The Gospel According to St. Bernard Shaw
by Aleister Crowley
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Page numbers from the 1st edition are indicated like this: {1} at the bottom of each page. Original footnotes are brought up to the point of citation in text and enclosed thusly: <> There is evidence internally that several other footnotes were intended, but inadvertently left in the text instead of being set to the bottom of the page. These have been kept intact, and are usually recognizable by their form, e.g. "(Footnote re this passage: This short passage is too shocking to ...)" Additional notes are marked in the same manner, and identified as to origin: <> --- note by the transcriber of pp. 1-143 <> --- note by Bill Heidrick 

 "The Lesser Mysteries." 1. The Virgin Birth. Practically all heroes of antiquity were said to be born of divine fathers, or occasionally of divine mothers. Hercules was the son of Zeus, who made the night last fortyeight hours in order to `mak' siccar'; Romulus and Remus were sons of Mars; Alexander of Apollo and so on. More definite demi-gods than these were equally fortunate in their parentage; Nana, the mother of Attis, conceived miraculously without commerce with the male. But we wish to call very particular attention to the story of Dionysus. Semele became pregnant by Zeus in the form of a lightning flash. Hera (a name curiously like Herod) sought to destroy the child, but Zeus hid it in his `thigh' to use the Scriptural expression. Now a flash of lightning is the `divine fire'; we read in Acts II.3.4 "And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost...." This symbolism is no accident. The Hebrew letter Shin is shaped like a triple flame; it means a tooth; its numerical value is 300, which is identical with that of the words Ruach Alhim, the Spirit of God, or of the Gods.<> Now the name Jesus or Jeheshuah {179} in Hebrew is spelt by placing this letter Shin in the midst of the four letters of the name Jehovah,<> and represents the mitigation of that terrible deity by the influence of the Spirit. Hence Jesus is also made equivalent to Joshua, `saviour', "for he shall save his people from their sins." To put this story in dramatic form it is then only necessary to represent a virgin as impregnated by this flame of fire. There is here no space to pursue the significance of the name Mary, connected with `mare' the sea,<><> and thus making the nativity result from the mystic wedding of fire with water. Volumes have been written on the subject. 2. The flight into Egypt. Egypt in Hebrew symbolism nearly always means `darkness'. We now see the flight as symbolical of the hiding of the seed in the earth, thus saving it from the terrible forces of winter. 3. The Baptism of Jesus. Omitting any elaborate analysis of the symbolism of the name John, we only point out the marriage of fire and water, the sun and rain that conspire to the growth of corn and wine, for in John I, 32, we read "And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him." The dove is the common symbol of the creative force, both male and female. This was later symbolized in initiation ceremonies and the like by `purification by water and consecration by fire' before {180} a man could enter the temple, that is, become the neophyte new-born, or the hero of the mysteries therein celebrated. 4. The hailing. (John I. 47-49.) "Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! Nathaniel saith unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel." Here we see the hero proclaimed king and God, just as in Carnival to-day, just as in the rites of Osiris and Saturn and Marduk and Tezcatlipoca three thousand years ago, just as in those of every nature-god, almost without exception. The intended victim must be identified as the King-god formally by his being acknowledged as such by some person of importance, John, too, and various disciples, make this acknowledgement, and no one who does not do so is mentioned. 5. The miracle of Cana. Dionysus reappears; the first miracle done by Jesus was the turning of water into wine, which is exactly what Dionysus does; the vine is the alchemist that transmutes the rain of heaven into the juice of the grape. And Jesus said "I am the vine." John writes (II,11) "This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him." It is certainly an excellent reason! Now in John's gospel, which is in many ways the best for our purpose, save that there is no mention of the virgin birth,<> this {181} miracle is immediately followed by the cleansing of the temple. 6. The cleansing of the temple. John II, 13-16. "And the Jews' passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and found in the temple those what sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting". With this we must compare the mysteries of Attis, where the priests in their excitement would dash through the town, lashing everybody with whips, in some cases with the very knives which they had just used to mutilate themselves, none daring to resist them. There may be some connection with the use of the flail in threshing; or, more likely, the waving of the whip is a symbol of the motion of reaping; but I only offer this as a conjecture. The reader will agree that it is hardly probable that the merchants in the temple, a numerous body of persons surrounded by active slaves of great physical strength, would have permitted a single man armed only with a "scourge of small cords" to drive them all out. As a history the story is absurd; as part of a sacred custom it falls into line at once. Just in the same way, one would instantly knock down a man who threw paper at one in the street; but, at Mardi Gras, one only laughs, and throws a lot more back.<> And we see immediately the close connection of this rite of scourging the people with the great central mystery of the whole life of the God. The very next verses explain it. Jesus does {182} "these things" for a very good reason. 7. The prophecy of death and resurrection. John II, 18-21. "Then answered the Jews and said unto him, what sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things? Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?" Now there is no connection at all between the scourging and the `sign'. No sign is given; no excuse made. But if we take it symbolically as part of a ritual all becomes clear. "Why do you whip these people?" "I am the god who is to die and rise again." It is a sufficient answer. It is all part of the play. The temple cannot be destroyed and raised again until the other part of the formula has been fulfilled. I cannot go into the whole history of flagellation -- that most popular of British sports -- but besides the explanation offered above, there is that of the "Hekas Hekas Este Bebeloi", the warning of the profane to depart from the vicinity. In New Guinea a bull-roarer is whirled around the head, and all uninitiate flee from the sound. This seems to me the most probable explanation, if the other be rejected. A moment's pause. Let us go over these points again. We have 1. A birth ) not given 2. A hiding in `darkness') in John 3. A baptism with water and fire. 4. A hailing, thrice repeated. 5. A supper where water becomes wine. {183} 6. A scourging. 7. A death and resurrection foretold. Now all this occurs on the very first appearance of Jesus; for in John 1 and 2 are missing. The Baptism takes place, then, "the next day after" (John I, 35) John and two disciples proclaim him King and god; "The day following (John I, 43) Phillip and Nathaniel follow suit. "The third day" there is a marriage, and Jesus makes wine; and then, after "not many days" John II, 12. as soon in fact as "The Jews' passover was at hand" (John II, 13 comes the final scene.) There are therefore seven incidents in John's `ritual'; 1. The baptism. 2. The first hailing. 3. The second hailing. 4. The third hailing. 5. The making of the wine. 6. The scourging. 7. The prophecy of death. To any one acquainted with ritual there is a formal feeling about this. It was usual in the ancient mysteries to have a sort of prologue which played the drama in petto, as it were to prepare the mind of the candidate for the real thing. Or the mysteries were played beneath a deeper veil for the postulants to lesser grades. (The High grade mason will note that the third degree is a veil for the eighteenth; and the 18th for the 30th.) Now if we were to find these same stage directions, as we must now call them, repeated on a larger scale later on, it would confirm {184} our view mightily. I particularly beg the reader to observe the crowding of these symbolic incidents together, beginning a few days before the passover and ending at that date; and to note well also that nothing of this kind takes place at all for the whole of the Gospel, until the last Passover is at hand, in Chapter XII. In the interval Jesus is the conventional worker of miracles, and dispenser of discourses; there is nothing in any way to suggest ceremonial. But the events at the end of his life are crowded into a few days, just like those which we have considered above. "The Greater Mysteries." (Just as John omits the Virgin Birth, he also omits the Transfiguration which corresponds with it in intention in the end of the matter.) 1. The anointing. (Six days before the Passover) John XII, 1-3, 7. "Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this." It is the custom to wash the newborn child (neophyte); it is the custom to anoint the dying with oil. It is also the custom to annoint a king with oil before proclaiming and crowning him. 2. The Proclamation. (Five days before the Passover.) John XII, 12-15. "On the next day such people that were come {185} to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, Took branches of the palm tree, and went forth to meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord. And Jesus, when he had found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is written." The reader will observe how closely this corresponds to the `hailing' in John 1; but it is more ceremonial. Compare Frazer (Adonis (Attis) Osiris, 3rd edition, Vol. 1. 266) "Certainly the Romans were familiar with the Galli, the emasculated priests of Attis, before the close of the Republic. These unsexed beings, in their Oriental costume, with little images suspended on their breasts, appear to have been a familiar sight in the streets of Rome, which they traversed in procession, carrying the image of the goddess and chanting their hymns to the music of cymbals and tambourines, flutes and horns, while the people, impressed by the fantastic show and moved by the wild strains, flung alms to them in abundance, and buried the image and its bearers under showers of roses." Dionysus, too, came from Syria and India riding upon an ass, attended by satyrs and nymphs in triumphal procession who hailed him Saviour and God. Now comes a further proclamation. John XII, 28. "Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again." (If Jesus had really made an entry of this sort into Jerusalem where a small Roman garrison was terrorizing a seditious and fanatical populace, Pilate would have needed no {186} urging to crucify Jesus, and a few score of the ringleaders as part of an annual carnival, it would be harmless.) Here heaven as well as earth is made to bear witness to the divinity of Jesus (Compare the record of fire and water in the Virgin Birth and in the Baptism. Fire represents heaven, water earth, in ancient symbolism.) 3. The Last Supper. John XIII, 4, 5. "He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded." Here ritualism is evidently in full swing. The new King accepts office by performing this menial function. Jesus himself then gives the cue to Judas to betray him (John XIII, 21, 26, 30.) "When Jesus had thus said, he was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas Iscariot, the Son of Simon. He then having received the sop went immediately out: and it was night." It is an amazing fact that John makes no mention whatsoever of the "institution of the Eucharist" as given in the Synoptics, but replaces it by this bewitchment of Judas, and that though he is very minute in detail, filling five of his twenty one chapters with the account of the supper. The account in Mark is a follows: (Mark XIV, 22-25.) "And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took {187} the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many." Here we have the Greater Mystery corresponding to the Lesser Mystery told in the supper at Cana. The story now becomes very confused in many ways; its main points are familiar to all readers, and one may forbear to quote in detail. 4. The Scourging. (Mark XIV, 65, XV, 15, 19, John XVIII, 22, XIX, 1, etc.) Note that Dionysus was tried, insulted, and scourged by Pentheus. This whole scene in the Bacchae is extraordinarily like the trial of Jesus. Jesus is also led before the religious and royal authorities -- the persons in fact whose godship and kingship he has taken on himself that he may die in their place -- and they condemn him to death. Here we must refer again to the magical reason of the sacrifice, which is to renew the powers of the king, or of the corn. The sham King is therefore condemned, and at the same time the executive officer (in this case Pilate) whether or not he realizes that this magic is rather a cruel business, ceremonially washes his hands of it lest the ghost of the victim should get back at him. We must now pass to the ceremonial robing and crowning of the mock King, already explained, and to the final scene of crucifixion. In this latter we get the solar symbolism introduced almost for the first time, for previously there has been little to suggest it but the twelve disciples, one of them a traitor and accurst, {188} which recall the twelve signs of the Zodiac which surround the Sun, one of them (Scorpio) being astrologically considered treacherous and fatal. The bar of the crucifix is the equator, which the Sun surmounts at the Vernal Equinox when Jesus is said to have died. We must here really quote Frazer; "Attis, Adonis, Osiris"<>, pp. 301-310. "Among the gods of eastern origin who in the decline of the ancient world competed against each other for the allegiance of the West was the old Persian deity Mithra. The immense popularity of his worship is attested by the monuments illustrative of it which have been found scattered in profusion all over the Roman Empire. In respect both of doctrines and of rites the cult of Mithra appears to have presented many points of resemblance not only to the religion of the Mother of the Gods but also to Christianity. The similarity struck the Christian doctors themselves, and was explained by them as a work of the devil, who sought to seduce the souls of men from the true faith by a false and insidious imitation of it. So to the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru many of the native heathen rites appeared to be diabolical counterfeits of the Christian sacraments. With more probability the modern student of comparative religion traces such resemblances to the similar and independent-<> workings of the mind of man in his sincere, if crude, attempts to fathom the secret of the universe, and to adjust his little life to its awful mysteries. However that may be, there {189} can be no doubt that the Mithraic religion proved a formidable rival to Christianity, combining as it did a solemn ritual with aspirations after moral purity and a hope of immortality. Indeed the issue of the conflict between the two faiths appears for a time to have hung in the balance. An instructive relic of the long struggle is preserved in our festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to have borrowed directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian calendar the twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that turning-point in the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at midnight they issued a loud cry, "The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing~!" The Egyptians even represented the newborn sun by the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers. No doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental goddess whom the Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess; in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte. Now Mithra was regularly identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the Unconquered Sun, as they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of December. The gospels say nothing as to the day of Christ's birth, and accordingly the early Church did not celebrate it. In time, however, the Christians of Egypt came to regard the sixth of January as the date of the Nativity, and the custom of {190} commemorating the birth of the Saviour on that day gradually spread until by the fourth century the Western Church, which had never recognized the sixth of January as the day of the Nativity, adopted the twenty-fifth of December as the true date, and in time its decision was accepted also by the Eastern Church. At Antioch the change was not introduced till about the year 375 A.D. What considerations let the ecclesiastical authorities to institute the festival of Christmas? The motives for the innovation are stated with great frankness by a Syrian writer, himself a Christian. "The reason", he tells us, "why the Fathers transferred the celebration of the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December was this. It was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth of January. Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has prevailed of kindling fires till the sixth." The heathen origin of Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on account of him, who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great rebuked the pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnized because of the birth of the new sun, as it was called, and not because of the nativity of Christ. {191} Thus it appears that the Christian Church chose to celebrate the birthday of its founder on the twenty-fifth of December in order to transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun to him who was called the Sun of Righteousness. If that was so, there can be no intrinsic improbability in the conjecture that motives of the same sort may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the Eastern festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which fell at the same season. Now the Easter rite still observed in Greece, Sicily, and southern Italy bear in some respects a striking resemblance to the rites of Adonis, and I have suggested that the Church may have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ. But this adaptation probably took place in the Greek-speaking rather than in the Latin-speaking parts of the ancient world; for the worship of Adonis, while it flourished among the Greeks, appears to have made little impression on Rome and the West. Certainly it never formed part of the official Roman religion. The place which it might have taken in the affections of the vulgar was already occupied by the similar but more barbarous worship of Attis and the Great Mother. Now the death and resurrection of Attis were official celebrated at Rome on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of March, the latter being regarded as the spring equinox, and therefore as the most appropriate day for the revival of a god of vegetation who had been dead or sleeping throughout the winter. But according to an ancient and widespread tradition Christ suffered on the twenty-fifth of March, {192} and accordingly some Christians regularly celebrated the crucifixion on that day without any regard to the state of the moon. This custom was certainly observed in Phrygia, Cappadocia, and Gaul, and there seem to be grounds for thinking that at one time it was followed also in Rome. Thus the tradition which placed the death of Christ on the twenty-fifth of March was ancient and deeply rooted. It is all the more remarkable because astronomical considerations<> prove that it can have no historical foundation. The inference appears to be inevitable that the passion of Christ must have been arbitrarily referred to that date in order to harmonize with an older festival of the spring equinox. This is the view of the learned ecclesiastical historian Mgr. Duchesne, who points out that the death of the Saviour was thus made to fall upon the very date on which, according to a widespread belief, the world had been created. But the resurrection of Attis, who combined in himself the characters of the divine Father and the divine Son, was officially celebrated at Rome on the same day. When we remember that the festival of St. George in April has replaced the ancient pagan festival of the Parilia; that the festival of St. John the Baptist in June has succeeded to a heathen Midsummer festival of Water; that the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin in August has ousted the festival of Diana; that the feast of All souls in November is a continuation of an old heathen feast of the dead; and that the Nativity of Christ himself was assigned to the winter solstice in {193} December because that day was deemed the Nativity of the Sun; we can hardly be thought rash or unreasonable in conjecturing that the other cardinal festival of the Christian Church -- the solemnization of Easter -- may have been in like manner, and from like motives of edification, adapted to a similar celebration of the Phrygian god Attis at the vernal equinox. At least it is a remarkable coincidence, if it is nothing more, that the Christian and the heathen festivals of the divine death and resurrection should have been solemnized at the same season and in the same places. For the places which celebrated the death of Christ at the spring equinox were Phygia, Gaul, and apparently Rome, that is, the very regions in which the worship of Attis either originated or struck deepest root. It is difficult to regard the coincidence as purely accidental. If the vernal equinox, the season at which in the temperate regions the whole face of nature testifies to a fresh out-burst of vital energy, had been viewed from of old as the time when the world was annually created afresh in the resurrection of a god, nothing could be more natural than to place the resurrection of the new deity at the same cardinal point of the year. Only it is to be observed that if the death of Christ was dated on the twenty-fifth of March, his resurrection, according to Christian tradition, must have happened on the twenty-seventh of March, which is just two days later than the vernal equinox of the Julian calender and the resurrection of Attis. A similar displacement of two days occurs in the festivals of St. George and the Assumption of the Virgin. However, another Christian tradition, followed by Lactantius and perhaps by the practice of the {194} church in Gaul, placed the death of Christ on the twenty-third and his resurrection of the twenty-fifth of March. If that was so, his resurrection coincides exactly with the resurrection of Attis. In point of fact it appears from the testimony of (an) anonymous Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ. In these unseemly bickerings the heathens took what to a superficial observer might seem strong ground by arguing that their god was older and therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted, indeed, that in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly demonstrated his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature. Taken together, the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental. They mark the compromise which the church in the hour of its triumph was compelled to make with its vanquished yet still dangerous rivals." This passage is extremely illuminating on the whole question of dates, and has the further merit of explaining the interpolation {195} of the story of the Virgin Birth. With regard to the eating of the god after his adornment and murder, see again Frazer "The Dying God" page 55. "Among the Jaintias or Syntengs, a Khasi tribe of Assam, human sacrifices used to be annually offered on the Sandhi day in the month of Ashwin. Persons often came forward voluntarily and presented themselves as victims. This they generally did by appearing before the Rajah on the last day of Shravan and declaring that the goddess had called them to herself. After due enquiry, if the would-be victim was found suitable, it was customary for the Rajah to present him with a gold anklet and to give him permission to live as he chose and do what he liked, the royal treasury undertaking to pay compensation for any damage he might do in the exercise of these remarkable privileges. But the enjoyment of these privileges was very short. On the day appointed the voluntary victim, after bathing and purifying himself was dressed in a new attire, daubed with red sandal-wood and vermilion, and bedecked with garlands. Thus arrayed, he sat for a time in meditation and prayer on a dais in front of the goddess; then he made a sign with his finger, and the executioner, after uttering the usual formulas, cut off his head, which was thereafter laid before the goddess on a golden plate. The lungs were cooked and eaten by such Kandra Yogis as were present, and it is said that the royal family partook of a small quantity of rice cooked in the blood of the victim." With regard to the reason why it must be that the `first-be-gotten son of the Father' of all should thus be slain, we refer once more to the same great authority in The Dying god, the whole {196} section on the Sacrifice of the King's son, of which we take the liberty of quoting a few short passages only. Page 160. "A point to notice about the temporary kings described in the foregoing chapter is that in two places (Cambodia and Jambi) they come of a stock which is believed to be akin to the royal family. If the view here taken of the origin of these temporary kingships is correct, we can easily understand why the king's substitute should sometimes be of the same race as the king. When the king first succeeded in getting the life of another accepted as a sacrifice instead of his own, he would have to shew that the death of that other would serve the purpose quite as well as his own would have done. Now it was a god or demigod that the king had to die; therefore the substitute who died for him had to be invested, at least for the occasion, with the divine attributes of the king. This, as we have just seen, was certainly the case with the temporary kings of Siam and Cambodia; they were invested with the supernatural functions, which in an earlier stage of society were the special attributes of the king. But no one could so well represent the king in his divine character as his son, who might be supposed to share the divine afflatus of his father. No one, therefore, could so appropriately die for the king and, through him, for the whole people as the king's son." Page 176-177. "The one thing that looms clear through the haze of this weird tradition is the memory of a great massacre of firstborn. This was the origin, we are told, both of the sanctity of the firstborn and of the feast of the Passover. But when we are further told that the people whose firstborn were slaughtered on that occasion were not the Hebrews but their enemies, we are at {197} once met by serious difficulties. Why, we may ask, should the Israelites kill the firslings of their cattle for ever because God once killed those of the Egyptians? and why should every Hebrew father have to pay God a ransom for his firstborn child because God once slew all the firstborn children of the Egyptians? In this form the tradition offers no intelligible explanation of the custom. But it at once becomes clear and intelligible when we assume that in the original version of the story it was the Hebrew firstborn that were slain; that in fact the slaughter of the firstborn children was formerly, what the slaughter of the firstborn cattle always continued to be, not an isolated butchery but a regular custom, which with the growth of more humane sentiments was afterward softened into the vicarious sacrifice of a lamb and the payment of a ransom for each child. Here the reader may be reminded of another Hebrew tradition in which the sacrifice of the firstborn child is indicated still more clearly. Abraham, we are informed, was commanded by God to offer up his firstborn son Isaac as a burnt sacrifice, and was on the point of obeying the divine command, when God, content with this proof of his faith and obedience, substituted for the human victim a ram, which Abraham accordingly scarified instead of his son. Putting the two traditions together and observing how exactly they dovetail into each other and into the later Hebrew practice of actually sacrificing the firstborn children by fire to Baal or Moloch, we can hardly resist the conclusion that, before the practice of redeeming them was introduced, the Hebrews, like the other branches of the Semitic race, regularly sacrificed their firstborn children by the fire or the knife. The Passover, {198} if this view is right, was the occasion when the awful sacrifice was offered; and the tradition of its origin has preserved in its main outlines a vivid memory of the horrors of these fearful nights." Page 178-179. "If this be indeed the origin of the Passover and of the sanctity of the firstborn among the Hebrews, the whole of the Semitic evidence on the subject is seen to fall into line at once. The children whom the Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Moabites, Sepharvites, and probably other branches of the Semitic race burnt in the fire would be their firstborn only, although in general ancient writers have failed to indicate this limitation of the custom. For the Moabites, indeed, the limitation is clearly indicated, if not expressly stated, when we read that the King of Moab offered his eldest son, who should have reigned after him, as a burnt sacrifice on the wall. For the Pheonicians it comes out less distinctly in the statement of Porphyry that the Phoenicians used to sacrifice one of their dearest to Baal, and in the legend recorded by Philo of Byblus that Cronus sacrificed his only-begotten son. We may suppose that the custom of sacrificing the firstborn both of men and animals was a very ancient Semitic institution, which many branches of the race kept up within historical times; but that the Hebrews, while they maintained the custom in regard to domestic cattle, were led by their loftier morality to discard it in respect of children, and to replace it by a merciful law that first born children should be ransomed instead of sacrificed." Page 194-195. "With the preceding evidence before us we may safely infer that a custom of allowing a king to kill his son, as {199} a substitute or vicarious sacrifice for himself, would be in now way exceptional or surprising, at least in Semitic lands, where indeed religion seems at one time to have recommended or enjoined every man, as a duty that he owed to his god, to take the life of his eldest son. And it would be entirely in accordance with analogy if, long after the barbarous custom had been dropped by others, it continued to be observed by kings, who remain in many respects the representatives of a vanished world, solitary pinnacles that topple over the rising waste of waters under which the past lies buried. We have seen that in Greece two families of royal descent remained liable to furnish human victims from their number down to a time when the rest of their fellow countrymen and country women ran hardly more risk of being sacrificed than passengers in Cheapside at present run of being hurried into St. Paul's or Bow Church and immolated on the altar. A final mitigation of the custom would be to substitute condemned criminals for innocent victims. Such a substitution is known to have taken place in the human sacrifices annually offered in Rhodes to Baal, and we have seen good grounds for believing that the criminal, who perished on the cross or the gallows at Babylon, died instead of the king in whose royal robes he had been allowed to masquerade for a few days." Further evidence with regard to the custom of hanging the god upon a tree is given in "Attis, Adonis, Osiris."<> We again quote. (Page 289-291.) "We may conjecture that in old days the priest who bore the name and played the part of Attis at the spring festival of Cybele was regularly hanged or otherwise slain upon the sacred tree, and that this barbarous custom was afterwards mitigated into the form in which it is known to us in later times, {200} when the priest merely draw blood from his body under the tree and attached an effigy instead of himself to its trunk. In the holy grove at Upsala men and animals were sacrificed by being hanged upon the sacred trees. The human victims dedicated to Odin were regularly put to death by hanging or by a combination of hanging and stabbing, the man being strung up to a tree or a gallows and then wounded with a spear. Hence Odin was called the Lord of the Gallows or the God of the Hanged, and he is represented sitting under a gallows tree. Indeed he is said to have been sacrificed to himself in the ordinary way, as we learn from the weird verses of the Havamal, in which the god describes how he acquired his divine power by learning the magic runes: `I know that I hung on the windy tree For nine whole nights, Wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin, Myself to myself.' The Bagobos of Mindanao, one of the Philipine Islands, used annually to sacrifice human victims for the good of the crops in a similar way. Early in December, when the constellation Orion appeared at seven o'clock in the evening, the people knew that the time had come to clear their fields for sowing and to sacrifice a slave. The sacrifice was presented to certain powerful spirits as payment for the good year which the people had enjoyed, and to ensure the favour of the spirits for the coming season. The victim was led to a great tree in the forest; there he was tied with his back to the tree and his arms stretched high above his head, in the attitude in which ancient artists portrayed Marsyas hanging on the fatal tree. While he thus hung by the arms he was slain by a spear thrust through his body at the level of the armpits." {201} We need hardly proceed. Every detail of the death of Jesus appears as the essential in some ritual or other of some earlier faith. We need not trouble the reader with similar parallels to the resurrection: we trust that the tests which we have offered him will induce him to make the Golden Bough the chief cornerstone of this religious library. It will be objected that we have proved almost too much, that we have had to mingle the rites of Attis with those of Osiris; we have traced one incident to the worship of Dionysus, another to that of Mithras or the Sun.<> << As an alternative answer to this criticism, may I briefly point out that the story of the Crucifixion is already told in the romance called The Book of Esther? There is a king Ahasuerus who has seven chamberlains (? The sun and the planets?) His queen Vashti (The Elamite goddess Mashti) refuses to show herself to the people, as any modest woman in the East would do. Ahasuerus was `merry with wine'. There are seven princes who propose to punish Vashti, who is accordingly deposed. The king then chooses a virgin named Esther (Ishtar or Ashtoreth or Asteria or Astarte, the regular name of the Goddess of those countries) adopted daughter of her cousin Mordecai (the local god Marduk) to be queen. Mordecai, doing a service to the king by revealing a conspiracy against him, on the part of two chamberlains, obtains favour through Esther; but he has a rival in Haman (The Elamite god Human) who is made `prince minister'. Haman tries to destroy all the Jews; Mordecai persuades Esther to come to the rescue. She orders all the Jews to fast and mourn for three days. At the end of this time Esther, pleasing the king, asks him and Haman to a banquet. Meanwhile Haman has prepared a gallows for Mordecai. The king, sleepless on the night before the banquet, reads history, and remembers that he has neglected to reward Mordecai for the service rendered him. Now comes the `comedy'. The king asks Haman what shall be done to the man whom the king delighteth to honour. Haman, thinking himself to be meant, recommends that the man should be dressed in the royal and crown, set on the king's own horse, and led through the city and proclaimed. The king orders Haman to do this to Mordecai; an excellent jest. Now comes the banquet, and Esther pleads for the Jews to be spared, accusing Haman. The king is angry and goes into the garden to walk it off. Haman, taking occasion by the hand to make {202 -- note continues} the bounds of freedom yet wider pleads for his life with Esther by attempting to violate her. At this he is caught by Ahasuerus, who forthwith orders Haman to be hanged on the gallows that he had built for Mordecai. The king gives the ring of office to Mordecai; the Jews slay all the regular subjects of Ahasuerus, instead of those subjects slaying them; and they all live happy ever after. In commemoration of these events the Jews established the feast of Purim. This story is evidently a romance in which myth is adapted to, and incorporated in an historical background. We have the same materials as for our Columbine, Harlequin, and Pantaloon. (Note especially the costume of Harlequin.) The essential features of it are much older than the romance; they -- are derived from the Babylonian Sacaea. Dio Chrystostom describes this festival in the following terms: "They take one of the prisoners condemned to death and seat him upon the king's throne, and give him the king's raiment, and let him lord it and drink and run riot and use the king's concubine's during these days, and no man prevents him from doing just what he likes. But afterwards they strip and scourge and crucify him." Compare this with the events of "Holy Week." There is in short no doubt that among the Jews themselves there was a festival of the `slain god', adopted during the Babylonian captivity. For the main features of the crucifixion we have not therefore even to assume the influence of a foreign current. Purim, though a month earlier in the year, may have become assimilated in this respect with Passover, whose doctrine of the substituted sacrifice of a lamb for the firstborn is so similar to that of the substituted king. For those who object to seek any materials for the Gospels outside of Syria, it may be suggested that the gospel story was an attempt to fortify Judaism by an identification of the Babylonian and Hebrew festivals, just as people in recent years have tried to make `Empire Days' and such out of Sir John Lubbock's purely humanitarian `Bank Holidays'. It may possibly be objected that the important figure of Ishtar is lacking in the Jewish festival; but the revival of monotheism after the return from the captivity explains how this was dropped. The priests would see little harm in acquiescing in a mere `mock king' ceremony, of which the religious import was obsolescent, or even not only kept alive the memory of a fabled racial glory, but was closely connected with their own old annual festival of the scapegoat. In Leviticus XVI, 1 we read: "And the Lord spake unto Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they offered before the Lord and died. And he shall take of the congregation of the children of Israel two kids of the goats for a sin offering, and one ram for a burnt offering. And he shall take the two goats and present them before the Lord, at the door of the Tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats, one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat, upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot {203 --- note concludes and text resumes} fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness. Purim means lots, and the reference is evidently to the expiation here described. Here one goat is Haman, the other Mordecai; one Jesus, the other Barabbas. I am indebted to Dr. J.G. Frazer for the outlines of this note, and would refer the reader to his full and most able discussion of the whole subject in the `Scapegoat' volume of The Golden Bough; but I have been bold enough to make several independent suggestions which it is hoped may do away with some of the difficulties of the subject.>> The point is excellent; but it proves our contention. Recall now what was said at the beginning of this section with regard to the political condition of the period. The local gods did very well while travel was rare; but as their devotees began to wander upon the face of the earth a clash was imminent. The priests took counsel together, in `the way they have in the' priesthood! They decided upon the only possible course, to devise a composite rite, with a composite story to suit it. Each priest, by the slightest modification of his own ritual, could join the `trust', and keep or even increase his revenues. Quod erat faciendum. It may be observed that a precisely similar process was carried out in ancient Egypt in circumstances of a like kind. The corn-nymph was identified with the moon-goddess and the Nile goddess and the Mother-goddess, and labelled Isis, all to her advantage. "Not only does Isis ripen your wheat", the priest would explain, "it is her tears that swell the Nile; it is her light that guides you in the night; it is she that gives you children." Hence the formation of groups of `thirty-three superior gods', presently `enneads', then `triads', and finally the resolution of the three into one, while yet keeping them separate, by the doctrine of {204} the Trinity. We now see, then, Jesus as a harmonizer between all these conflicting cults. The reader will naturally remark that all this is very fine, but it is only an hypotheses, and he would like some evidence that it was actually carried out. Fortunately we have something of the sort to offer. In the first place the silence of John and Mark with regard to the birth of Jesus is explained in the simplest manner. We have only to suppose that these were the earlier gospels and failed to satisfy certain sects, whose central celebration involved the legend of a mysterious birth. In order to secure the adhesion of these people, it would only be necessary to incorporate their rite; and instructions would immediately be given to insert these into the gospels, or into some subsidiary religious documents such as the calender. Now we have actual examples that this was done. Frazer says, in the first volume of The Golden Bough. "We can hardly doubt that the Saint Hippolytus of the Roman Calendar who was dragged by horses to death on the thirteenth of August, Diana's own day, is no other than the Greek hero of the same name, who after dying twice over as a heathen sinner has been happily resuscitated as a Christian saint." This is by no means the only example. We find in the same volume: "Perhaps then the images of cattle found in Diana's precinct at Nemi were offered to her by herdsmen to ensure her blessing on their herds. In Catholic Germany at the present time the great patron of cattle, horses, and pigs is St. Leonhard, and {205} models of cattle, horses, and pigs are dedicated to him, sometimes in order to ensure the health and increase of the flocks and herds through the coming year, sometimes in order to obtain the recovery of sick animals. And curiously enough, like Diana of Aricia, St. Leonhard is also expected to help women in travail and bless barren wives with offspring. Nor do these points exhaust the analogy between St. Leonhard and Diana or Aricia; for like the goddess the saint heals the sick; he is the patron of prisoners, as she was of runaway slaves; and his shrines, like hers, enjoyed the right of asylum." These are only two of very many cases. Even gods like Bacchus and Priapus were turned into saints. Not only do we find identity or similarity of name, but also of legend. If the god was accompanied by twenty-four nymphs, there would be twenty-four virgins to minister to the saint. If he had a company of fauns the saint would have a corresponding number of martyrs. If he was represented as the patron of some particular fish the saint would do some miracle, with regard to that fish, which would suggest the pagan story. When therefore we see in quite a historical way, despite the obvious interests of the church in concealing or masking the transaction, that the lesser religions were deliberately incorporated in Christianity by slightly editing their legends and their rites, it is quite a reasonable corollary that this was merely an extension of the original process. But why Jesus? the reader still queries. Because the Jesus whom Paul preached was popular with the democracy. Christianity was at first the religion of criminals and slaves. Its salvation {206} was dirt cheap. In the gradual decay of the Roman Empire the sacred priesthood had no choice but to attach the name and tradition of Jesus to their already modified rites. Only by this means could they refill their emptying temples, replenish their depleted coffers, and re-establish their waning power and influence. As Mr. Shaw says, Faith without Works, in the sense of payment to the priests, did the trick. It was the people, not the enemy, whom Constantine feared; it was them that he conquered `in this sign'. Even so it was long before the new Empire of the Papacy built up its power. The arts, the sciences, learning, literature, all fell into darkness; men knew no longer whence Jesus had arisen; they became so ignorant that they accepted the phantastic miracle story, with all its absurdities and contradictions, literally; and even the Renaissance, with its return to Pagan light and leading, the foundation of all that is good in modern civilization, left the Teutonic savages of Prussia and England still in the gloom, lit only by rare flashes of those who loved the Greeks, of that charnel where the mass of the people pullulate --- unto this day. "The Fabrication of the Final Canon of the Gospel." In this (I fear) somewhat over lengthy disquisition the reader may have lost the sense of the proportions of the argument. It will now be convenient to reweave the threads more closely, summarizing the positions taken, and surveying the field of battle as a whole. If the reader will take his Testament in hand, and make a synopsis {207} of the statements recorded, he will find a very striking circumstance. There are three main sections, and three only, of the Life of Jesus. First comes the birth-story; we have already discarded this as an evident interpolation, since even Paul (and probably Peter and John) were either totally ignorant of the existence of any such fable, or utterly incredulous of, and hostile to, it. Next comes the life of the wandering preacher, and finally, like a thunderclap, the tragedy, from "Palm Sunday" to the Resurrection. These two do not dovetail at all well and a study of their sources will explain why. Also we shall see how they came to be pieced together. We may call them the Life, and the Death, of Jesus; and we will analyse them seriatim. "The Life of Jesus." The whole misunderstanding of the Bible is due to the fact that it is an Eastern Vine planted in a Western garden. If Mr. Shaw (with all his ability and learning) is in the same quagmire as the most ignorant peasant in Lincolnshire, it is due to the fact that he has never been to the East to live. The incidents -- the simplest incidents -- of the Gospel are as strange to him as fairy tales. People in Eastern cities remove their shoes or sandals on entering a house; not because of any weird superstition, but because no provision is made by sanitary authorities for removing the excreta of animals from the streets. The city of Yunnan-Fu is many feet above the surface of a perfectly flat plain. It is not on a hill, but on its centuries of refuse. There is no `strange Eastern religion' about Sati or, as Englishmen usually spell it Sutee; {208} it is common sense. Hindu `wives cook their husbands', and the only way to prevent a woman from poisoning her good man is to prevent her from surviving his funeral. If you wish to shock a Christian very badly indeed, get him to picture -- to visualize -- Jesus at meat, his hands unwashed (Matthew VII, 2<>, Luke XI, 38) Yogis will not wash, because the ceremonial Law of the orthodox is so strict they should do so; this being universal in the east, it is also universal for dirt to be a sign of sancitity. Now imagine Jesus dipping one of the said hands in the dish with eleven other "very imperfect ablutioners." If this fail, give him a few more intimate Eastern details; explain exactly why cleanliness in cooking and eating is so vitally important in such countries as Syria. The understanding of Eastern customs is imperative, if the life of Jesus is to be truly imagined and realized. A few years travel in India and North Africa familiarizes one with the atmosphere, and it is to smile when people talk of the `wonderful life' of Jesus. By every roadside in India you may find a holy man today -- you might have found me in 1901! -- who is living exactly the life recorded of Jesus. He begs his food, or else `women minister to him of their substance' (Luke VIII, 3.) just as happens to the idle and vicious rascals who come out of India to America and England to pose as `yogis' at the expense of lazy and good-for-nothing society women in search of a new fad. Only, in India, the support of yogis is decent and honourable. The men are really saints, and demand nothing but a little rice and curry. You can support one for a year on the price of a lunch at the Claridge. {209} Most yogis in India are solitaries. Very likely they have a vow of silence. But in some few the itch of teaching works, and they wander from place to place picking up disciples. Now and then they go mad under the strain of the life, or the use of drugs, or the abuse of religious ecstasies, become ferocious run `amok' perhaps do murder, perhaps attack the temple of a rival sect on some pretext, or try to reform their own temples in some such violent way as Jesus took with the money-changers. Sometimes they get politically drunk, and start a campaign against the powers that be. Every Indian official will tell you what a plague such men often become; half the raids on the frontier are due to some such `exalte'. England at large (even) has heard of the Madhi, and the Mad Mullah, and the Senussi, and perhaps even in older days of the Druses and the Old Man of the Mountain, with his Hashish-maddened disciples, from whom we have our word `assassin'. The good people of England may be shocked to hear that there is not a penny to choose between such men and their idolized Jesus. But it is the fact. All these men have their disciples, and their following of women -- usually loose women, hermits and holy men having a great reputation everywhere for sexual prowess. They have their sayings, they make up their parables and fables to amuse their followers by the camp-fire at nightfall, they do their miracles, and fulfil the ancient prophecies in exactly the same way as Jesus did. The complaints of the Pharisees against Jesus are the stock complaints of the Orthodox in India to-day against the Yogis. They omit ceremonial washings; they eat filthy food; they take no heed of religious festivals or of the prescriptions of the Rishis and {210} other great teachers. They care nothing for caste; they are shiftless, idle, and vagabond; they pray instead of working; and so on. Similarly, nine-tenths of the injunctions of Jesus are aimed at the most cherished rules or fads of the Pharisees; and so are most of the Wise sayings of the `holy man' of India and all Islam to-day. + The little dialogues in which Jesus refutes the Scribes and Pharisees are extremely characteristic. The Oriental loves to have his `darwesh' outwit the heckler. Every Eastern story-teller has (a) hundred such in his repertoire. Here is a sample. A certain king asks a darwesh: "How is it possible that Iblis (Satan), who is made of fire, should be tormented by fire?" The holy man picks up a clod of earth and throws it at the king, who howls. "What! impossible!" exclaims the darwesh, "you who are made of earth cannot be hurt by earth." Here the saint has the right end both of the argument and of the brick. The type of story is as common as the desert sand itself. What Mr. Shaw calls the `comic miraculous overdraught of fishes' is also an absolutely universal story. The greedy man tries to exploit the powers of the thaumaturgist, and has his prayer granted to his own confusion. There is hardly a book of Fairy Tales in the world that has not some such story. One need only mention Ingoldsby's tale of Laybrother Peter and the beer.<> It is of the very root of the tree of primitive comicality; greed or pride or some such quality o'erleaping itself and falling on the other, the engineer hoist with his own petard. It is better than a true story; it is a story of All Truth, to use the admirable distinguish of Hermes Trismegistus. {211} But there is no reason why we should pick out one set of miracles, one set of parables, one set of dialogues, and yell "Unique!" It is not even worth our while to prove that the Sermon on the Mount is stolen from the Talmud; it might have been stolen from anywhere. Go now to any holy man from Marrakesh to Tali-Fu, and get him talking. Inquire further concerning his miracles from the villagers, `take thy pen, sit down quickly and write' another gospel like Luke's or John's according to your literary ability. It will not be material that is lacking. Show me any collection of the sayings of such men, and I will show you the ideas, even the very phrases, of your Jesus. Read the Tao Teh King on nonresistance, the Bhagavad-Gita on faith and devotion, the Dhammapada on right conduct, the questions of King Milinda on metaphysical puzzles, the Jataka for parables, the Upanishads for high theology; then find a saying of Jesus which is not explicit in some one or more of them! More, take an anthology of the whole collection; ask some person unfamiliar with religion to pick out the sayings of Jesus, and to build up a coherent and consistent system of philosophy, theology, and ethics from them. It would be easier to spin ropes of sand. The Bible itself testifies to the universality of the wandering `holy man', and his aptitude for the founding of sects and communities. (Acts XXI, 38, and elsewhere) The evidence that Jesus was such a `holy man' or `yogi' has been worked out in the utmost detail by another of the same guild, known to the initiated as Shri Parananda, and to the profane as the Hon. P. Ramanathan C.M.G. Solicitor General of Ceylon, in two commentaries, one on Matthew {212} and one on John. These books are unquestionably the most illuminating ever written on the life of Jesus, being written, as it were, from inside information. Any doubt of the truth of the theory put forward in this essay that may remain in the mind of any unprejudiced thinker must immediately be dispelled forever by a study of these two books. This thesis being accepted, we may formulate it thus: Jesus was the most popular of the `holy men' of Syria of his time, and his sayings were already being collected by a scribe. In the case of John's gospel, we have another `holy man', this time of the Essene persuasion. There is also what is to my mind a very minor portrait in the group, that of the orthodox Jew who wished merely to restore the strict law of Moses, or even to tighten its bonds. This is compatible either with Yogi, or with Essene. Finally, there is the attempt to identify Jesus with the Messiah, which has no basis in any of the stories recorded of the sayings or doings of Jesus. "The Death of Jesus." At the age of ten I was ambitious. I had gained a prize for `distinction in Religious Knowledge, Classics, and French', and already felt myself a marked man. Now I perceived a difficulty in the Scriptures. The beginning of my fall? I could not see how any one could be three days and three nights in the grave between Friday night and Sunday morning. I took my trouble to one of the masters, who admitted his own perplexity upon the point. It never occurred to him to doubt the story at all; he simply {213} said that no one had been able to explain it. Then and there I resolved to astonish the world. Alas for boyish ambitions; the problem is still unsolved, though I think that it might be tackled by the aid of Christian mathematics, beginning with the famous Trinitarian Equation. But make one assumption, and the difficulty disappears. Suppose that the whole story of the Crucifixion is not a record of fact, but the scenario of a sacred drama or ritual of initiation. Have we any grounds for making such an assumption? The reader must be referred to Dr. J.G. Frazer, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, and J.M. Robertson for the general analogy between the crucifixion story and those of Egypt, India, Mexico, Peru and a dozen other places. But Mr. Robertson argues the case specifically in this matter of "Unity of Time". He shows how absurd it is to suppose that the Procurator held his courts at midnight: all Eastern cities being still after sunset, except on certain festivals, for festival purposes of music and dancing. He shows how incident is crowdedupon incident, without reason, all with the evident necessity of getting the drama confined to a given number of hours. It is impossible to quote his proof in detail, for it is as elaborate as it is cogent. It is permissible however to call attention to several very astonishing facts. The entire symbolism of the Jesus who died and rose again is astrological and mystic in its minutest points. The incident of the anointing, which is a regular part of any ritual, like the ceremonial purification elsewhere recorded; the "man bearing a pitcher of water" (Luke XXII, 10) which suggests {214} the Zodical sign of Aquarius; the command of Jesus (Luke XXII, 36-38); to furnish swords which were not to be used, however (Luke XXII, 50, 51); the ceremonial robings and crownings and scourgings; all these things suggest a drama and not a history; a symbolic representation of John Barleycorn; not at all the record of what happened to any one man, but of what happens to all men. The mere facts of the Nativity at the Winter Solstice, and the Crucifixion at the Equinox of Spring, suggest the birth of the year and the elevation of the Sun above the equator, which was pictorially represented exactly in this way long before the time of Pilate. The reader can find in a Dictionary of Antiquities many pre-Christian pictures of a crucified man or a slain bull. Sometimes he is between two `thieves', one saved and the other damned, as shown by the one being represented anatomically and in a state of joy and excitement, the other as depressed and gloomy. Sometimes he is between the Sun and Moon also, or in their stead. Usually, at the foot of the cross, is a skull (Golgatha, see Mark XV, 22.) Sometimes, the equivalent of the thieves is given by a palm tree and a cornucopia; sometimes, the figure of the crucified is replaced by an egg about which a snake is twined, or a cross on which a snake hangs. (Numbers XXI, 8). The original Calvary, a tree on a hill, goes back to the cave-man himself. Compare, too, Exodus XVII, 11, 12, where, to prevail against Amalek, the hands of Moses were held up by a man on either side of him. There are dozens of variations upon this theme, but the symbols are always equivalent. The subject of the picture or the story is always the same; it is the eternal miracle of abounding life, ever self-restored, triumphant over death, the return {215} of the Sun and the resurrection of the Seed, which makes even George Bernard Shaw, professional sceptic, iconoclast of romance, scourge of poets, break out into lyrical prose "he will not resist you nor reproach you, but will rise again in golden beauty amidst a great burst of sunshine and bird music, and save you and renew your life." It is indeed a triumph for Solar-Phallic worship to add to the names of General Forlong, Sir Richard Burton, Sir R. Payne Knight, Messrs. Hargrave Jennings, Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey and Theodor Reuss the name of Bernard Shaw! It has been impossible in so few brief words even to glance at the evidence for this view that the Story of the Death of Jesus is merely a variation intended to epitomize many older variations of a ritual of commemoration of the mysterious activities of the Father of All in Macrocosm and in Microcosm. To present the evidence at all fully mean(s) the reproduction of many thousands of buildings, monuments, sculptures, pictures -- everything in short `movable or immoveable under the Canopy of Heaven', whereon the Master Mason has written, indited, carved, marked, engraved, or otherwise there delineated', and thousands of pages of parallel passages from the rituals of Dionysus and Attis to those of Set and Quetzlacoatl. The work has been done, and the conclusions are as certain as anything can be in human knowledge; and despite the Spanish proverb "De las cosas mas seguras, mas seguro es duvidar", the reader may rely on them. Every new fact that comes under his notice will enlarge and confirm his confidence. Enough then of the death of Jesus; he dies and is reborn in the life of man and the life of the year; {216} and he was wrong when he said "The poor ye have always with you, but me ye have not always", and a thousand times right when he said "Lo I am with you always even unto the end of the world. Amen." "The Unnatural Wedding." A few words upon the psychology of the people. In Syria 2000 years ago, as in London to-day, there were people who go to church like sheep, not knowing so much as the nature of the doctrines they are supposed to hold, and others who were like those modern Christians who think a little, and prefer the Rev. R.J. Campbell to the Rev. F.B. Meyer, or the `Gloomy Dean' to the `Boisterous Bishop'. In India to-day there are many who pay strict reverence to custom, and have only vague and distant admiration (sometimes, indeed, contempt) for the `holy men' who deliberately violate convention in order to prove superior sanctity. Jesus, the Jesus of Mr. Shaw, appealed naturally to the rarer class that knows a little of Yoga, and appreciates it. Now, when Paul came to the throne he found these people, and these people only, already `Christians'. His dream of world-dominion asked for more. He needed orthodox Jews, and he needed Gentiles. Having himself been an orthodox Jew, he at first regarded the idea of converting them as chimerical, called them all the bad names he could lay his tongue to, went out with a gun loaded exclusively for Gentiles, proved himself a Roman citizen free-born, broke with Peter because he avoided dining with Gentiles when certain visitors from James came to see him (Galatians XI, 11-14<>) and generally acted as though he hoped never to see a Jew again. {217} But whether the Gentile campaign went badly, or whether he found some unexpected Jews in the bag, he suddenly changed front. He found a community of real Hebrews large enough to write to, and devoted an epistle to the most passionate endeavour to persuade them that Jesus was the real High Priest of Israel "after the order of Melchisedec." This policy of pleasing everybody was successful; and when it came to be desirable to issue histories of the movement, those in charge simply classified the world as they knew it, the Roman world, and saw to it that something was put in to suit everybody. Contradictions might arise, but who minds contradictions? Germany and the Critical Spirit were in their infancy. So, as there were patriotic Jews, they must be told that Jesus was the Messiah, of the seed of David; Talmudic Jews, who must be told that Jesus came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it; mystical and Qabalistic Jews, Gnostics and Pythagoreans and Platonists, who must have Jesus identified with the Logos, and the Wisdom by whom God made the world; Pagans, who must be made happy by the story of the Virgin Birth; worshippers of Attis, Adonis, and Osiris, who must see the eternal sacrifice and resurrection of Nature crystalized in Jesus; ascetics who must be told of renunciation, and voluptuaries who must be comforted with the doctrines of atonement; slaves who must have freedom preached to them, and masters who must be reassured that Caesar shall always have the things that are Caesar's; primitive folk such as loving hearing stories of miracles and prophecies fulfilled; metaphysical folk, who must be tickled with abstruse theological dogmas; literary folk, who enjoy witty {218} dialogues, and people with conviction of sin who want a Saviour. Whosoever will may come! The Gospels have something to please every single one of you. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Bless the bed that I lie on; and it doesn't matter who made the bed! The whole hotch-potch of the Testament is now explained in the simplest manner. Everything becomes natural and probable.<>) (We have the main story of the wandering `holy man' grafted with the story of John Barleycorn; St. John takes care of the Gnostic, metaphysical Platonist department of the business; add a few condiments for the minor sects; and there are the documents of a world-religion.) Additional elements of confusion are negligibly small, and such as would naturally have crept into manuscripts copied carelessly or ambitiously by scribes at any time in the presumed three centuries between the original writings of "Mark" and the first codex yet discovered. Such alleged earlier documents as the Logia help the present theory of exhibiting one of the two main sources of the legend apart from the other. The Gospels are therefore, in that sense of the word which most implies moral turpitude, forgeries; the legend has been deliberately pieced together of incongruous elements, like a mermaid at a country fair, in order to defraud the lieges. Backed by the power of the priests of the various religions in the `merger', the plan could not fail of success. Christianity spread by the very convenience of its {219} international character in a world whose keynote was becoming daily more that word of Horace: Luctantem Icarius fluctibus Africum Mercator metuens, otium, et oppidi, Laudat rura sui; mox reficit rateis Quassas, indocilis pauperim pati. It only remained to lasso Caesar; and once this was done, the husbandman could return in peace, bringing his sheaves with him. The history of Christianity from that time on is but the account of how the robbers quarrelled among themselves over the spoils. Let us now try to summarize our conclusions still further, by the adoption of tabular form. The main elements of religion in the Roman Empire, and the corresponding Jesus. 1. The orthodox Jew, satisfied by Jesus the Messiah, of the fulfilment of the prophecies. 2. The `protestant' Jew, satisfied by Jesus the Isaiah-like prophet. 3. The Essene ) ) 4. The Gnostic ) satisfied by the Jesus of the discourses ) given in John. 5. The Greek Philosopher ) ) 6. The Mystic. ) 7. The ascetic or Gymnosophist: satisfied by Jesus of the of Yogi. Sermon on the Mount, of the parables and miracles, and of the practical rules of life. 8. The Pagan. satisfied by the Jesus of the Virgin birth. and him of the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. 9. The Slave. satisfied by the Jesus of Salvation by faith for himself, and Damnation for his neighbour. "The Solution of the Enigma according to the Plymouth" "Brethren." Enough of these profane speculations, which have been inspired {220} by the devil himself, (permitted to act in this manner in order to lead the ungodly into yet further darkness) soaring rather to those unsullied realms of faith where nothing so vulgar as a fact has a card of admission, where all is miracle, all simplicity of light and peace, where an instant reply is found to every question. Let this essay be my filial offering to the "manes" of my sire; let me be empowered by the Holy Ghost to silence every objection to the New Testament as John Nelson Darby would have done himself. The main argument is a follows: The actual working of the authorized version of the Scriptures bears the Imprimatur and the Nihil Obstat and the Ne Varietur of the Holy Ghost. The translators of 1611 were as directly inspired as the authors. (It is not `inspired', really; a stronger word is requested. People like Matthew and Isaiah were not authors, but stenographers (like mine, God bless her!) incapable of error. The Holy Ghost is the author. Any `difficulty' is therefore placed exactly as it stands by the Holy Ghost himself for a particular purpose. To illustrate the idea: fifty years ago (it sounds like a bad mad sad impossible nightmare) quite serious people were arguing as to whether the universe (not merely this planet) was made in six days 6000 years ago. Geikie, a bold bad geologist, proving ad nauseam that the chalk alone would have required more than 6000 years to deposit, was met by a thousand subterfuges. There were arguments as to what a day was, and how there could have been days at all before the creation of the sun and moon, and so on -- arguments which make Alice in Wonderland read like a text-book of plumbing {221} by a German! The whole literature is worth reading for its sheer fantastic folly. And these were the people who laughed at St. Thomas and the schoolmen! In the end Geikie, driven absolutely to bay, turned savagely on his assailants with the outburst "I will not believe that God has written a lie upon the rocks!" The passion and force of the appeal silenced most of his adversaries without convincing them; but the Plymouth Brethren, by the mouth of Mr. Philip Gosse (the father of the well-known man of letters, Edmund Gosse) saw the opening, and struck the supreme blow. "God shall send them strong delusion that they may believe a lie." God "had" written a lie upon the rocks, for the purpose of making absolutely sure that Archibald Geikie should be damned to all eternity! On some child of the Evil One remarking that Jesus said "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life", and that it was a little hard on Geikie that he should roast eternally for his love of Truth, the reply was equally a thunderbolt. "All our righteousness is as filthy rags." "Shall not the judge of the whole earth do right?" Mr. Gosse further condescended, however, and pointed out that God was Love, "Not willing that any sinner should perish, but that all should come to repentance", and that he had not by any means predestined Professor Geikie to be damned. He had, on the contrary, "separated the sheep from the goats", divided man-kind into two classes, the saved and the damned, predestined, chosen, and called the saved, but had carefully abstained from predestining, choosing, and calling the damned to that election. He had picked one apple out of ten, but had not left the other nine. (I feel {222} it absolutely incumbent upon me, at this stage, to pledge my personal honour as a gentleman and a man of letters that these "arguments" are stated with absolute fairness and accuracy. I have heard them almost every day for years. And if any man yet doubt, let him hunt up the nearest Plymouth Brother, and ask him if it be not as I have said.) In all argument the same principles applied. The Bible is full of contradictions? the reply is, in the first instance, No; in the second, Yes; they are put there to try our faith. Argue any point, basing your position on the literal words of Scripture. The reply is firstly quotation of that passage of Holy Writ which contradicts the one you have quoted, and secondly a reference to the Temptation on the Mount, which gives us an illustration of the fact that the Devil can quote Scripture. (You are the Devil, of course.) Reply that the Plymouth Brother himself has been quoting Scripture, and that for all you know he may be the Devil, by his own argument, and you get a mixture of Uriah Heep and Calvin. He is an unworthy sinner saved by grace, putting humbly his trust in the efficacy of the Blood of Jesus, and you are one of those `dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers, and idolaters, who loveth and maketh a lie referred to in the Apocalypse, and it was mistaken kindness on the part of St. John that he did not mention you by name. It will be seen that this position is entirely unassailable. Every cannon of morality, or of thought itself, is a definite engine of the devil, if you aim it at a Plymouth Brother. While the Catholic Church maintained an almost identical position, centralized in patristic authority and culminating in Papal infallibility; {223} refusing to discuss the question whether any Papal remark was ex cathedra or merely a personal opinion, denying reason and logic, she remained unshaken, and the gates of hell did not prevail against her. To open religion to discussion is to destroy it. The Plymouth Brethren must then be regarded as the only true Christians, if the foundation of Christianity be admitted to be the Bible. They obey each text as it is quoted; and as you cannot quote two texts at once, no possibility of contradiction can arise. Is instrumental music allowable in the "meeting", No; for the Bible says "I will sing with the Spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also", and makes no mention of an harmonium! Point out that musical instruments of all kinds, pshawn, sackbut, dulcimer, and psaltery, were used in the Old Testament; the Plymouth Brother placidly explains that this was the "Old Dispensation", and continues to sing out of tune. (I quote the actual argument, as always.) "Shall I buy railway shares?" No; railways are not mentioned in the Bible. Or, if one thinks it is good business to buy them: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might!" Plunge, plunge, my brother! It is a perfect system; the Plymouth Brother can do no wrong; the other man can do no right. If the Bible be the Word of god, Mr. Shaw is damned, and I am damned myself. May I hope that we may be permitted to argue in hell? For this small attempt on earth has been exceedingly amusing. On the other hand; if the New Testament be the composite document which it is here maintained to be in this essay, I am the truest of all Christians. I agree with practically every word {224} reported of the Yogi Jesus, and nearly every word of the Essene. True, I reject Salvationism, and the Jewish element of prophecies fulfilled, and the praise of the Law of Moses; but trust humbly that any deficiency in these respects may be more than made up by superfulity in another. For not only do I hold the cult of John Barleycorn to be the only true religion, but have established his worship anew; in the last three years branches of my organisation have sprung up all over the world to celebrate the ancient rite. So mote it be. "Credulity no Criterion." (NOTE). - This section-heading, and those following, are once more those of the Preface to Androcles and the the Lion. The foregoing eight sections are really sub-sections of "The Alternative Christs.") Mr. Shaw now makes a somewhat fatal admission. "This arbitrary acceptance and rejection of parts of the gospel is not peculiar to the secularist view." Of course, it is not, but it is open to any other critic to reply: "How dare you? `A fool is more wise in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason.'" Every heretic has begun by discarding the passages that did not suit him, and his only reason is that they did not suit him. Now no one has any objection to Mr. Shaw arising in his might and saying "This is "my" gospel", but it is monstrous that he should try to palm off his gospel on us as that of Jesus. Incidentally, one is a little puzzled by the title of the section, which appears to have little to do with its substance. Any criterion of what? {225} "Belief in Personal Immortality no Criterion" The difficulty mentioned above persists. It is impossible to agree with Mr. Shaw that Huxley was anything but what he said he was. If Huxley had been furnished with proof of the efficacy of the Crucifixion, he would have believed it at once. "The Secular View Natural not Rational, therefore" "Inevitable." Here Mr. Shaw condescends to give us his sitoriacal view of Jesus, which is that he was a socialist who went mad. Unfortunately, as indicated in the comment on previous sections, many of the megalomaniac speeches of Jesus come earlier in his life than the communistic ones. It has also been shown how the supposed communism is to be explained, that it was nothing of the sort, that when Jesus dealt with politics at large he had no notion of reform, but advised his disciples and the people generally not to meddle with government, but to mind their own business. "The Higher Criticism" Mr. Shaw in this section tries to excuse himself for not having given any account of the gospels based on anthropology and paleography. He says: "I should be the most exasperating of triflers and pedants if I were to digress into a criticism of some other belief or no-belief which my readers might conceivably profess if they were erudite Scriptual paleographers and historian(s), in which case, by the way, they would have to change their views so frequently that the Gospel they received in their childhood would {226} dominate them after all by its superior persistency." Mr. Shaw's mind is incapable of understanding two things: the one is sex,<> the other is science. He does not understand how science progresses, which is by the continual corrections of errors, and the gradual narrowing of their limits. He observes a terrible controversy between two astronomers as to whether the sun is ninety-two or ninety-three million miles away, and all he gathers of the controversy is that, since they disagree, very likely both are wrong, and consequently (for all any one knows) the sun may be within an easy morning walk from Adelphi Terrace. He seems to have no idea of the differential calculus in particular or mathematics in general. He seems to think that because opinion varies from time to time in matters of detail that the main body of doctrine is invalidated, which is like arguing that if a tree bears ten leaves more or ten leaves less on two successive springs there is no tree there at all. He claims to have made a synthesis of his subject; in reality he has only made an extremely sectarian analysis. He has not even tried to analyze the Bible in an unbiassed way; he has only been concerned to pick out the bits that suited him and label them `the Essence of Christianity'. He has in short wished to found a new heresy, and to popularize his own political views by attributing them to Jesus, just as a dishonest tradesman might try to thrust his biscuits on the public by stamping them with the name of Huntley {227} and Palmer. Here let me voice my own objection to his method. It is pernicious because his opponents will not play fair. They will misrepresent him, as they have always done to every one who has not come out against them with fire and sword as did Voltaire. Better to be damned out and out with him than to suffer what Bernard Shaw will suffer! The Christian will wipe the slate clear of all that he has said about `psychopathy and superstition!, and say "Even Bernard Shaw admitted that in Jesus lay the one hope of the whole world. In the name of Bernard Shaw, therefore, I say unto thee, Sell that thou hast and give it all to me!" Mr. Shaw knows this as well as I do. He thought (I doubt not) to make his preface a subtle sidelong thrust at Jesus; but the weapon will turn in his hand. He had better have trusted to the broadsword of Bradlaugh. However, in the next sections his blow rings truer; let us pass on! "The Perils of Salvationism." "The Importance of Hell in the Salvation Scheme." In these two sections we have the real objection to Christianity, the moral objection. "The Right to refuse Atonement." "Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all of us to believe in the Atonement, we should have to cry off it, as we evidently have a right to do. Every man to whom salvation is {228} offered has an inalienable natural right to say `No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to lead a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing'. Then, too, there is the attitude of Ibsen: that iron moralist to whom the whole scheme of salvation was only an ignoble attempt to cheat God; to get into heaven without paying the price. To be let off, to beg for and accept eternal life as a present instead of earning it, would be mean enough even if we accepted the contempt of the Power on whose pity we were trading: but to bargain for a crown of glory as well! that was too much for Ibsen; it provoked him to exclaim, "Your God is an old man whom you cheat', and to lash the deadened conscience of the XIX century back to life with a whip of scorpions." There is yet another form of this argument, one based on humanitarian grounds. We may perhaps be permitted to quote it. "So not one word derogatory To your own version of the story! I take your Christ, your God's creation, Just at their own sweet valuation. For by this culminating scene, Close of that wondrous life of woe Before and after death, we know How to esteem the Nazarene. ... "You see, when I was young, they said: `Whate'er you ponder in your head, Or make the rest of Scripture mean, You can't evade John III, 16.' "Exactly! Grown my mental stature, I ponder much: but never yet Can I get over or forget That bitter text's accursed nature, The subtle devilish omission, The cruel antithesis implied, The irony, the curse-fruition, The calm assumption of Hell's fevers {229} As fit, as just, for unbelievers --- These are the things that stick beside And hamper my quite serious wish To harbour kind thoughts of the `Fish'." ... "Hence I account no promise worse, Fail to conceive a fiercer curse Than John' third chapter (sixteenth verse). "But now (you say) broad-minded folk Think that those words the Master spoke Should save all men at last. But mind! The text says nothing of the kind! Read the next verses!" ... "This is my point; the world lies bleeding: --- (Result of sin?) --- I do not care; I will admit you anywhere! I take your premisses themselves And, like the droll despiteful elves They are, they yet outwit your plan. I will prove Christ a wicked man (Granting him Godhead) merciless To all the anguish and distress About him --- save to him it clung And prayed. Give me omnipotence? I am no fool that I should fence That power, demanding every tongue To call me God --- I would exert That power to heal creation's hurt; Not to divide my devotees From those who scorned me to the close: A worm, a fire, a thirst for these; A harp-resounding heaven for those! "And though you claim Salvation sure For all the heathen --- there again New Christians give the lie to plain Scripture, those words which must endure! (The Vedas say the same!) and though His mercy widens ever so, I never met a man (this shocks, what I now press) so heteredox, Anglican, Roman, Methodist, Peculiar Person --- all the list! --- I never met a man who called Himself a Christian, but appalled Shrank when I dared suggest the hope God's mercy could expand its scope, Extend, or bend, or spread, or straighten So far as to encompass Satan Or even poor Iscariot. {230} "Yet God created (did he not?) Both these. Omnisciently, we know! Benevolently? Even so! Created from Himself distinct (Note that! --- it is not meet for you To lead me Schelling and his crew) These souls, foreknowing how were linked The chains in either's Destiny. `You pose me the eternal why?' Not I? Again, `Who asks doth err.' But this one thing I say. Perchance There lies a purpose in advance Tending to a final bliss --- to stir Some life to better life, this pain Is needful: that I grant again. Did they at last in glory live, Satan and Judas might forgive The middle time of misery, Forgive the wrong creation first Or evolution's iron key Did them --- provided they are passed Out of this universe accurst. But otherwise! I lift my voice, Deliberately take my choice Promethean, eager to rejoice, In the grim protest's joy to revel Betwixt Iscariot and the Devil, Throned in their midst! No pain to feel, Tossed on some burning bed of steel, But theirs: My soul of love should swell And, on those piteous floors they trod, Feel, and make God feel, out of Hell, Across the Gulf impassable, That He was damned and I was God.' "Ay! Let him rise and answer me, That false creative Deity, Whence came his right to wrack the Earth With pangs of death, disease, and birth: No joy unmarred by pain and grief: Insult on injury heaped high In that quack-doctor infamy, The Panacea of --- Belief! Only the selfish soul of man Could ever have conceived a plan Man only of all life to embrace, One planet of all stars to place, Alone before the Father's face; Forgetful of creation's stain, Forgetful of creation's pain, Not dumb! --- forgetful of the pangs Whereby each life laments and hangs, (Now as I speak a lizard lies in wait for light-bewildered flies) {231} Each life bound ever to the wheel --- <> Now that the very crystals feel! --- For them no harp-resounding court, No palm, no crown, but none the less A cross, be sure! The worst man's thought In hell itself, bereft of bliss, Were less unmerciful than this! No! for material things, I hear, Will burn away, and cease to be --- (Nibbana! Ah! Thou shoreless Sea!) Man, man alone, is doomed to fear, To suffer the eternal woe, Or else, to meet man's subtle foe, God --- and oh! infamy of terror! Be like him --- like him! And for ever! My soul must utterly dissever Its very silliest thought, belief, From such a God as possible, Its vilest from his worship. Never! Avaunt, abominable chief Of Hate's grim legions; let me well Gird up my loins and make endeavour, And seek a refuge from my grief, O never in Heaven --- but in Hell!" (From "The Sword of Song", Aleister Crowley Benares 1904) "The Teachings of Christianity." There is little in this section which has not already been discussed. But we must call attention once more to Mr. Shaw's incapacity to estimate the value and seriousness of arguments. "When Hume said that Joshua's campaigns were impossible, Whately did not wrangle about it: he proved, on the same lines, that the campaigns of Napoleon were impossible." It never seems to occur to Mr. Shaw that Whately was only trying to score off Hume. He was making "A college joke to cure the dumps". His book is an academic squib, highly amusing to the Fellows of Trinity at the High Table over their port. It is not a serious argument. {232} Besides, it is entirely bad logic. The proof that Napoleon's campaigns were impossible does not disprove the existence of Napoleon; it only proves the error of the historian. Hume did not wish to disprove the existence of Joshua, he only wished to show that the account given in the Bible was inaccurate; and this was the point at issue, because the contention of Christianity was that the book of Joshua had been dictated verbally by the Holy Ghost, so that there could not possibly be even the minutest error of fact in it. Whately's argument was therefore really on Hume's side. He gave one more instance of the fact that historians can err; and by drawing a parallel between Napoleon and Joshua, he implicitly admitted the error in both accounts, which was all that Hume desired to prove. It is to be noted that Mr. Shaw anticipated that Christianity will continue to be taught. I do not think that he is in his prophetic mood in making this statement. I think that the next generation<>) will have a great deal to say with regard to the European War. I think that the war will be followed everywhere by revolution. I think that humanity will have had the facts of life presented to it with such soul-shaking violence that the pitiful pretense which some of us still make will fall at last by its own weight. I think that the controversy of the future will be between the law of nature or of Nietzsche, and that of compassion or of Shelley. It think that supernaturalism has received the mercy-stroke. I think that Christianity will be studied by {233} everybody (who has the leisure and inclination) just as it is to-day by antropologists, is in the due relation to other religions of the world. I think that the use of Christianity as an engine of oppression of the poor is ended. I think that the tyrants of humanity will have to think up something new: --- Or it may be that a brighter day is in store for us! The author<> of "The world's Tragedy" has presented his Jesus as the willing tool or rather the blind tool of oppression. He consents to his death in order to carry out the scheme of destroying the Golden Age. On the cross he attains humanity. We venture to quote the dialogue between him and the great magician whose power is directed to turn the tragedy to final good. We shall quote the passage at some length. "Scene. --- The thick darkness of the Emptiness of Things. Yet in the midst appears a certain glory veiling the figure of a tall stern man, the king Alexander. In his hand is a black rod clothed with twin glittering snakes, the royal Uraeus Serpents of ancient Khem; at its point gleams faint and blue A star of six rays, whose light now illumines the pale and tortured features of a man, with outstretched arms, who is hanging (apparently) in space. It is Issa, but the weariness is gone; and noble-strong is the scarred brow of his agony. Alexander. In the puissance of my will, Issa, I uphold thee still. Issa. Thou art? Alexander Keeper of the Way. Issa I am? Alexander Man, at mine essay. By the balance reaching forth To the south and to the North {234} Have I consecrated thee Co-victim with humanity. O Mis-begotten, miscreate Dwarf as thou wast, the child of hate; Thou who hast felt the sordidness Of thine own effect on thine own distress; Art comest hereby to the stature of man By my power, who am Pan. And by this death shalt laugh to know Thy father's final overthrow. My soul the heights and depths has spanned. I hold the star-streams in mine hand. I am the master of life and death And of every spirit that quickeneth. Yea! in the light of knowledge, Pan Hath grasped at the blackness of the ban: And thus do I crush it. As the storm Whirls shrieking round thy ghastly form, Thy spirit's torture shall abate The bodily pangs of thy fearsome fate. Weak fool! The fate of Arcady And the whole world --- that hung on thee! Hadst thou but made thee Emperor, And led thy legions into war! Thou broken reed --- a birth unclean, A life sucked up in sordid spleen, A death absurd, most foully wrought To the shape of thy father's leper-thought. This be thy doom, that thou shalt see The curses that are born of thee! Thou black bat that hast barred the sun From the sight of man, thou minion Of death and disease, of toil and want, Of slavery, knavery, greed and cant, Of bigotry, murder, hypocrisy --- Speak thou the things that are seen of thee! Issa Canst thou not save me, Pan, And balk the bestial plan? Alexander I too have died to Pan, and he Hath begotten upon me A secret wonder that must wait For the hour of the falling of thy fate. Nineteen centuries shalt thou Plague earth with that agonizing brow, And then that age of sordid strife Give place to the aeon of love and life. A lion shall rise and swallow thee, Bringing back life into Arcady. {235} So strong shall he roar that the worlds shall quake And the waters under the heaven break, That the earth, of thy father's hate accurst, Shall be greener and gladder than at first. Issa I shall endure then, if the Ultimate Be reached through the black fate. Alexander Let that sustain thee --- yet this hour I put forth all my torture-power To grind thee in the mills of martyrdom, That at last thy spirit may fully come To understand and to repent --- Else might thy new-born strength relent And all thy father's hate corrode Thy will, as the breath of a bloat toad Might rot the lungs of a young child. Then were indeed the earth defiled And the sole seedlings that must lurk In the desert world --- waste by thy work --- Itself its loveliness transplant To a flawless field whose grace should grant Life to that bright inhabitant. Issa These eyes are blind with blood and tears; They strain across the doubtful years; They search the stars: the earth they scan; All, all spells Misery to Man. Of whom I am. First, fables gross and foul Hooted and hissed by human snake and owl About me, twisted into doleful engines Of greed, hate, envy, jealousy and vengeance. Next, scythes laid to the root of every flower That asks but sunshine for its brief glad hour. Next, axes at the root of every tree That strains its top to immortality. Yea, o thou terrible magician, I see the black wings of suspicion Fanning each ear with tales of spite, Blasting each bud with bitter blight. I see the poisonous upas-tree, Its shade the ghastly trinity --- Religion, law, morality --- Sicken with its stifling breath Human loveliness to death. I myself the tool of priests, Tyrants, merchants, hags and beasts, {236} Lawyers, doctors, artizans, Whores and theologians! All my live misunderstood Built in slime and nursed with blood! This my death divinely hallows Boot and rack, stake and gallows. Strong men crushed beneath my domes, Children tortured in my homes, Women tricked and raked and herded In the stinking stye bemerded With the putrid excrement Of the marriage sacrament. Every scourge and sore and shame Blest in mine accursed name! Love and beauty under ban! Wit and wisdom barred to man! Nature smirched by hideous lies! Meanness lauded to the skies! Pain and ruin and disease Praised, as if they made mine ease. Dead be dance and dream and revel! Thought and courage, things of evil! Corn and milk, wine and oil, The guerdon of degrading toil! Life's bright draught of honied leisure Soured to sick and tasteless pleasure. All the gracious grape degraded, To a fatuous foulness faded; Ecstasy divinely deep Bartered for a brutal sleep In whose grunting crapulence They may forget the glory whence They came, and hide in a stinking slum The beastliness they have become. Wealth complaining in its stye! Stark starvation standing by! Poet, painter, sculptor, sage Prostituted to their age; Or starved or tortured, should they hold To the clear sunlight and the age of gold, --- Scarce a tithe of all I see, Yet --- thou dost not pity me? Alexander Thou art near death: thy corpse light dawns on us. See! the tenebrous glare and venomous And all it shews. Enough! I leave thee, man To hide me in the secret place of Pan Beneath the fallen groves Arcadian. He fades away, as if the new light, making the filth visible, made him invisible. After the death of Jesus Alexander re-appears, and ends the tragedy upon a ray of hope. {237} Alexander The flood sweeps on From horizon to horizon. Beauty, strength, virtue, all are gone. (the eclipse passes.) Now sudden springs the natural face Of all the earth's old grace. The broad sun smiles, as if that fatal close Of the revel in the garden of Eros Had never been. Yet to this keen Sight, to this sleuth-hound scent for subtle truth, The essential youth Of all things is corrupt. I will away Into the mystic palaces of Pan Hidden from day, Hidden from man, Awaiting there the coming of the Sphinx Whose genius drinks The poison of this pestilence, and saves The world from all its lords and slaves. Ho! for his chariot-wheels that whirl afar! His hawk's eye flashing through the silver star! Upon the heights his standard shall be plant Free, equal, passionate, pagan, dominant, Mystic, indomitable, self-controlled, The red rose glowing on its cross of gold ... Yea! I will wait throughout the centuries Of the universal man-disease Until the morn of his titanic birth ... The Saviour of the Earth! "Christianity and the Empire." I prefer to leave this essay in the key of hope just stated; Christianity and the Empire do not concern me; for the plainest sound to be heard on the planet at this moment is the death-rattle of just these two things. {238}