H A L L O W E ' E N
A FESTIVAL OF LOST MEANINGS
ALVIN BOYD KUHN, PH.D.
* Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. This notice is not to be removed. I can be contacted at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following: A. B. Kuhn’s graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn’s unpublished autobiography, The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes—But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy.
I also would welcome any contact with someone who has any letters of Kuhn or has any personal knowledge of him. Thank you.
Recently (January 15, 2005) I was contacted by a 15 year old student of Upton High (state and city to be determined) who wanted to interview me in regards to the life of Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam). The interview was conducted and this student asked me if there was anything else. This is what I relayed:
There is a nationally and worldwide known issue of a disabled person in my state (Florida) who is being subjected to attempted murder. Her name is Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo. The courts say that she is in a Persistent Vegetative State when in fact she is not, they lie. Videos were shown on CNN during a live feed that prove she is not comatose. She sits up in a chair. Her husband who lives with another woman for over 9 years and who has two children with this woman is trying to say that Theresa wants to die when in fact he has been denying her rehabilitation and therapy so that she can have her own voice and be back on to the road to her recovery. He has been with several women since he caused Theresa's incident and this is his latest live-in concubine who is in collusion with him to make Theresa dead. His attorneys are attempting to accomplish a heinous starvation/dehydration death on her for the third time. One of his attorneys wrote a book in which he talks about tearing out peoples feeding tubes and says he speaks to them by "soul speak" asking them if they want to die and they tell him along the lines "Yes, I want to die! Please kill me." The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast is holding her hostage for over 4 years. This feeding tube yanker attorney was chairman of the board of this hospice. This is the worst case of domestic terrorism happening in our country right now. While we are off in other countries helping helpless and disabled people the government has been remiss to save a human life from terrorism here in my state. There is a cover-up of mass proportions and I have the evidence on a CD to prove it. This message is to you and all of your classmates and teachers who may be reading this. Please contact others if you know of others who care to stop this murder. Perhaps you, or others, including activist friends, know people who have the power to stop what is happening here in my state or bring greater attention to what is going on. Contact me at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net or call me at 407-925-4141 and I will get whatever information you may need. Help me and others to stop the return of Nazi T4 days in Florida, the rest of the United States of America and the world. We must take a stand and make our voices heard.
Please join my Alvin Boyd Kuhn Yahoo!Group and Gnosis284! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlvinBoydKuhn/join : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosis284/join
"They became fools, and changed the
glory of the incorrup-
tible God into an image made like to corruptible
man, and to birds,
and four-footed beasts, and creeping
things."--Romans I:22-23.
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H A L L O W E ' E N
A FESTIVAL OF LOST MEANINGS
______________
AUTUMN'S MYSTERIOUS REVEL
The large Merriam Webster's
dictionary gives the definition of Hallowe'en
(spelled Halloween) as "the evening preceding All Saints' Day; the eve of
October 31. In many countries Halloween is traditionally devoted to
merrymaking, with playful ceremonies and charms to discover future husbands and
wives." Nothing more.
It is not unwarrantable to predict
that the time is not far distant when a world of more enlightened intelligence
will be able to look back upon the present age, particularly in the Western
area of civilization, and label it as the epoch in which the people celebrated
a series of religious festivals around the cycle of the year in nearly total
ignorance of their true significance. Certainly, whether or not this be the
future's judgment on our present state of semantic nescience, it is to be
presumed that if the departed souls of the Sages of antiquity are in any wise
in position to gaze down the corridors of history from their day to ours, they
must register uncomprehending dismay at the sight of our ghastly misconception
and utterly travestied motives in our commemoration of the great annual
festivals their dramatic genius instituted round the year. They must stand
3
agape at the sight of our mechanical
parade of "holidays" and the completely distorted spirit and elan with which we go through the perfunctory observance of
one after the other in total miscomprehension of the original inspiration and
signification of each in turn. It must afflict them with consternation to see
how in the case of every one of the cardinal festivals a true sense of the
meaning to be dramatized by the occasion has been overlaid by some outer, some
material or superficial reference that retains or conveys not the remotest
relevance to the primal message.
While the divagation from the basic
meaning is egregious in every instance, it has perhaps swung most outrageously
far from prime character in the case of our Hallowe'en
observance, falling annually on the night of October 31. So profoundly is this
true that one risks little in possible misstatement in venturing the assertion
that none of the millions of revelers on that riotous night has the faintest
real idea of the significance of his carousal, or any idea that approaches
within a country mile of the original intent of the occasion. It is quite
doubtful if one in ten thousand even ventures a random guess as to why he goes
out in the street of town or village in grotesque disguise. He does it from the
sheer force of custom. He hardly bothers even to wonder why, because he knows
nobody is going to ask him about it. The meaning does not concern him, because
society for ages has ordained it that way, and it
comes with the force and sanction of something established under the
unchallengeable authority of immemorial custom. If there is perhaps a mite of
idle curiosity about it, his wonder is fully satisfied by the reflection that
somewhere away
4
back in past history it had its origin in some
meaningful situation, and now it is enough to know that it goes on by the
automatism of habit and tradition. Under the sweep of conventional mores it
comes each year to give him, if he is still in the fling of youthful urges, an
evening of semi-wild license, embroidered with the possibility of interesting
adventure. It is at any rate one evening when at least a partial escape can be
made from the restraints of rigid canons of moral conduct and a suppressed
original elemental tendency can be freely indulged. And this vaguely felt
native urge to wildness, if he but realized it, is the one link, though mostly
all unconscious, still remaining between his psyche and the primordial esoteric
significance of the jubilation on October 31.
The Hallowe'en
rollicking is not generally regarded as of major significance at all comparable
with that of Christmas or Easter. Yet it can be affirmed that, as it was
originally conceived and formulated, it was rated fully as important as these
others. As a matter of fact it stood as one of the four cardinal festivals of
the entire year, embodying the significance of one of the four cardinal points
of the zodiac, -- the two equinoxes and the two solstices -- and these four
were considered the greatest of all the ritual occasions in the year's round.
It differs widely in character from all other observances, having come to be
regarded more as a secular festival than one of religion. Festivals generally
are designed to commemorate something of positive value or of universal import,
and therefore take on the aura of solemnity. Mostly they deal with events of
epic or national importance or of profound religious significance. On the
5
contrary, Hallowe'en gives
vent to a spirit of quite opposite cast, expressing frivolity, license,
mischief. Outwardly it stands at the very opposite pole from the serious or the
sacred. Because of its seemingly light and purely sportive character it has, as
said, not been evaluated as of first importance. Little do its wild celebrants
realize that its truly profound significance inheres in precisely this
seemingly bizarre and outlandish element of its observance.
But long established customs do not
take their rise out of nothing, nor out of wayward random impulses. So we must
ask: why the wild revel? Why the free fling in buffoonery, in rough horse-play,
in wanton, if limited destructiveness, in the ludicrous and the grotesque? Why
the freedom to indulge in sexual suggestiveness? Why the temporary let-down in
moral restraint? Why the wearing of masks? What can be the hidden import of the
general community turning out and acting like an untamed animal for one night
in the year? Why the candle shining through the grinning features of a pumpkin,
or the apple in a tub of water? Why the witch riding the skies on a broomstick?
Why the haunting revelry of imps and sprites and the stealthy prowling of Satan
himself? And why all this on the last night of October?
Has it no more pertinent significance than that it has grown out of a natural
revolt against the restraints of established moral and social decencies and
sanctities in general mores? Has it arisen as a revolt against the inhibitions
of conventional norms, as a sort of desperate resolve on the part of civilized
society to indulge for one night in the year in an escape into freedom of
action behind a mask of anonymity? Surely its roots of origin run deeper
6
into the ground of human life and nature than
that. How deeply they penetrate into the common soil of our being will be a
revelation to the present world, which has lost all connection with the primal
ancient sources of its traditional mores and its great annual ceremonials. We
continue to go through the outward forms of these rituals, almost totally
oblivious of their meaning. So far from feeding the natural hunger of our
collective psyche on the rich food of sublime import in these formalities which
our spiritual health demands (minds and souls must be nourished with proper
nutriment as well as bodies), we are near to starving them on the dead outer
husks of former semantic constructions of sublime truth. The form survives, the
meaning is lost. One might say that Hallowe'en
continues to be staged for the sheer fun and devilry of it. All the while the
world of culture is famished for the meat of living power implicit in the
stirring frolic of this night.
7
MAN A QUATERNARY
BEING
The festival, it might be said,
carries one-fourth of the symbolic representation of human life as depicted in
the great zodiacal figure or graph devised by the sapient genius of ancient
Sages. The zodiac (from the Greek word zodion,
"a little animal") was a semantic diagram of amazing ingenuity
and comprehensiveness, to portray the successive stages and salient features of
man's evolution in the scale of expanding being. A basic twelve steps in progress, or twelve segments of an eventually complete
divinization of his nature were the integral divisions of the graph. But as
these twelve were to be generated as the outcome of a trinitarian
subdivision of each of four grades or levels of the human consciousness, namely
sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual genius, the twelve differentiations
were clustered in four groups of three members each, cutting the zodiacal
circle of houses into the four quadrants. The boundaries were the lines cutting
the circle at the two solstices and the two equinoxes, giving us the
equal-armed cross in the circle. The yearly dates of these points were the
twenty-first (or twenty-second) of June (summer solstice), of September (autumn
equinox), of December (winter solstice) and of March (spring equinox).
What has been largely lost out of
present astrological study is the fact that the zodiac was to serve as a
pictorial or semantic representation of the evolution of man's divine soul as
it swung round the repeated cycles of life
8
in many incarnations on the earth. If his
evolution was to be consummated by the development and final unification of the
twelve composite facets of divine faculty through the total experience acquired
in the run of the cycles, the process involved the generation of the four
grades of consciousness, each in threefold organization. What the blueprint
indicated then at the four "corners" of the zodiac was the generation
successively of sensation, the first grade or form of consciousness, at
the September point; of emotion at the December point; of mind at
March; and of spirit grade at the consummation of the round at June.
Since the little sun of fiery conscious potential in man was of kindred
essence with the conscious power behind the sun itself, its cycle of rotation
was made in copy of the solar orb's annual round. As the design was intended to
register it, the soul was conceived in germinal state at the June station, was
integrated in a material organism at the September date, was quickened to life
after virtual "death" under the incubus of body at December, and was
raised to a new growth in a fresh cycle beginning at March, under Easter
symbolism.
September 21, then, marks the date
at which in the significance of zodiacal language the unit of fiery spiritual
essence, an emanation of creative Mind from the supreme Deity which is to be
the divine soul of man, descending from the heights of noumenal
activity toward manifestation in matter, crosses the line from pure mind force
into union with a grade of matter that, being attuned to its vibration, it can
mold into an instrument of expression of its potential capabilities of life and
consciousness. In more concise form of statement it there
9
enters embodiment in physical forms; it incarnates.
The fundamental import of a great religious ceremonial set for the autumn of
the year would be involved in the meaning that goes with the core doctrine of
the Incarnation. Hallowe'en is par excellence the
ritualization of the Incarnation.
But, it will be remonstrated,
Hallowe'en does not fall on September 21 or
reasonably near it. It comes forty days after that date. How can it be relevant
to the import of September 21? The interval of the forty days between the fall
equinox and October 31 holds the answer to the question.
The number forty is, as any Bible
reader will know, almost omnipresent in the Scriptures. It occurs sixty-four
times in the Old Testament. Along with seven, ten and twelve, it is one of the
basic numerological keys to the recondite meaning and the cryptic methodology
of Bible writing. From certain fundamental data in the realm of nature it had
come in the ancient days, in the esoteric language of symbolism, to connote the
period of time that the egg, or seed of life, was immersed or incubated in
matter before "hatching" or germinating to make the start of a new
cycle. A seed has to go into the ground and "die" in order to
generate a new living organism for a new cycle of life. Forty days were
calculated as the time the wheat grains sown in the waters standing over the
fields at the inundation of the
10
symbol of the dark interval preceding the dawn of a
new life cycle.
It was therefore used in semantic
science to intimate the involvement of soul or spirit in material embodiment,
and thus came to represent the whole life cycle itself. For a cycle, or at any
rate the manifest arc of it, is just that period in which soul entity is
involved in matter. It would dramatize the whole duration of any cycle of
birth, growth, maturation, decay and death, the entire span from birth to
death. The ancient genius for festival ordination succeeded in introducing at
least four periods of forty days into the round of the year. Taking the
interval between September 21 and October 31 as the first of these, a second
one is the period between Christmas on December 25 and February 2, the ancient Candlemas Day, or the festival of the Purification of the
Virgin from the corruption of a mortal birth. The third dates from forty days
before Easter to Easter morn, the Christian Lent. A fourth runs from Easter,
taken as the spring equinox date of March 21, to the first of May, which latter
date was of great prominence throughout all ancient traditional ritualism. It
is probable that several other periods running from the first of a month to the
tenth of the next month were taken as festival epochs.
The "Holy Night" or
"Hallowed Even" was therefore set for the fortieth day following the
autumn equinox, with the signification that the soul entered incarnation (Latin
carno means "flesh") on September
21, ran its cycle of evolution over its forty days of "incubation" or
embodiment in the soil of human life and on October 31 culminated its progress
at the end in its final
11
glorification in the hallowed state of incipient godhood.
It entered the cycle as the soul of a mortal human being and emerged at the end
in the blessed ranks of the gods. The forty days typified the entire cycle. The
thirty-first of October virtually symbolizes, therefore, in a smaller cycle the
same meaning that Easter dramatizes in a cycle of six months, starting at
September 21, or what Easter symbolizes at the end of Lent. The soul in both
cycles comes to its beatification at the forty days' end.
As a matter of significant fact, the
glorified end date of this forty-day festival really falls on the day following
Hallowe'en, November first. This day is for the
autumn precisely what May first is for the spring in semantic relevance, and
the two days are just six months apart, each forty days after the equinox
event. November first has borne the festival name of All Saints' Day, or All
Soul's Day. Obviously it intimates the idea of the day when all souls become
"saints," or are divinely sanctified, that is, perfected as divine
beings or gods. It connotes the final apotheosization
of the human when it is divinized, when from man it becomes god. Hallowe'en is thus properly envisaged as the
"Eve" of All Saints' Day.
So Hallowe'en
was dated to come on the night before November 1 because it was intended to
represent the natural-man development antecedent and preparatory to the
burgeoning out of the spiritual flower on the following day, and all this was
in strict accord with the sagacious design of the ancient theurgists, the
initiates in the wisdom lore of a primeval revelation, who by this stratagem of
dramatic genius fixed on the eve before the
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chief festival a night of preparation for the main
action of the morrow. It went by the name (Greek) of parasceve,
meaning "eve of preparation;" or proeortia,
"in advance of the going out."
It shrouds no deeper mystery than
that if one is going on a journey on a certain day, one would spend the eve
before in packing and other preparation. It might be said that the parasceve almost meant this "packing of
the baggage on the eve of the journey." But the meaning runs deeper into
the esoteric realm than any mere physical reference. It was not a merely
physical pilgrimage that the soul was preparing to begin on November 1. All
these festivals dramatize stages, aspects, processes of human evolution, and
their meaning is not to be considered as apprehended until it is brought into
reference to some vital facet of this evolution.
13
THE HEYDAY OF THE ANIMAL
So what is there in this sphere of
relevance that can come in as a stage antecedent or initial to the climactic
flowering of man's divine nature? Obviously it is just the physical bodily
development that, as the John Baptist of the Gospels, must precede and prepare
the way for the outburst of the spiritual-man consummation by laying the
physical foundations for it. Spiritual evolution is impossible unless there is
first built up the material or organic instrumentalities to implement its
manifestations. "That was not first which is spiritual," says
So it is the first, the animal stage
of our unfoldment that Hallowe'en vividly portrays,
and the day of glorification of all souls follows to crown this physical podium
of human life with the beautiful statue of spiritual man. This day of
consummation closes out the incubation period and the forty-day cycle ends with
the climactic dramatization of both the antecedent parasceve
and the ultimate divine culmination in a two-phased grand finale. It is
significant also that while All Soul's Day is set as a daytime observance, Hallowe'en is a night celebration. In the creation process
night pre-
14
cedes day, as, says the Bible, God brought forth
light out of the darkness of primordial night. The nocturnal character of Hallowe'en also arises from the symbolism of the soul's
immersion in matter during the preparatory stage as being its nighttime experience.
In body the soul sits or gropes in material darkness until the turn of the
cycle brings the dawn of the spiritual day, when it is awakened out of its
dreamy condition in the shadows of unreality into the bright day of its full
vision of truth.
Hallowe'en has also been designated in some traditions
as the All Fools' Night. The connection of this denomination with the
ceremonial is involved in a measure of obscurity. Yet there is a specific
significance in what the word "fool" connotes in reference to the
soul's incarnation. For we have other indications of it in the medieval
personage, the jester or court fool in every baron's castle, as well as in the
odd fact that the Number I card in the symbolic collection called the Tarot
cards is designated the Fool. Also we have the poet's observation that all
human life is marked with folly: "What fools we mortals be!"
So the term obviously carries some intimation of deeper import. It must be seen
to have a measure of esoteric reference in the reflection that the soul, when
in bodily incarnation, is cut off from the full light of truth and wisdom, and
therefore lives under the dominion of demoniac powers, which, as presented so
clearly in the allegory of Job's divinely sanctioned tormenting at the hands of
the imps of darkness and evil, are given tutelary control over the infant deity
in man during its incubation and incipient stages of growth.
15
the soul is in the unawakened state of its
childhood, corresponding to the ungerminated state of
the seed, it is under the supervision of tutors and guardians and in servitude
to the elements (indeed in several passages "elementals") of the
earth and the air, though it is at the same time (potentially) "Lord of
all."
Thus the characterization of the
soul in its bodily life as the "fool" carries deep philosophical
import. It was a most profound doctrine of the sapient Greek philosophy that
when the soul descends "from on high" into the realm of sense and
generation, "she" loses her clearer perspective of all real values in
the life of consciousness and is precipitated into every sort of incertitude
and finds her vision of "whole natures" distracted and diffracted
into distorted pictures of reality, her proper focus of vision and
understanding all confused by the wayward attractions of sense, passion and
ignorance. In this wretched condition caused by her loss of divine faculty, she
gropes blindly in the darkness of nescience, and perpetrates all manner of
folly.
The first Tarot card, called
"The Fool," pictures the soul as a blooming carefree youth striding
gaily forth in such position that his next step will send him plunging over the
brink of a sheer precipice. This is the soul in the upper world ready to
descend into incarnation. Perhaps it is only in the cryptic intimations of
ancient occult science that the soul is given the appellation of fool, pointing
to the folly of leaving heaven for the hardships of earth. For often this
recondite methodology disguised its true purport by symbol or character of a
nature suggestive of the very opposite idea to the one
16
intended to be conveyed to the initiated. It is known
that to some degree this science deliberately put out truths under what have
been called "blinds," in order to safeguard precious and dangerous
knowledge from the unworthy. In this case it seems obvious that the arcane
wisdom promulgators were not openly designing to give to the world the teaching
that the soul is guilty of folly for leaving heaven to gain its evolutionary
experience on earth. For if the soul remained forever in the
world of spirit, it would only perpetuate its static condition. If it is
destined under the Cycle of Necessity to take further steps in growth, it had
to be transplanted in successive lives on earth. "Unless a grain of wheat
fall into the ground and die," said Jesus, "it abideth
alone. But if it die it bringeth
forth much fruit." Hardly has it been seen that this statement is the
absolute confirmation of the necessity and the naturalness of the
"fall" of the soul into this dark underworld of matter and the flesh,
where alone it can ground itself for a new cycle of growth. This is the law of
the cosmos, and the soul commits no folly (as religion has so universally
imputed to her) in obeying its ordinances. Yet, in the understood sense of the
word, it does commit her to a long experience of trial and
"temptation" in her bodily life, in which her blundering course of trial
and error engages her in much "folly."
It must not be overlooked that we
have April 1 featured as an All Fools' Day. The motive for setting it in the
spring is readily seen. If the autumn began the incarnational
period of "folly," the spring would end it six months later. If the
symbolism were properly understood, it might be considered as appropriate to
date the
17
feature at the end as well as at the beginning of
the period in which the Fool had his fling.
This function of the
"fool" character is more boldly presented in the personage of the
medieval castle fool or jester. It seems indubitable that the custom of
maintaining this odd actor in the social scheme arose out of the milieu of
ancient representative typism of the religious drama.
As in the duality of the human constitution there were the two forces of the
universal polarity, the natural and the spiritual, the bodily and the divinely
intellectual, the human and the celestial, and the higher unable to evolve its
capacities apart from polarized attachment to the lower, it seems clear that
the idea was carried into the system of society in the institution of the
castle fool. He was a person of acknowledged privilege, even in his folly. He
was, in deeper sense, placed there to serve as the foil, the goading force, the
thorn in the flesh, the tempter and the prodder of the Lord of the castle. He
was to be the latter's alter ego, his human counterpart and secondary
self, to keep the Lord under stress and pressure to maintain his true place of
headship. It does not strain the imagery unduly to put it that the jester was
kept in the medieval household to make a "fool" out of the baron, who
of course in the type-drama represented the higher soul
self. The court fool went with the Lord as the body with its animal instincts
goes with the soul.
Astonishing material confirming the
elucidation is brought to light in data encountered in research. We discover
that the typical ancient ritual features two principal characters, a hero and a
buffoon. These two share
18
many adventures together and live on terms
of the greatest familiarity, -- quite naturally, since they live together in
the same body! Here we have the soundest reason for the special privilege
accorded the fool to jest at the expense of the castle baron. For the god and
the irresponsible joker were made bed-fellows in the same hostelry. And to
crown it all, we read that "fools were considered sacred on the seventh
day." One is driven to conjecture as to what infinite tragedy has
afflicted human life in the large as the result of the ingrained religious
infatuation that only the soul of man is "sacred," while the body is
held as foul, as base and worthy only of being crucified in the interests of the
spirit. The animal "fool" at any rate comes into the recognition of
his sacred function on his "seventh day."
Still another designation for Hallowe'en was in old English history Nutcracker Night. The
symbolic relevance embodied in the term would not seem to be too difficult to
resolve. It has already been elucidated that the soul enters body at the
September date of the year's cycle, and it can enter it only as seed of
its future growth. The commonest form of seed in the vegetable kingdom is the
nut. Once planted in the soil of human life, the evolutionary task of the
divine potential is to crack open the shell and bring out the kernel for the
purposes of new growth. Hence the figure of nut-cracking.
And what amazing and enlightening
significance lives for our dull intellection in the analogy of the vegetable
seed with the soul-seed! We plant the hard nut of a walnut or a hickory tree in
the ground. To open out a way for the life-germ in the kernel to burst forth,
nature
19
must crack open, or rot away the outer shell.
This outer covering, the ark which houses it during the dissolution of its
parent tree, must die away. And as it dies, the life innate in the kernel
begins to increase. So it is with the divine soul encased in the womb of man's
outer physical "shell."
Related in the general context of
the autumn memorials to Hallowe'en is the name given
to the September equinoctial date, -- Michaelmas.
Four of the seven "Angels of the Presence," the primordial
archangels, were allotted to the four cardinal stations of the cross in the
zodiac: Gabriel, Raphael, Michael and Uriel. The
station of Michael was at the autumn equinox. Hallowe'en
then fell forty days after Michaelmas. Gerald Massey,
the greatest of all Egyptologists, traces the name Michael to the Egyptian Makhu, the god holding the balance on the zodiacal
horizon line, and the Hebrew word for God, El, or Makhu-el,
the Lord of the Balance, one of the titles given to the Christ deity holding
the balance between soul and body in man's constitution.
20
THE GODS IN REVEL
It is thus intimated to us that the
prime motif of Hallowe'en is revelry, in the wilder
spirit of animal sportiveness. It requires a more penetrating philosophical
insight, however, to discern the deeper involvements and the revealing
appropriateness of this phase of the festival's meaning. It is inwoven in the context of the principles of the arcane
wisdom of old.
The prime datum, of course, is the
sheer fact that the ceremonial celebrates the entry of our units of soul into
their animal bodies here on earth. It is the festival of the
"in-fleshing" of units of spiritual essence, the incarnation. The
Latin carno is "flesh." The
divine emanations of cosmic mind, uttered by the "voice of God," are
what St. John calls the Word, the Logos, and this Logos becomes
"fleshed," that is, the active ensouling
and creative principle is embodied in fleshly forms. Massey with great
insistence asserts that the Egyptian word for the mummy, which, as type of that
which lives forever even in its "death" in matter, is Karast, is undoubtedly the origin of the
Greek Christos and the English Christ. Perhaps
this cannot be categorically established as correct. Yet it would meet every
demand of symbolic consistency if its claims to this honor were exhaustively
examined.
A most interesting and suggestive
word that derives from carno, flesh,
contributes grist to our mill of elucidation. This is the word
"carnival." The dictionary states
21
that it originally sprang from the "putting
away of meat" in Roman Catholic countries,
The gist of the meaning of
"carnival" at any rate is the note of revelry carried to wild excess,
and as the dictionary has it, "merrymaking, especially of an indecorous
character." But the axial idea embodied in the word must definitely be the
giving of free rein to the instincts and impulses of the "flesh," the
indulgence in carnality. The second part of the word is given as deriving from
the Latin levare, "to lift, to
elevate." So that instead of connoting originally the "putting away
of meat," it might with more directness have been intended to signify the
"exhaltation of the flesh." For this in
effect is precisely what the celebration became. It was carnality given vent in
"carnivality."
For a grasp of the basic elements of
the celebration's appropriateness, it is necessary to emphasize the item
22
that is the central axis about which the whole
meaning revolves. This is the fact that the human body is the product of the
evolution of animal life, that it is in and of
itself, just the highly developed animal. Plato defines man as through
intellect a god, but through body an animal. Ancient mythology and Scriptural
writings represent the interrelationship between the Heroes, the divine beings
who come to earth, and the various animals they all have to meet, combat and
slay. The only animals connoted by these myths and allegories are these animal
bodies into which the god-souls effect entry. This item is one of the pointed
keys whose loss in the early centuries plunged all interpretative effort into
obscurity and error.
A few Scriptural references to the animal
nature of man may profitably be introduced. The allegory of Daniel thrown into
the lion's den can at once be seen as the soul's imprisonment in animal body,
for in incarnation the spark of divinity is "cribbed, cabined and
confined" in the "den of the animal. In Marks' Gospel (I:13) one verse condenses the entire story of the Temptation.
Prefacing that Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness forty days
to be tempted of Satan, the narrative covers in six words the entire content of
the experience, after which "angels ministered unto him." And what
are these six words? "And was with the wild
beasts." Here is conclusive evidence that the Temptation was just a
poetic graph for the incarnation. All the temptation that soul ever meets
arises from the side of the body in which it has taken up its lifetime
habitation.
From the apocryphal Epistle to
the Romans of Ignatius we take a most revealing verse. The dramatized
23
Christ is speaking, and says:
"For I am the wheat of God, and I shall be ground between the teeth of the
wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ." The Christ has
said that we must eat his very body, to become immortal. And we, the human
entities, are those wild beasts between whose teeth the divine essence within
us is being constantly ground. Yet that divine essence is the bread of life on
which we feed.
In the Book of Ezekiel, speaking
to the souls he is about to dispatch to this nether world, God says: "I
will fill the wild beasts of the earth with thee." "The underworld
awaits thy coming," he declared elsewhere. And before his soul-children
migrated to earth, there were none but animals here to receive such royal
visitants.
A Chinese legend says that the
infant prince, son of the king, was thrown out into the pig-yard and left to
the mercy of the swine, which, however, saved him. The library of mythology
abounds in legends of heroes who were cast out in the wilds but were nurtured
by animals. Jesus was himself born in a stable among the animals. In the basic
myth of
But the material that most cogently
connects the incarnation with the Hallowe'en motif of
rough and sportive animal behavior is found in the fourth chapter of the Book
of Daniel. Interpreting the dream of
24
uchadnezzar, the prophet of the Lord revealed that the
king (always typing the divine soul) should be driven out from among men, his
dwelling should be with the beasts of the field, he should eat grass like cattle,
he should be drenched with the dews of heaven (indicating nighttime, the
universal glyph for incarnation), until "seven years" passed over him
(the glyph for a completed cycle) and he learned that the Most High ruled over
the kingdom of men. A later verse tells of the fulfilment
of the dream: the king was driven out from among men, and did eat grass
like oxen, his body was wet with the dews of heaven, his
hair grew like eagles' feathers and his nails like the claws of a bird. As
sanity forbids our taking this as veridical personal history of the man
Nebuchadnezzar--and certainly there is no evidence of its having happened to
this king--we have here one of the most positive proofs of the allegorical
character of Biblical literature. But the most pointed item in this allegory is
the statement that "an animal's mind shall be given unto him," which
is latter followed by the statement that "his
mind became like the mind of an animal." It was to take the transforming
experience of the whole cycle (of seven years) to enable the king, the soul, to
do just what Plato asserts it must do to recover the memory of its lost
intellectual Paradise. For the Daniel paralogue
states that when the experience was over, the king announced that
"my reason returned unto me." We lose the paradisical
consciousness when our souls leave heaven for earth. We live in an animal's
body (Isaiah says: "We live in darkness like the dead.") and
in the early stages of this lower world existence we exercise an animal's grade
of mind. We will regain
25
Here indeed is found the Hallowe'en motif and spirit. Our souls have taken lodgment
in the bodies of animals, and in the first stages they have no other awareness
or knowledge than that they are just the animal creatures with the animal mind.
Our behavior in this long inceptive period of the incubation ordeal is purely
that of ourselves acting like animals. Our real divine nature at that epoch is
shrouded in oblivion,--Plato's great doctrine of the "loss of divine
memory." It lies deeply submerged under the animal grade of mind which
occupies the open field of consciousness. Only later, and only completely at
the end of the cycle, will it have been awakened and developed its latent
powers to full spiritual rulership of the life. Hallowe'en is designed to commemorate our sensual activity,
our grade of animal-mindedness which in this earthly existence foreruns the
birth of the spirit. That is the core of the festival's recondite meaning.
No passage that has been encountered
in much study seems to picture with adequate clarity and vividness the basic
evolutionary situation as does a citation from the works of the great Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus.
Commenting on the mental metamorphosis superinduced
by the soul's migration from heaven to earth, he writes:
"They began to revel in
free will; they indulged in their
own movement; they took the wrong path. Then it
was
that they lost the knowledge that they sprang
from that
divine order. They no longer had a true vision of
the Sup-
reme or of themselves. Smitten with longing for
the lower,
rapt in love of it, they grew to depend upon it;
so they
broke away as far as they were able."
26
Forgetting that they were princelings of the heavenly kingdom, now enwrapped in the
coats of animal skin, their divine potential reduced if not smothered by the
deadening blanket of the body's sensuous life, they took themselves to be the
physical creatures they outwardly were. And as outer form shapes itself over
the likeness of the inward soul that pours itself out through it, it was not
long until animal propensity transformed the environing body into the animal
semblance.
The exposition could run into great
elaboration. As there are many kinds of animals, with each giving a different
expression of brutish propensity, the reveling throngs in city streets are at
liberty to exhibit a wide variety of antics. What is to be understood and
weirdly felt in the scene is the sense of a being potentially of god stature
glaring out through the eyes and features of an animal, a god grimacing like a
beast. And all of this is most appropriate to introduce the next and most
impressive and meaningful particular of the Hallowe'en
drama.
27
THE MASK OF THE PERSONALITY
This prominent feature is the mask
behind which all revelers hide their identity. Hardly have we ever caught
even the shadow of the light that is hidden behind this enigmatic symbol. From
it we gleam a new revelation, one which incontrovertibly corroborates the
thesis of interpretation here advanced.
What is disclosed to us, as the
outstanding item of the revelry, is the spectacle of humans masquerading in
the outer features and habiliments of an animal. In addition to being a
carnival, Hallowe'en is par excellence a masquerade.
Human features are overlaid and hidden behind the outer clothing of an
animal. For, let us make no mistake about this, those masks and those
masquerading costumes were originally the heads and hides of animals.
The author had conceived that this must be so considerably in advance of his
finding confirmation of the fact. That came in further research. It was found
that participants in the Mithraic Mysteries wore
animal masks. But much direct testimony to the fact was encountered in a most
valuable work, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, by Lord
Raglan (Oxford University Press,
"The incarnation of the divine
soul in man's animal
body is the basis of all the legends of the
sorcerer's turning
the hero or his men into animals, or their
disguising them-
selves as animals. The animal mask of Hallowe'en is the
28
survival and replica of the same thing, for the masks
were
originally the hides of animals! The prominence given this
phase of the drama's meaning is attested by what
Raglan
writes (p. 261). He says that a prominent feature
of every
type of traditional narrative is the man in
animal form, or
the animal that can speak."
This must be so because there is but
one central theme to the drama of human life, viz. the interrelated history of
the two components of man's life, soul and body, god and animal.
Hallowe'en is the masquerade ball of the ego-soul in
man. He is a (potential) god, yet here he is cavorting in the disguise of the
beast. And this is not mere histrionic fantasy, but the actual truth of the
situation in which he finds himself. His heavenly Father has sent him forth out
of the celestial palace to don the habiliments of a race of lower beings and be
the monitors, verily the gods of these creatures.
The young god, comely and radiant in
the first bloom of his youth before the animal brutishness has marred his
visage and contorted his beauty into coarseness, soon registers the contortions
of his features in forms of ugliness. This element of the interpretation was so
pronounced in the ancient purview of the incarnational
drama that it became distinguished as the doctrine of the god's
"disfigurement." The impingement of the beastly nature upon the
impressible consciousness of the young god distorted the latter's features into
painful deformity. So prominent indeed was this aspect of the semantic
delineation that when the Christian movement in the early centuries
transmogrified the spiritual drama into the personal biography of the man
Jesus, one party
29
in the Church strongly contended that in bodily
appearance the Nazarene was an ugly, deformed, wizened and decrepit little old
man! (The evidence for this is to be found in Lundy's valuable old work, Monumental
Christianity.) Isaiah in chapter 52 depicts this facet of meaning:
"His visage was so marred, more
than any man, and his
form more than the sons of men; disfigured till
he seemed
a man no more, deformed out of the semblance
of a man."
Again we read: "He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is
no beauty that we should desire him." In one striking picturization of the
god in this condition, the wisdom of old
30
And perhaps nobody has ever more
pointedly told us the cosmic necessity for the descent of these units of potential
godhood into the lair of the beasts than has Thomas Taylor, profound expositor
of the Greek philosophers. He writes:
"Without this participation of
intellect in the lowest
department of corporeal life, nothing but the
irrational
soul and a brutal life would subsist in the dark
and fluctua-
ting abode of the body."
The animal races ("three genera
of mortals" Plato in the Timaeus calls
them), which could progress by the natural biological impetus to the levels of
sensation and feeling (of pleasure and pain), could advance no further up the
ladder without receiving from above the implantation of the germ of mind in
their organic constitution. To effect the polarization of the negative forces
of sense and emotion with the positive energies of mind and spirit (the union
of earth and water with air and fire) God sent forth his sons,
"only-begotten" of mind, not of matter, and germinally
linked their spiritual potential with the physical nature of the lower beings,
to lead them over the gap between sense and mind and be in effect their
"gods." "You shall be their gods and they shall be your
people," he promised them.
31
MAN'S TWO VOICES
But it is when we come to examine
the etymological as well as the philosophical significations of the mask that
we gain a wondrous new vision of the festival's profounder import. The path of
this luminous understanding runs back to the Latin word for "mask." A
veritable flash of illumination floods in upon us when we find that this word
is persona. It is composed of per, "through," and sonum, "sound." When in
32
human race. The god, enjoying,
as Plotinus shows so clearly, the opportunity to
indulge in the free activity of creative will in his own right and in his own
domain, felt "in his blood" the delight of adventure in the exercise
of his new powers and glowed with eagerness to try his constructive efforts
upon the plastic nature of matter. For the Father had put him in charge
of a small kingdom of cosmos, a miniature world, made over the image of higher
worlds, so that when he became proficient in its rulership
he could be given dominion over larger universes. It was inevitable that, still
in his callow youth, untried and ignorant, impetuous, inexperienced and
inexpert, he would run wild in his wielding of the powers in the body he was to
rule. The Greek myth of Phaeton, son of Apollo, rashly essaying to drive the
sun-chariot of his father across the sky and letting it get out of hand, so
that the Sun-God had to strike him down to save the world, is a variant graph
of the same conception. It is no derogation of the theological presupposition
underlying this delineation of evolutionary process that the youthful god in
man's nature had to indulge in a veritable revel of license in his use of the
powers of the body which is the kingdom he is given to rule. Otherwise we must
ask how he would ever learn their power and master the art of bringing them
under his control for their true function in the upward movement which carries
both him and them forward to grander being.
As he took the reins of directive rulership in his hands and whipped up the fiery seeds of
the physical chariot he must learn to drive, he became familiar with their
capabilities and their power, saw how they could be exploited for high service
and at any rate took keen note of the outcome of his efforts. It was in this
way
33
that his rioting with them brought a return to
invaluable benefit to himself. For it is out of reflection upon the
consequences of our acts that mind is born. And only when mind assumes full
direction of the soul's employment of the life forces will the still higher
birth of spirit be brought to pass. Even the fool's folly becomes in the end,
through the pain that follows it, life's appointed schoolmaster, our pedagogue
in growth. Out of our wildest orgies eventually emerge the principles of
wisdom. Our reason returns unto us.
For when the ripening powers of
thought begin to take clear note of the consequences of "wasting our
substance in riotous living," mind comes forward and exerts its sovereign
prerogative in the way of opposing its mandates to the wild surges of the
animal propensities. For now mind knows that the sense and the emotions have a
beneficent role in the order, for the proper playing of which they must be kept
in leash, to be exercised in due and not inordinate measure and proportion, as
the Greeks have so well taught.
Here, then, begins the great Battle
of Armageddon, the inner conflict between soul and sense in man's conscious
life. The lower forces, like wild horses, are strong and rampant. The god
himself is eager to ride them to sensational adventure. Even the Bible asserts
that he "rejoiceth as a strong man to run a
race." He is in his youth and the conquest of life in its red morning glow
beguiles him on.
But the conflict grows grim and
tense as mind begins to impose a checkrein upon the native energies of the
animal. And the battle rages on, as again and again the balance between the
god's evolving mind and the con-
34
trolled forces of the body is upset and must be
reestablished. Inharmony, internal strife fills the temple of the body and
racks the peace of both contenders. The strong powers of the sense life refuse
stubbornly to take the bit or obey the reins.
In this phase of the subject we are
browsing in the field into which modern psychology, more particularly
psychoanalysis, has moved in its search for the springs of human motive. Here,
as spirit in its growing discernment and deepening wisdom tightens the reins on
sensuality, the animal soul, finding its automatisms and customary fling of
gratifications summarily inhibited, sets up disturbances of violent nature. The
sense life operates under the law of the subconscious; its activities are
automatic, once the consciousness at that level is fixated in their grooves.
When opposed, balked or denied altogether, there is a damming up of forces that
create insufferable pressures and rend the unity of life. Here is the
spring-source of neuroses, psychopathic disturbances, frustrations and
conflicts of every sort. The higher soul, on its part, will not too long abide
submissively the body's obdurate ignorance of its needs for the proper
conditions of growth. So the mighty war of the polar opposites goes--shall we
say?--merrily on. Now the animal, the dragon, again the divine infant, gains
the upper hand. The child Hercules is pictured as grappling with the two great
serpents that come up out of the sea and seek to strangle him in his cradle.
David, the youth, slays his Goliath by implanting a stone, universal ancient
arcane symbol of the divine unit of mind, in the center of the giant's
forehead. Evolution slays the old first Adam, the sense nature, by developing
the power of mind. For the ancients pictured mind as the
35
serpent-charmer, the magician that puts the dragon to sleep
and lets the imprisoned maiden of soul escape from his vile cave.
When medical science speaks of a
balanced mind, or an unbalanced one, it seems not to have in view any definite
force in relation to which it is in or out of balance. We are left to assume
that it is evenly and harmoniously balanced with itself,
or with the forces that flow through it. There need not be this indefiniteness.
The duality that is basic to all life tells us with what element or force it
must be balanced. It must equilibrate its working with the bodily energies of
animal consciousness, that is, with sense and emotional desire. Against these
the soul does battle with its weapons, mind and spiritual will. These higher
faculties are not to crush, but to control, order and
utilize the two lower forces to promote the interests of both sides. The
balance is between soul and sense. The conflict is not to terminate in the
victory of the one and the destruction of the other. It is going to eventuate
in the wedding of the two when they have learned to like each other well enough
to harmonize their opposing forces in equilibrium and stabilization in
complementary fulfilment of the functions of both.
All polar opposition is to be consummated in the union of the two, out
of which is to be generated the birth of their progeny, the glorified
Christ-in-man. All new values are born, as the German philosopher Hegel so
brilliantly has formulated it, out of the tension of opposites. And long ago
the Greek philosopher Heraclitus asserted that
"war is the father of all things," meaning that all things have their
birth in the pangs of stress and strain, the opposition of attraction and
repulsion.
36
OUR SATURNALIA
It is perhaps permissible to say
that our Hallowe'en is the modern vestigial survival
of the great ancient Roman festival of the Saturnalia. The date of the modern
celebration does not match that of the Roman holiday, which came on December
17. But in general character the two bear close resemblance to each other. In
the Roman version there was riot and revelry, masks, license, even to the union
of the sexes, and buffoonery. A quotation given by the Christian historian Epiphanius (regarded as a very unreliable purveyor of the
truth) from the Codex Marcianus, states that
Christ was born on the sixth of January, thirteen days after the winter
solstice, which, the passage affirms, the Greeks--whom he calls
Idolaters--celebrate on the twenty-fifth day of December with a festival which
is called Saturnalia by the Romans, Kronia by the
Egyptians and Kikellia by the Alexandrians. The
passage dates the twenty-fifth as the day when the "division takes place
which is the solstice," and that the Christ, born then, was
"incarnated among men" on January sixth, thirteen days thereafter.
The thirteen days were ordained, it is stated, in the cosmic plan from the fact
that "it needs must have been that this should be a figure of our Lord
Jesus Christ himself and of his twelve disciples, who made up the number of the
thirteen days of the increase of light." It seems pertinent to say here
that what "needs must have been" is just the product of folly and a
travesty of truth that result whenever structures of symbolism and allegory are
put into the hopper of credulous literalism and are ground out into the pan of
alleged history.
37
If standard reference books date the
Saturnalia on December 17, and churchly documents like this Codex Marcianus place it on December 25, it seems evident
that, since most festivals of ancient provenance were holidays covering periods
of days, three, seven or ten predominantly, there is the greatest likelihood
that the Saturnalia was a seven-day festival matching very closely the
structure of the Christian Passion Week. That is to say, it was set to bring
seven days (really eight) before a date that would bring its climactic
significance to a final head on a day that was itself the date of axial
movement. The date in the case was December 25, and that was fixed to fall
three days after the true day of the winter solstice, December 22, by the
insertion of the three symbolic days so often added to the central date to
typify the period of incubation of spirit in matter before new birth. (Fuller
elucidation of this methodology is to be found in the author's major works.) In
esoteric purview a seven-day festival graphed most aptly the whole
form-structure of creation "in seven days." And it was customary to
date the beginning of the festal seven days ahead of what would be the
climactic day that would appropriately crown the whole week with a glorious
finale.
But deeper research into the forms
of ancient festivals reveals a singular and very meaningful datum that appears
to have been completely lost out of modern religious or scholarly ken. This is
the baffling fact that nearly all festivals running seven days were carried on
an extra, or eighth day, called by the ancient Jews an azaret, or added day, a "morrow after
the Sabbath," and by the Greeks an epibda.
What seems to have been the esoteric
38
motif of this schematism
was the fact that a septave was conceived to carry
human evolution over the terrain of one full plane or level of conscious
development, yet to round out the cycle it was considered necessary to add one
more day, on which, symbolically, the current of life that had completed one
sevenfold grade of being would be safely launched on the first rung of the next
higher grade or scale above it, ready to begin its seven-step progress thereon.
This may be seen on any piano, where one complete tonal expression embraces the
seven keys plus the eighth, which rounds out the octave. The fact that we call
each group of seven keys an octave hints at the recondite purport behind
the "added" eighth day. Several ancient festivals began on a Sabbath
and ended on the next Sabbath, thus rounding out a complete cycle, in addition
to placing the life impulse in position to begin its next cycle above.
So then a seven-day period that
would be crowned in its final spiritual significance with an azaret, or eighth day,
and ordained to terminate on December 25 would have to be set to begin on
December 17. There otherwise seems to be no astrological schematism
that would make December 17 a day of direct significance per se, unless
it be that so many festal occasions in the old Jewish
dispensation fell on the seventh day of the tenth month, giving
sheer numerical importance to the number seventeen.
It was a common feature of the Roman
Saturnalia that masters exchanged places with their slaves, even appointing one
of them to reign as king, in full actual authority, for the duration of the
holiday. Further
39
study reveals that many celebrations
of New Year's Day in many lands were featured by the exchange of positions
between king and a subject, marked even by exchange of attire, the king donning
the slave's habiliments and the latter being royally outfitted and crowned. All
this, appropriate to the import of New Year's Day, when ends an old period and
begins a new, rings out an old regime to ring in a new, has its reflection
still in Hallowe'en in the exchange between the god
in the human castle and the castle fool. The god permits the fool to reign and
revel for the night. And the man dons and disports himself in the fool's
attire.
But the matter of the exchange of
clothing is preserved in a slightly varied form in our celebration through the
arrangement of the wearing of suits of two different colors, divided down the
middle. Here is another item of basic reference. It typifies the very relevant
fact that man's nature is dually compounded and dually divided, soul and body,
god and animal. He is two elements, two grades of conscious being, and the
divided suit denotes this duality. That is, he is such when his soul is in the
period of incarnation, and it is not to be forgotten that Hallowe'en
is the festival of the incarnation. A most pertinent background of this aspect
of the celebration is found in the philosophy which Plato expounded in the Symposium,
where he elaborates the theory that the soul of man, as itself dual, splits
as it were into two halves, one embodied in a male, the other in a female body,
so that the affinity drives the two to seek and unite with each other in
earthly life. It proclaimed the philosophy of twin souls, or affinities.
40
But a sententious statement, from
which indeed the Greek philosopher almost certainly inherited the idea, is
found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, virtually proclaiming the same
theory, in the sentence: "The soul makes its journey through Amenta in the
two halves of sex." (Amenta is the Egyptian "underworld," which,
however, is no dark limbo lying below our earth, but that good earth
itself, "under" as lying below the heaven world.) There is little
ground of authority in all ancient philosophy for crediting the thesis that a
soul is or can be itself split in two, with one part masculine and the other
feminine. What is back of Plato's romantic spiritual rhapsodizing and what is
the real sense of the Egyptian statement is doubtless the truth that original
primordial essence out of which all things emerge to manifest in the dual
expression of spirit and matter splits apart (as the first verse of Genesis affirms)
into the polarity, so that a unit of soul, which must itself be indivisible--as
attested by its character as "individual"--must naturally seek and
aim to unite itself with its congenial material organism, which it indeed
"marries" by entering its very womb and impregnating it for
fecundity. Often the body is spoken of as the "wife" of the soul. And
every god in the Hindu pantheon was united with his sakti,
or material force through which alone he could exercise his creative
function. Always it seems necessary to revise the aberrations of popular
misunderstanding of basic elements in traditional inheritances and restore lost
primal meaning to empty forms.
The eventual union of the two
selves, or two natures in man was undoubtedly prominent in the mental context
of the significance of the Saturnalia. For the human
41
action that would directly dramatize this union was
indeed all too prominently in evidence in the ancient carnival in honor of the
god Saturn. Indeed the celebration tended always to run to sexual excess. Sheer
and sublime cosmic principle, which became a fundamentally true conception in
the philosophical abstract, all too readily became the plausible motivation to
carry it out in physical actuality. Especially when in incarnation the body was
for long the king over the soul, the motive to give free rein to the body's
instincts ran strongly toward expressing itself in sexual union. One statement
concerning the Saturnalia tells us that "copulations did much
abound." The same tendency was found running to gross excess in the early
centuries in the celebration of the Christian festival of love, called the Agape.
This word is the Greek name for the love that is not of the flesh, but in
its fullest sense divine or spiritual love. Yet in the meetings of the early
Christian sectaries, held at one time mostly in the cemeteries at night, the
excesses ran to such proportions that the Church heads were constrained finally
to interdict the gatherings altogether.
Perhaps it is the fainter reflection
of this realistic dramatization of the love-and-union motive that is still to
be noted in the form and spirit of liberty and license which does prevail
strongly in the Hallowe'en carnival. The mask,
affording anonymity, provides an added incentive to personal approach and
suggestive familiarity. And such familiarity is less resented. The bars are
definitely let down. Much ancient tradition held that this was the night that
Satan and his hosts were free and on the prowl, so that the occasion is colored
a bit darkly
42
with the suggestion that evil is in the air and
has license to work its deviltry.
But how much of the profounder
theological esotericism was basic in determining the form which the ceremonial
took it is difficult to say. One finds without exception in diligent research
that all these ordinances of old time sprang from, and embodied in symbolic or
dramatic form the most recondite and abstruse conceptions which the highest
genius of mankind held as to the reality and the meaning of life and the world.
We can turn to St. Paul's Epistles and find that he unequivocally set forth the
thesis that the soul, resident in the spiritual spheres before incarnation, was
not "under the law," and was untainted by sin. But when the
"command" came home to it and brought it down to earth, there it came
under the law of the flesh and the seductions of carnality, and from the side
of the body "sin sprang to life" (Romans 7) and lured the
deity down to his spiritual "death." He directly states that the
cosmic command (improperly translated "commandment") that transferred
him from the dreamy bliss of heaven to the open life in body meant spiritual
"death" to him. This agrees, too, with Plotinus'
statement that the young deities ran amuck in wild libertinism when given
control of the body, and had not yet learned to ride and tame this spirited
steed. How clearly this facet of a true theology is mirrored in the hilarity of
our Hallowe'en!
43
THE THREE WITCHES
But Hallowe'en
is witches' night" also. It seems definitely that this eerie character of
the witch, who plays so prominent a role in the festival's
"witchery," is one of those dramatis personae of arcane
mystery representation that is to be, so to say, read in reverse meaning.
Outwardly of an unbeautiful aspect and character, aged, semi-evil in influence,
the character is probably not at all on the negative or sinister side, but on
the contrary personalized the divine soul itself. It may be said that she is
the god in disguise, the deity masquerading in what the ancient sages
denominated the "feminine phase" of the soul's life. Matter was
universally typified as feminine, as indeed it has to be, seeing that it
performs the mother function in all living creation. So that when the soul, charactered as masculine always, descends and clothes
itself in material body, it is allegorized as having turned feminine. It has
put on its earth-mother's robes.
That the witch, however, is
intrinsically masculine is to a degree proved by the derivation and etymology
of the word. It is from the same stem of Anglo-Saxon background which gives the
German wissen, "to know," and
our words wit, wizard, wise and others. Here is a clue that can not be
ignored or slighted. The personation represents the
knowledge constituent in man's being, and this can not be aligned with the
body. It must go with the soul. And Soul is masculine.
44
In Shakespeare's Macbeth the
poet, who was steeped in esoteric lore, gives us the eerie scene of the three
witches dancing around the fire burning under the cauldron of hellish brew, a
steaming, seething concoction of all things connected with dark night and dark moon.
These poetize the animal or natural ingredients which nature has thrown
together to consummate the human being. But around the fire dance the three
witches, and it seems indubitable that they represent the three component
elements of the knowing principle in man, which in Hindu terms are Atma-Buddhi-Manas, but in English are spirit-soul-mind. The
godhead was always given as trinitarian. And man
himself embodies a divine Trinity in exact replica of the cosmic Trinity. And
what a vivid representation of our human life this scene draws! In us the dark
sinister forces and elements of the lower bodily life are stewing in a ferment, are seething in constant agitation, as sense and
emotion embroil us in the heat of their hot blood and passion. All the while the
triform soul circles round and round, in cycle after
cycle, as incarnation brings it again and again down to flit about the bodily
fires of lust and sensuous life.
But we are told that the witch comes riding through the skies on a broomstick. Symbolism
probably has a deep message for us in this device of semantic fancy, since it
would seem to mean that the knowing principle, which all Scripture says does
"come down out of heaven," was the gift of the divine fire of the
gods to mortals (the Promethean "fire") and was itself emblemed by the element of air. All words for spirit, soul
and mind in nearly all languages are the same as for air, wind or breath, as anima,
pneuma, spiritus,--the
latter from
45
Latin spiro, "to breathe." Man spiritual is composed of the essences
typed by fire and air, the natural man by those typed by water and earth. And
we can well think that the knowledge principle could be depicted as coming down
from heaven to make a clean sweep of all the noxious impurities of the
carnal nature. Knowledge is ultimately the only broom that will sweep out the
psychological muck and dirt of the animal obsession. If this is not the basic
meaning intended in the witch-and-broom item, the recondite reference of the
construction must be "occult" indeed. That mind is the agency
indicated as sweeping out, cleansing, purging the filth and rubbish of the
animal self is evidenced universally in the literature of the ancient wisdom.
One of the twelve labors of Hercules was the job of cleansing the Augean stables.
46
THE MOON
And when the witch rides the skies
the moon is shining down upon her. Ah! the moon! Her
pale light is the very aura of witchery. And what is her contribution to the
semantic play? It might be suggestive enough to answer that in giving vent to
the carnal impulses the soul goes "lunatic" (Latin: luna, "the
moon") for this one night. She is bewitched by the moonlight. For she is seduced by the witchcraft of the body. And this
body, says the tomes of ancient occult knowledge, was generated from the astral
sheath developed in a physical existence of beings on the moon! Plutarch, one
of the last of the ancient esotericists, tells us
that man derived his physical body from the earth, his mental body from Venus,
his spirit body from the sun, but his emotion body from the moon. And over it
as a matrix man's physical body was formed of earthy material. It is lunar
influence that affects the two lower bodies, avers the arcane astrological
science; it is solar influence that dominates the two upper bodies, the mental
and the spiritual. But when soul migrates from heaven to earth she comes first
predominantly under the lunar forces, which bestir in the body the fires of
sense and emotion.
And now we have another and again a
reverse intimation of the symbolism of witchery. It is remarkable how the
significance of the chief symbols of ancient semantic art operate, so to say,
in both directions. They can be applied, with directions reversed, to both the
higher and the lower segments of our constitution. The symbol
47
of intoxication, for instance, can have apt
reference to the divine mania (as Plato terms it) of spiritual exaltation;
likewise it can typify the befuddlement of spirit by the strength of the lower
appetencies. One can be intoxicated either by soul or by sense. Each can
intoxicate the other, but of course in a different plane. So it is with
witchery. The soul can work its charm on the body; at a different level the
body can enchant the spirit. And it does so in the very fashion depicted by the
Hallowe'en frenzy. Only it is not then a "fine
frenzy flowing," but a gross and coarse one. Yet the soul succumbs to its
seduction, for ultimate evolutionary gains.
In ancient times it was Hecate who was the queen of the Saturnalian
revels. She is the most conspicuous and dominant of the several goddess of the
moon. The lunar deities, always feminine, were represented as triform, or with three faces. Or the lunar power was
apportioned to three goddesses, Diana-Hecate-Lucina.
In one mode of interpretation the triplicity was
based on the fact that each member of the spiritual triad of spirit-soul-mind
that was to be incorporated in humanity would have to be mated with his
"wife," or sakti.
But Hecate's
number was six. Her very nature is from the Greek word 'ex (hex),
meaning six. One may not always be certain of some of the significations
carried by numbers in the ancient hermetic methodology, but it would appear
that the basic connotation of this number six has positive reference to the
whole world of manifestation, the lower world,--if it is really legitimate to
put it in the inferior position and rating in the scale. There are two and
possibly more fundamental considerations
48
that were determinative in giving six its
significance in the relations associated with it. The most massive one is that
six is the number of sides or faces to a cube, which figure is ineluctably the
type of all existential form in the world of three dimensions. If the physical
world be the lower world, in distinction from the spiritual realm, then its
representative number must be six. Any solid object must be viewed as having
the possibility of extension in six directions, perpendicular to its six faces.
Six would therefore stand as the number of the world of manifested objective
existence.
The second potent factor is that
this world is generated and completed in six stages of formative activity. A
seventh is to follow, but this is not an additional day of creative work, for
God finished the physical creation on the sixth "day." Therefore it
is that Philo asks who can fittingly celebrate the glory and majesty of the
number six. He calls it "the festal day of all the earth." And again
he rhapsodizes over it as "the virgin among numbers, the motherless
nature, most akin to the monad and the beginning." He says that after God
had completed the physical creation "according to the perfect nature of
the number six," he hallowed the following day as "the birthday of
the world."
Six is then the number marking the
completion of the material universe, which, in the truest sense of the word, is
not completed until its material formation is crowned with its spiritual diadem
of glory of consciousness, the work of the seventh stage. Six gives to the
world its physical objectification, which is but the woody stem,--to use a
figure--on which the lovely flower of
49
divine being is to burgeon forth. As
Hence out of contrast with seven,
six takes on the hues of incompleteness, of insufficiency, defect, lack,
darkness and all aspects opposite to the glorification of consciousness. It is
the number of the world and of life as yet unillumined.
It is the numerical sign of the nether world of darkness, of spiritual
benightedness, which is the region in the universe denominated hell, hades, sheol
(Hebrew) and Amenta (Egyptian). It is the number of that underworld into which
all the mythological heroes, themselves personifications of divine soul,
descend to wage their battle with "the elements of the world,"
"the powers of darkness," the imps of Satan and the gates of hell.
Had theology preserved the knowledge that the underworld of mythology and the
hell of the creeds were just this our own lovely
world, the counsels of sane understanding would have prevailed in the Western
milieu instead of the maunderings of folly.
One might say that six thus becomes
the numerical symbol of the incarnation of deity in matter. We have seen it
equate inerrantly the material world, the feminine,
night, and we shall see its relation to water. Next we shall see its surprising
connection with sex. This is what we should expect, since it is only when the
soul is buried down in body (which is seven eighths water!) that the full
polarity of sex is manifest. "In heaven there is neither marriage nor
given in marriage." The
50
soul there is described as sexless, more or less
androgynous, epicene. It is only when incarnation has completely segregated the
opposite ends of the polarity in separate physical embodiments that the magic
potency of the sex attraction is generated. So six brings the
divine unit down into the region of sex. The surprise that awaits us is
that the word "sex" is virtually the word "six." Some one
has wittily said that it has struck sex o'clock in the world. (A magazine rack
would seem to indicate it.) He spoke doubtless more aptly than he suspected.
How insistently does
51
THE WITCHING HOUR
With hex being the Greek word
for "six," and six being virtually synonymous with sex, the witch
being the noetic or mind principle masquerading in
its "feminine phase," one may be prepared to learn without too great
astonishment that the German word for "witch" is Hex, and for
"witchcraft" Hexerei. It does
not inordinately stretch the fitness of sense if one were to say that when the
soul is "sixed" it is "sexed" and
"hexed," i.e., bewitched, using a word in colloquial vogue. For the
Greek "six" is the German "witch," Hex. It is so
often in the lost roots of language that the true links of ideas that
cryptically connect elements in the meaningful constructions of ancient
semantic art are to be found. Even our dictionaries in many instances fail to
trace words to their real sources. In this case they do not tell us that the
root of hex (and probably of sex, as "h" and
"s" interchange thousands of times) is the ancient hieroglyphic
Egyptian word for "magician," hekau.
But there is much more that concerns
us with Hecate, the moon goddess whose name is
"six." And general mythicism itself has
hardly in any lucid manner told us of the interrelated connotations of the moon
and its pale witching light, much less why specifically the moon is so
prominent a hieroglyph of Hallowe'en. And here shines
forth from the dark night of human unintelligence the moon ray of hidden wisdom
indeed, for those who will not obdurately persist in scorning the conceptual
genius of ancient sages. Instruction, those wise ones knew, gleamed forth for
the brain of man from every object and phenomenon in nature. So it was from
nature, which can not utter an untrue syllable, that the per-
52
spicacious minds of the theurgists of old time drew
their logoi, their noetic
principles of truth. And how oracularly did the wan
light of the moon bespeak to them the sermon of that other and brighter light,
now reduced to but a faint dim glow by its burial under the cover of the body,
which our divine souls from a world of sun-radiance above would bring into our
lives!
As one studies the positions and
aspects of sun and moon over the period of a lunar revolution of twenty-eight
days, it becomes almost a conviction that God structuralized the scenic effects
to poetize in beautiful form the analogous relation of the sunlight of our
inner spiritual divinity to our lower and purely human "moonlight"
grade of intelligence. Genesis says that God fixed two lights in the
firmament to illumine the earth, the great light to rule by day, the lesser
light by night. When one grasps the chief figure under which ancient sapiency depicted the soul's time of incarnation, not as
its daytime, but its nighttime--it being then submerged in the darkness of a
body of earth and water, poetized as a dungeon, cave or dark underworld--one
will for the first time sense the beauty of the poetic, but entirely real,
picturization of moonlight as the symbol of the soul's mighty light of the sun
when that light is dimmed and obscured by its having to shine out in our life
through the medium or the mask of our physical organism. Moonlight is the sun's
own light, but relayed to us only by reflection from the body of the moon. The
analogy of this with our divine light is perfect, when applied to our
situation. The soul is itself a portion, a fragment, a ray of the light of our
higher divine sun of intellect radiating out from cosmic Mind itself. But
though it is that very light that lighteth every man
that
53
cometh into the world, it can not shine on us
directly. In a remarkable little allegorical graph found in the Book of
Exodus God informs us that as his glory comes close to us he will place his
hand over our eyes, so that we will not be blinded by its overpowering
strength, and when he shall have passed, we will be able to gaze safely upon
his hinder part. If the frontal aspect of God is blazing glory of spirit, then
the hinder side is matter. And in all arcane science the sun symbolized spirit
and the moon matter. So it is matter that shields our feeble vision from the
ineffable and unbearable splendor of spiritual light. Are we surprised, then,
to find that our Scriptures tell us that "the Lord God is a sun and a
shield"? And again how marvelously nature follows the poetism here! For we can not gaze into the light of the sun
by day, but may safely look into the face of the moon at night!
Clearly natural typism
here teaches us that in the "nighttime" of our incarnation the light
of the spirit can not impact upon us directly, but reaches us only through the
medium of brain and mind, only as reflected from the plane surface of human
consciousness. The sun's light comes to us by night reflected from the moon;
the soul's greater light likewise comes to us here in body reflected from or
transmitted through the more opaque texture of the physical organism, which, as
has been noted, derives its nature from an evolution on the moon. All religion
asseverates that in the heaven world souls bask in the great undimmed light of
God's effulgence. Equally they assent to the assumption that
in the flesh they are cut off from direct incidence or vision of the
celestial light. "We live in darkness like the dead," says Isaiah.
"Now we see through a glass darkly," cries
54
will transmit or reflect a portion at least of a
light that falls upon it. This glass, this mirror is the mind, the power of
human intelligence which man can burnish until it conveys a clearer and sharper
image of the true divine radiance of divine thought that falls upon it from the
Sun of Truth above. In its reduced form it is the moonlight reflection of our
diviner genius symboled by the sun.
And this is the moonlight of Hecate, light reflected from God himself. It is our
heavenly radiance of soul power, but now dimmed by its medium of transmission
through the flesh. Though we are removed from God when imprisoned in body, his
illumination still reaches us, diminished in measure and brilliance by
reflection from the moon element in our nature.
It may not be inappropriate to cite
here a sentence from an unpublished work of the author anent the Hecate influence:
"This light that stands in
close relation to man's life in
in the darkness of incarnation is Hecate; the moon-spirit, the
light-by-night, the half-obscured, half-dimmed, half-
deceiving uncertain light of man's purely human intelli-
gence; that reflected light of higher divine
radiance that is
bedimmed and subdued as it tries to shine in the
murky
mists of human sense and emotion that arise, like
the mist
that arose out of the ground in Genesis, from
the lower
marshes of the body's instincts, to water the whole
face of
the adamah"
(ground).
It can not fail to strike one as a
thing most impressive that, as it is discerned in this analogy, the light of
man's human intelligence is indeed and in verity the reflection of God's own
omniscient Mind-light. But our vision of it is not clear. Under the obscuration
of our ignorance and mental darkness it is reduced to the halflight
of moonlight.
55
THE SPELL OF HECATE
Throughout all religious mythology
there rings that continuous note of man's haunting dread of the Hecate influence, his fear of the dark night, his
shuddering affright at the appearance of ghosts, that for all their unsubstantiality are the more terrifying because of their
shadowy, indistinct and unknown character; and all the spectral and eerie
awesomeness of the night. In the semi-darkness of his mind sober reason is
undermined by uncertainty and nameless terror strikes the soul. Darkness robs
us of our keen faculties by which we guard our safety. And these vague
apprehensions are the exact analogue of the very real loss of vision and
consequent bewilderment and trepidation which overwhelm our balance when we are
thrust down into the bristling shades of the underworld. For down here the
clear outlines and forms of truth are blotted out or blurred and grotesquely
distorted amid the surging mists of sensuality and passion.
A frequent item introduced in the
run of witchcraft and sorcery in world tradition was the rite of Hecate worship which was enacted at
Hecate is closely connected with Hermes as
conductor of the dead through the darkness of the underworld.
56
She is accompanied by the souls of
the dead, who are not ghosts, but souls deadened, as Virgil puts it, by mortal
bodies and members subject to death. She held the keys of death and hell and
the pit of the abyss. In this office she was called Kleidophorus,
Bearer of the Key, and a Festival of the Key was dedicated to her, in which she
was prayerfully entreated to open the gates of the pit to let the
"dead"--the living on earth in "death" of soul--return to
life above.
But she was again the triform deity; goddess of the moon in heaven; goddess of
souls in the dark underworld of death and hell; and goddess of the sea. This
accounts for her being pictured as a goddess with three faces. She aided Zeus
in his battle with the giants, which was won on the sixth day. Beside
the three heads, she is given six arms and feet. Her daughter Scylla by
Apollo (union of sun and moon!) had six heads. Hecate's
day, the sixth, was considered unfavorable for plants, but good for the birth
of males, not of girls. She was the patroness of those who go to sea and of
those who fish. Fish were offered in her worship on Friday, the sixth day.
Personifications of her in other goddesses, such particularly as Atergatis and Semiramis, were
actually dubbed "Fish-Mothers." She is goddess of the sea by virtue
of the fact that as she rules over the lower or moon element in human life, she
must have power over the body, which is itself-seven-eighths water.
A scholiast in Euripides says that
the moon of three days is called Selene; of six days
Artemis (Diana); of fifteen days Hecate. This
determines Hecate as the goddess of the full moon, as
this came on the fifteenth lunar day. However, her function embraced as well
the features that were adumbrated by the three dark days of the
57
moon. The fact of her union with the great solar
deity Apollo unmistakeably identifies her as the moon
at the full, for then sun and moon are "married" in glory, although
they are considered as being married again at the dark day of the lunar cycle,
and their conjunction then is taken as their copulation.
Again the witchery exercised by the
moonlight upon lovers is a demonstration of nature's magical influence and
stands as a vindication and redemption of much profound mythical romanticism
from imputed childishness of primitive minds. It might be analyzed as the
mystic sense in two souls of their awareness of their instinctive need and
longing for union of the two forces of their polarity. The paleness of the
moonlight almost audibly speaks to them of their groping alone in the
semi-darkness of mortal life and renders them sensible of their yearning to
find the solace and joy of union. It hints in a deep psychological way at the
feeling that love is the light that can illumine their darkness.
Whether it was a custom derived from
the ancient past or an extraneous and gratuitous feature introduced adventitiously
later, the illuminated "pumpkin face" can be seen to have pertinent
symbolic meaning. It is a vegetable, standing for the natural element in man,
and the cut-in features of eyes, nose and mouth make it representative of human
life. It therefore graphs the life of humanity at its human level, a living
natural organism with a light of intelligence glowing in side his head. It is
quite closely matched by the allegory connected with Gideon in his war with the
Midianites in the Book of Judges. Choosing
three hundred volunteers, he bade them mold clay pitchers, placing a candle
inside each. When the battle was joined in the darkness
58
these men were to dash down their pitchers to the
ground as the enemy drew near. At the sight of so much light suddenly released
by the shattering of the pitchers, the host of the Midianites
turned and fled in terror. So the pumpkin head can betoken for our thought the
presence of a great light that shines out through our dark features even in
this "dark night of the world."
The origin likewise of the trick of
"bobbing apples" in a tub of water is obscure, yet can yield meaning
when its symbolic analogues are scanned. The apple has stood in symbolism as
the fruit of the tree of life and knowledge in the garden of the world. It is
the fruit of the seed of that divine essence that is the soul of humanity. And
always water typifies life in the body, which is mostly composed of that
element. The apple floating in water is at once the emblem of the soul flung
into the water of incarnate life and thus undergoing a "baptism," but
not sinking down to be overwhelmed in its depths. The Scriptures carry out this
poetism in the "miracle" of Jesus walking
on the water and not sinking. Man is not able to redeem his apple-soul out of
its submerged condition with his physical strength, his hands. For it is not
physical power that is to save the soul from sinking down into elemental life;
it is mind alone that can save it out of the "water" of sense. So the
prescribed task is to lift it with the head, that is, with the mouth that can
speak the words of wisdom and love that can save it.
There would not seem to be any
profoundly hidden meaning to the noisy character of the celebration. Noise naturally, or at least inevitably goes with revelry. The
discussion has so far not brought in one of the names prominently given to the
Saturnalia in the early days in some nations. It was called the Hilaria. It was definitely the Feast of
Hilarity.
59
THE UNHOLY RIFT
This open character of spontaneous
mischief and rollicking license, as the chief motif of the religious festival,
can inspire some sombre reflections upon the glaring
contrast it presents with the tone of our modern religion. While not all
religious worship today can be said to be of the ultra-serious or solemn type,
nevertheless hardly anywhere now could a ritual so unreservedly featuring
sensual liberty and unbridling the animal impulses even only symbolically, be ceremonialized in our day. So far has the pendulum of
reaction swung in the other direction that most religious sentiment at present
openly condemns and severely rebukes anything tending to give free play to the
purely human side of our natures. In dour mood and in
solemn mien religion today exhorts its devotees to beware the snares of the
wily tempter who is ever watchful to seduce us away from holiness through the
enticements of worldly pleasure. In spite of this heavy blanket of pietism we
of course still do celebrate the Hallowe'en, and the
Mardi Gras gives a great southern city its annual
fling of jollity in the profane spirit. But these occasions are not considered
to be even remotely religious ceremonials. They are held to be purely secular
fun and entertainment, a social feature. And orthodox religious sentimentality
frowns on them.
When religion lost touch with its
ancient esoteric bases, which permitted worship to include reference to the
physical side of man's duality, and thus made place,
60
by virtue of its integrated relation to spirit,
for the function of the body, it was inevitably led to stamp the odium of evil
upon all the purely physical part of our life. With the accentuation of value
placed exclusively upon the spiritual, all bodily expression, particularly in
the hedonistic direction, had to be banned as worldly, sensual, devilish. One must keep oneself unspotted from the world.
This trend reached the limit of its extreme development when it decreed that
not only pleasures accruing from sense expression, but all pleasure was
religiously sinful per se. Piety had so far swept the field that
severity and austerity were the supreme marks of true religion. In spite of the
Bible's own statement that "a merry heart doeth good like a
medicine," religion had ousted gaiety from any legitimate place in the life
of devotion. Such frivolities as dancing, card playing and the theater were
ostracized from the sancta of religion.
All this becomes the more strange in
view of the historical fact that religious worship, ceremonialism and ritual
were quite certainly a development from the ancient Mystery theatricals of the
pre-Christian day; that chanting and hymn-singing grew out of the choral dances
or tribal incantations; and that the regular pack of playing cards is a modern
version of an original pictorially symbolic system of spiritual representations
of the principles of soul-body relationship or of elements of consciousness,
such as the well-known collection of the Tarot cards of the Bohemians. Even
modern games, such predominantly as chess and cribbage, were structuralized in
the pattern of number values found to subsist in the divine creation of the
world.
61
It is the likely truth that the
segregation by religion of secular and profane interests and affairs from the
area of the divine, sacred and holy has been close to the most disastrous error
in human cultural procedure. It is a grave question whether, in first reading
its own definition into the terms "sacred" and "holy," and
making that definition synonymous with its own determination of values, organic
religion has not perpetrated an aberration of the most calamitous character.
When the religious mind detached spiritual culture and science from the
interests of the physical and denounced the latter as "of the devil,"
it committed the uncritically credulous masses of mankind to a grievous and
perilous schizophrenia. And this severance, this illegitimate divorce, this
setting in hostility to each other the two characters in human life that are
basically--though in polarity--one, and in fact are destined to "marry"
to generate the Christ-in-man, John Dewey has pronounced the most disastrous of
all enmities. It has sundered the psychological unity of the human mind; it has
cleft the integrity of consciousness; it has divided the house of the human
spirit against itself. And with what fatal results in foul unbrotherliness,
in the clashing of narrow bigotries, in the reign of fanatical superstition, in
the fiendishness of persecution, war and carnage, all in the name of the Holy
Spirit, one may with sickened heart read in the annals of Western history.
Truly enough, spirit and flesh are
set in polar "opposition" to each other. But all theology went
tragically awry when in a degenerate age of philosophical decay, it came to the
shallow conclusion that, because the two were in positive-negative
counterbalance with each
62
other, they were therefore ranged as opponents in
the field of values, enemies in the battle of good and evil. This disposition
of forces in the conflict gave ground for the supposition that the good must
triumph by destroying the evil antagonist. Here was the baneful miscarriage of
the mental faculty in the religious domain. Sense and sanity should never have
lost the balance of knowledge that the opposition, the "enmity" if
you will, was that of male and female, husband and wife, not that of man and
his enemy. It was to be grasped as the opposition of function in a cosmic
device for the beneficence of life; not the opposition of positive good and its
evil thwarting.
The tradition that demons of all
grades were let loose to work havoc on the night of Hallowe'en
simply bespeaks the free activity of the forces of the negative pole in the
duality. The stress and strain that is to be consummated in marriage could not
be waged efficaciously if one party was free and the hands of the other tied.
"Satan" must be allowed to have his go at God's most righteous
servant Job. The bodily impulses, instincts and propensities, which religion
has eternally insisted must be mercilessly crushed down, must have their development
since they are to be controlled and utilized in the service of the spirit in
the end. But in the early stages of the incarnational
embroilment they long run rampant over the undeveloped reason and intelligence
and their untamed fling in free riot gave ancient sagacity the basis of the
night of Saturnalia. It is the free and irresponsible stage of the spirit's
youth as he moves forward to the task of becoming co-creator with his heavenly
Father. He is intoxicated with the glorious
63
joie de vivre and the esprit d' aventure. According
to the arcane teachings of the past he had rebelled against the "inane
passivity" and "morbid inactivity" in the purely ideal life in
the heaven world, and longed for the chance to exercise his latent forces and faculties
in self-conscious creative activity in concrete existence. God is described as
exercising his creative powers for the sake of Lila, the pleasure, the
delight, the play, sport and recreation of gods as of men. Made in his image
and likeness, his Sons likewise, and the more eagerly
for their youthfulness, plunge into the work of physical creation with eager
zest. As Plotinus said, they reveled in free will,
ran wild, overspent their forces, plunged into excess
in wrong directions. The light that Hecate furnished
them was pale and wan, too feeble to enable them to see clearly the right
paths. But in the morning would come Apollo's radiant sun in full intellectual
power of knowledge and wisdom, and the night of sinister and eerie ghostliness
would turn into the morn of the glorification of All Souls.
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