CHAPTER XXIII.

THE ESOTERIC TEACHINGS OF THE GNOSTICS—THE DIVINE FEMININE.

No more fascinating doctrine than that of Gnosticism can possibly engage our interest, and especially now that the position properly assignable to Woman is one of the burning issues of the times. According to Frances Swiney, who has written a wonderful book treating upon this topic, among true Gnostics, Woman is higher than Man, as Sophia, the Divine Feminine, is the central object of Gnostic adoration. In a perfectly synthesized system of thought and practise, we feel well assured that neither sex will be in the ascendancy over the other, but as we have seen so much of ill resulting from masculine despotism and monopoly, Mrs. Swiney’s other-extreme doctrine deserves earnest thought and careful consideration, and though at first it may strike the average reader as preposterous, there are a good many sane arguments to be brought forward in support of the main body of it. Gnostics have seen the feminine aspect of Deity rather than the masculine, so they have apotheosized women and relegated men to an inferior rank. Perfect sexual equality everywhere acknowledged is our own forecast for the coming age and the coming race; but we can hardly expect that so thoroughly ideal a condition can be ushered in until many children have been born into mental as well as physical surroundings very far superior in all respects to those which now almost universally obtain, and it can only be through the direct agency of emancipated and consecrated motherhood that a new and higher race can be brought into existence. There is a veritable “mystery of godliness” in the Gnostic philosophy now being brought before the public gaze, but there is also a very important “open teaching” concerning the relation of the sexes which is never properly concealed, as it is of the utmost importance to race improvement that it be publicly disseminated. With the breaking up of old ideas and institutions, now everywhere proceeding, preparatory to the installation of a new order, it is not surprising to find a vast amount of religious, social, and industrial unrest. This is far from being a discouraging symptom or a sign of racial decay; it is, to all who can read the signs of the present day aright, a convincing proof that we are on the immediate verge of a new era, in which we may reasonably expect to behold a condition of humanity far superior to that now extant.

The early Christians were many of them Gnostics, and there are numerous unmistakable traces of pronounced Gnostic teaching in many of the Epistles attributed to St. Paul. This fact makes it very easy for Mystics to remain within the Catholic Church while they hold views entirely at variance with the common outer doctrine promulgated in parish churches and accepted as the all-in-all of Christianity by the great bulk of priests as well as laity. Dr. Anna Kingsford, author of that very popular treatise, “The Perfect Way, or the Finding of Christ,” did not consider her own position in the least degree inconsistent, for she held that there is a “church within a church,” which is often referred to in the columns of “The Occult Review” as “The Church of the Holy Grail.” St. George Mivart, Father Tyrrell, and many other distinguished scholars of recent date, have stirred up much controversy by their “Modernism,” which is not very far removed from Gnosticism in many of its most decided features.

The Gnostic will never be satisfied with literalism, to her, or for him, the inner life or quickening spirit is all that is of real moment. Historical events or episodes sink into insignificance when contrasted with a consideration of the operation of the Divine Spirit within humanity in the living present. Historical discussions are never attractive to the Gnostic or to the Mystic, any further than they may prove useful in showing the perpetual continuity of esoteric doctrine and in illustrating, by famous examples, the place of honor which Gnostic teaching has ever held among the most enlightened and enlightening teachers of the human race. From the Preface to Mrs. Swiney’s highly artistic and wonderfully illustrated volume we extract the following: “There have always been minds that have grasped, in some measure, the eternal verities; they have, as it were, caught a transient vision of the whole in all its glory and divinity, and have been surcharged with the Wisdom of the Highest. But the majority of the race have lagged far behind; the general development of the spiritual consciousness in mankind being as gradual as has been the organic evolution. And thus religious beliefs mark the state of consciousness to which human psychology has attained. We now smile at the coats of skin and too solid flesh with which primitive man in his grossness clothed the most sublime ideals of his race. But, even allowing that the transcendent reality was soon submerged under the materialised form through whose medium it was presented to the world, the Divine intuition, like a golden thread of truth, glistens through all the various faiths. Interwoven, in spite of man's incertitude, with the objective manifestations and symbolism was the subjective indivisible entity of everlasting Wisdom. Forms of belief are but the transitory phases of the Soul in its upward path from consciousness to consciousness, from truth to truth, from revelation to revelation, from glory to glory, until it attains the Light of Lights.

“But mankind is loth to recognize the ephemeral character of the distinctive creeds that smother the intrinsic verity under external ceremonial, ritual, dogma, theories, codes, canons, conventions, precedents and definitions, until the outward shell imprisons the living truth in an atrophied contraction. We forget that these evolutionary expositions of faith are but resting-places for the human soul in its sore travail for self-completion, as it emerges from the material depths. Instead of being rock-bound sepulchres, in which we bury our Christs, or marble fanes, crumbling before the onslaught of time, they are only tents that are struck in the dawning, when yet another night of darkness has passed away of the ignorance, fatuity, and misery of humanity.

“We toil during the night, as did the disciples on the Galilean Sea. We behold but the unfathomable blackness of the waters, and the inscrutable vault of the midnight sky. Around us lie obscurity, mystery, and the dreaded Unknown. Yet, when the morn breaks, comes also the sublime revelation. For encircling us are the everlasting hills, and the Christos awaits us on the shore—the shore of a sunlit sea.”

Gnosticism and Occultism are very near neighbors and close friends, if they are not identical; therefore we are likely at any time to find these terms used interchangeably. True Occultism is a system which seeks to penetrate below all surfaces and discover what has long been enshrined in seemingly impenetrable mystery. The fixed ceremonies of Ecclesiastic and Masonic bodies can serve a useful purpose by preserving an unbroken tradition. Ceremonies are like letters in words, and words in languages, but letters and words are alike useless and cumbersome unless we employ them wisely for the conveyance of living thought from mind to mind and locality to locality.

According to a Gnostic view of religious tenets, the word tenet is directly associated with tent, a temporary abiding or halting-place, and also a movable dwelling which can be easily folded and carried from place to place, as permanent houses certainly cannot be. There are, however, Gnostic temples as well as tents, but these stand for immovable principles, the same in every clime and age, not for special interpretations placed upon facts at different epochs in human evolution, and by men who though high ecclesiastical dignitaries were often far more carnal than spiritual.

Mead, in his “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten,” tells us that during the first century of the present era the Gnostics at Alexandria endeavored to discover a truly universal religion, or to formulate a theosophy which would satisfy all minds; but the new race then springing up was found to be composed of such heterogeneous material that the task was too great for their accomplishment. The Western intellect has never seemed equal to the task of grasping the subtle metaphysics or the abstract reasoning of the Oriental mind, and it has been largely on this account that esoteric verities have been so grossly carnalized in accepted Christian definitions. Much of this carnalizing has proved so repulsive to spiritually-minded people that they have turned away entirely from the church and its sacraments, until they have been shown some inner meaning by some outside teacher who has possessed the necessary insight into the origin and inner meaning of the mysteries, enabling them to disentangle this from the crude materialism in which it has lain long concealed.

In the light of Gnostic interpretation, the characters in the Gospel narratives stand out clearly and instructively as permanent human types, not simply as historical personages who lived once for all at a given time in a certain place. But it is not by any means chiefly on that account that the Gnostic clue to the New Testament is needed, but by reason of the profound verities veiled in the doctrine of the Trinity and other arcane mysteries that we most need this elucidation. In the popular notion of the Divine Trinity, there are three Persons but only one God. This is said to be a mystery too deep for the human intellect to probe; therefore, outside the Athanasian Creed we find no ambitious attempts to define the concept. But we cannot afford to remain silent as to the pernicious influence exerted throughout Christendom by the prevalent idea that the three Divine Persons are exclusively male. Much older, purer, and far more natural ideas of a Trinity are to be found among the records of ancient Egypt, where Osiris, Isis, and Horus were regarded as Father, Mother, and Offspring. Some aspects of Horus are male and others female; showing that the highest and purest religious concepts of the Egyptians gave to the feminine a place of honor equal with the masculine in all things. People cannot entertain an exclusively masculine idea of Deity and at the same time believe that motherhood is as divine as fatherhood. The degradation of woman is always supported most strongly where the belief is pregnant that only males are fit to officiate at sacred altars. Mohammedanism has kept women in much greater servitude than Christianity, because it has never tolerated the idea of a Queen as well as a King of Heaven, an idea which the Church of Rome has always fostered, thereby largely counteracting the baneful effect of suppressing the vision of the Divine Mother standing between the Father and the Child.

Judaism has never tolerated pictorial representations of the Divine One, for to the pious Israelite any attempted picturing of Deity would be regarded as a flagrant violation of the Decalogue; but in many Christian churches, and in illustrated Bibles, we see attempts to portray the Holy Trinity, and always by three figures—one of an elderly man, one of a younger man, and one of a dove. Now the dove hides the face of the Divine Mother, and is her emblem. Were the representation to be restored to its original form, it would be far better than it is now, and when thus restored it could be readily interpreted to mean simply three distinct manifestations of Deity accommodated to human necessity, while, as H. P. Blavatsky suggested after gazing upon Gustave Doré’s famous painting, the silence of the formless mystery in the background symbolled the Ineffable One far more than the three limited figures in the foreground.

If we must have representations of human conceptions of Deity, we certainly have the right to urge that they be of the most elevating character possible, and this they never can be if they exclude the mothers from equal rank with the fathers of our race. It is to Art that we must largely look to carry the gospel of the coming age to the utmost regions of the earth, as works of art appeal to multitudes to whom didactic teaching makes no appeal whatever. What is now often called the state of Super-man is called by Gnostics the state of “the woman perfected, who comprises and surmounts man.” This is, of course, an extreme view, but in the interests of better race-propagation it is much safer to exalt woman above man than to elevate man above woman, because mothers exert a far greater influence over the unborn, and over little children, than do fathers. The Gnostic doctrine of the Forgiveness of Sins is an important one, and quite at variance with all belief in “vicarious” atonement, for to the Gnostic it is indeed true that Christ within is “the hope of glory.” Jacob Boehme went very far toward explaining the Gnostic attitude when he said: “God in man gives that which is sinful away. Nobody can forgive sins except Christ in Man. Whenever Christ lives in Man, there is the absolution.” One can very readily detect in the above utterance of a modern German mystic a form of esoteric teaching which does away entirely with all disputations concerning genealogies and other purely external matters against which all Gnostic writers in primitive Christian days continually warned their catechumens. It was not earlier than the fourth century that the dominant exoteric party in the Church gained the upper hand to such an extent that they forcibly repressed all public teaching of Gnosticism and spread the infamous report that Gnostics were shockingly immoral persons, who sought to pervert the Gospel to the ends of licentiousness, a statement which is a flagrant contradiction of well-attested fact. As no persecution or opposition of any sort to esoteric teaching has ever arisen without some superficial show of justification, it is quite probable that some sincere persons in bygone days did actually so far misunderstand the real trend of Gnostic philosophy as to believe that it advocated immorality; but no ripe scholar could at any time have held so utterly erroneous a view unless he had become so warped by prejudice and fanaticism as to have rendered himself altogether incompetent to weigh evidence in that particular, or consider statements in the light of calm judicial reasoning. Gnosticism had long preceded Christianity, and it was no doubt often feared by dominating ecclesiastics that the real original of Christian rites and ceremonies might be discovered by the people at large, if Gnostic “heresies” were tolerated. The great sin of Christendom has been its arrogant attitude toward all religious systems older or other than orthodox Christianity, and though it has so far endorsed ancient Judaism as to declare that it was a Divinely instituted religion, its attitude to modern Judaism has been one of relentless and unending opposition and persecution. It would be a happy day for persecuted Israel in Russia and several other nominally Christian lands were the light of Gnosticism to break through the dense fog of prevailing literalism, for then the Crucifixion of the Christ, being understood esoterically and universally, on no pretext whatever could Jews be execrated as “Christ-killers,” a title often applied to them as an excuse for the gross injustice with which they are treated many times by their avowedly Christian neighbors.

Emancipated womanhood in the light of Gnostic teaching represents “Pistis Sophia” liberated from all bondage to carnal lusts, and exalted to the throne of dominion where she rightfully belongs. Goethe, in the second part of his mystic drama, “Faust,” finds “Mater Gloriosa,” the centre of 183 Spheres of light; this is indeed “the Divine Feminine that ever leads us on.” Jealousy on the part of male disciples of a Master who appointed women to instruct them in the mysteries of Anastasis (resurrection and regeneration), must have had much to do with the rigorous exclusion of women from the Christian priesthood, for nothing can well be plainer than the words attributed to the risen Master in the Fourth Gospel, where he tells Mary Magdalene to tell his disciples, and especially Peter (the nominal head of the Roman Church), that he has risen from the sepulchre. Entirely apart from an immense mass of extra-Christian testimony, the accepted Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament furnish abundant evidence that the Master gave many of his deepest instructions to women, thereby initiating them into the “mysteries of the kingdom of heaven,” a phrase well understood by Gnostics, who understand it to mean a living realization of truth inwardly apprehended, not outwardly witnessed to on historic grounds, as in the case of all who depend on extraneous testimony and not on interior realization. The transmutation of all energy is the dominant aspiration of the Gnostics, and no one can be a practical, experienced Gnostic who has not learned to so subdue the flesh to the spirit that the “old serpent” becomes transformed from the death-dealer to the life-bringer. Thus will the prophecy be at length completely fulfilled, “They shall take up serpents,” and thus also will many equally enigmatical scriptures be fully verified.