation concerning the Christ now apotheosized as Ichthus the fish. Thus, as previously demonstrated, the proper date for the commencement of Christianity or equinoctial Christianity is somewhere about 255 B.C.

One of the most perfect illustrations of fulfilment attained by the mythos may be studied in a scene that was copied from the Roman [Page 737] Catacombs by De Rossi (Rom. Sott., 2, pl. 16). In this the seven great spirits appear in human guise, who are elsewhere represented by the seven fishers or the seven lambs with Horus, ignorantly supposed to be an historic personage. These seven are with the fish in the sign of the two fishes, who are figured as the two fishes laid out on two dishes. Moreover, lest there might be any mistake in reading the picture it is placed between two other illustrations. In one of these the lamb is portrayed as the victim of sacrifice; in the other a fish is lying with the bread upon the altar. So that the central picture shows the result of the transference from the sign of the ram to the sign of the fishes. In another scene the seven who were followers of Horus are portrayed together with seven baskets of bread (Bosio, pp. 216, 217). In relation to the group of seven spirits in the Roman Catacombs it must be noted that the company of twelve, as followers of Horus, or disciples of Iusa, was not a primary formation. It was preceded by the group of seven, the seven who were with Horus, the leader of that “glorious company”, from the beginning; the same in the eschatology as in the astronomical mythology. They are the seven with Horus in the bark of souls or Sahus that was constellated in Orion. In the creation attributed to Atum-Ra, which opened on the day of “come thou hither”, otherwise upon the resurrection day, the seven great spirits are assigned their place in this new heaven; they are called the seven glorious ones “who are in the train of Horus” ; and who follow after the coffined one, that is Osiris-Sekari, whose bier or coffin was configurated in the greater bear. They who followed their lord as his attendants in the resurrection were also grouped as seven khuti in the lesser bear.

In his various advents Horus was attended by the seven great spirits termed his seshu, or his servants. So Jesus, according to Hebrew prophecy, was to be attended by the seven spirits called (1) the spirit of the Lord; (2) the spirit of wisdom; (3) the spirit of understanding; (4) the spirit of counsel; (5) the spirit of might; (6) the spirit of knowledge; (7) the spirit of the fear of the Lord (Is. XI. 1, 2). These, as Egyptian, were they who had originated as the seven elemental powers and who afterwards became the Khuti as the seven great spirits. But in their Hebrew guise they are evaporized and attenuated past all recognition except as a septenary of spirits. The seven with Jesus as a group of attendant powers or followers may be seen in the seven doves that hover round the child in utero; the seven solar rays about his head; the seven lambs or rams with Jesus on the mount; the seven as stars with Jesus in the midst; the seven as fishers in the boat; and lastly, the seven as communicants who solemnize the Eucharist with the loaves and fishes in the mortuary meal of the Roman Catacombs. There are various pictures in the Catacombs which can only be explained by the pre-Christian gnosis. This alone can tell us why the divine infant should be imaged as a little mummy with the solar halo round his head, or why the so-called “Star of Bethlehem” should be figured with eight rays. Such things are Egypto-gnostic remains belonging to the Church in Rome that was not founded on the Canonical Gospels, but was pre-extant as gnostic; the Church of Marcion and of Marcelina. Several of these pictures contain the group of the seven great spirits who were with [Page 738] Horus of the Resurrection at his advent in the sign of Pisces, as they had been with him in the previous signs when he was the lamb, the calf, the beetle or the lion. Two pictures are copied by Lundy, one from De Rossi’s Roma Sotteranea Christiana (vol. 1) and one from Bosio (Rom. Sott.). In the one scene seven persons are seated at a semicircular table with two fishes and eight baskets of bread before them. In the other scene, seven persons are kneeling with two fishes, seven cakes and seven baskets of bread in front of them (Lundy, Monumental Christianity, figs. 169 and 171).

Now, there is nothing whatsoever in the canonical Gospels to account for or suggest the eight baskets-full of cakes which are somewhat common in the Catacombs. These we claim to be a direct survival from the Egyptian; the eight loaves or cakes which are a sacred regulation number in the Ritual. According to the Rubrical directions appended to chapter 144 it is commanded that eight Persen loaves, eight Shenen loaves, eight Khenfer loaves, and eight Hebennu loaves are to be offered at each gate of the seven arits or mansions of the celestial Heptanomis. These offerings were made for the feast of illumining the earth, or elsewhere (ch. 18), the coffin of Osiris, and therefore for the festival of the Resurrection and solemnizing of the Eucharist. The seven persons present with the Lord are identifiable with the typical seven followers of Horus as the seven khuti or glorious ones. The speaker, who personates the lord of the seven, says “I am the divine leader of the seven. I am a khu, the lord of the khus”. The Osiris Nu thus celebrates the monthly festival by offering eight loaves or cakes at each of the seven halls. The khus were seven in number or eight with Horus their lord, in whom Osiris rose again from the condition of the dead. The chapter is to be repeated over a picture of the seven sovereign chiefs, which we now claim to be the original of the seven personages that keep the sacramental ceremony in the Catacombs when the eight cakes are figured on the table of the seven personages who have been termed the “Septem Pii Sacerdotes” (Northcote and Brownlow, Rom. Sott., vol. 2, pl. 17, p. 68). But to return, our starting-point for tracking the movement in precession was with the vernal equinox in the sign of Leo, on the birthday of the year that was determined at the time by the heliacal rising of the star which announced the birthplace of Horus, now figured in the solar zodiac, nigh where the evil dragon Hydra lay in wait to devour the babe as soon as it was born. This was about 11,000 years B.C., or 13,000 years ago. During these eleven thousand years, by the changes in precession and the continual rectification of the calendar from old style to new, July 25th at starting had receded to December 25th in the end. That is, the birthday of the coming child Iusa or Horus in the Lion sign, celebrated on the 25th of July, came to be commemorated on the 25th of December at the end of this period, by those who kept the reckoning, and this, as will be shown, is precisely what did occur in the evolution of the Jesus-legend.

Two birthdays had been assigned to Horus of the double horizon, one to child-Horus in the autumn, the other to Horus the adult in the vernal equinox. These were the two times or teriu of the year. But when the solstices were added to the equinoxes in the new creation of [Page 739] the four quarters established by Ptah for his son Atum-Ra, there was a further change. The place of birth for the elder, the mortal Horus who was born child of the Virgin Mother, now occurred in the winter solstice and the place of rebirth for Horus the eternal Son was celebrated in the vernal equinox, with three months between the two positions instead of six. If the birth occurred at Christmas with the winter solstice in the sign of the Archer, the Resurrection at Easter would occur in the sign of the fishes as at present. The equinoxes, of course, remained upon the double horizon, whereas the winter solstice took place in the depths of Amenta, and this became the place of rebirth for the child-Horus as Iu-sa, the coming son in the astronomical mythology. Horus in the autumnal equinox was now succeeded by Horus who suffered in the winter solstice. The Jews still celebrate their mysteries annually as mysteries. And it is instructive to note that with them the two times remain equinoctial, and have never been changed to the winter solstice and Easter equinox. The Jews have subterranean reasons for not accepting the Messiah born at Christmas. Theirs are the mysteries of the double horizon; or of Ra-Harmachis. The double birth of Horus at the two times, or the birth of the babe in the winter solstice and the rebirth as the adult in the Easter equinox is acknowledged in the Egyptian Book of the Divine Birth. The celebration of the Nativity at the solstice is referred to in the calendar of Edfu, and it is said that “everything is performed which is ordained” in the “Book of the Divine Birth”. Also, it was commanded in the calendar of Esné that the precepts of the Book on the Second Divine Birth of the child Kahi “were to be performed on the first of the month Epiphi” (cited by Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, pp. 284-6). The child Kahi is a pseudonym for the child-Horus. He is the revealer, the logos or word, and the “Revelation of Kahi” is associated with New Year’s day, when this occurred on the 26th of the month Payni. Now the first and second “divine births” (or the birth and rebirth) of Horus were celebrated at the festivals of the winter solstice and the Easter equinox, and these are the two times of the two Horuses identified by Plutarch, the first as manifestor for Isis, the Virgin Mother, the second as Horus, the Son of God the Father, when he tells us that “Harpocrates (Har the Khart, or child) is born about the winter solstice, immature and infant-like in the plants that flower and spring up early, for which reason they offer to him the first-fruits of growing lentils; and they celebrate her (Isis) being brought to bed after the vernal equinox” (Of Is. and Os., ch. 65). Here are the three months between the two birthdays which were celebrated at the two festivals now known as Christmas and Easter. Two different birthdays were likewise assigned to the Greek Apollo. One of these was commemorated by the Delians at the time of the winter solstice; the other by the Delphians in the vernal equinox.

According to the decree of Canopus (B.C. 238) the date of Osiris’s entry into the moon at the annual resurrection had then receded to the 29th of Choiak, equivalent to December 26th, in the Alexandrian year, which was established in the reign of Augustus, B.C. 25. “The entry of Osiris into the sacred bark takes place here annually at the [Page 739] defined time on the 29th day of the month Choiak”. In this way the Christmas festival, by which the “Birth of Christ” is now celebrated, can be identified with the yearly celebration of the rebirth of Osiris (or Horus) in the moon. Moreover, we can thus trace it, following the course of precession, from the 17th of Athor (October 5th in the sacred year; November 14th in the Alexandrian year), mentioned by Plutarch, to the 29th of Choiak, our December 26th. The next day, December 27th, was the first of Tybi, and this was the day on which the child-Horus was crowned, and the festival of his coronation celebrated. If we reckon the 25th of December (28th Choiak) to be the day of birth, the day of resurrection and of the crowning in Amenta is on the third day. In the month-list of the Ramesseum, Tybi is the month dedicated to Amsu, the Horus who arose from the dead in Amenta, and who was crowned as conqueror on the third day — that is, on December 27th=Tybi 1st. There are several symbols of this resurrection on the third day. First, Osiris rises on that day in the new moon. Next, Amsu figures as the Sahu-mummy risen to his feet, with right arm free, as ruler in Amenta, the earth of eternity. Thirdly, Horus the child is ruler in Amenta, the earth of eternity. Thirdly, Horus the child is crowned in the seat of Osiris for another year. Fourthly, the Tat was erected as a figure of the god re-risen, and a type of eternal stability in the depths of the winter solstice. Thus the resurrection on the third day was in Amenta and not upon this earth.

The Egyptians celebrated their festival of the resurrection every year, called the feast of Ptah-Sekari-Osiris, in the month Choiak (November 27th, December 26th, Alexandrian year). The rite is otherwise known as “the erection of the Tat-pillar”. Erman recovered a description of the festival from a Theban tomb. Of this he says: “The special festival was of all the greater importance because it was solemnized on the morning of the royal jubilee. The festivities began with a sacrifice offered by the king to Osiris, the ‘LORD of Eternity,’ a mummied figure, wearing the Tat-pillar on his head”. It lasted for ten days, from the 20th to the 30th of the month Choiak, the 26th being the great day of feasting. The royal endowment of the temple at Medinet Habu for the sixth day of the festival included 3,694 loaves of bread, 600 cakes, 905 jugs of beer and 33 jars of wine. This was the great day of eating and drinking, corresponding to our Christmas gorging and guzzling, but on the 22nd December, instead of the 25th, of a somewhat later period. The festival was devoted to the god Osiris-Ptah-Sekari, who had been dead and was alive again; cut in pieces and reconstituted with his vertebrae sound and not a bone of his body found to be broken or missing. The festival of the sixth day is clearly the Ha-k-er-a feast that was celebrated on the sixth night of the Ten Mysteries. Moreover, the ten days of the festival that was sacred to the god Osiris-Sekari are also in agreement with the ten nights of the mysteries (Rit., ch. 18). In the scene copied from the Theban tomb the “Noble Pillar” of the Tat-cross is to be seen lying pronely on the ground where it had been overthrown by Sut and the Sebau. The object of the festival was to celebrate the re-erection of the Tat and turn the Cross of death once more into the Cross of life as the symbol of resurrection. The king, as representative of Horus who reconstitutes [Page 741] his father, with the aid of the royal relatives and a priest, pulls the pillar upright. Four priests bring in the usual table of offerings and place them in front of the Tat. So far, says Erman, we can understand the festival. But the further ceremonies refer to mythological events unknown to us. Four priests with their fists raised rush upon four others, who appear to give way; two more strike each other, and one standing by says of them, “I seize Horus shining in truth”. Then follows a great flogging scene, in which fifteen persons beat each other mercilessly with their sticks and fists; they are divided into several groups, two of which, according to the inscription, represent the people of the town Pa and of the town Tepu. This is evidently the representation of a great mythological fight, in which were engaged the inhabitants of Pa and Tepu, i.e., of the ancient city of Buto, in the north of the delta. “The ceremonies which close the sacred rite are also quite problematic; four herds of oxen and asses are seen driven by their herdsmen, and we are told in the accompanying text four times they circle round the walls on that day when the noble Tat-pillar is re-erected”.

Raising the Tat-pillar was typical of Horus in his second advent raising the dead Osiris from his sepulchre and calling the mummy to come forth alive. The gods in Tattu on the night of the resurrection, symbolized by this re-erection of the Tat, are Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, and Horus the avenger of his father. Thus in re-erecting the Tat, Amenhetep III, with his queen Ti and one of the royal princesses were personating Horus the avenger and the two divine sisters in the resurrection of Osiris. (Rit., ch. 18.)

The Christians celebrate the birth of the divine babe at Christmas and the death and resurrection at Easter; whereas the birth and death were commemorated at the same season in the Egyptian mysteries of Ptah, and later of Osiris — as it was in the beginning, when the death was that of the old year and the rebirth that of the new year; otherwise, the death of Osiris and the birth of Horus, or the death of Atum and the rebirth of Iusa. The new year came to be reckoned from the shortest day when the sun had reached its lowest point and the shadow of darkness or the dragon its utmost length. The sufferings of the Sun-god were naturally accredited to him at that time, and the death and resurrection in Amenta were both timed to the solstice. The sun was lord of light as ruler of the lesser year. The Apap-monster was the reptile power of darkness, and of desert drought. This dreaded adversary of the sun was now the uppermost, Osiris in Amenta was the victim in the winter solstice. The suffering and death of Osiris were the cause of the long period of mourning, of fasting and supplication that was memorized in the mysteries. In the winter solstice the birth took place below, in Amenta, the earth of Sut, and habitat of the Apap-reptile. In the equinox at Easter, Horus the fulfiller was transformed from the human child to the divine hawk-headed Horus, who rose from the underworld as the spirit of life and light and food, and who was then re-fleshed or re-incorporated anew on earth, conceived of the Virgin, incarnated in her blood once more, to be brought forth in human shape again at Christmas; and by the gestator [Page 742] in the divine form, as Horus of the resurrection now reborn at Easter.

The last night of the old year (July 24th), “the night of the child in the cradle”, had been named from the new birth as the Mesiu; also the evening meal of the next day, the first of the new year, was called the “Mesiu”. These were the exact equivalent of our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day on December 24th and 25th, after a lapse of 11,000 years in time according to the movement in precession. The sacred old Egyptian year, which opened on the first of Tekki (or Thoth) as the year of the great Bear and the inundation, began upon the 25th of July in the year of 365 days. Therefore July 24th was the last night of the old year and the 25th (or the 20th in the year of 360 days) was New Year’s Day, the birthday of Horus the child, or fish of the inundation. Time was sacredly kept by means of the festivals, and these were redated age after age from old style to new. The decree of Canopus is both explicit and emphatic on the necessity of correctly readjusting the calendar to the lapse of time, whether in the Sothiac cycle or the movement in precession so that “the case shall not occur that the Egyptian festivals by which time was kept — now celebrated in winter— should be celebrated some time or other in summer, as has occasionally occurred” in times past, in consequence of the calendar being incorrectly kept (Records, vol. 8, p. 87).

For example, a new year was introduced by the Egyptian priests B.C. 25, in the name of the Roman Emperor Augustus, which is known as the Alexandrian year. When this new year was established a readjustment was made to allow for the lapse in precession and to correct the calendar. At this time the so-called “sacred year” was for the last time readjusted. This was that year of 360 days which was based on the twelve moons or months of thirty days each and on the reckoning permanently figured in the 360 degrees of the ecliptic that was to be kept in endless sanctity howsoever supplemented by other reckonings in the total combination to be united in the great precessional year of 360x71-2=26,000 years. In this corrected calendar the first of Choiak, which fell on October 18th in the sacred year is shifted to November 27th in the Alexandrian year, and there is a rectification of time to the extent of forty days. These forty days in the lesser year represent nearly 3,000 years in the cycle of precession. In other words stellar time was corrected by the time of the sun and determined on the grand scale by the position of the vernal equinox. This had now receded to the sign of Pisces, when Horus or Jesus, who had been the “Lamb of God” in the previous sign, and the calf in the sign of the bull, was figured as the fish by the Egypto-gnostic artists (fig. on p. 343). Thus the cult was continued without a break in Rome. Augustus personally posed himself in the character of the expected one, the Prince of Peace, the Messiah of the astronomical mythology and thence in the eschatology.

At the time when the change of equinox from Aries to Pisces occurred in the great year, or in connection with this event, the birthplace was rebuilt as the crib or cradle, meskhen, or holy of holies in the temple for the new-born babe. Now the temple of Hathor at Denderah was last rebuilt in the time of the Ptolemies, a century or [Page 743] so B.C. The inscriptions show that this rebuilding of the temple was attributed to Augustus. He never was at Denderah in person, but the ruler in Rome was assigned the place of the king or Pharaoh in Egypt as rebuilder of the temple for Hathor and her babe, and the king on earth was the royal representative, first as the Repa, then as the Ra, of the king, who was divine or astronomical. Augustus was invested with this divinity, and thus the Egyptian doctrine was continued in the person of the Emperor in Rome. Augustus proclaimed himself to be not merely a human likeness, but the very God himself on earth. “The reverence due to the gods”, says Tacitus (Annals, I, 10), “was no longer peculiar; Augustus claimed equal worship. A mortal man was directly adored, and priests and pontiffs were appointed to pay him impious homage”. Thus the apotheosis of a mortal had begun and a kind of papacy was already established as a bridge betwixt Alexandria and Rome. The vernal equinox was now in Pisces, and Horus, as type, was the fish instead of the lamb or ram. “Ichthus the fish” had been a title self-conferred by Alexander in his apotheosis 300 years earlier. So Augustus, in relation to the same fulfilment in astronomical time was Ichthus the fish in Rome before the title was conferred upon a supposed historical Jesus of Nazareth. Thus the festival now dated Choiak 29th in the Alexandrian year had been celebrated 3,000 years earlier in the sacred year, and we behold it being readjusted according to the reckoning in precession as it had been aforetime.

It has often been a matter of wonderment why the birthday of the Son of God on earth should be celebrated as a festival of unlimited gorging and guzzling. The explanation is that the feast of Christmas Day is a survival of the ancient Uaka festival, with which the rebirth of the Nilotic year was celebrated with uproarious revellings and rejoicings, as the festival of returning food and drink. It was at once the natal-day of the Nile, and of the Messu or Messianic child under his various names. It is called the birthday of Osiris in the Ritual (ch. 130). Osiris, or the young god Horus, came to earth as lord of wine, and is said to be “full of wine” at the fair Uaka festival. The rubric to chapter 130 states that “bread, beer, wine, and all good things” are to be offered to the manes upon the birthday of Osiris, which, in the course of time, became equivalent to our New Year’s festival, or Christmas Day. The grapes were ripe in Egypt at the time the imagery was given its starry setting. This offers a datum as determinative of time and season. The times might change in heaven’s “enormous year” ; other doctrines be developed under other names; the grapes be turned to raisins. But the old Festival of Intoxication still lived on when celebrated in the name of Christ. The babe that is born on Christmas Day in the morning is Horus of the inundation still.

The mythical ideal of a saviour-child was Egyptian. But this ideal did not originate in the human child. The child was preceded by other types of eternal, ever-coming youth. Each year salvation came to Egypt with the waters just in time to save the land from drought and famine, and the power that saved it was represented by the shoot of the papyrus, or the fish as the bringer of food and drink [Page 744] on which the salvation of the people depended; and the bringer of these was Horus the saviour, as the Messu of the inundation. Horus the jocund who rose up as Orion “full of wine”, with Krater for his constellated “cup” that held 7,000 gallons of intoxicating drink; Horus who brought the grapes to make the wine; who drowned the fiery dragon Hydra, was he who came to Egypt as a veritable saviour once a year. The same mythical character passed into Greece and is also repeated in the Canonical Gospels as the wine-bibber who comes eating and drinking.

In this way the birth of the child at Christmas and the rebirth at Easter came to represent the keeping of time in the great year, which can be calculated by a twofold process of reckoning, from the original starting-point. On the one hand, the lapse of time in the course of precession is five months=the equinox passing through the five signs, that is, from July 25th (the first of Taht) to December 25th. On the other hand, the time taken for the equinox to travel through the five signs is the exact equivalent in the great year to the five months’ lapse in the solar year of 365 days. The reckoning has to be made one way by the lesser year, from July 25th to December 25th in accordance with the natural fact. The other way it has to be computed on the scale of the great year in the cycle of precession. The total result of this twofold and verifiable computation is that on the one side we are ultimately landed with a birthday of Iusa in the solstice at Christmas, and on the other hand we are landed with the birthday or day of rebirth for Iusa at Easter, when the equinox was entering the sign of the fishes, about 255 years before the time that has been falsely dated “B.C.”.

One knows well enough that Christian credulity is quite capable of still assuming that this Jesus who manifested during 10,000 years in the astronomical mythology, and who was accreting the typical character of the unique person all that time, is but the fore-shadow cast backwards by the historical figure in whom they believe as the one reality of all realities. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, such being the character pre-extant, there was nothing left to have any historical human origin at the wrong end of 10,000 years.

This is a strictly scientific and not-to-be-controverted demonstration of the indubitable truth that the birthday of the Messiah now celebrated on the 25th of December had been celebrated for at least 10,000 years on the corresponding day as the birth of the Egyptian Messu at the feast of the Messiu on the first day of the Egyptian year, which was the 25th of July, from the time when the Easter equinox was in the sign of the lion. There is evidence also that the lapse of time was religiously rectified in the readjusted calendar according to the course of precession from July 25th down to December 25th, when the winter solstice coincided with the sign of Sagittarius and the vernal equinox first entered the sign of Pisces, in the year that was erroneously dated. Through all the ten or eleven millenniums intervening the Messu had periodically manifested in the annual inundation and as the fulfiller of time in the house of a thousand years, whilst the Easter equinox kept travelling and the birthplace shifting, [Page 745] from Virgo to the lion, from the lion to the crab, from the twins to the bull, from the ram to the fishes. All that went to the making of the latest legendary saviour, barring the false belief, was pre-extant on entirely other grounds in the Egyptian mythology and eschatology; and when the Easter equinox entered the sign of the fishes, about 255 B.C., the Jesus who is the one verifiable founder of so-called Christianity was at least 10,000 years of age and had been travelling hither as the Ever Coming One through all this period of time. During that vast length of years the young Fulfiller was periodically mothered as mortal by the Virgin with Seb for his reputed earthly father and with Anup the baptizer as his precursor and announcer in the wilderness. All that time he had fought the battle with Satan in the desert during forty days and nights each year in every one of those 10,000 years as a matter of fact in the natural phenomena of time and season in Egypt. During those 10,000 years that ideal of the divine incarnated in Iusa the Coming Son had gone on growing in the mind of Egypt preparatory to its being rendered historically as the divine man of a later cult by those deluded idiotai who dreamt the astronomical forecast had been fulfilled in Hebrew prophecy and in veritable human fact, through their ignorance of sign-language and the wisdom of the past.

The two birthdays at Christmas and Easter which were assigned to Iusa in his two characters of child-Horus and Horus the adult, Horus the Earth-born and Horus the Heaven-born in the Osirian mythos, were brought on as the two birthdays of Jesus. But there was a diversity of opinion amongst the Christian Fathers as to whether Jesus the Christ was born in the winter solstice or in the vernal equinox. It was held by some that the 25th of March was the natal day. Others maintained that this was the day of the incarnation. According to Clement Alexander, the birth of Jesus took place upon the 25th of March. But in Rome the festival of Lady-day was celebrated on the 25th of March in commemoration of the miraculous conception in the womb of a virgin, which virgin gives birth to the child at Christmas, nine months afterwards. According to the Gospel of James (ch. 18) it was in the equinox, and consequently not at Christmas, that the virgin birth took place. At the moment of Mary’s delivery on what is designated “the day of the Lord” the birth of the Babe in the cave is described. It occurs at Bethlehem. Joseph went out and sought a midwife in the country of Bethlehem. “And I, Joseph, walked, and I walked not: and I looked up into the sky, and saw the air violently agitated; and I looked up at the pole of heaven, and saw it stationary, and the fowls of heaven were still; and I looked at the earth and saw a vessel lying, and workmen reclining by it, with their hands in the vessel, and those who handled did not handle it, and those who took hold did not lift, and those who presented it to their mouth did not present, but the faces of all were looking up; and I saw the sheep scattered, and the sheep stood, and the shepherd lifted up his hand to strike them, and his hand remained up; and I looked at the stream of the river, and I saw that the mouths of the kids were down, and not drinking; and everything which was being impelled forward was intercepted in its course”. There can be no doubt of this description being equinoctial. It is a picture of the [Page 746] perfect counterpoise between night and day which only occurs at the level of the equinox when the Lord of the balance is reborn in the house of a thousand years, or at some other fresh stage in the circuit of precession: and the Messiah Dag was now in the house of the fish and of bread, with the prophecy fulfilled according to the astronomical reckoning.

This duality of the divine birth at Christmas and Easter has been the cause of inextricable confusion to the Christians, who never could adjust the falsehood to the fact; and now at last we recover the fact itself that will be fatal to the falsehood.

It will be elaborately demonstrated that the concocters of Christianity and its spurious records had a second-hand acquaintanceship with the Egyptian Ritual, and that they wrought into their counterfeit Gospels all that could be made to look more or less historical-like as a sacerdotal mode of obtaining mastery over the minds of the utterly ignorant, who were held to be the “better believers”. But they never could determine whether the divine child was born at Christmas or at Easter, which was naturally impossible to the one-man scheme of supposed historic fulfilment. Again, in the Christian version the crucifixion=the death of Osiris, has been postponed until Easter. This makes the period of mourning wrong. In Egypt there was a time of fasting for forty days during the Egyptian Lent. The mourning and the fasting naturally followed the suffering and the death of Osiris, which supplied the raison d’être. But when the death was shifted to Easter, to be celebrated in accordance with the Jewish Passover, to which it was hitched on, the long time of fasting remained as in Egypt, and for the first time in this world the death was preceded by the mourning with which the murder is supposed to have been commiserated and solemnized. The fourth Sunday in Lent is commonly observed in Europe by the name of “Dead Sunday”. But the death then celebrated or “carried out” has no relation to a personal crucifixion that is assumed to have occurred once upon a time at Easter. Such customs followed Christmas or the death in winter with a prehistoric significance varying in accordance with the old style and new in the keeping of the festivals; whereas there is no death at Christmas in the Christian scheme to be celebrated before Easter or to account for the mourning-festival during Lent. The death and rebirth at Christmas, or New Year, and the resurrection at Easter can only be explained by the Osirian mysteries, and these are still celebrated throughout Europe, precisely the same as in Asia and in Africa. The Ritual also has a word to say concerning the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, and the Christian Sabbath sacred to the sun. The ancient Egyptians celebrated festivals on the first, the sixth, the seventh, and the fifteenth of the month. The feast of the first and the fifteenth was a festival of Ra and the day was dedicated to Horus, who represented the earlier sun, and whose Sabbath was the seventh day, or Saturday in the earlier cult. It is said in the Ritual, “I am with Horus on the day when the Festivals of Osiris are celebrated, and when offerings are made on the sixth day of the month, and on the Feast of the Tenait in Heliopolis” (Rit., ch. 1). This Tenait was a feast associated with the seventh day of the month. Here then is a feast of the sixth and [Page 747] seventh, or night and day, corresponding to the Jewish Sabbath. Osiris entered the moon on the sixth day of the month. The seventh was the feast-day, when “couplings and conceptions did abound”. This was celebrated in Annu, the city of the sun, and thus far the day was a sun-day. The word tenait denotes a measure of time, a division, a week or a fortnight. A feast-day on the seventh, dedicated to the solar god, would be the sun’s day, or Sunday once a month. Now, two great festivals were dedicated to Ra, the solar god, upon the seventh and fifteenth of the month. Here, then, is a fifteen-day fortnight, or solar half-month (fifteen days), which was correlated with the half-month, or tenait, of fourteen days in the lunar reckoning. The sixth of the month was a moon-day, on the night of which the love-feast of Agapae began with the entrance of Osiris, earlier Horus, into the moon, or the conjunction, say, of Horus or Hu with Hathor. This was on Friday night. The next day was a phallic festival in celebration of the celestial conjunction; it was the day assigned to Sebek=Saturn in conjunction with his mother. The festival was luni-solar; hence it was celebrated on the sixth and seventh of the month, like the Sabbath of the Jews, which is repeated later on the sixth and seventh days of the week. Now, if we start with Sunday as the first of the month, the tenait festival fell on Saturday as a Sabbath of the seventh day. The second festival of Ra, that of Sunday, was on the fifteenth of the month, which would be eight days after the Tenait-feast upon the seventh of the month. The tenait on the Saturday and a feast of the 15th on a Sunday show the existence of a Sabbath celebrated on Saturday, the 7th, and another, eight days later, on Sunday, the 15th of the month. These, however, were monthly at first, as the festivals of Osiris or Ra, and not weekly, as they afterwards became with the Jews and the Christians. The festival of Saturday as the seventh day of the month is Jewish. The Sabbath of Sunday, the day of Ra, is a survival of the festival celebrated on the 15th of the month in ancient Egypt as the sun’s day, or Sunday, once a month.

It was the custom at one time in Rome for the mummy, or corpse of the dead Christ, to be exhibited in the churches on Holy Thursday, the day before the Crucifixion, and if the symbolical corpse is not now exposed to the public gaze, the Holy Sepulchre is still exhibited. This has the appearance of commemorating two different deaths, the only explanation of which is to be found in the Egyptian mythos. Osiris was the Corpus Christi at Christmas or in the solstice. He died to be reborn again as Horus in various phenomena on the third day in the moon; also from the water in his baptism; after forty days in the buried grain; and at the end of three months, in the Easter equinox. In the Kamite original the night of the Last Supper, and of the death of Osiris, and the laying out of his body on the table of offerings are identical. It is the “night of provisioning the altar” and the provender was the mummy of the god provided for the mortuary meal. That was the dead Christ, or Corpus Christi (Rit., ch. 18).

Holy Thursday is especially consecrated by the Roman Catholic Church as a commemoration of the Last Supper and the institution of the eucharistic meal, at which the corpus of the Christ already dead was laid out to be eaten sacramentally. It is similar in the Gospels. [Page 748] The Last Supper is there celebrated, and the body and blood of the Christ are there partaken of before the Crucifixion has occurred. This, in the Egyptian original, would be the corpse of Osiris, the karest-mummy of him who died in the winter solstice three months before the resurrection in the equinox occurred at Easter. Seven days of mourning for the burial of Osiris were also celebrated at the end of the month Choiak. This was known as the “fêtes des ténèbres”, which, according to Brugsch, commemorated the “sept jours qu’il a passé dans le ventre de sa mère, Nût” — equivalent to Jonah being in the belly of the fish, only the days of darkness in this phase are seven instead of three. These seven days of mourning are the prototype of Passion week in the rubrical usage of the Roman Church, during which the pictures of the cross (and Crucifixion) are all covered up and veiled in darkness. Here the funeral ceremony followed the burial of Osiris, whereas in the Christian version the fêtes des ténèbres precede the death and burial of the supposed historic victim.

According to the synoptics, it was on the 15th of the month Nisan that the Crucifixion occurred. But according to John, it was on the 14th. These two different reckonings are solar and lunar. When time was reckoned by the lunar month of twenty-eight days, the 14th was the day of mid-month, or full moon, the day of the equinox and of the Easter Pasch. In the luni-solar reckoning of thirty days to the month, the 15th was the day of full moon in the equinox. The two dates for the Crucifixion are identical with these two possible dates for the equinox. There was a fortnight, or half-moon of fourteen days, and a half-month of fifteen days. The French fortnight is quinze jours, or fifteen days, and this is the fifteen-day fortnight of the Christian festivals, the Passion and the Resurrection. The 14th Nisan was true to the lunar calculation of time, but the 15th was also needed for the solar reckoning, and, as usual, the Christian founders have brought on both in aiming at the one supposed event. It has lately become known, from a lexicographical tablet belonging to the library of Assurbanipal, that the Assyrians also kept a Sabbath (Shapatu) of the 15th day of the month, or full moon in the luni-solar reckoning.

Thus the crucifixion assigned by the synoptics to the 15th Nisan was according to the solar month, and the 14th assigned by John was lunar, both being astronomical, and both impossible as dates in human history. The festival of the seventh day is Jewish, and a festival of the eighth day was continued by the Christians. Barnabas (Ep. 15) says, “We observe the eighth day with gladness, in which Jesus rose from the dead”. This identifies the eighth day as a Sunday, and only in the Egyptian way of celebrating the 15th following the Tenait on the seventh can the eighth day be a Sabbath. The seventh day was Saturday, the day of Sebek. The eighth day was Sunday, once a month, the day of Ra, and thus the eighth day became the Lord’s day in the pre-Christian religion; and the origin of both festivals or Sabbaths of the seventh day and of the 15th, eight days afterwards, can be traced to the sun-god as Horus and the sun-god as Ra (Rit., ch. 113, 7). “The ancients speak of the Passion and Resurrection Pasch as a fifteen days” solemnity. Fifteen days (the length of time) was enforced by law of [Page 749] the empire and commanded to the universal Church” (Bingham, 9, p. 95; Gieseler, Catholic Church, sect. 53, p. 178). Fifteen days include the week of seven days and the period of eight days. Both days — Saturday the day of Horus and Sunday the day of Ra, as the seventh-day feast and the eighth-day Sabbath — were being celebrated as their two feast-days by the Christians in the middle of the fifth century, and these were known as the feasts of Saturday and of the Lord’s day, or Sunday (Socrates, Hist. Eccles., lib. V, cap. 22, p. 234). When Dionysius the Areopagite arranged the dates for the Christian celebration of the festivals he had only the pre-Christian data to go upon. Both the dates and data were Egyptian, and these had been continued with the calendar and the festivals more or less correctly. But the early Christians never really knew which was the true Sabbath, the seventh day or the eighth, so they celebrated both. As now demonstrated, according to the record of the mystery-teachers in the astronomical mythology of Egypt the legend of a child that was born of a mother who was a virgin at the time is at least as old as the constellation in the zodiac when the birthplace (in precession) coincided with the sign of Virgo some 15,000 years ago. The virgin, in this category, was the goddess Neith. The child was Horus-Sebek, the great fish of the inundation that typified the deliverer from drought and hunger, and was, in other words, the saviour of the world. Thus, by aid of equinoctial precession, the origin and development of the Christian legend and its festivals can be scientifically traced in the pre-Christian past from the time when the virgin birth of the divine child and the house of birth were in the sign of Virgo, or in Leo for the present purpose, reckoned by the movement in precession.

We shall find the virgin motherhood of Jesus, the divine sonship of Jesus, the miracles of Jesus, the self-sacrifice of Jesus, the humanity of Jesus, the compassion of Jesus, the Sayings of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus had all been ascribed in earlier ages to Iusa, or Iusu, the son of Iusãas and of Atum-Ra. Thus Egypt was indeed the cradle of Christianity, but not of the current delusion called “historic Christianity”. The saying attributed to the Hebrew deity “out of Egypt did I call my son” was true, but in a sense undreamt of by the Christian world. Such was the foundation of the Jesus-legend in the astronomical mythology with Horus of the inundation on his papyrus, or Iusa=Atum-Horus in the zodiac. As we shall see, nothing was added to the Egypto-gnostic “wisdom” by the carnalizers of the Christ in Jerusalem or Rome except the literalization of the mythos and perversion of the eschatology in a fictitious human history.

A religion of the cross was first of all established in the mysteries of Memphis as the cult of Ptah and his son Iu-em-hetep, otherwise Atum-Horus, who passed at Annu into Atum-Ra, the father in spirit, with Iusa, son of Iusãas, as the ever-coming Messianic son.

We have evidence from the pyramid of Medum that from 6,000 to 7,000 years ago the dead in Egypt were buried in a faith which was founded on the mystery of the cross, and rationally founded too, because that cross was a figure of the fourfold foundation on which [Page 750] heaven itself was built. The Tat-cross is a type of the eternal in Tattu. But whether as a fourfold, a fivefold, or a twelvefold support it was a figure of an all-sustaining, all-renewing, all-revivifying power that was re-erected and religiously besought for hope, encouragement, and succour, when the day was at the darkest and things were at the worst in physical nature. The sun apparently was going out. The life of Egypt in the Nile was running low and lower toward the desert drought. The spirit of vegetation died within itself. The rebel powers of evil gathered from all quarters for the annual conflict, led by Apap and the Sebau in one domain, and by Sut and his seventy-two conspirators in another. At this point began the ten mysteries grouped together in the Ritual (ch. 18). The Tat for the time being was overthrown. The deity suffered, as was represented, unto death. The heart of life that bled in every wound was no longer felt to pulsate. The god in matter was inert and breathless. Make ye the word of Osiris truth against his enemies! Raise up the Tat, which portrayed the resurrection of the god; let the mummy-type of the eternal be once more erected as the mainstay and divine support of all. It was thus that the power of salvation through Osiris-Tat was represented in the mysteries. Fundamentally the cross was astronomical. It is a figure of time, as much so in its way as is the clock. It is a measure of time made visible upon the scale and in the circle of the year instead of the hour. A cross with equal arms ✙ denotes the time of equal day and night. Hence it is a figure of the equinox. Another cross ✝ is a figure of time in the winter solstice. It is a modified form of the Tat of Ptah SYMBOL on which the four quarters are more obviously portrayed in the four arms of the pedestal. This was re-erected annually in the depths of the solstice where the darkness lasts some sixteen hours and the daylight only eight — the measure of time that is imaged by this Tat-figure of the cross. These two are now known as the Greek and Roman crosses, and under those two names the fact has been lost sight of that the first is a type of time in the equinox, the other a symbol of the winter solstice. The two crosses are scientific figures in the astronomical mythology. They were symbols of mystical significance in the Egyptian eschatology: and they formed the ground plan of the Ka-chambers of King Rahetep and his wife Nefermat in the pyramid of Medum (Petrie, Medum).

The tree was first of all a sign of sustenance when the sustainer was the Great Earth Mother; Apt in the Dom Palm, Uati in the papyrus plant, Hathor in the sycamore, or Isis in the persea-tree. On this the type of Ptah was based as the Tat-image of a power that sustained the universe. Osiris-Tat then typified the power that sustained the human soul in death. This was buried with the mummy as a fetish in the coffin, where the dead were seen to lie at rest in the eternal arms. And thus a cultus of the cross was founded many thousand years ago. The Christian doctrine of the crucifixion, with the human victim raised aloft as the sin-offering for all the world, is but a ghastly simulacrum of the primitive meaning: a shadowy phantom of the original substance. The doctrine had its beginning with an idea of up-bearing, but not in the moral domain. When the sky was suspended by [Page 751] Ptah in Amenta the act was symbolized by raising up the Tat-type of stability and support. This not only sustained the sky of the nether-world, it also imaged the divine backbone of the universe. The Tat, was a figure of the pole and the four corners, which united in one the “five supports” or fivefold tree of the Egypto-gnostic mystery (Pistis Sophia, B. 1, 1-3). Otherwise stated, it was a symbol of the power that sustained the heavens with the supporting pole and the arms of the four quarters. This power was personified in Ptah as well as figured in the Tat. Hence the god is seen within the type as Ptah-Sekari or the later Asar-Tat. Then the type of the eternal is the eternal’s own self: the power that sustains the universe in very person who is Ptah in one cult, Osiris in the other. The superincumbent weight and pressure on the sustaining power is probably indicated by the squelched face and compressed features of the Osiris-Tat (Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, vol. 3, pl. 25). The sustaining power within the Tat would make the god and the cross to be one as they are in the Osiris Tat. The deceased arises from the tomb as the Tat. He says “I am Tat, the son of Tat” (Rit., ch. 1), or of the eternal who establishes the soul for eternity in the mystery of Tattu (Rit., ch. 17). Hence the figure of a god extended crosswise as the sustainer of the universe could be equivalent to the cross. The Hindu figure of Witoba, for example, is portrayed in space as the Crucified without the cross (Moor’s Hindu Pantheon). On the other hand, the Swastika is a form of the cross without the crucified. In the Christian Iconography, as Didron shows, Christ and the cross are identical, as were Horus and the Tat. The cross takes the place of the Tat as symbol of supporting power, and the god as the sustaining force within the Tat may account for the legend of the gospel Jesus being the bearer of the cross on which he was to suffer death. A resurrection of Osiris from death in the month Choiak is mentioned in several texts (as in the Pap. Biling. Rhind., II, 4, line 8, ed. Birch, plate 8) without giving the day of the month, but of course rebirth and resurrection in Amenta were identical, and the resurrection is also signified there by the raising of the Tat-pillar or cross. When the Tat was annually overthrown it was raised again by the uplifting power of the god represented by the Son as the sign of resurrection. Thus the genesis of the legend of the cross, like to that of the Christ, can be traced in Egypt to the cult of Ptah at Memphis, where the religion of the cross originated; and to Annu or On, where it was continued in the cult of Atum-Ra with Iu-em-hetep as the Egyptian Jesus. This, as we show, was Iusa the Jew-God brought out of Egypt by the Ius or Aius, or when the name is spelt with the letter J, by the Jews. For 13,000 years has Iu the Egyptian Jew been coming astronomically as Iu the Su or Iu-sa, the son of Atum, or rather as Atum manifesting in the person of the son. For 13,000 years he has been the bringer of good-will and peace and plenty to the world in accordance with the meanings of his title, Iu-em-hetep. And as this Jesus is the ever-coming-one who is always figured one foot before the other and best foot foremost in the act of coming, never-hasting never-halting, and as Iu is the Jew we see in this wanderer of eternity with no rest for the sole of his foot through all the cycles of time, the original personification of him who lives in later legend as the “Wandering Jew”. [Page 752]

How often has it been confidently declared that the idea of a divine fatherhood was introduced into the world some time after A.D. by an historical Jesus; whereas it is a matter of scientific demonstration that the doctrine was established in the cult of Ptah, and perfected in the religion of Atum-Ra; in both of which Iusa or Jesus was the ever-coming son as demonstrator for the eternal in the sphere of time.

The doctrine of a future life, or in modern phrase, the immortality of the soul, was also taught at Memphis many thousand years ago under at least four different figures of the re-arising human spirit. One of these was the Apis called “the second life of Ptah”; one the Scarabaeus termed “the old one who becomes young” ; a third was the Hawk of soul emerging from the mortal mummy; and a fourth Iu-em-hetep, as the type of an eternal child.

Until the time of Ptah, the Totemic types prevailed in the Egyptian astronomical mythology. There was only the Great Mother, in several characters, with her children, the same as in Totemism. But when the fatherhood was founded in Ptah his predecessors were designated his children. We learn from a hieroglyphic inscription on the temple of Iu-em-hetep at Philae that he was called “the great one, son of Ptah, the creative god, made by Tanen (a title of Ptah), begotten by him, the god of divine forms, who giveth life to all men”. On one line of development he became the father-god as Atum-Ra at Heliopolis; on the other he was God the son as Atum-Horus or Iu-em-hetep, he who comes with peace or rest.

Christian ignorance notwithstanding the Gnostic Jesus is the Egyptian Horus who was continued by the various sects of gnostics under both the names of Horus and of Jesus. In the gnostic iconography of the Roman Catacombs child-Horus reappears as the mummy-babe who wears the solar disc. The royal Horus is represented in the cloak of royalty, and the phallic emblem found there witnesses to Jesus being Horus of the resurrection. The resurrection of Osiris, the mummy-god, is reproduced in the Roman Catacombs as the raising of Lazarus. Amongst the numerous types of Horus repeated in Rome as symbols of the alleged “historic” Jesus are “Horus on his papyrus” as the Messianic shoot or natzer; Horus the branch of endless ages as the vine; Horus as Ichthus, the fish; Horus as the bennu or phoenix; Horus as the dove; Horus as the eight-rayed star of the Pleroma; Horus the Scarabaeus; Horus as the child-mummy with the head of Ra; Horus as the black child, or Bambino; Horus, of the triangle (reversed)
(Lapidarian Gallery of the Vatican, Lundy, p. 92).
Horus in his resurrection betwixt the two trees; Horus attended by the two divine sisters, or two women; Horus as the lion of the double force; Horus as Serapis; these and others were reproduced as Egypto-gnostic by gnostic artists in illustration of Egypto-gnostic tenets, doctrines, and dogmas. The Catacombs of Rome are crowded with the Egypto-gnostic types which had served to Roman, Persian, Greek, and Jew as evidence for the non-historic origins of Christianity. To Marcion of Pontus, for [Page 753] example, the epicene Serapis would represent the soul of both sexes which was the non-historical Egypto-gnostic Christ. Horus of the inundation brings the fish and grapes for the Uaka festival “Called Christ as a Fisherman”, Lundy, fig. 54). Horus still issues from the mummy as the young sun-god with the head of Ra, the same as in the Ritual. The soul of Ra still issues from the sepulchre as the phoenix=bennu; and Osiris comes forth at the call of Horus from the tomb. Amsu still rises from betwixt the trees of Nut and Hathor as the good shepherd with the lamb upon his shoulder, wearing the cloak of royalty, and carrying the panpipes in his hand as a figure of the All-one, that is, as Horus of the resurrection. Double Horus, as the child of the virgin and the son of God the Father, is portrayed in both his characters as the heir of Seb, god of earth, and the heir of Ra, the father in heaven. As the heir of Seb he is seated on a throne that is supported on the head of an aged man, who represents the god of earth (“Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus”, Lundy, fig. 41). As the heir of Ra he is enthroned in heaven, or on a figure of heaven (Nut), as Horus divinized (Lundy, fig. 42; Didron, figs. 18 and 66). The ox and the ass which appear in the Roman Catacombs with the worshippers of the new-born infant are witnesses for Iusa, and not for an historical Jesus. Iusa in Egypt had been represented by both the ass and the ox, or the short-horned bullock, in the cult of Atum-Ra at On. In a sculptured sarcophagus of the fourth century, the three Magi are offering gifts to the divine infant, or mummy-child. These, according to their caps, are Zoroastrians. They are worshippers, however, of the risen Christ. Only the risen one in this case is Mithra, son of the sun, and not the Jewish Jesus. The story of Jesus riding on two asses, or on an ass and the foal of an ass, in the triumphal procession to Jerusalem also shows that he was one with Iusa, the Egyptian Jesus. It has been suggested that the Gospel narrative was derived from the Greek tradition of Dionysius riding on two asses. But it is of incomparably greater likelihood that it was derived from the Hebrew prophecy being converted into an historical event. Either way, there was one origin for both in the Egyptian mythical representation. As already shown, Iu, the ass in ancient Egypt, was a type of Atum-Ra, and his son Iusa in the Kamite mythos. It was a zootype of the swift-goer where there was no horse, and bearer of the solar god who was Atum in the two characters of the father and the son, the old one and the young one, or, in sign-language, the ass and the foal of the ass, upon which the Messu, or Messiah rode, in coming up to day from Amenta. Iusa is portrayed with asses’ ears. Iu is both the ass and the god under one name, and if not portrayed as riding on an ass, or, according to the Märchen, on two asses, he is represented by the ass with the solar disc upon his head, at the sides of which are the two ears of an ass. According to Lefébure “he seems to raise himself by means of a rope” (“Book of Hades”, Records of the Past, v. 10, 130). Thus, and in no other way, the youthful sun-god rode upon the ass as Iusa or as “Horus with the royal countenance”, considered as the son of Ra (ib., p. 131). The twin-lions form another tell-tale type. Ciampini says two lions used to be stationed at the doors of ancient churches and basilicas in Italy, not as mere ornaments, but for some mystical signification (Vet. Mon. I. C., 3, p. 35). As Egyptian, the type is as old [Page 754] as the Kherefu, which were stationed in the sign of Leo at our point of beginning in the Jesus-legend where Iusa was born as Atum-Horus, the lion-faced, supported by the two lions on the ecliptic, which imaged the double force of the young sun-god coming in the strength and glory of the father, Atum-Ra, whether supported by the two lions or riding on the ass. Thus the two lions supposed to be guarding the doors of the church in Rome were at that time guarding the double-doors of the horizon, through which the solar god came forth at Easter in the equinox.

Naturally it was for mythical not for historical reasons that the child-Christ remained a starrily-bejewelled blackamoor as the typical healer in Rome. Jesus, the divine healer, does not retain the black complexion of Iu-em-hetep in the canonical Gospels, but he does in the Church of Rome when represented by the little black bambino. A jewelled image of the child-Christ as a blackamoor is sacredly preserved at the headquarters of the Franciscan order, and true to its typical character as a symbolical likeness of Iusa the healer, the little black figure is still taken out in state, with its regalia on, to visit the sick, and demonstrate the supposed healing power of this Egyptian Aesculapius thus Christianized. The virgin mother, who was also black, survived in Italy as in Egypt. At Oropa, near Bietta, the Madonna and her child-Christ are not white but black, as they so often were in Italy of old, and as the child is yet conditioned in the little black Jesus of the eternal city. According to local tradition the image of the black bambino was carved at Jerusalem out of the root of a tree from the mount of Olives. This supplies another illustration of Egyptian origin. In the solar mythos the divine babe rises from the emerald tree of dawn. In the Ritual he issues from the Asru-tree (ch. 42). But under one Egyptian type the tree of dawn is the bakhu or olive-tree, the “son of oil”, from which the solar light was born. Hence mount Bakhu, the solar birthplace, is the mount of Olives, and the infant born from the tree of dawn was represented by the image carved out of the tree upon mount Olivet. In this, as in unnumbered other instances, the mythos lives obscurely in the legend which is still capable of reconversion. The cult of the child who was black is further illustrated at the festivals of the Bambino in Rome, when sermons are preached from the pulpit by “the mouths of babes and sucklings”. There is a little black doll in the hieroglyphics which is a determinative of the word “men” to be concealed. This appears alongside of Atum as variant to the Ankh-symbol of life, and is very suggestive of the little black bambino as a figure of child-Horus in his darkness, or Iu-em-hetep in Amenta. From this standpoint it is possible to see how it came to pass that the Jew-God could have a son born to him with a black complexion, and thus account for the black Jesus that is worshipped in the cult of papal Rome. Surely the profoundest sigh of an ever-warring world went up to heaven in the cult of Iu-em-hetep, who was worshipped as the giver of rest, the Kamite prince of peace. The bringer of peace was the giver of rest to the weary; the word hetep having both meanings. From the time of the fifth dynasty the Egyptian dead were buried “em-hetep” or “In pace” in the great resting-place of Amenta. This giver of rest was the leader of his followers into the kingdom of rest, [Page 755] where they reigned with him in the glory of the father. In one of the sayings of Jesus, or Iu-em-hetep, “Jesus saith” of him who seeks, “Astonished he (the seeker) shall reach the kingdom, and having reached the kingdom he shall rest” (“New Sayings of Jesus”). It is also said in the Gospel according to the Hebrews, “He that wonders shall reach the kingdom, and having reached the kingdom he shall rest”. “The promise of Christ (or Jesus) is great and wonderful and rest in the kingdom to come and life eternal” (Clement II, Epis. v. 5). And in the Acts of Thomas it is said that “they who worthily partake of the goods of this world have rest, and in rest shall they reign”.

Iu-em-hetep is portrayed as the youthful sage and precocious teacher. He is the “heir of the temple”, depicted as the teacher in the temple; the boy of twelve years who wears the skull-cap of wisdom, and sits in the seat of learning. He holds a papyrus on his knee and is in the act of unrolling it for his discourse. This is he who personated the divine Word in human form as the wise and wondrous child of whom the tales of the infancy were told. Hence he was the mythical teacher, and reputed author of the “Sayings” and writer of the Books of Wisdom. But it cannot even be pretended that any historic personage named Jesus, alleged to have been born into the world in the year one, or four, of the present era, could have been the author of “the wisdom of Jesus” in the Apocrypha. But there is the book, and there is the name to be accounted for. In the “New Sayings of Jesus”, found at Oxyrhynchus, it is said in the opening paragraph, “These are the words (or logoi) which Jesus the living spake to . . . and Thomas, and he said unto (them) ‘Every one that hearkens to these words shall never taste of death.’ “ And this is the common formula in the rubrical directions of the Ritual. For example, the 64th chapter is to be recited in order that “the soul of the person may not die a second time” or may not suffer the second death. It is also said of ch. 20, “Let the person say this chapter and he will come forth by day after death, and escape from the fire”. These are the words of life that deliver the soul from second death in Amenta. Of chapter 70 it is said, “If this scripture is known upon earth he will come forth by day (from the dead) and walk among the living. His name will be uninjured for ever”. Ch.130 is entitled “A book by which the soul is made to live for ever”. By means of ch. 180 the manes takes the form of a living soul. In truth one half of the Ritual consists of the magical words of power that save a soul from the dreaded second death; the rest describe the way of salvation together with the transformations and trials which have to be undergone in the course of working it out. Iu-em-hetep was pre-eminently the divine healer, the medicine-man amongst the Egyptian gods. He was the good physician of souls as well as the healer of bodily disease. He was the caster-out of evil demons, the giver of sleep and rest to sufferers in pain. AEsculapius was a Greek version of Iu-em-hetep, “the great son of Ptah”. The Greeks called his temple near the city of Memphis “The Aesculapion”. “Under the Ptolemies a small temple was built in honour of Iu-em-hetep on the island of Philae” ; and a Greek version of the hieroglyphic [Page 755] inscription was placed over the door by the command of Ptolemy V (Budge, Gods of Eg., vol. I, p. 23). Iu-em-hetep is not mentioned by name in the “Book of the Dead”, but it is said to the deceased in “the Ritual of Embalmment” “thy soul uniteth itself to Iu-em-hetep, whilst thou art in the funeral valley”, where he takes the name of Horus as lord of the resurrection.

The cult of Iu-em-hetep was eclipsed or much obscured by the Osirian religion. In fact Iu-em-hetep was but a title of him who was the bringer of peace and good luck, and who was Atum-Horus as the son of Ptah; hence Iu-em-hetep is far better known as Horus the son of Osiris. Nevertheless, this cult of Iusa the child, the little hero sayer and healer, had a remarkable recrudescence and a considerable increase in Saitic and Greek times. We find that a temple was erected for his worship at Sakkara between the Serapeum and the village of Abusir. This is near enough in time to help in establishing a link betwixt the Egyptian Iusa and the Jesus of the Gospels, who was brought on from Memphis as Iu the Sa or son of Ptah, to Annu as Iu the ever-coming sa or son of Atum-Ra, thence to Alexandria as Iu-em-hetep, and to Greece as Imuthes, or AEsculapius, the god of healing there as he had been in Egypt, and to Rome as Jesus the Egypto-gnostic Christ.

In the transition from the old Egyptian religion to the new cult of Christianity there was no factor of profounder importance than the worship of Serapis. As the Emperor Hadrian relates, in his well-known letter to Servianus, “those who worship Serapis are likewise Christians; even those who style themselves the Bishops of Christ are devoted to Serapis”. The very Patriarch himself (Tiberias, head of the Jewish religion), when he comes to Egypt, is forced by some to adore Serapis, by others to worship Christ. “There is but one God for them all”. Clearly this was but a difference in type and title. According to inscriptions at the Serapeum of Memphis, the ancient Egyptian Serapis was born of the Virgin Mother, when she was represented by the sacred heifer — a far earlier type than the mystical human Virgin. Serapis was “the second life of Ptah”. Hence, as Diodorus says (I. 25), Serapis was a name given to all persons after their death or in their resurrection.

Prehistoric Christianity was founded, as Egyptian, on the resurrection of the human soul from the deaf and dumb, the blind and impotent inertia imaged in death, and its coming forth to day as demonstrated by the reappearance of the eidolon or double of the dead. The Egypto-gnostic Christ only existed in the spirit as a spirit or a god. Their Christ was represented by the superhuman types of the risen mummy; the eight-rayed star of the pleroma; the divine hawk; the mystical dove; the sacred beetle; the lion, fish or lamb; not by the man in an individual form of historic personality. That is why there is no portrait of the man Christ-Jesus. There is no human portrait for the reason that there was no man.

THE JESUS-LEGEND IN ROME.

Before it could be for the first time understood, the story outlined so elusively in the canonical Gospels had to be retold in accordance [Page 757] with the astronomical mythology, and more especially in terms of the Osirian eschatology. The legend was so ancient in Egypt that in the time of Amen-hetep, a Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty, it was humanly applied to his child and to his consort Mut-em-Ua in the character of the divine woman, the mother who, like Neith, was ever-virgin. A passage and a picture from the “Natural Genesis” (vol. II, p. 398) may be repeated here. The story of the Annunciation, the miraculous conception (or incarnation), the birth and the adoration of the Messianic infant had already been engraved in stone and represented in four consecutive scenes upon the innermost walls of the holy of holies (the Meskhen) in the temple of Luxor (which was built by Amen-hetep III. about 1700 B.C., or some seventeen centuries before the events depicted are commonly supposed to have taken place. In these scenes the maiden queen Mut-em-Ua, the mother of Amen-hetep, her future child, impersonates the virgin-mother, who conceived and brought forth without the fatherhood.

The first scene on the left hand shows the god Taht, as divine word or logos, in the act of hailing the virgin queen and announcing to her that she is to give birth to the coming son. (That is, to bring forth the royal Repa in the character of Horus or Aten, the divine heir.) In the second scene the ram-headed god Kneph, in conjunction with Hathor, gives life to her. This is the Holy Ghost or spirit that causes conception, Neph being the spirit by nature and by name. Impregnation and conception are apparent in the virgin’s fuller form. Next, the mother is seated on the midwife’s stool, and the child is supported in the hands of one of the nurses. The fourth scene is that of the Adoration. Here the infant is enthroned, receiving homage from the gods and gifts from men. Behind the deity, who represents the holy spirit, on the right three men are kneeling offering gifts with the right hand, and life with the left. The child thus announced, incarnated, born and worshipped was the [Page 758] Pharaonic representative of the Aten-sun or child-Christ of the Aten-cult, the miraculous conception of the ever-virgin mother imaged by Mut-em-Ua. (The scenes were copied by Sharpe from the temple at Luxor.) Thus the divine drama was represented humanly by the royal lady who personated the mother of God, with her child in this particular religion.

And here a dogma of “historic personality” may be seen in the germ. Indeed, when the Pharaoh first assumed the vesture of divinity and a doctrine of historic personality for the Messiah could be and was established, Ra was the representative of God the Father and the Repa was a type of God the Son, as heir-apparent for the eternal. The father was the ever-living and the son the ever-coming one. These, in the cult of Annu, were Atum-Ra the father, and Iusa, the Egyptian Jesus, the coming son. The eternal existence of the father was thus demonstrated by the ever-coming of the son. These divine characters of the Ra and Repa, so to say, had become historical in Usertsen First according to a record of the twelfth dynasty. In this the king says of his God, the double Har-makhu, “I am a king of his own making, a monarch long-living, not by the Father. He exalted me as lord of both parts; as an infant not yet gone forth; as a youth not yet come from my mother’s womb”. This was in the character of the unbegotten Horus, the Virgin’s child, who had no father (Records, vol. 12, pp. 53-4), and who as Har-makhu was earlier than God the Father, Ra. We learn from a still older document that the Son of God may be said to have become historical in Egypt early in the fifth dynasty; that is, as the Son of Ra. The earlier Pharaohs were not the sons of Ra, they were Horus-kings. The “Son of Ra” then gave historic personality to the god who was first imaged in the human form of Atum-Iu. Thenceforth the Repa, or heir-apparent, was the representative of that ever-coming son who was the child of Iusãas in the cult of Annu, and who was, in fact, the Egyptian Jesus or Iusa, the coming son in historic personality as the royal representative of Ra.

Another version of the ancient legend that was at length converted into Christian history has recently been discovered in Egypt. This was written in Demotic, but however late the copy, the internal evidence shows that it is an Egyptian folk-tale containing matter of the indefinitely more ancient mythos. That is the all-important point. The story is told of one Si-Osiris, the son of Khamuas, a famous high priest of Ptah at Memphis who was head of the hierarchy of his time, about 1250 B.C. The tale of Khamuas, so far as it goes, is a perfect parallel to the story of the marvellous child that is told in the Gospels, canonical or apocryphal, which contain some portions of the mythos reduced to the status of the Märchen. There was one origin for all — that is, Egyptian. The mythos is the parent of the Märchen, and the unity of the Märchen is traceable to the Egyptian mythology and eschatology — there, and nowhere else. It is the story that had been dramatized and narrated by the Egyptians during many thousand years in the cult of Ptah-Sekari at Memphis; of Aten and of Atum-Iu at Annu, and of Osiris in Egypt generally. Only minds completely crazed or fatally confused [Page 759] by the current Christomania would suppose that the details of the story, which is as old at least as the cult of Ptah in Memphis, were derived from the “historic” version that was canonized at last as Christian. The Ritual is a permanent reply to all such false assumptions. At least the “Book of the Dead” is not a forgery of post-Christian gnostics.

The folk-tale here is told of Si-Osiris, son of Setme-Khamuas, who was incarnated as the human representative of Horus the divine. It is said of Horus, son of Pa-neshe, “he being in the shape of Si-Osiris made an effort of written magic against the man of Ethiopia”. Moreover, this Horus comes up from Amenta on purpose to contend against the black art of Hor, son of the negress, and in doing this assumes the shape of the human Si-Osiris. As the translator remarks, “the end of the story shows that Si-Osiris is really Horus, son of Pa-neshe, who had obtained leave from Osiris to revisit the earth”.

Setme-Khamuas, the son of Pharaoh Mer-ma-ra (King Rameses II) took to wife his sister Meh-wesekht, whom he loved devoutly, but they had no child, and their hearts were grieved because of it. The childless wife is spoken with one night, by superhuman visitants, in a dream. They tell her (or words are spoken to the effect) that she shall conceive and bear a child. Khamuas, her husband, is also informed in a dream that his consort, who is called his sister, just as Isis is the sister of Osiris, has conceived and will bear a son. “The child that will be born, he (shall be named) Si-Osiris (Osiris’ son); many are the marvels that he shall do in the land of Egypt” (Griffith, Stories, p. 43). Meh-wesekht is told that she will find a melon-vine, which shall be to her for medicine, and she is to give of it to Khamuas. Then “she lay down by her husband and she conceived seed of him” (Stories, p. 43).

In this account of conception the melon-plant, its gourd or its flower, takes the place of the papyrus, lotus or lily presented to Isis the virgin and to Mary. This is referred to after his birth by the child Si-Horus, who, in speaking of his coming forth, says, “I grew as that melon-vine, with the intent of returning to the body again that I might be born into the world” for a purpose variously described in the different texts. In this he becomes incarnate to combat the power and influence of evil in the form of black magic (Stories, pp. 43-65). Si-Osiris is really Horus, the son of Osiris in Amenta. This he leaves to visit earth and become the son of Meh-wesekht, the sister and consort of Khamuas. He says, “I prayed before Osiris in Amenta to let me come forth to the world again. It was commanded before to let me forth into the world. I awoke; I flew right up, to find Setme, the son of Pharaoh, upon the Gebel of On and the Gebel of Memphis, the place of burial in the desert”. Si-Osiris, like Jesus in the “history”, has the power of suddenly becoming invisible; as it is said, “Si-Osiris passed away as a shade or spirit out from the land of Pharaoh and Setme, his father, nor did they see him” (Stories, p. 65). Like the young Jesus in the Gospel (Luke II. 40), the child grew and waxed strong. The exact words are, “The child grew big; he waxed strong; he was sent to the school. He rivalled the scribe that had been appointed to teach him”. “The child, son [Page 760] of Osiris, began to speak with the scribes of the House of Life (in the temple of Ptah); all who heard him were lost in wonder at him” (Stories, p. 44). “Now when the royal Si-Osiris had attained the age of twelve years it came to pass that there was no good scribe (or learned man) that rivalled him in Memphis in reading or in writing that compels” ; that is, in uttering the Ur-hekau or mystical words of great magical power. As the translator remarks, it is curious to find that linguistically the tale is somewhat closely related to the new Egyptian of the twelfth century B.C.; that is, to the time of Khamuas, one of the chief characters, as the date of the original document.

But not only in Egypt was the divine hero, the Prince of Eternity, represented by the royal child born heir-apparent to the throne. It was the same in Rome. For instance, the birthday of Augustus Caesar was hailed in Rome as that of the Messianic Prince of Peace. In a well-preserved Greek inscription of eighty-four lines, in which an ancient account is given of the introduction of the Julian calendar on the birthday of the Emperor Caesar Augustus, September 23rd, it is written: —

“On this day [i.e., the birthday of Augustus] the world has been given a different aspect. It would have been doomed to destruction if a great good fortune common to all men had not appeared in him who was born on this day. He judges aright who sees in this birthday the beginning of life and of all living powers for himself. Now at last the times are passed when man must regret that he has been born. From no other day does the individual and all humanity receive so much good as from this day, which has brought happiness to all. It is impossible to find words of thanksgiving sufficient for the great blessings which this day has brought. That Providence which presides over the destinies of all living creatures has fitted this man for the salvation of humanity with such gifts that he has been sent to us and to coming generations as a saviour. He will put an end to all strife and will restore all things gloriously. In his appearance, all the hopes of the ancestors have been fulfilled. He has not only surpassed all former benefactors of mankind, but it is impossible that a greater than he should ever come. The birthday of this god [i.e., Augustus] has brought out the good news of great joy based upon him. From his birth a new era must begin.

The Egyptian Repa or the Roman Caesar was enacting on this earth, approximately, the character assigned to the son of God in the Egypto-gnostic mysteries. The world would have been doomed to destruction but for the rebirth in time of the Messu or Messiah, the Repa or divine heir, who represented the eternal as the child, the ever-coming prince of peace, who is also imaged as the living link which connects and unites the past and future in the present, by means of him who became the representative of the deity on earth, whether in Egypt or in Rome, in India or Japan (Rit., ch. 42, 4, 5). But the man whose coming changed the world, and saved it by renewal, was mythical, and his advent was aeonian from age to age, under whatsoever name. Thus, in Rome the Emperor Augustus personalized the coming prince of peace in an historical character.

The repetition of this as Christian legend in the Gospels is no mere replica of “heathen” sentiments, images, types, and phrases. It is a reproduction of the Egyptian astronomical mythology and eschatology in the disguise of a pretended history.

In Egypt the Pharaoh and his son for ages had represented Ra and [Page 761] the Repa, the divine heir-apparent or the prince. As Egyptian the fatherhood and sonship of the one god were founded on the Pharaoh and the heir-apparent, the Ra and Repa, who constituted the King that never died. The son of God was born as manifestor for the eternal, and the ruler as Pharaoh, emperor or king, was the earthly representative of the God with whose divinity the new historical ruler was invested as the Anointed, the Repa, the Prince, the Caesar, the Mikado, the Cyrus, or the Christ. This birth of the eternal in time was astronomical. But it was humanized for the birthday of Amen-hetep in Egypt, for Alexander in Greece, and for Caesar-Augustus in Rome before the era that was designated Christian. The virgin-mother in mythology, and there never was any other, is she who made her proclamation in the Temple of Neith at Sais that she proceeded from herself and bore the child without her peplum being lifted by the male. The myth reflects the matriarchate from a time when the fatherhood was not yet individualized. The mother with child, the great or enceinte mother, is at the head of the Kamite Pantheon as the mother of life and a figure of fecundity. This type of the mother and child retains its position in the Christian iconography when the child Jesus, like Kheper, is exhibited in the Virgin’s womb surrounded by the seven spirits as doves (Didron). The mother with her child in utero or in her arms was indefinitely earlier than the typical father and son whose worshippers were opposed to the more primitive representation of nature. Horus, at first, is the child of Isis only, with Seb as putative or foster-father, who was not the begetter.

Thus the mother might remain a virgin. Horus, the child, was an image of the god, made flesh in human guise. He is the mortal Horus, very imperfect, sometimes sightless, at others a cripple, but divine; the divine victim in a human shape, which was now the manifesting mask of the deity or superhuman power, instead of the totemic zootype. And naturally the divine child thus humanly featured involved the mother of the god in a human effigy. The child assigned to the earth-father Seb=Joseph is Horus up to twelve years of age, and then he passes from the mortal sphere.

A virgin mother in the ancient wisdom is she who was fecundated by her own child as bull of the mother in the moon, in the earth, or in other phenomena that were at first entirely non-human. But the doctrine survived when the divinized mother and her child were rendered anthropomorphically. Thus the gnostic Jesus in the Pistis Sophia says, “I found Mary, who is called my mother, after the material body; I implanted in her the first power which I had received from the hands of Barbêlô, and I planted in her the power which I had received from the hands of the great, the good Sabaoth” (Mead, B. 1, 13). That is in the character of the mythical child who fecundates his own mother. And here the overshadowing of Mary by “the power of the Most High” (Luke I. 35) is suggestive of another overshadowing of the Virgin who conceives. This is described in the magic papyrus (Records of the Past, vol. 10, p. 141) as a “concealment” of the mother in the process of generation.

“On Horror’s head horrors accumulate” in manufacturing history from the mythos. Horus, the fatherless, was the fecundator of his own virgin mother, but neither as the human Horus nor the divine [Page 762] Horus was it presented that he was other than the typical figure in a mystery, or that the doctrine came the human way. Jesus in the same character, called the Mamzer SANSKRIT by the Jews, is the same fatherless fecundator of the virgin mother when the two are Jew and Jewess. To the truly religious sense this is a most profane parody of the sacred Osirian drama. Thus the fragments of a great complex in dogma and doctrine were collected together in relation to the conception of the Messianic child. First, the virgin mother was the insufflator of a soul. Secondly, there is a begettal in which the offspring fecundates the mother — this of course is in the mythical representation. Thirdly, according to Matthew, the divine child was either conceived or begotten of the Holy Ghost.

It is the type that tells so many secrets of the non-historical beginnings: and nothing has been bottomed, nothing could be fundamentally explained with the Egypto-gnostic wisdom still unknown. The dove that laid the egg is pre-eminent as a type in the conception and the birth of Jesus. At first the insufflating spirit of life, whether called holy or not, was female. This was demonstrated by the Mother-nature. In the Gospels the Holy Spirit as female suffices for the miraculous conception of the child-Jesus who is generated without a father. But Pistis Sophia witnesses that the gnostic Jesus proceeded from the father in the likeness of a dove. And that the mystery of all mysteries, the first and final mystery, was this of the dove, considered to be the bird of God the Father. By this means the Holy Spirit is portrayed as male, whereas according to the secret wisdom the dove had been a female type of spirit from the first. The gnosis was so ancient as Egyptian that the dove had been succeeded by the hawk as the bird of Ra, the Holy Spirit as male. The hawk was now the symbol of the father and the son, that is, of Ra and Horus. Whereas the dove as mother-bird was primary. The female nature of the mystic dove is also shown by its co-type the pigeon, still employed in modern slang as a survival of sign-language. Thus the earliest human soul was insufflated by the mother, and the mother divinized was represented by the Dove, the bird of soul when soul was first attributed to female source. Lastly, the same bird was given to the Holy Spirit as God the Father, and as a type of the Trinity consisting of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, with the mother veiled and hidden by the dove. It may be noted in passing that the dove was not necessarily a type of sensual desire although it became associated with Venus in Greece. There was nothing licentious in Hathor or Iusãas. The earliest Venus was a personification of the enceinte mother, not a goddess Lubricity provocative of lust, but in all simplicity and seriousness a type of tenderest maternity. The dove had been the bird of Hathor as the insufflator of a soul of breath. In this character it is portrayed with brooding wings extended on the bosom of the mummy as quickener of the spirit for a future life. On the tomb of Rameses IX the dove appears in place of the hawk as a co-type of Horus at the prow of the solar boat. Also, in a statuette of the 19th dynasty there is a human-headed dove which takes the place of the hawk as a zootype of the soul. It is seen hovering over the bosom of a mummy. The divine Horus rises again in the form of a dove, as well as in the shape of a hawk. “I am the [Page 763] Dove: I am the Dove”, exclaims the risen spirit as he soars up from Amenta, where the egg of his future being was hatched by the divine incubator (Rit., 86, 1). Here the bird of Hathor is also the bird of Ra, and thus the dove became the bird of the Holy Spirit, female in the mother, and male in the divine child Horus, and finally in the Father. In the Councils of Nice and Constantinople, the fathers condemned Xenora, who derided the imaging of the Holy Spirit by the dove. And to show how the type will persist, in The Catholic Layman for July 17th, 1856, there is a Papal picture of the Christian Godhead that was extant in that same year, as the trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In this, God the Father and God the Son are represented as a man with two heads, one body and two arms. One of the heads is like the ordinary pictures of Jesus, or Serapis, the other is the head of an old man surmounted by a triangle. Out of the middle of this figure is proceeding the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove (Catholic Layman, July 17th, 1856).

The dove, then, as an emblem of the Holy Spirit, also shows the gnostic nature of the beginnings in the Gospels termed Canonical. “Now the birth of the Christ was on this wise. When his Mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost”, or, as rendered in sign-language, with the dove as emblem of the Holy Spirit. Hence, in the Iconography, child-Jesus is represented in the Virgin’s arms or womb, surrounded by the seven doves as symbols of the Holy Spirit (Didron, fig. 124).

We might say that the dove of Hathor-Iusãas came to Rome on board the papyrus-boat, in which the mother Isis crossed the swamps to save her little one from the pursuing dragon (Plutarch, Of Isis and Osiris, 18). For the papyrus-boat is obviously the bark of Peter in the Roman Catacombs (Lundy, Mont. Christ, fig. 139). Iusãas, the mother of Iusa=Iusu, the Egyptian Jesus, was a form of Hathor-Meri, and was brought on in the cult of Rome as Mary, the mystical dove and mother of Iusu, now believed to have become historical. A dovecote was the dwelling where she brought him forth in Rome. As Cyprien Robert says, “The first basilicas, placed generally upon eminences, were called domus columbae, dwellings of the dove, that is, the Holy Ghost” (Didron, 1, 439, Eng. tr.).

Now Atum was the holy spirit in the eschatology of Annu; the first who ever did attain that status in theology. His consort was Iusãas, who, in the character of Hathor, was the female holy spirit, as the dove. Their child was Iusa, the Egyptian Jesus. This was he who says, on rising from Amenta as a spirit, “I am the dove, I am the dove” (The “Menat”. Rit., ch. 86). Thus, the gnostic mystery of the dove is traceable to Atum as the holy spirit, and to Iusãas-Hathor as the Mother of the Coming Son (Iusa), he who emanated from them as the dove. This mode of incarnation is followed by a second descent of the holy spirit in the baptism of Jesus. “Lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him; and lo, a voice out of the heavens saying, This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”. Thus, the child that was conceived of the virgin in the first descent of the spirit is authenticated as son of the father at the time of the second [Page 764] descent of the holy spirit as the dove. And this, as Egyptian, is the doctrine of the dual Horus, who was born of Isis, the virgin, and afterwards begotten in spirit as the beloved son of Ra, the holy spirit. Jesus when mothered by the virgin-dove, whether at On or Bethlehem, is Iusa the coming child of Hathor-Iusãas; and Jesus when authenticated by the bird from heaven is Iusa as the son of Atum-Ra, the holy spirit who is fathered by the dove. This fatherhood of Jesus in his baptism is vouched for by the writers of the Canonical Gospels. And in “the Gospel according to the Hebrews”, Jesus speaks of His “Mother, the Holy Ghost”. He says, “the Holy Spirit, my mother, took me and bore me away to the great mountain, called Thabor”. Which can be understood as a saying of Iusa, the Egyptian Jesus.

Iusa of Annu went to Rome as Ichthon of Annu. Jesus went to Rome as Ichthus, the fish. The black Iusa went to Rome as the Bambino. He went to Rome as the ass-headed Iu, and also is the dove as bird of resurrection in the Catacombs. He is found there in the several characters of Horus, Serapis, Mithras, and under various types. But nowhere is the “historic” personage discoverable, living or dead, in subterranean Rome.

According to the Osirian eschatology in the Ritual, Horus, the son of God, was with his father in heaven before he descended to our earth as the bringer of peace and goodwill (hetep) to men. In coming forth from heaven, he is said to reveal himself by disrobing himself to present himself to the earth. He issues forth as Horus, the son of Isis, the child of the Virgin Mother, saying, “I am Unbu”. That is, “I am the Branch”. He also describes himself as the mortal Horus who was born blind and dumb in “the abode of occultation”, En-arar-ef (Rit., ch. 71). Jesus is born at Bethlehem, in the house of bread. Horus comes forth in Annu, the place of bread. The vesture of Horus is girt on him by Tait, the goddess of food. This answers to the swaddling-clothes in which the child was wrapped when the mother laid him in a manger. Offerings were made to the child who is received by the worshippers with “bendings of the head in Annu” (Rit., ch. 82). The reason why the divine child should be born in a manger is not because there was lack of room in the inn, but because the child had been previously born as a lamb or a calf before the type was humanized, and when the crib, or manger, was the earliest cradle of the little one. The birth of the babe in a manger was anciently exhibited in Egypt, and the origin is traceable to-day. The mother can be identified with the cattle-shed and the manger. For instance, Hathor was the hat or hut; Nephthys is the house; Isis, the seat; the old first mother Apt was the crib; and Apt the crib is also the manger which was a type of the cattle-shed when her offspring was a calf. The Apt was the birthplace when this was the womb of Apt, the water-cow. The name was then applied to the manger, the crib, the hold of a vessel, and to the city of Apt, or Thebes, in Egypt, which is the city of the manger by name. The child born in a manger or Apt=crib is the wise way of showing a continuity of type which survived in Egypt down to Ptolemaic times. The child was incarnated to live and eat the bread of Seb=Joseph beneath the tree of Hathor — one of whose names is Meri. In various legends, the child was brought forth beneath the tree, and in our ancient carols the tree, as a cherry-tree, [Page 765] bows down for Mary to eat of its fruit at the command of the child, who is yet in the mother’s womb. The oblations offered in Tattu and the adorations made in Annu are the same as in the story of the Magi, who bring their presents and bow down before the babe in Bethlehem. This rebirth is referred to in the tale of Sanehat: “Thou shalt see thyself come to the blessed state, they shall give thee the bandages from the hand of Tait, the night of applying the oil of embalming” (Egyptian Tales, p. 114, Petrie); where the making of the Karast-mummy is a type of the birth of the Christ or Anointed. Horus comes to record the words of God the father with his mouth; the same mouth that draws to it the spouse of Seb as wet-nurse for the child. Like Jesus in the Christology of John, he is the Word made flesh; and the spouse of Seb is the prototype of Mary, the spouse of Joseph, who is portrayed as the suckler of Jesus in the Christian version of the legend. At his coming there are cries of adoration in Suten-Khen, the royal birthplace, and of exultation in An-arar-ef, the city of the blind. The whole cycle of the gods is filled with satisfaction at seeing Horus inherit his throne to rule over the earth. There are bendings in Annu where the different generations of the Rekhet, the Pait, and the Hamemmat bow down before him. The evil Sut is filled with consternation at what has taken place. This reception of the child in Annu, the house of bread, as a celestial locality, is the prototype of the jubilation heard in Bethlehem when, “Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God” (Luke II. 13). These are the acclamations uttered in Annu, on the divine babe making his appearance there (Rit., ch. 125), and being declared the heir of Seb, the god of earth, from whom he issued in the character of Iusa, the child of Iusãas. At his advent Horus says the gods come to him with their acclamation, and the female deities with jubilation, when they see him. Horus, in the litany of Ra, is called the son of Ra, proceeding from Tum. “He has placed your offerings before you; he accords you the favour of receiving your portion as his father Ra commanded. He is his darling. He is his descendant upon the earth”. “ Show the way to his spirit. Show him his dwelling in the midst of the earth”. What we may term the human history of Horus is passed in the earth of Seb, his foster-father on earth, whose bread he eats, and in whose house he dwells with Isis, the virgin mother. There is neither date nor history of Horus betwixt the age of twelve and thirty years. The child-Horus quits the house of Seb and the virgin to reappear in the house of his father Osiris in the earth of eternity. This will explain why the youthful Jesus leaves his mother and his earthly father Joseph to be about his heavenly father’s business when he is twelve years of age. Also, this fact in the mythical representation will account for there being no further mention of Joseph in the Gospels after the journey to Jerusalem (Luke II. 43, 50). Seb ceases to be the foster-father and protector of Horus, who disappears from the earth of time (or Seb) to reappear in the earth of eternity.

The infant Horus was suckled by Isis in solitude. She is said to have nursed him in secret. No one knew the hiding-place, but it was somewhere in the marshes of Amenta, the lower Egypt of the mythos. As an earthly locality, the place where Isis hid herself to suckle her [Page 766] child was identified in the marshes of the Delta. This part of the programme is fulfilled in the Gospel according to Matthew, and there only, by the flight into Egypt. So soon as the babe was born, “an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt”. And the child was there until the death of Herod, “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord, through the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt did I call my son” (Matt. II. 13, 16). The child of the mother had to be taken down into Egypt in order that the Son of God might be brought up out of it, and for the mythos to be fulfilled as biblical history.

At the birth of Horus the life of the young child was sought by the evil Sut. The mother was warned of the danger by Taht, the lunar god, called the great one. He says to her, “Come, thou goddess Isis, hide thyself with thy child” ; and he tells her it is well to be obedient. She is to take the child down into the marshes of lower Egypt, called Kheb, or Khebt. There, says Taht, “these things will happen: his limbs will grow; he will wax entirely strong; he will attain the dignity of prince of the double earth, and sit (or rest) upon the throne of his father”. Then the child and mother make their way to the papyrus-swamps. It is said that the plants were so secret that no enemy could enter there. “Sut could not penetrate this region, or go about in Kheb”. Nevertheless the child was bitten by the reptile, as the story is rendered in the sorrows of Isis, the pre-Christian mater dolorosa (Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, vol. II, ch. 14). “Horus in Kheb” (Egypt) was a title of the divine child. Kheb was in the north of Egypt, and it was there that Horus passed his early days, and was reared in secret by his mother Isis. Horus lands upon the earth of Seb at eventide. He sits upon the seat of Ra, which is on the western horizon, and receives the offerings upon the altars. He says, “I drink the sacred liquor each evening, in the form of the lord of all creatures” (Rit., ch. 79). The descent of Horus, as a child, to earth was daily or yearly according to the mythos. Every night the sinking sun was received by the mother in the breeding-place, or Meskhen, of the western mount, where she prepared him (or he her) for his new birth daily in the East. The point at which the god descends to earth at evening is well portrayed in the oblong zodiac of Denderah. In this the child-Horus is seated on the mount of the western equinox in the sign of the Scales. The sign of the Scales, Makhu, was once the sign of the autumn equinox, and at that point child-Horus touches earth for his descent from heaven. In this sign the child is portrayed sitting on the mount in the disc of the full moon. As seen by night, the mount of earth, or the horizon, is the mount of the ecliptic, the meeting-point of earth and heaven. The full moon is the mother who is Virgo in the previous sign, and in the sign of the Scales she has brought forth the child.

In the Gospel of pseudo-James (ch. 22) it is John, the child of Elizabeth, who is sought for by Herod. “And Elizabeth groaned and said with a loud voice, Mount of God, receive a mother with her child. And suddenly the mountain was divided, and received them. And light shone through to them”. It is the same story of the mother and child when applied to the infant John instead of Jesus. [Page 767] The opening of the mount is in the equinox, and it is there the pursued ones attain safety by entering the earth to escape from Apap, the devouring dragon. Seb is the Egyptian Joseph, as consort of Isis, the earth-mother and foster-father of the child; and at this point in the western equinox where Horus enters the earth or the earth-life, Seb, as god of earth, takes charge of the child and mother to convey them on the way to the lower Egypt of Amenta.

Going down into Kheb or lower Egypt, as rendered in the Ritual, is descending to the secret earth of Amenta, where the mother hid her infant in the marshes, when they were pursued by Sut, otherwise the crocodile. Now it is related in the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew (ch. 18), that when Joseph and Mary were on their way to Egypt with the child-Jesus they came to a certain cave, and “Behold there suddenly came out of the cave many dragons, seeing which the youths cried out with excessive fear. Then Jesus descending from the mother’s lap stood on his feet before the dragons, and they adored Jesus”. In this scene, Jesus saves his father and mother from the dragons, which obey him; and the dragons we may consider to be crocodiles in accordance with Hebrew use and wont. In the Ritual, there is a chapter on repulsing the crocodiles in which Horus saves his father from the four crocodiles (these are eight in the Turin text of the Ritual). “I am the one”, he says, “who saves the great one from the four crocodiles. “I am the one who delivers his father from them”. ‘I am the one who cannot be overthrown by the principles and powers of evil” (Rit., ch. 32), or, as it is otherwise rendered by Renouf: “O son who conversest with thy father, do thou protect this great one from these four crocodiles. I know them by their names and their way of living, and it is I who protect his own father from them”. He orders the crocodiles to go back, one by one, to their quarters, and they obey him with docility. Ra has given him possession of lower Egypt, in which the living are destroyed, and the crocodiles or dragons of the waters do not triumph over him (ch. 32, 9). Coming, as Horus, to make ready the horizon, he repulses the crocodiles of darkness (ch. 136, 8, 9). The dragons of a “certain cave” that is found upon the way to Egypt are an Egypto-gnostic version of the crocodiles of Amenta in the Ritual. Thus, the animals in attendance on the child-Jesus in the apocryphal Gospels are witnesses for the child-Horus. Horus, as the youthful sun-god on the horizon, is accompanied by the two lions, Shu and Tefnut. He is attended by the two lions. He is lighted in their recesses by the two lions (ch. 3, 1, 2). The power of two lions is represented by the head-dress of Horus. He is strengthened by the double force of the two lions. He arrives each day in the dwelling of the two lions (ch. 78, 20-22), with the two lions who are his protectors. It is also said of the Osiris, “He is furnished with two lions” (ch. 144).

The lions are likewise in attendance upon Jesus in the Gospels of the Infancy. The lions adored him, and kept him company in the desert. They walked along with the child; bowed their heads before him, and showed subjection by wagging their tails (Gospel of pseudo-Matthew, chs. 19 and 35).

The “apocryphal” Gospels are not a mere collection of “foolish traditions” or fables forged or invented to supply an account of that [Page 768] period in “our Lord’s” history, respecting which the accepted Gospels are almost silent. They are disjecta membra of the original matter; the mythos reduced to the state of Märchen; the story of the miraculous child told as a folk-tale which was at last repeated as a history in the Gospels with matter like the above omitted because it was too naturally incredible, and could not be utilized by the most desperate expedient of miracle.

When, or where, the mythos was no longer interpreted astronomically, from lapse of the necessary knowledge, the folk-tales and legendary lore began to take the place of the ancient wisdom that was scientifically verifiable. Celestial localities were made geographical. The descent of the little sun in the lower hemisphere is described as the journey of the child-Horus into lower Egypt, accompanied by the Virgin Mother and Seb, or Joseph, the earthly father. It is observable that in an Egyptian planisphere, according to Kircher, the god Seb is figured, on a large scale, in the Decans of Scorpio, with the symbolic goose of earth upon his head. This, at one time, marked the western equinox; the point at which the earth of Seb, or the mountain, opened to protect the mother and child, when they sought refuge from the dragon, the scorpion, or serpent that stung the infant on the way to Egypt in the nether earth, and where “earth helped the woman” (Rev. XII. 16) in her flight.

The origin of the “Holy Family” can be traced to this initial point of the journey down to Egypt. The moon at full was the mother with the child who rode upon the ass attended by the old man Seb. This was the “woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars”, who was persecuted by the crocodile of darkness. At the autumn equinox the Apap-reptile reared its loathly form from out the abyss to pursue the mother and destroy her Babe. But the earth opened and helped the woman, or Seb protected her as foster-father to the child of light. According to the astronomical mythos, the Pool of Putrata, or lake of darkness, lay upon the western side of the mount. This was the habitat and lair of the dragon, “eternal devourer is its name” (ch. 17, 40, 44). Here the reptile lurks and watches the “bight of Amenta” for its prey. With wide-open jaws of the crocodile it swallows the sinking stars (in the mythos), and the souls that fall into darkness (in the eschatology). Above all, the dragon of darkness lies in wait for the virgin mother and her forthcoming child, who is the saviour of vegetation and preserver of the light. The journey into Egypt can be followed a little further in the Gospels of the Infancy. The Arabic Gospel says the mother and child remained three years in Egypt, and the Lord Jesus wrought very many miracles in Egypt, which are not found written either in the Gospel of the Infancy or in the perfect Gospel (Cowper, H. B., The Apocryphal Gospels, p. 191). The child-Jesus in Egypt is the child-Horus in Egypt, and the traditions of Horus have been assigned to an “historic” Jesus. “These”, as Wiedeman puts the cart before the horse, “have affected a series of Coptic texts which, in making use of the well-known apocryphal account of Christ’s journey through Egypt as a child, describe the triumphal march of the Saviour along the valley of the Nile, and relate how he drove his foes from place to place, [Page 769] destroying them as he went” (Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, p. 77, Eng. tr.).

According to the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew, the Holy family, fleeing from the murderer Herod, came into the borders of Hermopolis and “entered into a certain city of Egypt which is called Sotinen”. Nothing has been made of this statement geographically. But Sotinen evidently represents the Sutenhen (earlier Suten-Khen) of the “Book of the Dead” (ch. 17). This is a celestial locality of great importance to the legend of Horus in Kheb. In “the childhood of Jesus, according to Thomas”, one year is thus accounted for. “Now when they had come into Egypt they found a lodging in the house of a certain widow, and they lodged one year in the same place” (ch. I). It may be remembered that in one of her characters Isis is the widow of the dead Osiris. In a small papyrus now at the Louvre there is an incantation against the evil serpent that stung the infant, in which the goddess Isis is the speaker. She says, “I am Isis the widow, broken with sorrow” (Deveria, Catalogue des Manuscrits Eg. Du Louvre). Isis is the original widow who has an only son, and it is she who seeks the lost Osiris, and brings him to rebirth as Horus, her child, in the house of the widow. In the Kamite version of the journey into Egypt the Herrut-reptile takes the place of Herod, and the child-Horus is bitten by the serpent, though not stung to death. This event occurred when Isis was about to go down into Egypt for the safety of her child. M. Revillout (in 1881) described a Demotic papyrus at Leyden, which gives an account of the attack made on Horus by the serpent. This text corroborates the statement of Plutarch and Aristides (Apology, par. 12) that the scene of the serpent’s attack was in Syria. It occurred when Isis was about to go down into Egypt, for Horus, the divine heir, to take possession of his father’s kingdom. When Isis and the child were setting out, Horus began to weep and cry because the serpent had stung him (Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archy., May, 1892, p. 372). Isis protects her child and heals his wound. This is the journey of the virgin mother from Syria down into Egypt, as represented in the mythos. The massacre of the Innocents is a common legend. In the Jewish traditions there is a massacre of the little ones at the time of Moses’ birth, in which the Pharaoh plays the part of the monster Herod. So universal was this murder that no distinction was made betwixt the children of the Egyptians and the Jews. On the day that Moses was born the astrologers told Pharaoh they had seen in the stars that the deliverer of the Jews had been born that day, but they could not tell whether his parents were Egyptian or Jewish. Therefore Pharaoh kills not only all the Jewish boys born that day, but also all the Egyptians (for authorities see Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, December 4, 1888). It is the old, old story of the child that was born to be king in defiance of all obstacles.

The origin of the innocents that were massacred by the monster Herod can be traced in accordance with the ancient wisdom. A primitive soul of life was derived from the elements; the soul of Shu from wind or air; the soul of Seb from the earth; the soul of Horus, son of Ra, from the sun, which became the supreme source of the [Page 770] elemental souls that preceded a human soul. When the solar force was looked upon as the highest soul of life in nature, the souls of future beings were considered to be emanations from the sun as a source of life in external nature that was superhuman. This gave rise to the class of beings known as the Hamemmat, which originated as germs of soul that issued from the sun. They are described as circling round the solar orb in glory. The word hamemmat signifies that which is unembodied or not yet incorporated. We might say the hamemmat were pre-existing souls when souls were derived from the elemental forces in the germ, and the highest of these was solar. They are the germ-souls of future beings which originate as children of the sun portrayed in a human form. As offspring of the sun, they are called the children of Horus, who, as the child-Horus, is one with them; and if they can be destroyed in the germ, or, as the Ritual has it, in the egg, the devourer of souls may succeed in slaying the divine heir himself, who is destined to bruise the serpent’s head and win the victory over all the powers of evil as the lord of light and link of continuity of life. Being at enmity with the sun, the reptile of darkness seeks to devour the new-born child of light. For that purpose he lies in wait till the woman clothed with the sun shall bring forth. He seeks the life of the young child-Horus, and other lives are involved in taking this. For Horus is the head of the solar race, the hamemmat or future beings that issue from the Eye of the sun. These future souls are called the “issue of Horus”. They are the Innocents of the legend that are supposed to suffer, whereas the child of light, the divine offspring of the solar god, is sure to escape from the coils of the monster who has been rendered anthropomorphically as the ruling tyrant — the monster Herod in a mortal guise. Thus, if any little children were murdered by the Apap-monster, the dragon of darkness, these would be the offspring and issue of the solar disk in the domain of physical phenomena — little ones that were neither human nor spiritual beings, but the seed or germs of souls about to be. The parallel to the slaughter of the innocents can be traced in what is termed “the slaughter which is wrought in Suten-Khen” ; that is, in the khen or birthplace where the young child-Horus was reborn as the royal Horus. Each one of the manes or the “younglings of Shu” had to pass through this place of rebirth where the Herrut-reptile lay in wait. Chapter 42 is the one “by which one hindereth the slaughter which is wrought in Suten-Khen”. Here the manes speaks in the character of Horus the babe. “I am the babe” is said four times. As human manes, he is one of those who may be destroyed, but is safe so far as he has become assimilated to Horus. He tells the reptile, the herrut=Herod, that he is not to be seized or grasped by him, and that neither men nor gods, neither the glorified nor the damned can inflict any injury on him who is Horus the divine child, born and bound to fulfil his course as the ever-coming One, who “steppeth onward through eternity” (ch. 42). Sotinen, “a certain city on the borders of Hermopolis”, is the dreaded place in Amenta, where the slaughter of the innocents was periodically wrought. The would be destroyer of the child is addressed in one of his reptile-forms, “O serpent Abur!” (the name rendered “great thirst” is [Page 771] equivalent to that of the dragon of drought), thou sayest this day “the block of execution is furnished (Rit. ch. 42), and thou art come to contaminate the Mighty One”. In another chapter Horus exults that in making his descent to the earth of Seb for putting a stop to evil his nest is safe. ‘Not to be seen is my nest. Not to be broken is my egg. I have made my nest on the confines of Heaven” (Rit., ch. 85). He rejoices on account of his escape from the slaughter of the innocents which followed his descent into the earth of Seb. Thus in the Osirian mythos the child-Horus was with the widow in Suten-Khen, and in the Gospel of the Infancy it is the child-Jesus with the widow in Sotinen.

THE EGYPTO-GNOSTIC JESUS.

On one line of its descent the Jesus-legend was brought on to Rome from Egypt by the mystery-teachers whom we term Egypto-gnostics, and whose Jesus was no Word-made-flesh in one historic form of personality, either at Nazareth or at Bethlehem, but was absolutely non-historical. One of the most important of all the written gnostic remains is the Pistis Sophia. And whether we look on this as the work of Valentinus or another, it continues the Jesus-legend from the Egyptian source, and constitutes a further link betwixt the genuine mythos and the spurious history.

These books of Ieou are the books of Jesus, like the “Wisdom of Jesus” in the Apocrypha and the lately discovered “Sayings of Jesus”, that is, when the only real Jesus has been discovered in Iusa the son of Iusãas, he whose Jewish name is Ieou, Iao or Iah, as derivatives from Iu, in Egyptian. The two books of Ieou are said to contain the Mysteries, the first being the lesser, the second the greater mysteries, as the Pistis Sophia carefully explains. Here we reach the Egyptian rootage of the Jewish Ieou, whom the Pistis Sophia calls “Ieou the first man, the legate of the first order” (p. 333). Now as Atum was the first man, the created man, who under one of his names was Iu, the Egyptian Jesus, this also tends to identify the Egypto-gnostic Ieou with Iu-em-hetep, the author of the Sayings and the books of wisdom which included these books of Ieou. One of the two books had the general title of The Book of the Great Logos, according to the Mystery, an equivalent for the Logoi or Sayings of Jesus, which were Christianized as the Logia Kuriaka or Sayings of the Lord, and on which the canonical Gospels were eventually founded.

Pistis Sophia, like the Ritual, is mainly post-resurrectional, with the briefest allusion to the earth-life. It begins with the after-life in which Jesus has risen from the dead, like Amsu the good shepherd. It opens with the resurrection on the Mount of Glory, the same as the Ritual. The localities, like those in the Egyptian books, are not of this world. They are in the earth of eternity, not in the earth of time. Pistis Sophia begins where the Gospel story comes to an end. Jesus rises in the Mount of Olives, but not on the mount [Page 772] that was localized to the east of Jerusalem. The Mount of Olives, as Egyptian, was the mountain of Amenta. It is termed Mount Bakhu, the Mount of the Olive-tree, when the green dawn was represented by this tree instead of by the sycamore. Mount Bakhu, the Mount of the Olive-tree, was the way of ascent to the risen Saviour as he issued forth from Amenta to the land of spirits in heaven (Rit., ch. 17). So when the Egypto-gnostic Jesus takes his seat upon the Mount of Olives or the Olive-tree, he is said to have “ascended into the heavens” (Pistis Sophia, Mead, G. R. S., whose version is the only one in English: London, 1896). Jesus “descended into hell”, according to the Christian creed. This forms no part of the Gospel-legend, but we find it in the Book of the Dead; also in Pistis Sophia. Hell or Hades in Greek is the Amenta, as Egyptian. Horus descends into Amenta, or rather rises there from the tomb, as the teacher of the mysteries concerning the father, who is Ra the father in spirit and in truth. This descent into the under-world is spoken of by Horus in the Ritual (ch. 38). He goes to visit the spirits in prison or in their cells and sepulchres. Those “who are in their cells”, the manes, “accompany him as his guides”. His object in making this descent is to utter the words of the father in heaven to the breathless ones, or the spirits in prison. The passage shows the speaker as the divine teacher in two characters on earth and in Amenta. Speaking of Ra, his father in the spirit, Horus says, “I utter his words to the Men of the present generation”, or to the living. He also utters them to those who have been deprived of breath, or the dead in Amenta. So in the Pistis Sophia the gnostic Jesus passes into Amenta as the teacher of the greater mysteries. As it is said of his teaching in this spirit-world, “Jesus spake these words unto his disciples in the midst of Amenta” (p. 394, Mead). Moreover, a special title is assigned to Jesus in Amenta. He is called Aber-Amentho. “Jesus, that is to say Aber-Amentho”, is a formula several times repeated in Pistis Sophia.

According to the Ritual, a glorious “vesture” is put on in the place where the human soul becomes eternized or is made immortal. This is represented in the mystery of Tattu, where the body-soul in matter (Osiris) is blended with the holy spirit Ra; the female with the male (Tefnut with Shu), or Horus the child of twelve years with Horus the adult of thirty years. The transaction occurs on the day that was termed “Come thou to me” (Rit., ch. 17). This call is reproduced in the Pistis Sophia as “Come unto us” on the day of Investiture, when Jesus puts on the divine vesture in his character of Aber-Amentho, or Lord over Amenta, a title which identifies the Egypto-gnostic Jesus with Horus in Amenta. The call is made to him by the attendant spirits, “Come unto us, who are thy fellow-members”; “Come unto us, for we all stand near to clothe thee with the first mystery (that of the father) in all his glory” ; “Come therefore quickly, that thou mayst receive the full glory, the glory of the first mystery”, the mystery of God the father (P. S., 16-19).

The Pistis Sophia is a book of those Egypto-gnostics with whom the Father-God is Ieou=Ihuh, and God the son is Iao=Iah (P. S., B. 2, 192, 193, Mead). It contains an Egypto-gnostic version of the mysteries, astronomical and eschatological.[Page 773]

Relics of the ancient wisdom have been piously preserved in this, the most important of all the gnostic remains, i.e., for the purpose of establishing a link betwixt the Egyptian origins and the canonical Gospels, and for showing how the “History” was concocted. The Jesus who is teacher of the twelve in Pistis Sophia is the Egypto-gnostic Jesus who had been from of old the ever-coming son of the eternal father, whom we trace by nature and by name as far back as the time of Ptah in Memphis. This is the Jesus, or the Horus, of the Egyptian mysteries, and not of any Judean biography. In the religion of Atum-Ra the names of Horus and of Iu or Jesus were employed to denote the same character, and both names were continued for the one type by the Egypto-gnostics. The gnostic Jesus is the son of God who had been with the father from eternity. Hence it is he alone who knows the father and is able to expound the mystery of his nature to the Twelve. This is the first, great and only ineffable mystery, which is before all others and embraces all the rest. Jesus proceeding from the father as a spirit, divine in origin, impersonates the soul that became incarnate in the human form. The great primordial and ineffable mystery, from which the others radiate, and in which the total twenty-four revolve as the central source of an eternal evolution and involution, is the mystery of God the father becoming God the son. God the father is the holy spirit represented by a bird. This bird in the Egyptian symbolism was the hawk, or dove. In the gnostic version it is the dove. One chief difference between the two birds is in the dove being a type of the mother and child, whereas the hawk was the bird of the father, Ra, and the son; the holy Spirit, and Horus the son of the father. In the Pistis Sophia the son proceeds from the father in the likeness of the dove where Horus proceeded from the hawk-headed Ra in the likeness of a hawk. Under whichever type the duality of the father and son was indicated by one bird as symbol of the God in spirit, who was over all the powers which had been (elemental or astronomical) rulers in the realms of matter from the beginning.

The gnostic Jesus utters the Sayings or Logia Kuriaka on the mount, and is also the revealer of the greater mysteries of Amenta. According to the Pistis Sophia, when Jesus expounded the greater mysteries to the twelve it is said “Jesus spake these words to his disciples in Amenta” (Books of the Saviour, P. S., 394, Mead). He had previously taught the lesser mysteries to the twelve disciples in the life on earth. It is the same with Jesus as with Horus in Amenta. When Horus passes from the life on earth he rises from the tomb wearing the double feather and wielding the whip as his sign of sovereignty. He is Amsu-Horus, Lord of Amenta. This is the title of the gnostic Jesus, who is designated “Jesus, that is to say Aber-Amentho” — which we take to be Jewish-gnostic for Jesus, the mighty or great one, who in his resurrection is the Lord or Master over Amenta (Books of the Saviour, Pistis Sophia, 358, Mead). And Jesus “Aber-Amentho” is an Egypto-gnostic equivalent for Osiris “Khent Amenta”.

The mysteries of Amenta, as in the Book of Revelation, are more or less repeated in the mysteries of Pistis Sophia which contains sufficient data to identify a gnostic version with the Kamite original. [Page 774] There are twelve divisions in Amenta corresponding to the twelve hours of darkness. Twelve gates or doors successively enclose twelve sections of space, and the doors are guarded by twelve serpents, one serpent “to each door”. These twelve divisions of the nether regions are repeated in Pistis Sophia as twelve dungeons of infernal torment. The surrounding gloom is represented by the Apap-dragon of darkness. As it is said, “the outer darkness is a huge dragon with its tail in its mouth” (B. 2, 320). There are twelve rulers or guardians to the twelve dungeons who take the place of the Egyptian twelve serpents (Book of Hades, Records, vol. 10). They have the faces of serpents, dragons, basilisks, crocodiles, cats, vultures, bears and other beasts; for, as it is said of the rulers of “these twelve dungeons which are inside the dragon of outer darkness”, “each hath a name for every hour, and each one of them changeth its face every hour” (B. 2, 322). A dog-faced demon, called the eternal devourer, who lives upon the damned, is described in the Ritual (ch. 17). The deceased prays to the great Osiris, “Deliver me from that God who liveth upon the damned, whose face is that of a hound, but whose skin is that of a man, at the angle of the pool of fire”.This “dog-faced one” and his rivers of fire reappear in the Pistis Sophia. Certain sins are to be renounced in order that the manes may escape from “the judgment of that dog-faced one” and from the “judgments of Amenta”, “from the fires of Amenta”, and “from the torments which are in Amenta” (B. 2, 255-256). Knowing the magical names in Amenta has the same power, according to the Pistis Sophia, as with the Book of the Dead. For instance, the dragon of outer darkness has twelve names written on the doors of its dungeons, and, as it is said, whosoever shall understand the mystery of one of the names, if he is abandoned in the outer darkness and he pronounceth the name of the dragon, he shall be saved and receive the treasure of light (B. 2, 335, Mead). To know the name was to obtain possession of the magical word of power which meant salvation.

In the Egyptian hall of judgment there are forty-two assessors, and the deceased has to plead in their presence that he has not broken any of the forty-two commandments (Rit., ch. 125). A version of these is retained in the Pistis Sophia in the shape of forty-four renunciations, two having been added to the Egyptian forty-two. By renouncing these forty-four sins the deceased is saved from the dog-faced devourer of souls, from the dragon of outer darkness, from Ialdabaoth=Sut, prince of the powers of darkness, and from the torments of the twelve dungeons of the outer darkness, all of which are Egyptian. The lesser mysteries were astronomical; the greater mysteries are spiritual. The astronomical nature of the “lesser mysteries” is convincingly shown in the Pistis Sophia; also the astronomical origin of the Twelve who were taught those mysteries by the Egypto-gnostic Jesus sitting on the mount. The mystery of the five supporters, the mystery of the seven amens or seven voices (in the heptanomis), the mystery of the nine guardians of the three gates of the treasures of light (=the Put-circle of the nine gods who were in three threes), the mystery of the great forefather, the mystery of the triple powers or of the trinity, and lastly the mystery of the twelve saviours who preserve the treasure of light [Page 775] in heaven and on earth, are all identifiable as primary types in the astronomical mythology of Egypt.

The teacher of the mysteries is an Egyptian type. He was the Her-Seshta. Brugsch enumerates seven classes of such teachers: (1) the mystery-teachers of heaven; (2) the mystery-teachers of all the lands, which were first of all celestial; (3) the mystery-teachers of the depth (Amenta); (4) the mystery-teachers of the secret world; (5) the mystery-teachers of the sacred language; (6) the mystery-teachers of Pharaoh; (7) the mystery-teachers who examine words. The divine child manifests to men as expounder of the mysteries or revealer of the hidden wisdom of which he is the word, the sayer, or the teacher. The teacher of the lesser mysteries was child-Horus or Iusa, the youth of twelve years. These were the mysteries of matter and of mythology revealed by the child of the mother at his first advent. The teacher of the greater mysteries was Horus the adult, who expounded the nature of the fatherhood, the begettal or duplication of the divine soul, and all the other mysteries of the resurrection in and from Amenta, as the son of God the father in heaven. But the Egypto-gnostic Jesus is the fulfiller of both the first and the second advent; the first as the child of twelve years, the second as the Horus of thirty years; the first in the life on earth, the second in Amenta; the first as solar in the astronomical mythology, the second as spiritual in the eschatology; the first as the utterer of parables, the second as the expounder of the greater mysteries.

In vain do we try to make out the doctrinal mysteries of the eschatology, whether it is called Egyptian, Hebrew, Coptic, Gnostic, or Christian, until we have mastered the mythology. Without this foundation there is no foothold. Neither is there any help in an exoteric version of the esoteric wisdom. The group of powers was seven or eight, nine or ten, before it included the twelve. And the character is the same in the mythos when the group is twelve as when it was ten or nine, eight or seven or four — that is, it was astronomical.

Pistis Sophia commences formally after the manner of an historic document, whilst being, from beginning to end, entirely non-historical. It opens with a date that is astronomical, and also with what the Ritual terms “the manifestation to light” at the time of full moon — that is, when the eye was full or the circle complete in Annu, where the divine heir was born. “It came to pass, when Jesus had risen from the dead in the first advent, that he passed eleven (should be twelve) years speaking with his disciples and instructing them up to the regions of the first statutes only and up to the regions of the first mystery — the mystery within the veil — the veil that was rent in death, which is before all mysteries, because it is the mystery of the One Eternal God and the son who issues from the father in the likeness of a dove, just as Horus issued from the father in the likeness of the hawk or dove, or the canonical Christ as the dove. “It came to pass, therefore, that the disciples were sitting together on the Mount of Olives, speaking of these things, rejoicing with great joy, and being exceedingly glad, and saying one to another, ‘Blessed are we before all men who are on earth, for the Saviour hath revealed this unto us, and we have received all fulness and all perfection’ “— [Page 776] as these were received upon Mount Bakhu, the Mount of the Olive-tree, in the ascent of Horus from Amenta. “And while they were saying these things the one to the other Jesus sat a little apart from them”. “It came to pass, therefore, on the fifteenth day of the month, Tybi (or Tobe), the day of the full moon, on that day when the sun had risen in its going, that there came forth a great stream of light shining exceedingly. It came forth from the light of lights. And this stream of light poured over Jesus and surrounded him. He was seated apart from his disciples and was shining exceedingly. But the disciples saw not Jesus because of the great light in which he sat, for their eyes were blinded by the great light” on this, the Egypto-gnostic mount of the transfiguration (pp. 4, 5, Mead). (By the bye, the fifteenth of the month Tybi in the esoteric Gospel sounds somewhat suggestive of “the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius” in the exoteric Gospel according to Luke.) “And Jesus said to his disciples, I am come from that first mystery which is also the last mystery” of the four-and-twenty mysteries which he had now come to expound, because “his disciples did not know that mystery”.

In the Egyptian tale of Khamuas, Si-Osiris, i.e. Horus the son of Osiris, comes forth from Amenta to spend twelve years on the earth. This has an important bearing on the statement in the first part of Pistis Sophia. The time spent by Horus the elder in the great hall of Seb, or on earth, in mortal form, was twelve years in the original mythos, this being the Egyptian limit of child-life. It is twelve years in the tale of Khamuas. But in the Pistis Sophia the time is given as eleven years, which has the vagueness of the märchen. This tends to show the origin of the tradition reported by Irenaeus, that the ministry and teaching of Jesus extended over a vague period of ten or more years, and that the Lord lived on to be an old man, the old man being a literalized version of the old child, Har-Ur, the elder Horus (Iren., B. 2, ch. 22, 5). During those twelve years he was the child of the mother only, as in the Gospels of the Infancy. He is her Word or logos, and the teacher of those lesser mysteries that led up to the one great ineffable mystery which was now held to be the source of all the rest.

We hear little of the wonderful child as divine teacher in the canonical Gospels, but some of the excluded matter appears in the apocryphal Gospels. In the canonical Gospels the child-Jesus is the teacher at twelve years of age. This corresponds to Horus as wearer of the lock, and to Iu-em-hetep, the youthful sage, each of whom had been portrayed as the typical teacher twelve years old. It was during those years that the child-Horus or child-Jesus taught. Something of this may be read in the so-called “apocryphal Gospels”, ignorantly supposed to contain the lying inventions concocted by the gnostic heretics to discredit and destroy a veritable human history. There is a very naïve confession in the “Arabic Gospel” that, during the first three years of the infancy, the child-Jesus” wrought very many miracles in Egypt which are not found written either in the Gospel of the Infancy or in the Perfect Gospel” (ch. 25). Such stories had been told for ages of the child-Horus, who was a miracle-worker in and from the womb; and also of the [Page 777] child as Iusa, son of Atum-Ra, and earlier still of Iu-em-hetep, the son of Ptah. The miracles were a mode of demonstrating the divinity of the ever-coming little one, Iu-Su. At three years of age he performs the miracle of making a dead fish live (Latin Gospel of Thomas, B. 3, ch. 1). At five years of age he takes clay and models twelve sparrows, which he commanded to fly, whereupon they lived and flew aloft (Latin Gospel of Thomas, B. 2, ch. 2). Horus or Jesus, Egyptian, Jewish, or Gnostic, the little hero of the mythos, is one and the same divine son of the Virgin in mortal guise.

Horus, at his coming-froth from Amenta, as the Word or Teacher, says: “I make my appearance on the seat of Ra, and I sit upon my seat which is upon the horizon” (Rit., ch. 79). The horizon and the mount are identical in Egyptian, and this seat of Ra, the father in heaven, assumed by Horus in his ascent from Amenta, is the mount of earth according to the solar mythos — that is, the mount of sunrise, which is Mount Bakhu in Egyptian, the Mount of the Olive-tree, the prototypal Mount of Olives. In the Pistis Sophia Jesus takes his seat upon the Mount of Olives as the divine teacher, word or logos, who utters the Sayings to his disciples. This is the advent of Jesus which is dated the fifteenth day of the Egyptian month Tybi, the day of full moon, by which the resurrection or new birth was always reckoned. This month in the Alexandrian year (B.C. 25) began December 27th, which is near enough as a date for the nativity at Christmas, when measured in the circle of precession. The “coming-forth to day” is illustrated by the great flood of light that emanated from the light of lights and “enveloped him entirely”. “The multitude of the heavenly host praising God” (Luke II. 13) is described. “And all the angels with their archangels, and all the powers of the height, all sang from the interior of the interiors, so that the whole world heard their voice”. “But the disciples sat together and were in the greatest possible distress” (B. 1, p. 6, Mead). In the Ritual when Horus stands or is seated (on the Mount of the Olive-tree) “in the (human) form of that god who is raised aloft upon his pedestal” or his papyrus, it is said “the gods come to him with acclamation, and the female deities with jubilation”. “They rejoice at his beautiful coming-forth from the womb of Nut”, or, as it might be rendered, the womb of Meri, for Meri=Mary is another name for Nut the mother-heaven (Book of the Dead).

The gnostic Jesus, on emerging from Amenta, takes his seat as teacher of the twelve disciples on the Mount of Olives. The way up from Amenta for the sun-god in the solar mythos was on the eastern side of the four-faced mount of earth which on that side was known as Bakhu, the Mount of the Olive-tree. The way of ascent, worked out in the mythos, served for the manes in the eschatology. Thus Jesus in the ancient character of sun-god, or as the divine child who taught, or who was the word in mortal guise, attains the landing-stage upon the Mount of Olives or the olive-tree of dawn, when he issues in or from Amenta, like Horus in the tamarisk, as Jesus of the resurrection. The divine child is not merely born in human guise, but also as the youthful solar god. Hence in the beginning of the narrative the disciples are sitting round him on the Mount of Olives [Page 778] with Jesus shining like the sun in glory (P. S., B. 1, 4). The scene had been already set in the astronomical mythos. He images the sun-god on the mount; the twelve are round him in the zodiac. And, as it is noted, although Jesus is in their midst, he is “a little apart from his disciples”.

Thus Pistis Sophia shows the physical foundation of the mysteries. Astronomical science was taught as matter of the mysteries, but the science being physical these were classified as the lesser mysteries, whereas the greater mysteries were eschatological. The twelve on earth, or in matter, were the companions of elder Horus, the son of Isis, the suffering saviour. The twelve in Amenta are the associates of Horus, the triumphant saviour, the beloved only-begotten son of God the father. The twelve with Horus or Jesus risen from Amenta are freed from the environment, the darkness, the stains of matter, as pure spirits to be wholly perfected. They have attained the beatific vision, as the children of light. They have passed through death and the purgation of matter to become clear spirit when risen to the status of Horus the immortal. With Horus or Jesus, in the character of the young sun-god, the twelve were astronomical powers, rulers, or saviours of the treasure (light) in the physical domain. With Horus or Jesus, the saviour as son of God the father, they are the twelve glorious ones or gods of Amenta, the twelve who as spirits are the children of Ra the holy spirit; in short, they are the twelve in the eschatology who were the chosen twelve with Horus on earth as sowers of the seed, and the twelve with Horus as reapers of the harvest in Amenta.

Our starting-point, then, is that Jesus or Horus in coming to earth and assuming the vesture of mortality issues forth in Amenta; not the Greek Hades, nor the Hebrew Sheol, but the Egyptian Amenta, that other world in which the dead as sleepers wake to life in spirit, and where the mortal Horus makes his transformation and arises as the first-fruits of them that slept — a resurrection of Horus that was celebrated in Egypt when the “first-fruits of the earth” were the shoots of the papyrus-plant or sprouts of the lentils, as described by Plutarch. When Jesus, in his second advent, issues from Amenta to become the teacher of the twelve upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples are already seated on the mount. Jesus suddenly appears to them, a little apart from them, in such a dazzle of glory as to be at first invisible to them. This glory of light was composed of various lights. “The light was of every kind, and of every type, from the lower to the higher” (P. S., 1, 5). It was the glory of the youthful solar god upon the mount of sunrise, with the lesser lights surrounding him. So in the Ritual it is said of the sun-god, who was Horus in his beautiful coming-forth, “Ra maketh his appearance at the mount of glory, with the cycle of gods about him” (Rit., ch. 133, Renouf). This was upon the Mount Bakhu or the olive-tree of dawn, and the cycle of gods about the “golden form” of Horus are the astronomical originals of the disciples with the Egypto-gnostic Jesus on the mount of sunrise called the mount of glory. The twelve disciples of the Lord are no more human than was their teacher. But when the word was made flesh and Jesus assumed the human guise, his followers likewise conformed to the anthropomorphic [Page 779] type of Horus the mortal in the life that was lived, as mythically represented, for twelve years as the child of Seb on earth. The twelve with Horus in the harvest-field are reapers, and reapers, mariners, fishers, or teachers demanded the anthropomorphic type. The human type, however, does not necessarily imply the human personage, either in the teacher or as the taught, any more than the zootypes imply that the god was a crocodile, a hawk, a lion, or that the goddess was a water-cow, a serpent, a tree, or a cleft in the rock.

As the gnostics truly declared, in reply to the pretended “History”, the twelve apostles were a type of the twelve aeons, who were set in the zodiac as timekeepers and preservers of the light. (Irenaeus, Bk. 2, ch. 21, 1.) That is, they who knew vouched for the apostles being the same as the aeons who were the twelve powers of the twelve saviours of the twelve treasures of light with the gnostic Jesus on the mount, whose twelve stations were figured in the zodiac; and who were the twelve powers in matter, in physics, or in the astronomical mythology which preceded the twelve as great spirits with Jesus or Horus in the eschatology. Even if there had been twelve men as a group of teachers, fishers, or harvesters, in every city, town, or village of the earth who called themselves the disciples, or apostles, of Jesus, Horus, or the Lord, it could not change one jot or tittle of the fact that the twelve were teachers of astronomy, whose names were written in heaven as attendants on the youthful solar god; and who in the second phase became the twelve great spirits in Amenta as reapers of the harvest for Har-khuti, the Egyptian lord of spirits. The god at the head of a group or cycle of powers was a teacher from the first. Sut, Anup, Taht and Ptah were typical teachers of astronomy in the stellar, lunar and solar mythos, when the group was seven, eight, or nine in number. Jesus (or Horus) is the only teacher in the heaven of twelve astronomes. He was the only-begotten son in spirit who was made flesh in his incarnation to enter the human sphere as child of the mother, that is of matter as the matrix of spirit. He became the greatest of all the teachers in the astronomical mythos, and “the twelve” who had been pre-solar teachers and preservers of the treasures of light were now his servants (Seshu), his followers, his apostles. And being the Only Son of God it was Jesus alone who knew the nature of the Father, which knowledge he now expounded to the twelve in the higher mysteries of Amenta. Jesus describes the twelve in the two different categories, astronomical and spiritual, and says, “When I first came into the world I brought with me twelve powers. I took them from the hands of the twelve saviours of the treasure of light” : that is, from the twelve who are called the aeons in the astronomy; the twelve who had been the powers in physical phenomena. These were unified in him; he gathers their powers to himself in passing through the twelve signs of the zodiac as the youthful solar god. At an earlier stage of the mythos the powers that were gathered up in the one supreme power were but seven in number, called the seven souls of Ra; in the final zodiac they are twelve. Jesus also describes the founding of the twelve as his ministers on earth in matter, or in the lower range of the mysteries. The first Horus imaged a soul in matter; the second was the likeness of an immortal spirit. Jesus [Page 780] brought the primary soul to the twelve who are his associates in the life on earth. But that was before he was invested as a Sahu or spiritual mummy to become the lord of the resurrection as Jesus Aber-Amentho.

The typical twelve, who latterly became the teachers of, and for, the Word, were as ancient as the signs of the zodiac, or the twelve great gods of Egypt, which according to Herodotus were extant some 20,000 years ago. They were the twelve as kings, who rowed the solar-bark for Ra, with Horus on the look-out at the prow. They were the twelve in various characters and in several countries into which the gnosis of the mysteries passed from out the birthplace of the ancient wisdom; although the twelve have no such universal radius as the seven, or the four, because of their comparative lateness in Egypt. They were the twelve princes of Israel (Num. I. 44), the twelve sons of Israel; the twelve judges on twelve thrones with the Son of man sitting on the throne of his glory (Matt. XIX. 28); also the twelve that sit at the table with the son in the new kingdom founded by him for the father (Luke XXII. 14). They are the twelve knights that gathered round the table of Arthur; the twelve gods with Odin in their midst, with others that need not be enumerated now. At his second advent, which is in the spirit, the Egypto-gnostic Jesus says to the disciples, “I am come now, and not (as) formerly before they had crucified me”. That is when he was represented as the afflicted mortal suffering in the flesh. (P. S., 1, 10.) He has now come in the spirit which was imaged by the dove, and not as formerly or aforetime when he was incarnated in matter, for the twelve years on earth, as the lifetime of the child was reckoned. Becoming a spirit is described as putting on the vesture of everlasting light. And the coming forth of Jesus as a spirit, or the Christ, is described as his investiture, the same as with Horus in Amenta. He says, “The times are fulfilled for me to put on my vesture. Lo, I have put on my vesture, and all power hath been given to me by the first mystery” — or God as the one eternal source. He issues from this source as the light of all the lights; a light that is infinitely beyond the star-fires, the moon-light, and the splendours of the sun, in the mythical representation. All the previous powers of light had contributed to fulfil the glory of this vesture. These powers belong mainly to the astronomical mythology as the lights that were revealed and set forth in the lesser mysteries of the physical domain, which, according to gnostic terminology, were designated the rulers in matter. Amongst these are “the seven amens which are the seven voices” ; the five supports, the nine guardians, the three powers, the twelve saviours of light, all of whom are recognizably astronomical. (P. S., B. 1, 14, 18, 19.) He wears the glory now, “as of an only-begotten from the father”. In making this transformation Jesus presents an outer view of God the father as the first ineffable mystery of all the mysteries. When he came previously, in his first advent, it was from the mother as the mortal, or the mould of soul in matter. Now he issues from the father in spirit as revealer of the mystery of which he alone has ever had an inner view. He is now invested with the glory of the father. This investiture of Jesus in spirit might be claimed as pre-eminently [Page 781] Egyptian if all the rest were not pre-eminently so. As a mystery of Amenta this investiture took place when the deceased became a Sahu and put on the divine vesture of a spiritual body, or the soul of Horus. The Sahu signifies the invested, and it is identical with the Karest or the Christ.

There is one datum which by itself alone might dispel any doubt respecting the Egyptian origin of the Pistis Sophia. It is this: the day of investiture is the day of “Come though to us”, or “come unto us” (B.1, 17-19) this, is in the Kamite eschatology, was the day of “Come thou hither”, on which Ra called to Osiris in Amenta, “Come thou hither”, or “Come thou to me”. (Rit., ch. 17.) In the Pistis Sophia this is the call, not only of Ra but of all the powers of light who raise the cry of “Come unto us” that Jesus may receive the glory of the Father as his vesture for the resurrection. In the so-called earth-life “Jesus had not told his disciples the whole distribution of all the regions of the great invisible, and of the three triple powers, and of the four-and-twenty invisibles”. ‘’Nor had he told them of their saviours, according to the orders of each (of the twelve) as they are; nor had he told them of the region of the saviour of the twins; nor the region of the three amens; nor those of the seven amens, which are also the seven voices. Nor had Jesus told his disciples of what type are the five supporters, or from what region they had been brought forth. Nor had he told them how the great light had emanated, nor from what region it had been brought forth”. (B. 1, 2, 3, Mead.) In brief, as the data when identified will show, he had not instructed them in the spiritual nature of the mysteries, which is the object of the second coming. But now the teacher in Amenta says to the twelve, “Rejoice and be glad from this hour. From this day will I speak with you freely, from the beginning of the truth unto the completion thereof; and I will speak to you face to face without parable. From this hour will I hide nothing from you of the things which pertain to the height”. (B. 1, 3, 1, 8, 9, Mead.) This is said by Jesus Aber-Amentho, or Jesus in the spirit-world of Amenta, who had “Come forth to day” at his second advent. When he is expounding the profounder mysteries, Jesus says to the disciples, “As for the rest of the lower mysteries, we have no need thereof, but ye shall find them in the Two Books of Ieou, which Enoch wrote when I spoke with him from the tree of knowledge, and from the tree of life, which were in the paradise of Adam”. (B. 2, 246, Mead.) In this passage Jesus identifies himself with Iao the son of Ieou=Ihuh — and also in the character of the solar god who spoke with Moses from the midst of the burning bush.

 It was shown in the mysteries why and how the Twelve Immovables, or Unspeakables, “rent themselves asunder”, to move, to manifest, to reveal, to find utterance by means of God the Son as teacher of the mysteries in Amenta (B. 2, 219-226). Pistis Sophia marks the change of the twelve rulers from one category to the other. These things, said Jesus, speaking of the change which he had come on earth, or entered the lower domain of matter, to effect, “these things shall come to pass at the time of the completion of the aeon (or cycle), and of the accession of the Pleroma. The twelve saviours of the treasure, and the twelve orders of each of them, which are the emanations of the [Page 782] seven voices and of the five trees (or supports) shall be with me in my kingdom”, which was in the heaven of eternity. Jesus speaks of those “ who receive the mystery of light when they shall have quitted the body of the matter of the rulers” (B. 2, 201), who were the rulers in matter versus the life in spirit, or in Horus as the lord of light who was the witness to the light of life eternal.

Jesus is described in Pistis Sophia as passing through the twelve signs of the zodiac. The ram, bull, twins, crab, lion, balance, scorpion, bowman, goat, and waterer are all mentioned by name. (B. of the S. in Pistis Sophia, 366-372, Mead.) He passes through the twelve signs in his character of solar god. He takes a portion of their light from the twelve aeons who were the Kronian rulers. “And the twelve powers of the twelve saviours of the treasure of light, which I had received from the twelve ministers of the midst, I cast into the sphere of the rulers . . . and I bound them into the bodies of your mothers”. The rulers of the Decans thought that these twelve were “the souls of the rulers”. But, when in the fulness of time they were brought forth into the world, there was no soul of the rulers in them; they were recognized as beings of a superior nature. Jesus is to reign as king over these twelve saviours, the twin-saviour, the nine guardians, the three amens, the five supporters, and the seven amens and all the other characters, which had been “light-emanations”, and which would have no meaning if Jesus had not likewise had an astronomical character. (B. 2, 230, 231.) For these names connote the seven rulers of the Heptanomis; the five supports of a heaven that was based upon a figure of the pole and the arms of the four quarters; the solar trinity; the nine gods of the put-cycle, the Twin-Horus, and the heaven that was perfected at last as the heaven of the twelve tribes, twelve sons, twelve brothers, twelve kings, twelve reapers, twelve rowers, twelve fishermen, twelve voices of the word, twelve teachers, who began as saviours of the treasure of light in physical phenomena; and who were assigned a spiritual status with Jesus in that kingdom of the Father which they had assisted in establishing for ever; and finally in the heaven of eternity. These, however, are mysteries that never could be understood whilst a fictitious history of Jesus barred the way. Horus or Jesus in Amenta is the founder of a kingdom for his Father in heaven, and for his followers in spirit-world, at the head of whom are the typical twelve who now become the children of Horus. This heaven for spirits made perfect is built upon foundations that were laid in the mythology. The Ritual shows us how the four foundations of this new heaven were laid by Horus in establishing the kingdom of God. First, he himself united the “double earth”, or the two worlds in one, by his death, burial and resurrection. Then he prays to his Father in heaven that the “four brothers” of “his own body” or flesh and blood may be given to him as protectors of his own person “in dutiful service”. (Rit., ch. 112, 11, 12; and 13, 8.) These four who were his brothers previously are the first of the twelve with Horus “on his papyrus”, or monolith, or on the mount. The four brothers of Horus who were first chosen to become his children had been astronomical as the ancient gods or divine supports of the four quarters, Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef and Kabhsenuf. With these four as supports the foundations of the kingdom of [Page 783] heaven were laid, and “the fold” of the good shepherd established in Amenta, the earth of eternity. The explanation here is that Horus was born one of the twelve like Joseph, but as the young solar god, and beloved son of the father Ra, he obtained his supremacy as the head over all the rest of the brethren. Then the twelve became his founders, reapers, fishers, his disciples, pupil-teachers or his children. As it is said in the Ritual (ch. 112, 9, 10), these are “the circle of gods who were with him when Horus came to light in his own children” ; that is, when the twelve powers were assimilated to the son of God, who was in them as they were in him at the second coming.

The gnostic Jesus, the mystery-teacher of heaven, issues from the father in Amenta in the likeness of the dove as the expounder of the greater mysteries to the twelve disciples. He now says to the disciples, “I will tell unto you the mystery of the one and only ineffable, and all its types, all its configurations, all its regulations . . . for this mystery is the support of them all” (B. 2, 226, Mead). This first ineffable mystery — looking within, as Pistis Sophia phrases it — is the mystery of God the Father. The first ineffable mystery — looking without — is the mystery of God the Son. It is the mystery of the one God in the two aspects of the Father and Son; hence the mystery of the one and only ineffable, “looking within”, is also the mystery of the one and only word or logos “looking without” (B. 2). Jesus says, “I am come from the first mystery which is also the last” (B. 1, 1). The power now given by the first mystery, within the veil, to him who personates the mystery to men, looking without, is received by the Son from the Father, from whom he emanated in the likeness of the dove, or the hawk and not as previously in the likeness of a puny mortal, the human Horus — born of the virgin mother as her blind and deaf, her dumb and impubescent child.

Pistis Sophia shows the twofold character of the teaching on the earth and in Amenta. The “wisdom of Jesus” in the Apocrypha was taught in parables. Jesus in the canonical Gospels speaks to the multitude in parables, and “without a parable spake he nothing unto them” (Matt. XIII. 34). But he says, “The hour cometh when I shall no more speak unto you in parables, but shall tell you plainly of the Father” (John XVI. 25). This promise is fulfilled by the Egypto-gnostic Jesus after his return to the regions from whence he came into the earth-life. He says to the disciples, “I have gone to the regions whence I came forth. From this day I will speak to you face to face without parable” (B. 1, 8, 9). Henceforth he speaks to them plainly of the Father, and, as it is frequently said, “without parable”. This is after that second advent which the Jesus in the Gospels is not permitted to fulfil, but which is still expected by the millenarians.

Various sayings that were uttered aforetime in the earth-life are now expounded by Jesus in Amenta “without parable”. He says to the disciples, “When I shall be king over the seven amens, the five supports (or trees), the three amens, and the nine guardians; king over the child of the child, that is to say, over the twin-saviours (or the double Horus); king over the twelve saviours and the whole number of perfect souls — then all those men who shall have received [Page 784] the mystery in (or of) that ineffable, shall be fellow-kings with me. They shall sit on my right hand and on my left in my kingdom; therefore I said unto you aforetime, ‘Ye shall sit on my right hand and on my left in my kingdom, and ye shall reign with me’ “ (B. 2, 230). Speaking of the greater mysteries, which are spiritual, Jesus says, “I have brought the mysteries which break all the bonds of the counterfeit of the spirit (i.e., the bonds of matter) and all the seals which are attached to the soul, the mysteries of which make the soul free, and ransom it from the hands of its parents, the rulers, and transform it into the kingdom of the true Father, the first Father, the first One, ineffable and everlasting mystery”. “For this cause have I said unto you aforetime, ‘He who shall not leave father and mother to follow after me is not worthy of me.’ What I said then was, ye shall leave your parents the rulers, that ye may all be children of the first, everlasting mystery” (B. 2, 341). This is the esoteric true interpretation of a saying that has been used exoterically (Matt. XIX. 29; Mark X. 29). The parents signified were not human, but those rulers in matter who preceded the one God, the Holy Spirit, whom the Son made known in the mysteries of Amenta under his title of Jesus Aber-Amentho. Again, he exclaims, “I said unto you aforetime, ‘Seek that ye may find.’ “ When he said that it signified “Ye shall seek out the mysteries of light, which purify the body of matter. I say unto you, the race of human kind is material. I tore myself asunder, I brought unto them the mysteries of light to purify them . . . otherwise, no soul in the whole of human kind would have been saved” (B. 2, 249, Mead). Salvation here is brought by means of the Son of God the Father becoming incarnate to redeem the human race from matter by inculcating the virtues of purification which were taught by Horus or Jesus in the mysteries of Amenta.

The gnostic Jesus also gives an esoteric rendering of the Resurrection when he says that “All men who shall achieve the mystery of the resurrection of the dead which healeth from demoniac possessions, and sufferings, and every disease, which also healeth the blind, the lame, the halt, the dumb, and the deaf, (the mystery) which I gave you aforetime — whosoever shall receive of these mysteries and achieve (or master) when if he asks for anything whatsoever . . . it shall at once be granted unto him” (B. 2, 279). In the resurrection the deceased transforms into a spirit, and it was in the mysteries of Amenta, and in the spirit-life, that these miracles were achieved, not in the life on earth. In the Ritual the deceased goes where he pleases, does as he pleases, and assumes whatsoever form he pleases as he masters mystery after mystery according to the gnosis. In the canonical Gospels we find an exoteric rendering of these mysteries of Amenta, which the lie-enchanted Christian world believe in as historical miracles performed on earth by an historical Saviour named Jesus. There were seven preservers of the treasures of light in the celestial heptanomis, whether as rulers of constellations or as lords of pole-stars, who first upraised the starry firesticks which were kindled on the seven hills of heaven. The Pistis Sophia shows the way in which an additional five were added to the seven in completing the first twelve saviours of the treasure of light. This is indicated when it is said (B. 2, 189), “The twelve saviours of the treasure, and the twelve [Page 785] orders of each of them, which are the emanations of the seven voices and of the five supports, shall be with me in the region of the inheritance of light; they shall be kings with me in my kingdom”. Which shows that the first twelve were combined as the 7+5 that were pre-zodiacal, and that they are to become kings in the kingdom of eternal light; which twelve were stationed in the solar zodiac, or round the mount of glory. There is frequent reference in Pistis Sophia to the mystery of the five supports. These are also figured as five trees, one of which is said to be “in the midst” (B. 1, 3 and 18, B. 2, 191, 196). These five tree-supports, with the great one in their midst, are equivalent to the tree-type of eternal stability imaged as the Tat of Ptah (or as Ptah himself), which is a figure of support at the four corners with the pole as the central great pillar of support. It is also equivalent, as a symbol, to the group of Horus and his four children in the Osirian mysteries. The Kamite twelve, as reapers in the harvest-field with Horus in Amenta, were also put together from two earlier groups of seven and five, the same as in the gnostic mysteries of the twelve supports or the pole-tree of heaven with twelve branches in the zodiac. A sketch, however tentative, may be drawn of the original characters in the astronomical mythology, that were given the twelve thrones under one name or another in the final zodiac. (1) Sut, (2) Horus, (3) Shu, (4) Hapi, (5) Ap-Uat, (6) Kabhsenuf, (7) Amsta, (8) Anup, (9) Ptah, (10) Atum, (11) Sau, (12) Hu, as the Kamite originals of the twelve who rowed the solar bark for Ra.

We claim, then, to show that the typical Twelve, who are called apostles or disciples in later language, originated in twelve characters which had represented twelve stellar powers in the astronomical mythology, and that these were afterwards given thrones or seats as rulers in the twelve signs of the zodiac or in heaven. These, in the Pistis Sophia, are designated twelve preservers or saviours of the treasure of light. They form the cycle of twelve lesser gods around the sun-god on the summit of the mount, and are the same in signification, whether called gods in the Ritual or disciples of the Egypto-gnostic Jesus in the Pistis Sophia. These are at first the twelve with Horus the mortal, Horus in matter, Horus in the mythos, Horus the youthful solar god. But when he makes his transformation and becomes the Son of God the Father, in the spirit life, they are his companions in Amenta; the twelve great spirits to whom he expounds the mysteries of the fatherhood; in short, they become the typical twelve as characters in the Kamite eschatology.

According to Pistis Sophia the localities of the teachings, whether in the midst of Amenta, or on the Mount of Olives, were celestial, and not mundane. As it is said, “Jesus and his disciples remained in the midst of an aerial region, in the paths of the ways of the midst which is below the sphere”. This is the starting-point from which the twelve accompany him, through the regions that are mapped out by the zodiacal signs (Books of the Saviour in Pistis Sophia, 359-371), when they “go forth three by three to the four quarters of heaven to preach the gospel of the kingdom” (390). It is also said that “Jesus stood at the altar, and cried aloud, turning towards the four angles of the world” (358). Here the “altar” is [Page 786] urano-graphic. It was figured in the constellation Ara as a co-type with the summit called the Mount of Hetep, or of Heaven, in the astronomical mythology.

DOUBLE HORUS, OR JESUS AND THE CHRIST

It was a saying of Philo’s that “the logos is double”. This it is as the double Horus, or as Jesus and the Christ, who was dual as manifestor for the Virgin Mother and afterwards for God the Father: double by nature, human and divine; double in matter and in spirit; double as child and as adult, double as the soul of both sexes. But when the word “logos” comes to be used for the divine Reason we are in the midst of Greek metaphysic and doctrinal mystification. These two, blended in one person, constituted the double Horus who was that double logos spoken of by Philo, the figure of which was founded, as Egyptian, on the two halves of the soul, or pair of gods in the mystery of Tattu (Rit., ch. 17). Horus in these two characters was Horus with the tress of infancy, and Horus who becomes bird-headed at the transformation in his baptism. In his first advent Horus is the sower in the seed-field of time; in his second he is the lord of the reapers in the harvest of eternity. In the astronomical mythos Horus was the king of one year. Naturally that was as ruler of the seasons in the annual circuit of the sun. As the prince of eternity he was the typical adult of thirty years, and lord of the Sut-Heb festival, who is called “the living Horus, the powerful bull, lord of the festivals of thirty years,” which are termed “the years of Horus as King” (Rec. of the Past, vol. 10, 34). This was the royal Horus in whom the child that was destined to be a king attained his manhood and assumed his perfect sovereignty.

As already shown, the genesis of the double Horus is portrayed in the Ritual (ch. 115). In this description ”two brethren come into being.” One of these was the wearer of the female lock, as the child-Horus. His birth was mystical. He was both male and female in person, or, as it is said, “he assumed the form of a female with a lock,” the sign of pre-pubescence in either sex, and hence a type of both. He is also called “the Afflicted One,” which denotes the mystery of the Virgin’s child. The second is “the active one of Heliopolis.” He is “the heir of the temple.” The first is also called the heir, and the second the heir of the heir. He has the divine might of “the son whom the father hath begotten.” This was “the only-begotten of the father.” Thus the “two brethren” were Horus the child who wears the long tress that is the sign of either sex, and Horus the adult who images the power and glory of the father as the god in spirit.

Iusa, the Jesus of On, like Horus in the Osirian cult, was born bi-mater. His two mothers were Iusãas and Neb-hetep, the two consorts of Atum-Ra. These two mothers were at first two sisters in the mythos. One of them was the mother in the western mountain, or later in the winter solstice; the other gave birth to Horus on the horizon in the eastern equinox. It follows inevitably that the Gospel-Jesus has two mothers who were sisters, and two places of birth and rebirth. When [Page 787] the mythology was merged in the eschatology, and Ra became the father in heaven, he is described as having two companions who are with him in the solar bark. In this text the two sister-mothers with whom Ra consorts in the “divine ship” are Isis and Nut, who are the bringers-forth of Iusa or Jesus in his twofold character: child-Horus at his first advent being the son of Isis (Har-si-Hesi) the earth-mother, and in his second advent, or rebirth in spirit, the son of Nut, the heavenly mother. Such is the origin of the two mothers who were two sisters, and two consorts in two places of birth and rebirth represented in the “historic” narrative by Nazareth and Bethlehem as the birthplace of the shoot or natzer in Virgo, and the house of bread in Pisces, which two places of birth corresponded to the two seasons of seedtime and of harvest in the old Egyptian year.

Not only had Horus two mothers, Isis the virgin who conceived him, and Nephthys who nursed him. He was brought forth singly, and also as one of five brothers. Jesus has two mothers, Mary the Virgin who conceived him, and Mary the wife of Cleopas, who brought him forth as one of her children. He, likewise, was brought forth singly, and as one of five brethren. Horus was the son of Seb, his father on earth. Jesus is the son of Joseph, the father on earth. Horus was with his mother the Virgin until twelve years old, when he transformed into the beloved son of God as the only-begotten of the father in heaven. Jesus remained with his mother the Virgin up to the age of twelve years, when he left her to be about his father’s business. From twelve to thirty years of age there is no record in the life of Jesus. Horus at thirty years of age became adult in his baptism by Anup. Jesus at thirty years of age was made a man of in his baptism by John the Baptist. Horus in his baptism made his transformation into the beloved son and only-begotten of the father, the holy spirit, represented by a bird. Jesus in his baptism is hailed from heaven as the beloved son and only-begotten of the father God, the holy spirit that is represented by a dove, which denotes the mystery of all mysteries concerning the origin of the Egypto-gnostic Christ.

The elder Horus came to earth in the body of his humility. The younger came from heaven to wear the vesture of his father’s glory. The first was the child of a baptism by water. The second is Horus the anointed or Christified; the oil upon whose face reflected the glory of the Father. This was the double baptism of the mysteries which is referred to in the Ritual by the priest who says, “I lustrate with water in Tattu and with oil in Abydos” (ch. 1). The duality manifested in Horus is shown when he is said to come into being as two brethren, the same that Pistis Sophia describes as “the Saviour-twins” ; also when the transformer Kheper takes the form of two children - the elder and the younger (Litany of Ra, 61). Again, in the seventy-first chapter of the Ritual, Horus divinized is called “ the owner of twin souls, who lives in two twin souls,” now united in the eternal one. It is the potential duality of sex in the child-Horus that will account for Queen Hatshepsu being designated Mat-Ka-Ra, the true likeness of the solar god, called the golden Horus. She assumed the habiliments of both sexes in token that the divinity was [Page 788] dual, and that this duality was reproduced in the golden Horus whose various phases of twinship included the two souls of sex. The golden Horus was a supreme type because of the twofold nature of the soul. It was this duality of Horus that is referred to by Hatshepsu when she says “the two Horus-gods have united the two divisions (south and north) for me.” “I rule over this land like the son of Isis” ; “I am victorious like the son of Nut” ; which two likewise constitute the double Horus (Inscription: Records, vol. 12, 134). It is said of the Osirian Horus in his twofold genesis from matter and spirit, “Horus proceedeth from the essence of his father and the corruption which befell him” (Rit., ch. 78). That is in the incarnation or immergence in matter as the opposite of spirit, according to the later theology. Matter was at this time considered to be corrupt, and matter was maternal, but spirit was paternal and held to be divine. This will also explain the language of the Ritual applied to Osiris when he is spoken of as suffering decay and corruption, although inherently inviolate and incorruptible. The Osiris is embalmed in the divine type of him that never saw corruption. Yet Horus the child is born of Isis into the corruption of matter in his incorporation, and all the evil that was derived from matter or the mother-nature has to be purged away in becoming pure spirit like Horus at the second advent, when he has become the glorified, anointed, only-begotten son. These were the two halves of a soul that was perfected in oneness, when Horus the child was blended with Horus the adult in the marriage-mystery of Tattu, but not till then, and not otherwise. “The two Horus-gods” is a title of the dual Horus in the Pyramid-texts of Teta. The Olive is there said to be “the tree of the two Horus-gods who are in the temples.” Horus proclaims himself to be the issue of Seb (or Earth) whose spouse is Isis, and affirms that his mother is Nut (ch. 42). That is as the double Horus. Horus the human soul on earth, and Horus as a spirit in Amenta; Horus born of two mothers who were two sisters, and who in the different theologies may be Neith and Sekhet; Iusãas and Nebhetep; Isis and Nut; or two Marys, the two Meris who were at first the cow of earth and the cow of heaven. The child of Isis, the virgin heifer, was imaged as the calf, the red calf of sacrifice, also by the golden calf. After his death he rose again as the bull in the likeness of his father, Osiris, the bull of eternity. In the solar mythos he was born as a calf in the autumn equinox that became a bull in the Easter equinox when this occurred in Taurus. The type was repeated in the eschatology, when the manes is baptized to become the anointed in the character of Horus, who says, “I am the divine bull, son of the ancestress of Osiris” (Rit., ch. 147).

The story of Jesus in the canonical Gospels follows the totemic and mythical representation. Like Heitsi-Eibib and the human Horus he is the child of a virgin mother, the child of Mary only up to twelve years of age. Then the same change occurs with him as with the totemic youth at puberty. He waxes in force and stature, and is immediately “about thirty years of age.” This is the age of Amsu-Horus when he has made his transformation from childhood into manhood as the khemt or typical adult of thirty years, [Page 789] at which time he rises in Amenta as a sahu in the glorified body. The transformation of Horus who was a child of the mother alone, the immaculate virgin Neith, she who came from herself, is reproduced by Luke. When Horus the child transforms he is only twelve years of age. As a child with Mary Jesus “waxed strong and was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him” (Luke II. 40). The “grace of God” in Egyptian is termed “khemt” for grace and favour, and it is as Amsu-Horus that the child waxes strong and is in favour with, or endowed by, God the Father. The way in which he “waxed in stature” can be seen in the effigy of Amsu-Horus, the divinized adult who is the fulfiller at puberty, mythical in the vernal equinox, human in the harvest-field, and in the resurrection eschatological. But there had been no fecundator of a human mother by her own child since the days of utter and incestuous promiscuity until the time when the mythical Horus (or Jesus) was made human in a personal and historical character as the fertilizer of a Hebrew virgin.

The titles given to two Egyptian priests who, in succession, present the deceased person to the gods are the An-mut-ef and Si-meri-ef. These are two titles of Horus in his two characters, first as the support of his mother, and secondly as the beloved son of his father. According to Egyptian doctrine, the incarnation of the elder Horus was no isolated individual event. Nor was a soul made flesh in any single form of personality. It was the soul of the totem, family, stock or tribe, and lastly of the individual that was represented in the typical figure of Horus or Jesus, child of the virgin mother. The soul of flesh that was born of the mother’s blood and made a type of in mythology could no more be limited to a single person than the soul that was previously derived from air, earth, water or other element of life. It was in keeping with natural law that, when the pubescent virgin had conceived, the incarnation of a human soul commenced. The mother, as the insufflator of that soul, was the mode and means of the incarnation which was effected in her blood, the flow of which was diverted to that end. The earliest embodiment then of a soul that was derived from a human source, and not simply from the elements of external nature, was by incarnation in the blood of the female who was mythically represented as the virgin mother. Thus the embodiment of the human soul, when descent was traced from the mother only, was by incarnation, and not by begettal. As it is said of the elder Horus, Har-si-Hesi, he was born but not begotten. The second Horus is begotten of the father with a second mother Nut, who is added as the bringer-forth above. It was comparatively late before the begettal of a human soul was ascribed to the individual progenitor. As shown by Egypt in the mirror of the mythos, this was not earlier than the time of Ptah when the double primitive essence was first recognized. A pair of souls were then derived, the one from matter, the other from spirit; one from the motherhood, the other from the fatherhood, both of which were blended in Ptah, the epicene parent. Child-Horus literally embodies the first half of a soul that was human primarily and in a latter stage divine. In its first phase this soul was derived from the mother’s blood and quickening breath as a body-soul. In its second, the source is spiritual, [Page 790] a causative source from the father in heaven. For example, the Ka, or highest soul of seven, is thought of in the Ritual as food or sustenance for the body and the means of duration. It is also looked upon as a typical sacrifice to that end. Hence the speaker says, “Am I not the bull of the sacrificial herd: are not the mortuary gifts upon me, and the powers above “ (ch. 105). Horus in the second phase says, “I am a soul and my soul is divine. I am he who produceth food. I am the food which perisheth not — in my name of self-originating force, together with Nu,” the mother heaven. (Rit., ch. 85). This is he who possessed the “powers above Nu” as bringer of the bread of life from heaven. “The bread of God which cometh down out of heaven and giveth life to the world” was this imperishable food of soul that gave eternal life to men: and which when personified in Horus imaged a saviour from death in matter. When the Osiris deceased attains the type of the sacred hawk he speaks of being invested with the soul of Horus. “Horus has invested (him) with his own soul for the seizing of his inheritance from Osiris at the Tuat.” “It is I, even I, who am Horus in glory” (ch. 78). Horus had come again in glory from the father as revealer of the bliss towards which his followers were bound (ch. 30B). When Horus was invested with the soul that is to be eternal, he becomes hawk-headed, in the likeness of the father, as Jesus was invested with that other bird of soul, the gnostic dove, when he was proclaimed to be the beloved son of God the father in his baptism.

Paul’s doctrine of the resurrection is founded on this mystery of the double Horus. As taught by the Egyptian wisdom, continuity was conditional, and the power of resurrection was personally secured by living the life of human Horus in fellowship with his sufferings as the bearer of his cross by which the power of his resurrection in the after-life was attained through becoming Horus the divinized adult. Paul’s resurrection is obtainable on the same conditions of becoming. As a struggling mortal he hopes “by any means” to attain “unto the resurrection from the dead,” and says, “Not that I have already attained or am already made perfect; but I press on.” In Paul’s Epistles, Christ takes the place of Horus the anointed by whom the power of resurrection was made manifest in the mysteries, and the doctrine is the same as in the Ritual. In his own body and sufferings Paul was living the life and trying to emulate the character of Horus the mortal, whilst looking forward to the future fulfilment as it was portrayed in Horus glorified, whose second coming in Tattu as representative of Ra the holy spirit and the power of resurrection is perfectly described by Paul. The manes in the Ritual says, “My enclosure is in Heaven,” as it was imaged on the mountain summit in the eternal city. Paul writes, “Our own citizenship is in heaven: from whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation (which was one with the maimed, deformed and suffering human Horus, changed and glorified in the resurrection) that it may be conformed to the body of his glory” as it had been set forth scene by scene in the mysteries of Amenta by the divine scribe Taht, and preserved sufficiently intact to make it out as pre-historical and non-historical in the once-more living Egyptian Book of the Dead (Phil. III. 20-21). [Page 791]

The reason why the Virgin’s child should make his change and pass away when twelve years old, and why the divinized adult should not take up the story until thirty years of age, to leave no record during eighteen years, is to be explicated by the Egyptian wisdom. It is because the two as double Horus, or as the dual Jesus Christ, are no more than types, and have no relation to an individual human history, Kamite, Hebrew, Persian, Gnostic, or Christian; and in this unity, as before said, the different versions all agree.

The Pistis Sophia tells us more about the double Horus, the twofold Messiah, or twin Saviour, than all the records outside the Ritual put together; more particularly in the astronomical phase of the mythos, only in this work the double Horus is the Egypto-gnostic Jesus, who does fulfil the second advent in accordance with the map of mythology. In one representation of his nature Horus is portrayed as the ruler, both in time and eternity. In time he is the foster-child of Seb, god of earth, brought forth by the mother-moon or Virgin in the zodiac as the king of one year. This is Horus in the circle of the lesser year. At his second advent, as fulfiller on the vastest scale, he is said to travel the everlasting road as the ever-coming prince of eternity. It was thus the first Horus, or Jesus, represented the solar god that made the circuit of the signs in the forward motion through the zodiac, whereas the second Horus, or Jesus, was the “traveller of the heavenly road,” the backward way in the hugest all-embracing circle of precession.

The gnostic Jesus represents the double Horus, human and divine, more fully and definitely than does the Jesus of the canonical Gospels and independently of any personal history. The first and second advents are both fulfilled by the Jesus of Pistis Sophia. As the youth of twelve years who was Horus the word, he instructs the disciples “up to the regions of the first statutes only” and is the teacher by means of parables. In his second advent he says, “I will speak with you face to face without parable.” He then unveils and expounds the greater mysteries from centre to circumference; from the first to the last. In the same gnostic scripture Mary, the mother of Jesus, describes her son in accordance with the Egyptian gnosis of the double Horus, which was not derived from the canonical Gospels. She thus addresses him: “When thou wert a child before the spirit had descended upon thee, when thou wert in the vineyard with Joseph, the spirit descended from the height and came unto me in the house (so) like unto thee I knew him not, but thought that it was thou. And he said unto me, “Where is Jesus, my brother, that I may go to meet him?” And when he had said this unto me I was in doubt and thought it was a phantom tempting me. I seized him and bound him to the foot of the bed which was in my house.” Jesus, the mortal, is in the vineyard with Joseph. He hears Mary tell her naïf story to Joseph, and exclaims, “Where is he that I may see him? I am expecting him in this place.” Mary continues: “We went together; we entered into the house, we found the spirit bound to the bed, and we gazed upon thee and him and found that thou wert like unto him. And he that was bound to the bed was unloosed. He embraced thee and kissed thee, and thou also didst kiss him; ye became one and the same being” (P. S., B. 1, 120, Mead). [Page 792]

The two Jesuses, one in matter and one in spirit, or Jesus and the Christ, are identical with Horus, the prince in the city of the blind, and Horus who reconstitutes his father. The meeting and the blending of the two into one being is a gnostic version of the mystery enacted in Tattu, where Horus in spirit meets with Horus the mortal, or Ra, the holy spirit, embraces Osiris, the god in matter, and the pair are united in the one double divine soul, which dwelleth in the place of establishing a soul that is to live for ever (Rit., ch. 17, 16-18).

In the opening chapter of Matthew’s Gospel the birth or generation of Jesus is called “the birth of Jesus Christ” (ch. I, 18), a twofold character equivalent to that of the double Horus, who was Horus in the flesh until twelve years of age, and Horus in the spirit from the age of thirty years. In other versions it is designated “the birth of the Christ.” But in accordance with the genuine doctrine these are two births entirely distinct from each other, one for Jesus the Virgin’s child and one for the Christ as en effluence of the Holy Spirit emanating from the father in the form of a dove. Horus the Virgin’s child was born but not begotten. At his second advent he became the divinized adult as the only son begotten of the father. This was the anointed son, and the anointed is the Christ, or Christified. The Christ was constituted by a begettal in spirit, when the spirit of God descended from heaven as the dove, or the hawk of soul, and the youth of twelve years was transformed into the man of thirty years. There was no Christ until this change of state and type took place, and could be none without the necessary transformation by which it was accomplished. This was represented in the transformation and transubstantiation of the mummy; in the baptism, circumcision, regeneration, resurrection, and other modes of the mystery, in which the body-soul was converted into a likeness of the eternal spirit; child-Horus into Horus the adult, or Jesus into the Christ. But, to compare as we proceed, the Word in the Kamite original was the first, or elder Horus, the child-Horus born of the Virgin Mother, he who issued out of silence as the inarticulate Logos (Rit., ch. 24). He is called the Kheru in Egyptian, which not only signifies the Word, but also denotes a victim doomed to be sacrificed, whether as the sufferer in the Tat, on the cross, or as the victim bound for slaughter. The second Horus, Horus in spirit, was the demonstrator of eternal life in his resurrection from the sepulchre who is thus the word-made-truth that was personalized in Har-Ma-Kheru. This second Horus, who is the fulfiller that follows the founder, is referred to in the Gospel, parenthetically, in a way that blends or confuses the two in one as the word. “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten from the father) full of grace and truth.” This is the merest passing allusion to the second Horus who was the anointed, only-begotten Son of God the Father; that is, to Horus, glorified, who followed human Horus in the flesh, but could not be so easily made to look historical.

The difference betwixt “the Son of Man” and “the Son of the woman” may also be explicated by the doctrine of the double Horus. The “Son of Man” is a title of Jesus in the Gospels, which has been supposed to denote the Son of God in the body of his humanity. [Page 793] But there was a “Son of Man” with an esoteric and mystical significance, who was known to the gnostic teachers as Anthropos the son of Anthropos; also as Monogenes. Horus the Saviour in his first advent was the child of Isis; that is, the son of woman when the woman is divine. In his second advent he is Iu, the Su or Son of God the Father, who became the Son of Man by title thus: Atum-Ra, son of Ptah, was the earliest god in the likeness of the perfect man. He was the first man in the same sense that the Jew-god Ieou in the Pistis Sophia is called the “First Man” (333) as the divine begetter in the human likeness. Ieou is the first man, and Iao is his son. Thus Iao, or Jesus, is “the Son of Man.” He comes to earth as the one God in the form of man. This, in the Ritual, is the Egyptian Jesus, Iu-em-hetep, the Son as Revealer of the Father Atum-Ra. The Father gives authority to the Son “to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man” (John V. 27). That is at the second coming, when he is to appear in the power and the glory of the Father, as did the second Horus with the oil upon his face which expressed the glory of his divinity. This is “the Son of Man” who was in heaven whilst on the earth (John III. 13), and who was to “come in his glory, and all the angels with him” (Matt. XXV. 31); and who did so come to judgment periodically as Horus in the mysteries of Amenta (Rit., ch. 125). But the title is applied to Jesus indiscriminately in the Gospels, where the two Horuses are continually confused together by the concoctors of the human history, which was limited in locality as much as possible to this earth, to make it the more convincing in its appeal.

In the Ritual Horus says: “I am the heir, the primary power of motion and of rest.” He was the heir in several characters. In the first he is the heir of Seb, the earth-father. In the second he is the heir of Osiris. When Osiris and Ra are blended in one Horus becomes the heir of Ra, the father in heaven, as the inheritor and the giver of eternal life to his followers. “The two earths have been decreed to Horus absolutely and without condition” (ch. 19). Because it was he who joined the two Horuses together, and as Paul phrases it, “made both one, and brake down the middle-wall of partition, that he might create in himself of the twain one new man” (Eph. II. 14, 15). As son of Seb he is the Virgin’s child on earth, or in matter. As son of Osiris he is Amsu the Divine Manes in Amenta, and as Har-Sam-Taui he is the uniter of the two earths in one, the conqueror who makes the word of Osiris truth against his enemies, and thus becomes the founder of the future kingdom of heaven for his father in the spirit as the double Horus, he who wins and wears the double diadem.

The dual Horus — Horus as mortal and Horus in spirit, Horus as child of the Virgin and Horus begotten of the Father, Horus twelve years of age and Horus the adult of thirty years — is reproduced in the Gospels, however briefly, although the object of the writers was not to distinguish between the two natures, human and divine, whilst both were limited to the one life on this earth. Still, there is a dual Jesus, or Jesus and the Christ, corresponding to the double Horus. Child-Horus is portrayed as the child-Jesus up to twelve years of age. In his baptism by water it is prognosticated by John that Jesus is to come as the Baptizer with the Holy Spirit and with [Page 794] fire. This is he “whose fan is in his hand,” and this is the transformation that was made by Horus the mortal when he became Horus rising in spirit with the fan, or khu, in his hand. Jesus in the same circumstances is the same character. The Spirit of God the Father descends upon him in the likeness of a dove, which indicates that he is now the Christ in Spirit. The Virgin’s child has changed into the Son of God the Father, and the change is authenticated by the “Voice out of the heavens, saying, this is my beloved Son” (Matt. III. 16, 17). The transaction is one of many that could only take place in the Earth of Amenta, but which are represented perforce in the earth of time, because the matter of the pre-existent mythos was rendered as a human history in the exoteric Gospels.

It has to be repeated again and again that the primitive mysteries of totemism were continued and developed as spiritual in the Egyptian eschatology. Child-Horus at twelve years of age represents the typical youth that passed into the ranks of the adults at puberty, who was circumcised and regenerated in the rite of Baptism, blood, water or oil being used for the purpose of lustration. This is repeated in the transformation of child-Horus into Horus the adult, the child of twelve years into the sherau of thirty years; otherwise the child of the mother into the son of the father. Thus, the child-Horus becomes the beloved son of the father in his baptism, as did Jesus. In the Ritual (chapter of the baptisms) the speaker at the fourth portal says: “I have been baptized in the water with which the Good Being was washed at the time when he had his contention with Sut (Satan), and when the victory was given to him.” In the baptism at the fifth portal, he says he has washed himself, or has been baptized in the water that Horus was washed in when he became the beloved son of his father, Osiris. “Su-meri-f” is the son whom the father loves, hence the beloved son, the anointed, or the Christ when Christified. In one of these baptisms (eighth portal) the baptizer is mentioned by name as Anup. He was the typical baptizer, the embalmer and anointer of the dead from of old, before the time of the solar Horus, or Osiris. “I have been washed in the water wherein the God Anup baptized when he performed the office of embalmer and binder-up of the Mummy.” Or, as it is otherwise said, when he became the chief minister to Osiris in the later cult. Here we find (1) that Anup was the baptizer in preparing Osiris (or the mortal Horus) to become the Horus in spirit, the anointed and beloved son of the father in the rite of embalmment, or baptism; that Osiris, or Horus, was baptized preparatory to or at the time of his contest with Sut (Satan); and that the baptism of Horus took place when he became chief minister, the beloved son Su-meri-f of his father, he who had previously been the pillar of support (An-mut-f) to his mother. (Naville, Texts; Budge, Book of the Dead, ch. 145.) There is a baptism in the Ritual which takes place at the time when Horus makes his transformation into the menat, the bird of soul as a swallow, dove or pigeon. That is when mortal Horus has become a spirit (ch. 85, 1), with the head of a bird, whether as the Divine hawk or the dove, and the same transformation takes place in the baptism of Jesus, when the dove from heaven descended and abode upon him as the sign to show that he was now the Son of the Father in Spirit. [Page 795]

There was a double baptism in the ancient mysteries: the baptism by water and the baptism by spirit. This may be traced to the two lakes of heaven at the head of the celestial river in the region of the northern pole, which were also repeated as the two lakes of purification in Amenta. The manes says, “I purify me in the southern tank, and I rest me at the northern lake” (ch. 125). They will account for the two forms of baptism mentioned in the Gospels. John baptizes with water, Jesus with the Holy Spirit and with fire. This twofold baptism had been represented by the two celestial lakes or pools that were configurated in the northern heaven which are to be read of in the Ritual (ch. 97) as the baptistery of Anup. One of these was the lake of purification by water; the other by spirit. This latter was the lake of Sa by name, in which the gods themselves were wont to be vitalized in their baptism. Sa signifies spirit; the Sa was a divine or magical fluid which made immortal; and the baptism in this sacred lake of Sa was literally a baptism of the holy spirit. The scene of the baptism by John can be paralleled in the Ritual (ch. 97). Horus claims to be the master of all things, including the water of the Inundation. When he comes to be baptized, it is “said at the boat,” called “the staff of Anup,” “Look upon me, oh ye great and mighty Gods, who are foremost among the spirits of Annu; let me be exalted in your presence.” The plea for baptism is very express. “Lo, I come, that I may purify this soul of mine in the most high degree: let not that impediment which cometh from your mouth be issued against me, let me be purified in the lake of propitiation and of equipoise: let me plunge into the divine pool beneath the two divine sycamores of heaven and earth.” After the baptism, he says, “Now let my Fold be fitted for me as one victorious against all adversaries who would not that right should be done to me. I am the only one just and true upon the earth” (Rit., ch. 97, Renouf). In the Gospel, when Jesus cometh “unto John”=Anup the baptizer, “John would have hindered him.” “But Jesus answering said unto him, suffer me now for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness” (Matt. III. 14, 15) — a probable rendering of the Egyptian word Maat! In the Egyptian baptism three elements are involved: the elements of water, fire and spirit. Osiris represented water, Horus the solar fire, and Ra the holy spirit. These elements agree with the three persons in the trinity that were Osiris the father, Horus the son, Ra the holy spirit, in whose names as father, son and holy ghost the rite of baptism still continues to be practised. The second character was fulfilled by Horus when he became bird-headed as a spirit in the resurrection. This fulfilment is obvious if not perfectly accomplished on behalf of Jesus after his baptism. “And Jesus, full of the holy spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led in the Spirit” (Luke IV. 1, 2). He also returns “in the power of the Spirit” (IV. 14). The same change has occurred with him as with Horus in the same circumstances. It is now that he makes the announcement. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor: he hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. To-day hath the scripture been fulfilled in your ears.” This was the [Page 796] fulfilment, according to Jewish prophecy, of that second advent which took place, and could only take place in spirit-world, and not in the life on earth, except as a performance in the religious mysteries.

Another episode in the canonical account of Jesus will serve to illustrate the transformation from the child of twelve into the adult of thirty years. When Jesus was twelve years old, says Luke, his parents went up to Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover. When they were returning to Nazareth they found the boy had tarried behind in Jerusalem. After three days they discovered him in the temple sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. They were astonished; and his mother said unto him, “Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold, thy father and I sought thee sorrowing.” And he said unto them, “How is it ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be on my father’s business?” — or must be about the things of my father. This, in the original, is a legend of the infancy and of the time when the child-Horus made his transformation into Horus the adult, to become the fulfiller for his father, “and,” as he says, “to take the lead.” Osiris in his maimed and mutilated state was represented by the child of Isis, the Horus of twelve years, or the moon in the fourteen days of waning light, or the sun in the winter solstice. Thus Isis in search of the scattered limbs and members of Osiris was in search of her child (Rit., ch. 157). As it is said in the “Hymn to Osiris,” “she went round the world lamenting him. She stopped not till she found him. . . . She raised the remains of the god of the motionless heart. She extracted his essence. She bore a child. She suckled her babe in secrecy. No one knew where it happened” (Records, vol. 4, pp. 101-2). In the text quoted from the Ritual the child of the papyrus-marshes has changed and come forth as the ruler, he who fights the great battle against Sut. Horus was then about his father’s business. He had now transformed from the child of Isis only, or Horus in the secret place, into Horus the begotten of the father, the Horus of thirty years. This is the original of the story told by Luke of the child-Christ when he was twelve years of age. Mary, like Isis, searches the districts for her missing child, who is found after three days, which is the length of time assigned to the transformation of Osiris for renewal in the moon. Meantime he, too, has “made a great battle,” asserted his supremacy, and “ordered what was to be done,” although the nature and mode of the contest have been changed. He has also given terror and caused his mother to fear. When reproached by his mother, who had sought him sorrowing, he asks his mother and father if they did not know that he must be about his father’s business, or attending to the things of his father.

There is a chapter of Isis seeking for child-Horus at his going forth from the marshes in which the papyrus grew; that is, when Horus is the child of twelve years who transforms into the living likeness of the father as the man of thirty years. A vulture with outspread wings is the emblem of the seeking mother, who goes about searching the “mysterious retreats” of Horus in which he hides himself after leaving the marshes. Her son goes forth to face misfortune, to command the chiefs of the district. He fights a great battle. He calls to [Page 797] remembrance what he has done, imposes fear on them, establishes his terror, his mother Isis having made charms for the protection of her child (Rit., ch. 157; Naville and Renouf). Horus in his two characters of the child and the adult is called the lad in the country, and the youth in the city or in the town (Rit., ch. 85). As the lad in the country he is the child with Isis the virgin mother, and Seb the earth-god, who was his foster-father during his childhood. As the youth in town he is in his father’s house, and is “the heir of the temple” in Heliopolis (ch. 115). When Horus the child passes into Horus the adult he becomes the heir to the “things of his father.” The Egyptian word “khetu” for “things” is most idiomatic, and “the things of my father” in the Greek is uniquely perfect as a rendering of the Egyptian “khetu.”

It is as the youth in town or in Heliopolis=Jerusalem, that Horus says, “I am a soul, and my soul is divine”; this was derived from Ra, his father in heaven: “I take the lead. I put an end to darkness. I put a stop to evil.” And when Horus goes to Abydos to see his father Osiris, all the great gods, together with the groups of the gods, come forth to meet and greet him with their acclamations. He is hailed by them as “the king of hosts” who cometh to unite and take possession of the two worlds. His father’s house is seized (in the juridical sense of seizin or feudal possession) “in virtue of the writs,” which have been issued on behalf of the divine heir, “the heir of the temple” (ch. 138), the “son whom the father hath begotten” (ch. 115). Abydos is the mythical rebirth-place of Osiris, and it was there that Horus took possession of his father’s house. In the Gospel it is Jerusalem. Twice over in one brief chapter of the Ritual (115th) Horus is called “the heir of the temple.” He says, “It is with reference to me that the gods say, Lo, the afflicted one is the heir of Annu.” This was as Horus the wise and wonderful child. And again it is said of Horus the divine adult, “active and powerful is the heir of the temple; the active one of Annu, the son whom the father hath begotten.” In the Ritual the temple is in Annu; it is otherwise termed the hat-saru, or house of the prince. Horus enters this as the child of the mother, and he comes forth as the son of the father, and the wielder of the whip as the symbol of his sovereignty. Here is the parallel to the child-Jesus sitting in the temple as a teacher of the teachers, laying down the law to the masters of the law. As the Word of truth, Horus “assembles the chiefs of truth” or law. These are the acolytes who sit with Osiris in the great hall of Maat. The lords of truth (or the law) collected there to watch over iniquity, as they sit in “Seb’s great dwelling,” recognize the lad as the lord of justice, and delegate authority to him as their chief. The original of a scene in the temple is traceable in the “Hymn to Osiris.” Horus has grown strong in the dwelling of Seb. “The divine company rejoices when the son of Osiris comes, even Horus steadfast of heart, with (or as) the word made truth: the son of Isis, the flesh of Osiris.” Horus in the hall of Mati was in the house of his father Osiris seated on the judgment-seat surrounded by the chiefs of truth as the lad who is acknowledged now to be the universal master, and the lord of law and of very truth itself. The father’s house in the Gospels becomes the temple at Jerusalem, the “chiefs of truth” collected there are the doctors or Tannaim, and [Page 798] the divine child Horus, the royal Horus, wearer of the double crown, has been converted into the child of Joseph the carpenter.

According to John, the first thing that Jesus did after his baptism was to prove his power by turning water into wine. This is immediately followed by his foray in the temple at Jerusalem. He makes a scourge of cords, where Horus, as “heir of the temple,” wields the whip or flagellum and drives out those who have made the Father’s house a house of merchandise or den of thieves. He thus proves himself to be, like Horus, “active and powerful,” “the heir of the temple” who hath the might divine as the only son, whom “the Father hath begotten,” in the one instance by vanquishing Sut on the pinnacle, and in the other by driving out the evil-doers=the Sut-Typhonians from the temple (John II. 14-17), both of which events are stated in two different Gospels to have followed immediately after the baptism, in which occurred the transformation of Jesus into the dove-headed Son of God the Father.

In the Ritual the subject of chapter 138 is the “Entry into Abydos,” and it describes a scene of triumph for Horus analogous to the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. He is the lord of life in Abydos. He exclaims, “O gods of Abydos. Let us be joyful. Do not hinder me from seeing my father. I am the Horus of Khem-Ka, the red shoot (or branch=natzer) which nothing can injure, whose hand is strong against his enemies: avenger of his father, striking his enemies, repelling violence: governor of multitudes, chief of the earth, who takes possession of his father’s dwelling with his arms.” The object of this triumphant entry is for the divine heir to take possession of his father’s dwelling. This he effects by force of arms. “And Jesus entered into the temple of God, and cast out all that bought and sold in the temple and overthrew the tables of the money-changers.” And he saith unto them, “It is written my house shall be called a house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of robbers” (Matt. XXI; Rit., 138).

Amsu-Horus rises in Amenta with the signs of government upon his shoulder in the shape of the crook and the whip (or khu). As bearer of the crook he is a form of the Good Shepherd who comes in that character to look after his father’s flock or herd. As wielder of the whip he came to drive out and scourge the enemies of his father. The Christ who is portrayed as the Good Shepherd in one character is also described as making his advent with the fan in his hand, which in the hand of Amsu is the flail or whip. This, in another scene, becomes the whip or scourge with which Jesus drives out the illegal occupants of the temple. The Passover of the Jews being at hand, Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and “he found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting” together in this compound of menagerie and mart, which is as if the Stock Exchange and Smithfield Market met together in St. Paul’s Cathedral. “And he made a scourge of cords, and cast all out of the temple, both the sheep and the oxen: and he poured out the changers” money and overthrew the tables, and to them that sold the doves he said, take these things hence; make not my father’s house a house of merchandise (John II. 13-17). This portrait of the [Page 799] wielder of the whip driving out the sheep and oxen is the reverse to that of the good shepherd with the crook, and this historic fulfilment of the mythos is a very puerile parody of Amsu-Har-Tema, the doer of justice, scourging the foes of his father out of the temple in his consuming fury of resentment, so soon as ever he had taken in hand the whip of his divine authority. Horus is not mentioned as riding into Abydos on an ass, but in the cult of Atum-Ra the solar disk was hauled up from Amenta by the ass-eared god Iusa, and Iusa was the original rider on the ass or the foal of the ass.

Immediately following this clearing out of the temple it is said that Jesus hungered — and seeing a fig-tree by the wayside he came to it and found nothing thereon. He is described as coming to the fig-tree hungry, when figs were not in season, and because there was no fruit upon it he sterilized it for ever, “and immediately the fig-tree withered away” (Matt. XXI. 19). This is in the character of Horus the avenger, who comes to the fig-tree in the Aarru-garden and says, “I am Amsu-Horus, the avenger of his father the Good Being. I carry out for my father the overthrowal of all his enemies,” including the fig-tree, as it is rendered in the Gospels. In the Ritual the cedar is quoted in the place of the sycamore-fig. The speaker, in addressing the keeper of the twenty-first gate, says, “Thou keepest the secrets of the Avenging God (Har-Tema) who causes the Shennu-tree to bear no fruit” (Rit., ch. 145).

The earth-life ceases for Horus at the age of twelve. Partly because he typified an impotent or impubescent body-soul in matter, mere soul of the mother-blood, and the difference between child-Horus and Horus divinized was expressed by the difference betwixt the child of twelve and the perfect man of thirty years. It ceased by the transformation into that which was typical of another life. Child-Horus passed away from earth to make his change or to be made “a man of” in the mysteries of Amenta. He rose again as Amsu in ithyphallic form to show the potency of soul or spirit in the after-life by means of the nature figure. Thus, according to the genuine mythos, at the time of the baptism in the Jordan, when Jesus had attained the age of twelve, the earthly life came to an end, the mother’s child had for the first time found his father. But that was not in this world. The second Horus was begotten in Amenta, not on earth. Also the baptism of regeneration, and other of the spiritual mysteries, occurred in that earth of eternity and not upon the earth where mortal beings dwell. In the totemic mysteries circumcision was a rite of puberty which marked the transformation of the youth into the man, and this, like other typical customs, was continued in the religious mysteries. When Horus makes his change and rises in Amenta as Horus the adult, it is in a figure that has suffered the rite of circumcision, as the portraits of the risen Amsu prove. Thus, circumcision, like baptism, was a rite of regeneration and resurrection or re-erection from the dead; that is, from the state of the inert Osiris, the impubescent Horus, or, doctrinally, from the status of the uncircumcised, the unbaptized, who were “unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed,” and who might thus remain in mummied immobility. The first Horus is impubescent; the second is circumcised to show that he has risen in the likeness of the father, “full of [Page 800] grace and truth”, “the image of the invisible god, the first-born of all creation.” Amsu-Horus, the risen Sahu, is identical doctrinally with the gnostic Christ of Paul, who tells his hearers that they have been circumcised in him who includes the pleroma of the godhead bodily, “with a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with him in baptism, wherein ye were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col. II. 10-12). When Horus rises from the dead he wields the weapons and he bears the symbols of his sovereignty. He has been baptized and circumcised, or lustrated with water, with oil, with the Holy Spirit, and crowned with the double feather. The doctrine is the same whether the risen one be Horus or the Christ; and there was nothing historical in the death, the baptism, the circumcision, the resurrection of Amsu-Horus, either as the Karast mummy or the Christ.

A difficulty all through with the concocters of the Gospel history was this dual character of Horus in two lives and two worlds. They had only the one lifetime to go upon in one world. Jesus had to become bird-headed in the human lifetime and on earth. Whereas the human Horus made his change into the “second-born, the golden hawk,” after he had passed into Amenta. It was as a spirit in the earth of eternity that he became bird-headed in the likeness of his father Ra, not on the earth of Seb, where he was imaged in the likeness of mortality, as the human Horus. Still, the risen Jesus acts the part of Horus in issuing from the sepulchre as a spirit. After his death and burial, he appears to the disciples in the rôle of the second Horus who represents the Father after the resurrection in spirit. He tells them that the Father hath sent him. “And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit” (John XX. 21, 22). This is in the character of the hawk-headed Horus who, as the son of Ra, is given power from the Father to breathe the Holy Spirit. It is a mystery of Amenta, with no meaning elsewhere. In this the Horus who had conquered death and risen again in triumph as the Beloved Son of God the Father, became the representative of the Holy Spirit with power to impart it to the breathless ones, and raise them from the dead; he who, as Horus or Jesus, in this character was “the resurrection and the life.” But, in the gospels of the Sarkolatrae it had to be demonstrated that the risen Christ was not a spirit or anything superhuman, if the history was to be accepted as simply human and limited to the life on earth.

Horus, in his first advent, was the word-made-flesh in mortal guise, according to the Kamite doctrine of the incarnation. In his second advent, he is the word-made-truth as Horus the fulfiller in the spirit, according to the Kamite doctrine of the resurrection. In his baptism, Horus the word-made-flesh transformed into the word-made-truth, according to the Kamite doctrine of baptismal regeneration, each of which doctrines was of necessity perverted in the exoteric rendering. The scene of this rebirth in Amenta was underneath the tree of dawn — the tamarisk, persea, olive, or sycamore-fig-tree. The desire of the manes is literally to be with Horus under the fig-tree at the time of his resurrection from Amenta, a figure that was derived from the [Page 801] Horus-sun arising from under the tree of dawn in the mythology. Horus reborn as the sun of morning, says, “I am the babe. I am the god within the tamarisk-tree” (ch. 42). The olive was another tree of dawn. The transformation of Osiris into Horus, or of Amsu into Horus the bird-headed, was effected underneath this tree. One of the seven khus, or great spirits who are the companions of Horus in his resurrection is named Kheri-bakhu-f or “he who is under the olive-tree,” which is equated by the fig-tree in the Gospel of John for the green tree of dawn. On a papyrus at Dublin the Osiris prays that he may be under the sycamore (fig-tree) of Hathor at the rising of Horus (Trans. Soci. Bib., vol. VIII, p. 218). This, according to John, was the place where Nathaniel had been with Jesus before the two had ever met on earth (John I. 48, 49). “Now,” says Andrew, “we have found the Christ.” He calls upon Nathaniel to “come and see.” Jesus recognizes him. Nathaniel says, “whence knowest thou me?” “Jesus answered and said unto him, before Phillip called thee, when thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw thee” (John I. 41-49).

The two characters of the double Horus, commonly ascribed to Jesus, are also portrayed upon the gnostic monuments in the Roman catacombs. In one character he is the little old and ugly Jesus. In the other he corresponds to Horus of the beautiful face. The first is the suffering Messiah, the despised and afflicted one, who was considered to be of an ignoble origin compared with that of Horus the younger. He was the child of the Mother only; the soul in matter; the heir of Seb, and therefore of the earth earthy. Horus the younger is the man from heaven; the immortal Son of the Divine Man who is in heaven, Horus in his glory and his majesty. These often occur together on the same monuments in their irreconcilable contradiction of each other (Bosio, Rom. Sott.). But the “elder Horus” did not mean the aged Horus, for he was at the same time the child-Horus. The title has been misinterpreted by the artists of the catacombs who have represented “the afflicted one,” the Man of sorrows, as diminutive, and pensive, old and ugly, whereas, according to the true type, he was never more than twelve years of age, and always wore the lock of childhood. “Old Child” was his name.

Horus in his childhood was the sower of the seed in the fields of his father. This Mystery follows that of the great battle in which Osiris is avenged and the associates of Sut are slain in the shape of goats, and the fields are prepared for the seed by being manured with their blood. The vignette is given by Naville from the tracing taken by Lepsius of the now lost papyrus Busca. The picture represents the great hoeing in Tattu. The long text at Denderah (Mariette, tom. 4, pl. 39) contains directions to be observed on the festival commemorative of the ancient custom. Two black cows are put under a yoke of am-wood, the plough is of tamarisk-wood, and the share of black bronze. The ploughman goes behind, with a cow led in a halter. A little child with the side-lock attached to its head is to scatter the seed in the field of Osiris. Barley is sown at one end, spelt at the other, and flax between the two. The Kher-heb in chief recites the office for the sowing of the field (Renouf, Book of the Dead, ch. 18, note 9). The child with the side-lock represents the Horus of twelve years who leaves his mother at that age and goes forth to be [Page 802] “about his father’s business.” That business, as here shown, was the sowing of seed for Osiris, the divine husbandman. Jesus at twelve years of age is said to leave the Virgin on his father’s business for the purpose of sowing the seed of the word; the word that was to be made truth in the fields of divine harvest. Osiris is the husbandman as God the father, and child-Horus the seed-sower as the son, in human form. Sut, the anthropomorphic Satan, is the opponent of Horus in the harvest-field; he undoes what Horus does. As the prince and power of drought and darkness, he is busy in the night. He sows the tares, the thorns and thistles, the weeds or “devil’s-dung” amongst the good seed of Osiris sown by Horus. Horus has his assistants in the seed-sowing and the reaping of the harvest. These are grouped as the two, the four, the seven, and finally the typical twelve who are the reapers in the Aarru-fields, which are in the earth of eternity. There is no exact parallel scene in the canonical gospels to this of the seed-sowing in the Ritual, but the child that sows the seed in his father’s field, survives in the Gospels of the Infancy. As we read in the Gospel of Thomas (ch. 12) at the time for sowing the child went out with his father to sow corn in their field, and when his father sowed, the child Jesus also sowed one grain of corn. And having reaped and threshed it, he made “a hundred quarters of it,” and bestowed the corn upon the poor. “Now Jesus was eight years old when he wrought this miracle,” during his first advent. At his second coming, Horus is the reaper in the fields of harvest. This is he “whose fan (or flail) is in his hand” when he rises from the sepulchre. The harvest at the end of the world was reaped by the followers of Horus at the end of the age or cycle of time. It was periodic in the mythology, like the harvests of the earth, and therefore periodic in the eschatology. He that sowed the good seed in the Egyptian mysteries was Horus the son of Isis, or the human Horus, who reappears as Amsu the husbandman in the fields of divine harvest, otherwise as Horus-Khuti the master of joy with his twelve followers who are the reapers of the harvest in Amenta. This is portrayed both in the nether-world and in the upper paradise of Hetep on the summit of the mount. The object of the beatified deceased is to attain the harvest-field in Hetep, that he may take possession of his allotment there, and be in glory there, and plough and sow and reap the harvest there for ever, “doing whatsoever things were done on earth,” but changed and glorified. This was to be attained, not at the end of the world, but at the end of all the trials, the purifications and purgatorial pains, the strenuous efforts made in climbing up the ascent to reach at last the paradise of rest upon the summit; the place of re-union and reconciliation; the land of the tree of life and the water of life, of perennial plenty and of everlasting peace. Here the reapers, called the “angels’ in the Gospel, show the harvest-field is not upon the earth of time. They are the twelve with Horus in the fields of divine harvest. Horus tells Osiris at the harvest-home that he has cultivated his corn for him in the Aarru-fields of peace; and in the person of Har-khuti with the twelve as lord of spirits gathered in the harvests of eternity.

Two opposite characters are assigned to Jesus in the Gospels, in one of which he comes with peace, in the other he is the bringer of the [Page 803] sword. He is the bringer of peace on earth (Luke II. 14; John XVI. 27), who says he has not come to bring peace on earth (Luke XII. 51). “I came not to send peace but a sword” (Matt. X. 34). Horus had appeared previously in these two rôles. He is “Horus the peaceful.” As Iu-em-hetep he comes to bring peace and good fortune on earth and make wars to cease. Horus also comes with the sword as the avenger of his father when he pierces Sut to the heart, and annihilates the rebel powers. Har-tema is a title of the second Horus. The word Ma for justice also signifies the law. And he who reveals and makes justice visible is the Horus who not only fulfils the word by making it truth, but who also comes to fulfil the law, or maat. This is the character assigned to the Jesus of the Gospels, who says, “Think not I came to destroy the law. I came not to destroy but to fulfil. Verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law till all things be accomplished” (Matt. V. 17, 18). This law is the maat of the Ritual. And in the Gospel the speaker assumes the position of Har-tema, who was the fulfiller of justice or the law. In the earth-life Jesus is the word or speaker in parables. In that way the “Inarticulate Discourse” of Horus is assigned to Jesus, with the usual misrendering of the hidden meaning, as the matter of parables which no one but the duly initiated could possibly understand. Indeed they were prepensely intended to be non-intelligible to all others. As it is said to the disciples, “Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to the rest in parables, that seeing they may see not and hearing they may not understand (Luke VIII. 10). Child-Horus opened his mouth in Sign-language only. Jesus only opens his in parables. At his second coming he is to speak no more in parables but to tell the disciples plainly of the father. That is how the twofold character of Horus was to be fulfilled by Jesus, and as it had been already fulfilled by the Egypto-gnostic Jesus in “Pistis Sophia.” Also, however indirectly, Jesus is identified with the child-Horus as the teacher who was a babe and suckling and who exclaims, “I am the babe” (repeated four times) in the Ritual (ch. 42). Jesus says, at the time when “he rejoiced in the holy spirit” (Luke X. 21), “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things (the things which had been given him to teach) from the wise and understanding and didst reveal them unto babes. (Such babes as Horus with the side-lock.) All things have been delivered unto me of my father and no one knoweth who the son is save the father.” But in the course of making out a human history from the mythos and the eschatology in the Ritual, Jesus has been forced to remain on the earth not only after he was twelve years of age but after he was thirty years, when he ought to have been a manes in Amenta. The “Pistis Sophia” retains the true version of Horus, or Jesus, in Amenta, when it says, “Jesus spake these words unto his disciples in the midst of Amenta” (390) and describes him in the character of Aber-Amentho, the lord of Amenta, in which he rose again triumphant over death.

That which was taught by Horus, or Jesus, the Word in the sayings and parables, was made truth by Horus-Makheru, the fulfiller indeed. And this fulfilment at the second coming is imitated by Jesus when [Page 804] he says, “These things have I spoken unto you in parables (or in proverbial sayings). The hour cometh when I shall no more speak unto you in parables but shall tell you plainly of the father” (John XVI. 25). The teaching of child-Horus did not contain a revelation of the father in spirit. This was the mission of Har-Makheru, the fulfiller of the word in truth, as it was acted in the mysteries to be repeated in the mortal life, for human use. This second part is promised in the Gospels but remained a matter of prophecy that never was fulfilled. Albeit the doctrine survives in the Christian “Word-of-truth” with no foundation in the historical life of Jesus. The Christian advent of Horus-Makheru, the word-made-truth, the beloved son who represents the father, from beginning to end of the Ritual, still awaits the ending of the world or that last day which was annually solemnized in the Egyptian mysteries. As Paul the Christian Gnostic puts it, “the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.” That is in fulfilment as the word-made-truth (1 Cor. IV. 20). The first Horus was the word, the second is the power: the heir of glory who hath the might-divine of the only-begotten Son of God the Father (Rit., ch. 115). This, wherever met with, is Egyptian first of all as Horus, who was the word or logos in one phase of character, and in the other of two he was the power. As the word he represented the virgin mother. As the power he imaged the glory of the father. Horus was the word in the earth of Seb, and he is the power in the earth of Sut. In the canonical and apocryphal Gospels both the word and power have been continued and fused into one, as there was but one life to be represented, that on earth, in the “history.” It is said of the child-Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas (chap. 4), “Every word of his becometh at once a deed.” “Every word of his is at once a deed” (ch. 17). “Every word he speaketh forthwith becometh a deed” (4). The sum and substance of the doctrine of Maati is to make the word of Osiris truth against his enemies. Elder Horus was that word in person. The word was also uttered in dark sayings which constituted the ancient wisdom. Then it became the written word of Taht Aan, the scribe of the gods, and Horus at his second coming was the divine ensample of the son who made the word of Osiris truth against all opposition as the fulfiller of the word and the doer in truth. The word of the Christ, according to Paul, is identical with the Makheru, or word-made-truth by Horus the fulfiller. He likewise speaks of “the word of the truth of the gospels” (Col. I. 6). The power of his Christ is that of the risen Horus; it is the power of the resurrection to eternal life; and both are the same, because both represented one meaning, namely the soul of man that rose again from death, and was personalized in Horus or in Iusa.

Although the second character of Horus is realized by Jesus in his baptism; in his becoming the beloved and anointed son of God; in his contests with Satan as a spirit; in proving himself to be the “heir of the temple” in his breathing the Holy Spirit into the breathless, raising of the dead, and in various other ways, such fulfilment had to be repudiated on account of the alleged Judean history. Hence he promises that if he goes away from the disciples he will send them the Comforter, the Paraclete, or advocate, “even the Spirit of Truth [Page 805] which proceedeth from the father .” “A little while, and ye behold me no more; and again a little while and ye shall see me.” This was the short time betwixt the first and second coming of the Lord, which was about three nights in the mysteries. “If I go not away the comforter will not come unto you.” Whereas in the Egyptian judgment scenes the comforter has come already. Horus in his second character is the paraclete or advocate with the father. One by one he introduces the faithful to Osiris (in the vignettes to the Ritual), and is the intercessor and the mediator with the father on behalf of his children. In the papyrus of Ani, for example, Horus the intercessor or advocate introduces Ani to his father, saying, “I have come to thee, O Un-nefer, and I have brought unto thee the Osiris-Ani. His heart is right; it hath come forth guiltless from the scales. It hath not sinned against any god or goddess. Taht hath weighed it according to the decree pronounced unto him by the company of the gods; it is most right and true. Grant that he may appear in the presence of Osiris; and let him be like unto the followers of Horus for ever and ever.

The process of converting parts of the Osirian drama into Gospel narratives and of making the wisdom of the mystery-teachers portable for ordinary use, is obvious still in various of the parables of the double-Horus. For instance, in his first estate child-Horus was the sower of the seed, and in his second character at the second coming he is the reaper of the harvest. Thence comes the parable of the sower. In the pictures to the Ritual Horus is the sower who goes forth to sow the seed in the field of his father. And when he sows the wheat the enemy, that is Sut the power of darkness, comes by night and sows the field with tares and thorns and thistles, it being his work to undo all the good that Horus does. This is represented in a parable by means of which “the kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man that sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept his enemy came and sowed tares also among the wheat and went away.” The disciples ask for an explanation and the answer is “he that soweth the good seed is the son of man; and the field is the world, and the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the tares are the sons of the evil one; and the enemy that sowed them is the devil; and the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels” (Matt. XIII). Thus the matter of the drama was reproduced piecemeal in religious märchen and exoteric narratives.

Continues on Book12 B