Tuesday, April 13, 2010

(article) Mary Magdalene and Her Seven Devils

"The character of Mary Magdalene, the incidents touching it and particularly the casting out of seven devils from her spiritual life by the Christ, are but one phase of a manifold group of allegorical depictions
of an element of cosmic meaning which is the key, so to say, to practically one half of the interpretation of all sacred scriptures. The pivotal importance of this portrayal of arcane meaning can hardly be too vigorously asserted. Mistaken for history, it failed to be read as cosmic graphology because of the crassness of scholarship in linking in meaning a variety of symbols referring to the Motherhood of all life. Why impurity and sin should be associated with a woman and the number seven was a mystery that found no solution after the early Church crushed out the esoteric academies. Bible exegetists have not seen the connection or discerned the significance of this family of symbols. Yet we shall see that these are keys that unlock the hidden truth in a quite simple and elementary way. It will then appear next to inconceivable that centuries of supposedly astute study of the Bible could have failed to yield to a single scholar the fact of such ridiculous obviousness as that woman characters in the Bible represent matter!"

This article was re-typed by the person who posted it. The first few paragraphs are irrelevant to the rest of the article. Just skip past them. Click on the title above to read the article.


Notes from the article:


"The character of Mary Magdalene, the incidents touching it and particularly the casting out of seven devils from her spiritual life by the Christ, are but one phase of a manifold group of allegorical depictions of an element of cosmic meaning which is the key, so to say, to practically one half of the interpretation of all sacred scriptures.

Yet we shall see that these are keys that unlock the hidden truth in a quite simple and elementary way. It will then appear next to inconceivable that centuries of supposedly astute study of the Bible could have failed to yield to a single scholar the fact of such ridiculous obviousness as that woman characters in the Bible represent matter!"

"It will be immediately seen as both futile and foolish to rebel against the imputations of the woman symbol, as the emblem of matter, if for a single moment we accept the fitness of assigning to woman the function of motherhood. It only needs that we accept the other principle of the profound philosophy of the past, that matter performs the same motherhood function with regard to spirit, to reconcile our opposition to the symbolism."

"When the Christian Bible states that the whole natural creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, waiting to bring forth the Sons of God, it is setting forth the basic construction of all sacred script. For all Holy Writ deals essentially and primarily with the one great cosmic story of the motherhood of matter and nature in giving birth to mind and spirit."

"Six emblems the natural man for the excellent reason that he is the product of the first six energies of life working through the first six "days" or aeons of creation. (See the Genesis lecture, No. 7 in this series.) Arcane science of old informs us that the first three creative waves of energy proceeding forth from the First God brought matter from its inchoate formless condition into a sub-atomic state available for crystallization into actual substance. The fourth wave then precipitated it into visible "matter" as we know it, physical substance, embracing the ninety-three elements of our mineral kingdom. The fifth wave raised it to the vegetable kingdom, and the sixth lifted it to the complex development of animal forms. Man, as animal, on the side of body, is thus the highest product of six evolutionary impulses or outgoings of force. Six is therefore the numerical index of man the first, the natural man, child of Mother Nature."

"The animal man, summit of Mother matter's creative edifice, was to be completed and redeemed (from mere animality) by the coming of the seventh principle."

"Imperfection prevails until it is overcome at the very end of the seventh impulse."

"Why, it has always been asked, were powers engendered in man which needed to be crushed and ruthlessly eradicated? The answer is, in part, that these powers, like a scaffold, serve an early purpose, but later have to be torn away. The stricter truth is that they are, in all ancient systems, converted into useful servants of their spiritual Lord, as his vibrations gradually transmute their cruder forces into higher type. They are to be "killed out" only in the sense of being lifted up, transformed and transfigured to serve as fit vehicles for the currents of a higher life. The importance of this clarification can not be overstated, since failure to apprehend it aright has hardened the hearts of otherwise kindly people and led to untold foul malpractice in religion."

"Not till near the end of six long aeons of slow evolution in the womb of Mother Nature does the Christ consciousness come to birth! Nature had first to bring matter up through the mineral, vegetable and animal stages before the body of man was of requisite complexity and capacity to accommodate the Christ vibration."

"Matter has been made to play the role of the enemy of the soul, the drag on the wheels of spiritual progress, the foil of the god, the villain of the theological piece. And woman is its symbol!"

"...the assumption that matter itself is evil in any absolute sense is one of the grossest misconceptions in the philosophical field that has ever darkened the intellectual vision of mankind."

"Matter and spirit are as equally meritorious and as mutually indispensable as are man and woman in actual life. They are the two polar opposites, the two nodes of being into which God divided his original unit nature "in the beginning" of creation. Neither can exist without the other or out of tensional relation with it. Abolish matter, and spirit would disappear off the scene. Talk of spirit being all in all, and good, and matter nothing, and evil, is sentimental mystic nonsense."

"The Bible is--in spite of the blatant ridicule of the atheists and freethinkers--a grand volume of a truly divine wisdom. But its quickening message is couched in the lost language of symbolism and natural analogue. Translated into meaning it spells out supreme guidance for human life. But mistranslated into the nonsense of a literal and historical rendering it has afflicted the western mind with disastrous befuddlement and played havoc with western society. From this miscarriage of symbolism came not alone the debasement of woman, but the ugly monster of religious persecution, which in the estimate of historians has cost the sacrifice of fifty millions of lives. The intrinsic values in human life, as Ruskin insisted, are fine, not coarse. And who, therefore, can calculate the dire injury inflicted on a world by the gross mistranslation of an allegory picturing cosmic Intellect purging and healing cosmic Matter into the objective story of a man--no matter how godlike--practicing sorcery on one woman and stopping the menstrual wastage of another? At this low level has Christianity transmitted to its devotees the sublime Ancient Wisdom."

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