New Lectures
on the Ancient Wisdom--No I
PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY
IN THE BIBLE
by
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any of the following: A. B. Kuhn’s graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn’s unpublished autobiography, The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of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
PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY IN THE BIBLE
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The Christian Bible presents to the reflective mind one of the most astounding phenomena of modern life. Though neglected and even repudiated by a large segment of modern thinking, and evidencing few signs of a controlling influence on current modes of life, it yet occupies a place of dominance that can only be realized when its position and authority are challenged. More than that, it exercises through the subtle power of tradition and child-indoctrination a totally unbelievable thraldom over the common mind which can only be compared to a type of hypnotic obsession. The force and sweep of the subtle acceptance is not dreamed of by the person who has not become consciously emancipated from it and can view it objectively, or from the outside. Few people have been able to dissociate themselves sufficiently from their indoctrined prepossession in this regard to objectify this phenomenon of the psychological life of the day. Only a trained and freed mind can stand out from under its own inherited habitudes of thought and feeling and subject them to rational and dispassionate criticism. Few can rationally appraise mass sentiments. This is the function of the philosopher and thinker. For the most part, people accept as authoritative the mass conceptions amidst which they grow up, and regard their general vogue as the seal and surety of their rightness.
In such fashion the Bible has been accepted as the great unique work of divine authority, and, with the force of sanctified allegiance back of it for generations, it now wields a perfectly unrealized power over the common mind. Even those who have outwardly rejected it are unwittingly influenced by it in ways they little dream of; for society has been insidiously impregnated with the germs of a thousand ideas, springing from the vast number of phrases, texts and incidents which have taken unshakable rootage in the mass consciousness. In the area of Christendom the book is still regarded as the supreme moral and spiritual guide of the race. And from time to time one reads the oft-broadcast declaration from eminent divines that what the world needs most of all as a salve for its ills, is more consecrated study of the Bible.
We have pondered this assertion deeply and sought what truth there may be in it. It is one of those equivocal statements that are true without meaning much after all. The answer might be "yes" and "no." We would say "yes," but with tremendous qualifications and reservations. We can agree that more study of spiritual things is decidedly a need of our time. But we face a strange situation here, which does not seem to have been discerned by the advocates of Bible study. To
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begin with, there never has been a book that has been studied so assiduously and zealously as this. No book has received such devotion and reverence. No other has been preached on so often and so fervently. It has been organically dissected and analyzed without end. Thousands of volumes of exegesis have been written upon it. Yet we are told we need to study it more. And a prominent writer has, with general approbation, dubbed it The Book Nobody Knows, and its central hero, The Man Nobody Knows. If this is the outcome of past study on an enormous scale, what profit to study it further? The outcome of centuries of consecrated effort to glean its message is held up as a nullity!
On our part, we stand ready to make the bold assertion that it is yet a sealed book. Few, if any, know that it does contain a message that would save the race from disaster. Few, if any, know that it is one of the books of a grand past wisdom. And perhaps no one now living knows thoroughly what is hidden in its pages. Our verdict, then, is that it is futile to give it more study of the kind that it has received heretofore. If it lacks study it is because thousands have labored to get its meaning and have failed. The effort has bred disappointment and resentment against its incomprehensibility. What the modern age needs with regard to the Bible is not more study but some comprehension; not more waste of futile wrestling with riddles, but a few grains of understanding. In brief, what is needed is a knowledge of the background out of which it grew, and in reference to which alone it can be grasped.
Failure of modern effort to read the deep message of the Book is due to the fact that modern scholars stupidly and stubbornly refuse to see that ancient scriptural writing was esoteric or hidden as to its meaning, and allegorical and symbolical as to its method. The ancients did not use newspaper directness. On the contrary they put up their secret wisdom, vouchsafed to them by the great Sages, in the form of allegories and myths, which were to be taken as fiction in their outward dress, but as the cinematograph of profoundest truth and knowledge in inward sense. By a combination of symbols, nature signs and allegories, often woven into a background of real history, they sought to portray the deepest types of spiritual experience and an intellectual grip on reality. The Bible has been crassly taken for literal truth about living personages on the stage of mortal history. It has been rendered literally and historically. This is the most egregious blunder, the most grandiose error, in all human history,--this mistaking of spiritual allegorism for literal human narrative. We are in position to make the unqualified declaration for the first time in the modern age that there is not one iota of history, in the ordinary acceptation of that term, in the Bible from beginning to end. Some portions of Jewish history are utilized as the base and frame of spiritual myths. The several Judges, Patriarchs and Kings are made to stand for the central figure of the Christos. Geographical names and
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historical persons are mentioned but only as characters in the mystic or religious drama. According to Eusebius, one of the three chief formulators of Roman Christian theology, the Gospels of the New Testament are themselves nothing but old dramatic books of the Essenes in pre-Christian days. The earliest and greatest of the framers of Christian theology, Philo, Clement and Origen, expressly declared it was impossible and an impiety to assert that the logos of God could take the flesh of a human personality. New research makes it positively clear that the Old Testament narratives are in their entirety rewritings of old Egyptian material, distorted and obscured as it passed through later Hebrew hands. And Egyptian scripture was never historical. It was spiritual symbology, pure and unalloyed. The weirdest phenomenon of history transpired when later ignorance took the Egyptian constructions and converted them into absurd literal narrative. And the thinking of the whole world of the civilized West has thus been based on history that never occurred, and the Christian Church has been founded on a set of miracles that were never performed. The only miracle envisaged in ancient theology was the transformation of human character by the indwelling god, and this spiritual miracle was poetized, dramatized and allegorized in a hundred forms of outward representation, all of which was absurdly taken for personal history later.
This conversion of spiritual into biographical history has made Christianity the instrument of the grossest degradation of sublime ancient truth to which it has ever been subject. That is to say, that all Christian doctrines present the ancient wisdom in a more literal and hence cruder form of meaning than had ever been done before in national religions. In the nailing of a personal Jesus on a wooden cross Christianity reduced the glorious drama of the spiritual life to its grossest and most repellant form.
It is the business of enlightened Theosophy to lift this weight of crass literal dogmatism from off the modern imagination and conscience at whatever cost. The human soul is itself bound on the cross of gross superstition so long as these crude notions dominate the conscious and subconscious thought of modern man. The light of the true spiritual Gnosis of olden times must be cast into the dark nooks and corners of modern thinking, and disperse the mists of such errant and arrant doctrinism.
It is our declaration, based on years of the most assiduous research, that it is impossible to understand the allegories of the Bible without a knowledge of ancient methods of sacred writing, and of the ancient philosophies. Our work in this field has been rewarded by a number of the most signal discoveries which are basic for further grasp of the material.
(1) The composers of ancient scriptures were poets, allegorists,
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dramatists and mythicists. They never wrote
literally. They were in the line of generations of sages and seers who had
developed the art of spiritual representation to a point of the utmost
ingenuity and complexity, completely shrouding the intended real meaning under
veils of symbolism, which have utterly misled modern scholars who could not
pierce the outer veil to read the truth hidden underneath. Hence the works can
not be read without the keys to the myths and reference to the symbols used.
The ancients themselves testify plentifully that the scriptures are allegories.
Origen regards the whole Bible as a set of allegories. But the most astonishing
declaration to this effect is
(2) The ancients were also esotericists, writing only of the inner life and for intiated pupils. They wrote of inner things under an outer veil. They wrote of the Greater Mysteries which were never given out to the multitude, but taught in secret to disciplined students. Spiritual truth was not published in modern fashion. Whatever was written, was veiled under glyph and symbol. Mostly it was taught by oral tradition.
(3) Then the ancients were "uranographers." The
"uranograph" was a chart of heaven. By this is meant a map outlined
by the early sages charting the spiritual constitution and physiology of man,
the psychic centers, areas of spiritual force, and all "after the pattern
of things in the heavens." Man, the microcosm, is a replica of the
heavenly man and the universe. From the history of man written thus in the
constellation of the skies, the early religious formulators transferred the
record to earth and distributed the various phenomena and localities over the
national maps in accordance with the heavenly chart! All nations tried to frame
their own history and geography after the pattern of things in the heavenly
mount. Mainly the Egyptians and after them the Jews made this transfer almost
completely. According to this chart each nation was given an upper and lower
section, had a river flowing from the upper down to the lower, had a lake or
sea, a central city representing the
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of this it is offered that a monument in
(4) Lastly it was our discovery that all religious writings deal with but one central fact, the incarnation of man, or the descent and resurrection of the soul. It is graphically outlined in the Prodigal Son allegory. It is the whole story of religion. The old books deal with nothing beyond this story and its involvements. It is itself the key to all philosophy and religion. All meanings proceed from this one fact and return thither. In the light of this one fact all complicated meanings can be reduced to clear significance. It unravels the infinite complexities of the symbology that have confounded the learned scholars and theologians. That man is a god dwelling in an animal form is the central and cardinal fact of all religion.
It is well to note a few situations in the Bible which preclude any sane mind taking it for literal truth. How the literalist "swallows" them we know not.
First, the story of the flood. Forty (or four hundred) days' rain would not raise the ocean an inch, as all rain is first drawn off the ocean and only runs back into it at the constant level. And how could millions of species of every living thing be collected, cared for and housed in the "ark" by a single man and his family. It would take an army many years to gather a minute portion of all creatures. Then how could they be kept in living conditions, fed, and tended on board for months?
And how did the children of the first pair, Adam and Eve, go off and marry
the women of another nation, as recorded in Genesis? And in the genealogy of
Jesus as of David's line, the link with David is broken at his father Joseph,
who was not his father after all. Jesus is of David's line, yet is denied
parentage from David's descendant. Then we have the anomaly of Joshua's
commanding the sun and moon to stand still at Ascalon. The sun is not moving
(relative to the earth) to begin with. It is already and always still. And the
matter of the star of
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lehem is a thing impossible in astronomy. And stars never stand. They rush on with unbelievable speed. And finally how was it humanly possible for the events of Maundy Thursday of Passion Week to have occurred in the space of a single night? The last supper at sundown, the long siege in the garden of Gethsemane, the arrest, the mockery, then three separate judicial trials before three distinct courts in the dead of night (!), then the carrying of the cross up the hill, the long agony of the crucifixion, the earthquake, the rent veil, the opened graves, and the burial,--all in the hours of a single night! It is incredible as human history. Like the Abraham story, it is an allegory. Paul himself never mentions it as real history, albeit he lived at the time.
These and a hundred other irrationalities make it sheer folly to uphold the literal historicity of the Bible. Yet the major theses of Christianity stand on this weak ground. There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that the history of the Church has been a tale of warfare, controversy, schism, blind faith and frightful cruelty, and that it is repudiated by about sixty per cent of the populations among which it is strongest, and is rather loosely held by its own adherents.
We are prepared to support the statement, then, that the Bible, sadly
misinterpreted by its most loyal devotees, is in reality a collection of
ancient works that embody in veiled figures the fundamentals of the genuine old
wisdom of the hierophants. One might say indeed, that it is a repository of the
great Mystery teaching of early times. In fact it is an assemblage of material
comprising the substance of Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Kabalism, Chaldean
astrology, Greek Orphism and Hindu Wisdom, drawn mostly from ancient
It is a practical impossibility, however, to expound even the crudest outline of Plato's teaching in such a lecture. We must be content with a few statements dealing with the emanation of living streams of being and intelligence from the first fount of all things. Plato represents life as unfolding from within itself at the beginning of a new period of manifestation, and proceeding outward or downward from a summit of pure spirit into ever-denser forms of creation. The One Life pours forth its power and essence in streams, called "rivers of
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vivification", "from on high as far as to the last of things," bringing all forms of life into existence and ensouling all forms with more or less of its own mighty being. At each step of the way out, or down, this life takes embodiment in coarser forms of cosmic matter, thus giving birth to the greater and lesser gods of various ranks. For the gods are embodiments of the several grades and forms of nature's life, power and intelligence. The whole creation forms a chain of beings reaching from the lowest mineral crystals to the highest God. Somewhere in this chain stands man, and Plato tells us where it is. Humanity occupies a place of great strategic importance in the hierarchy, standing precisely at the point of junction between the highest animal and the truly human kingdom. Man is the creature that is fashioned to bridge the gap between the animal and the divine order. Hence his nature is compounded of the two elements, the animal and the godlike, in one organism, making it possible for the higher to "lift up" or humanize the lower. In his Timaeus Plato gives us the remarkable speech of the Demiurgus (Creative Logos) to the "junior gods," who were the divine beings commissioned by the Lords of Karma to come to earth and be the gods embodied in an animal race that had no chance of reaching the next level of evolution without such tutelage. In it the Demiurgus enjoins the deities to come to earth and "unite mortal with immortal natures," promising them that they would "never be dissolved," if they held fast to their oath of purity and the covenant which they made with their Overlord. This is the covenant in the Old Testament which the Lord tells the Children of Israel (who were these junior gods, never the earthly Hebrews!) that they have broken times without number. For the gods, once incarnated, fell under the cloud of oblivion (drank the waters of Lethe), lost their divine memory and went "the way of all flesh" into carnality and beastliness. (See scores of passages in the Old Testament books).
But after rebellion they finally came to earth, incarnated in mortal bodies of flesh and thus linked a divine principle of intelligence with a body and a sensual animal nature. And this fact is the basis of all religion. Man is a god and a beast in one organism. Rather he is a god tabernacling in the flesh of an animal. Daniel (Chaps. 3 and 5) tells the King, who represents the divine soul, that he shall come to live with the animals and be given the mind of an animal. Ezekiel (32:4) says that the Lord "will fill the beasts of the whole earth with thee." A hundred texts from the old books confirm this statement of the linking of the two diverse natures in one organism. And this great basic fact is the heart of Theosophy. Reincarnation and Karma are ancillary to it.
We have, then, in Greek philosophy the "descent of the soul" or the advent of the gods. This is equated in the old Christian tradition by the legend of "the fall of the angels," the fall of Lucifer. It is
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outlined in full by the Prodigal Son allegory, and hinted at in many other places. The story of Abraham is a glyph of it, for he, like the Prodigal Son, left his home and kindred, left his native land, and journeyed to a far country that the Eternal promised to show him, where he would dwell among savage beasts and eat of the grass of the earth. (See Genesis 12.) Paul says "we are a colony of heaven." We, these junior gods, are collectively that second Adam, who, Paul says, "is the Lord from Heaven," following the animal man who, he says, "is of the earth, earthy."
There were twelve legions of these angel hosts, and this, indicated clearly
by Plato, is evidenced in the New Testament, where at the feeding of the five
thousand there were gathered up "twelve baskets of fragments"; and
again in the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, where, when Jesus is seized by
the deputation of soldiers sent out to arrest him, he says to them, in effect:
"Don't you know that I could call upon my father and he would sent to my
aid instantly twelve legions of angels?" These are the mysterious
"ten lost tribes of
The Greeks have all this depicted in their great fable of Prometheus stealing the heavenly fire--which, be it known, is divine intelligence, not the physical flame we cook our suppers with!--from the gods and bringing it to man for his behoof. It was what the Theosophists call Manas, the spark of thinking intelligence which made "man" a manasic being, or capable of abstract thought. We, then, are angels from heaven, and higher than the angels we shall be. For Paul, in two passages, avers that "we are to manage angels, let alone mundane things," and adds that "God hath made man for a little while (see Moffatt translation) lower than the angels and hath crowned him with glory and honor." Another ancient scripture says that "angels from their seats envy him" (man). For his experience in incarnation will advance his station beyond that of those spirits who have not been tried in the fires of earth and refined to purest gold.
The Nicene creed of the Church itself, describing the Second Logos
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of the Trinity, avers that it "came down from heaven, was incarnate . . . and was made man," for us and for our salvation. John declares that no man shall ascend into heaven save he that first came down from heaven. Jesus said he "beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." Satan is Lucifer, and we came down in the character of the bright and morning star, Lucifer, bright effluence of deity. The Chinese have a great saying that the "stars ceased shining in heaven and fell on earth where they became men."
The Neo-Platonic philosopher, Plotinus, has a remarkable passage in which he makes it clear why the soul or god in man was under the necessity of taking incarnation in an animal body. As I regard this passage as the clearest statement of the philosophy of incarnation ever given, I take the liberty of quoting it:
"Thus although the soul have a divine nature, though she originate in the intelligible world, she enters into a body. Being of the lower divine, she descends here below by a voluntary inclination, for the purpose of developing her power and to adorn what is below her. If she flee promptly from here below, she does not need to regret having become acquainted with evil and knowing the nature of vice, nor having had the opportunity of manifesting her faculties. . . . Indeed the faculties of the soul would be useless if they slumbered continuously in incorporeal being without ever becoming actualized. The soul herself would be ignorant of what she possesses if her faculties did not manifest by procession, for everywhere it is the actualization that manifests the potentiality. Otherwise the latter would be completely hidden and obscured; or rather it would not really exist, and would not possess any reality. It is the variety of sense-effects which illustrates the greatness of the intelligible principle, whose nature publishes itself by the beauty of its works."
We are on earth, then, to come to self-consciousness as divinities, but to do it by working through and with an animal. We are here to educate, refine, humanize and finally divinize, an animal! We are in bodies, which properly are not ours, but those of the animal soul, who is our appetitive or instinctual lower self. We are assigned the duty of "taming" this creature and conforming it to ways of intelligence and brotherhood. We must teach it the better way of curbing its savage instincts, its lusts and greed inherited from its wild experience in the animal orders, and must lead it upward to a final assimilation into the nature of the angel, its tutor. Little wonder the task can not be done in a single incarnation!
But how was the god to link his higher nature with the body of the animal so far below his stature? The very fundamentals of religion are interwoven with the answer to this question. For religions grew out of this relation between the god and his animal protege. Religions were not
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originally forms of mere cult sentimentalism and piety. They were regimes of ritual and ethical practice designed to keep man in memory of his divine estate, and to hold him to the obligations of the "broad oaths fast sealed" (Empedocles) of his covenant to raise up the lower self, while keeping himself "unspotted from the world."
The technique of his incarnation is philosophically described under the terms of the great Law of Incubation. This is announced in the Bible in John's verse: "Unless a grain of corn (wheat) fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Also it is seen in Paul's description of the resurrection in I. Corinthians, 15: "What you sow cannot come to life unless it die." These texts proclaim the great truth of evolution, missed by scientific eyes, that each kingdom of nature is linked to the kingdom below it for the nourishment of its life. The vegetable kingdom is rooted in mineral soil, the animal is sustained on vegetable matter, the human is built up physically of animal and vegetable elements, and in their turn the lower divine beings must take rootage in the human bodies. As the acorn can not develop its oak potentialities unless it descend and be buried in the dark damp soil of the mineral kingdom, so the angels of God can not evolve to higher perfection of their divinity unless they undergo experience in human bodies. This is the simple law which is the philosophical basis of the incarnation, at once its explanation and its justification. The son of man must descend into the bowels of the earth for three "days" (aeons), one in the mineral kingdom, one in the vegetable and one in the animal, before he rises out of matter again as a god in the perfection of his spiritual nature in the human kingdom. In the old scripture the advent of the god always occurs about "the fourth watch of the night," which symbols the human kingdom, as it is fourth in order. "As Jonas was three days in the belly of the whale, so must the son of man be three days in the bowels of the earth,"--in the lower kingdoms of evolution, not in a literal rocky tomb! We shall have light on the ancient scriptures when we follow the forms of the old symbolism.
The coming of the god to inhabit the body of an animal is in all respects equivalent to his death and burial, analogous to the death of the old seed in the ground, and is necessary if he is to rebeget himself anew as the risen son of the slain father. For when he steps into the lower body, he loses all the freedom of his glorious life as a spirit, and comes "under the law" that rules on the plane of physical matter. He is subject to all the vicissitudes of climate, bodily needs and the hardships of imprisonment in a body of flesh. In brief, he is in hell, and the grave or tomb they speak of is nothing more than his physical body. This is the first great mystery of ancient theology, lost since the third century, and now restored through occult discovery. The words tomb and womb are of the same origin and have the same significance. To
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be born from the womb of a mortal mother is to enter the tomb of mortal life. Many passages from Greek philosophy will confirm this interpretation.
Spirit, then, must be buried and die in matter, to reproduce its new generation. The divine son must come to birth in the womb of Maria (the sea of matter). "Matter is the mother of the gods," said an ancient sage; as spirit is their father. The seminal seed of divinity must be sown in the body of flesh. It is sown to die, or as Paul says, "in corruption; it must rise in incorruption." It must be sown a mortal body, and be raised a spiritual body. Paul, who was an Orphic Mystery initiate, was simply giving one of the old symbols of the descent and resurrection of the god in mortal life.
But the god did not come as an adult. What life cycle starts at maturity? He
came as a god in potentiality only, a god in embryo, a seedling god, in fact a
baby god. The Christmas or advent festival celebrates the birth of an infant
Christ. He is the Christ-child, the Krist Kingle (Kindel, Kindlein, little
child--German), the Jesu Bambino of