XIII. — St. Augustine and the Church 227

Notes ..... 239

CHRISTIANITY AS MYSTICAL

FACT

Christianity as Mystical
Fact

POINTS OF VIEW

NATURAL Science has deeply influenced
modern thought. It is becoming more
and more impossible to speak of spiritual
needs and the life of the soul, without taking
into consideration the achievements and
methods of this science. It must be ad-
mitted, however, that many people satisfy
these needs, without letting themselves be
troubled by its influence. But those who
feel the beating of the pulse of the age must
take this influence into consideration. With
increasing swiftness do ideas derived from

natural science take possession of our brains,

I

2 Christianity as Mystical Fact

and, unwillingly though it may be, our hearts
follow, often in dejection and dismay. It is
not a question only of the number thus won
over, but of the fact that there is a force
within the method of natural science, which
convinces the attentive observer that that
method contains something which cannot be
neglected, and is one by which any modern
conception of the universe must be profoundly
affected. Many of the outgrowths of this
method compel a justifiable rejection. But
such rejection is not sufficient in an age in
which very many resort to this way of think-
ing, and are attracted to it as if by magic.
The case is in no way altered because some
people see that true science long ago passed,
by its own initiative, beyond the shallow
doctrines of force and matter taught by ma-
terialists. It would be better, apparently, to
listen to those who boldly declare that the
ideas of natural science will form the basis of
a new religion. If these ideas also appear
shallow and superficial to one who knows
the deeper spiritual needs of humanity, he
must nevertheless take note of them, for it
is to them that attention is now turned,

Points of View 3

and there is reason to think they will claim
more and more notice in the near future.

Another class of people have also to be
taken into account, those whose hearts have
lagged behind their heads. With their reason
they cannot but accept the ideas of natural
science. The burden of proof is too much
for them. But those ideas cannot satisfy
the religious needs of their souls, — the per-
spective offered is too dreary. Is the human
soul to rise on the wings of enthusiasm to the
heights of beauty, truth, and goodness, only
for each individual to be swept away in the
end like a bubble blown by the material
brain? This is a feeling which oppresses
many minds like a nightmare. But scientific
concepts oppress them also, coming as they
do come with the mighty force of authority.
As long as they can, these people remain
blind to the discord in their souls. In-
deed they console themselves by saying that
full clearness in these matters is denied to
the human soul. They think in accordance
with natural science so long as the experience
of their senses and the logic of their intellect
demand it, but they keep to the religious

4 Christianity as Mystical Fact

sentiments in which they have been educated,
and prefer to remain in darkness as to these
matters, — a darkness which clouds their
understanding. They have not the courage
to battle through to the light.

There can be no doubt whatever that the
habit of thought derived from natural science
is the greatest force in modern intellectual
life, and it must not be passed by heedlessly
by any one concerned with the spiritual
interests of humanity. But it is none the
less true that the way in which it sets about
satisfying spiritual needs is superficial and
shallow. If this were the right way, the
outlook would indeed be dreary. Would it
not be depressing to be obliged to agree with
those who say: "Thought is a form of force.
We walk by means of the same force by
w^hich we think. Man is an organism which
transforms various forms of force into
thought-force, an organism the activity of
which we maintain by what we call 'food,'
and with which we produce what we call
'thought.' What a marvellous chemical
process it is which could change a certain
quantity of food into the divine tragedy of

Points of View 5

Hamlet. ** This is quoted from a pamphlet of
Robert G. Ingersoll, bearing the title, Modern
Twilight of the Gods. It matters little if
such thoughts find but scanty acceptance in
the outside world. The point is that in-
numerable people find themselves compelled
by the system of natural science to take up
with regard to world-processes an attitude
in conformity with the above, even when they
think they are not doing so.

It would certainly be a dreary outlook if
natural science itself compelled us to accept
the creed proclaimed by many of its modern
prophets. Most dreary of all for one who
has gained, from the content of natural
science, the conviction that in its own sphere
its mode of thought holds good and its
methods are unassailable. For he is driven
to make the admission that, however much
people may dispute about individual ques-
tions, though volume after volume may be
written, and thousands of observations accu-
mulated about the struggle for existence and
its insignificance, about the omnipotence or
powerlessness of natural selection, natural
science itself is moving in a direction which,

6 Christianity as Mystical Fact

within certain limits, must find acceptance
in an ever-increasing degree.

But are the demands made by natural
science really such as they are described by
some of its representatives? That they are
not so is proved by the method employed
by these representatives themselves. The
method they use in their own sphere is not
such as is often described, and claimed for
other spheres of thought. Would Darwin
and Ernst Haeckel ever have made their
great discoveries about the evolution of life
if, instead of observing life and the structure
of living beings, they had shut themselves
up in a laboratory and there made chemical
experiments with tissue cut out of an or-
ganism? Would Lyell have been able to
describe the development of the crust of the
earth if, instead of examining strata and their
contents, he had scrutinised the chemical
qualities of innumerable rocks? Let us really
follow in the footsteps of these investigators
who tower like giants in the domain of
modern science. We shall then apply to the
higher regions of spiritual life the methods
they have used in the study of nature. We

Points of View 7

shall not then believe we have understood
the nature of the "divine" tragedy of Hamlet
by saying that a wonderful chemical process
transformed a certain quantity of food into
that tragedy. We shall believe it as little
as an investigator of nature could seriously
believe that he has understood the mission of
heat in the evolution of the earth, when he
has studied the action of heat on sulphur in a
retort. Neither does he attempt to under-
stand the construction of the human brain
by examining the effect of liquid potash on
a fragment of it, but rather by inquiring how
the brain has, in the course of evolution,
been developed out of the organs of lower
organisms.

It is therefore quite true that one who is
investigating the nature of spirit can do
nothing better than learn from natural
science. He need only do as science does,
but he must not allow himself to be misled
by what individual representatives of natural
science would dictate to him. He must in-
vestigate in the spiritual as they do in the
physical domain, but he need not adopt the
opinions they entertain about the spiritual

8 Christianity as Mystical Fact

world, confused as they are by their exclusive
contemplation of physical phenomena.

We shall only be acting in the spirit of
natural science if we study the spiritual
development of man as impartially as the
naturalist observes the sense-world. We shall
then certainly be led, in the domain of
spiritual life, to a kind of contemplation
which differs from that of the naturalist as
geology differs from pure physics and biology
from chemistry. We shall be led up to higher
methods, which cannot, it is true, be those of
natural science, though quite conformable
with the spirit of it. Such methods alone are
able to bring us to the heart of spiritual de-
velopments, such as that of Christianity, or
other worlds of religious conceptions. Any
one applying these methods may arouse the
opposition of many who believe they are
thinking scientifically, but he will know him-
self, for all that, to be in full accord with a
genuinely scientific method of thought.

An investigator of this kind must also go
beyond a merely historical examination of
the documents relating to spiritual life. This
is necessary just on account of the attitude

Points of View 9

he has acquired from his study of natural his-
tory. When a chemical law is explained, it is
of small use to describe the retorts, dishes,
and pincers which have led to the discovery
of the law. And it is just as useless, when
explaining the origin of Christianity, to as-
certain the historical sources drawn upon by
the Evangelist St. Luke, or those from which
the ** hidden revelation" of St. John is com-
piled. History can in this case be only
the outer court to research proper. It is not
by tracing the historical origin of documents
that we shall discover anything about the
dominant ideas in the writings of Moses or in
the traditions of the Greek mystics. These
documents are only the outer expression for
the ideas. Nor does the naturalist who is
investigating the nature of man trouble about
the origin of the word "man," or the way in
which it has developed in a language. He
keeps to the thing, not to the word in which it
finds expression. And in studying spiritual
life we must likewise abide by the spirit and
not by outer documents.

II

THE MYSTERIES AND THEIR WISDOM

A KIND of mysterious veil hangs over the
manner in which spiritual needs were
satisfied during the older civilisations by
those who sought a deeper religious life and
fuller knowledge than the popular religions
offered. If we inquire how these needs were
satisfied, we find ourselves led into the dim
twilight of the mysteries, and the individual
seeking them disappears for a time from our
observation. We see how it is that the popu-
lar religions cannot give him what his heart
desires. He acknowledges the existence of
the gods, but knows that the ordinary ideas
about them do not solve the great problems
of existence. He seeks a wisdom which is
jealously guarded by a community of priest-
sages. His aspiring soul seeks a refuge in
this community. If he is found by the sages

10

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 1 1

to be sufficiently prepared, he is led up by
them, step by step, to higher knowledge, in
places hidden from the eyes of outward ob-
servers. What then happens to him is con-
cealed from the uninitiated. He seems for a
time to be entirely renioved from earthly life
and to be transported into a hidden world.

When he reappears in the light of day a
different, quite transformed person is before
us. We see a man who cannot find words
sublime enough to express the momentous
experience through which he has passed.
Not merely metaphorically but in a most real
sense does he seem to have gone through the
gate of death and to have awakened to a
new and higher life. He is, moreover, quite
certain that no one who has not had a similar
experience can understand his words.

This was what happened to those who were
initiated into the Mysteries, into that secret
wisdom withheld from the people and which
threw light on the greatest questions. This
** secret" religion of the elect existed side by
side with the popular religion. Its origin
vanishes, as far as history is concerned, into
the obscurity in which the origin of nations

12 Christianity as Mystical F^act

is lost. We find this secret religion every-
where amongst the ancients as far as we
know anything concerning them; and we
hear their sages speak of the Mysteries with
the greatest reverence. What was it that
was concealed in them? And what did they
unveil to the initiate?

The enigma becomes still more puzzling
when we discover that the ancients looked
upon the Mysteries as something dangerous.
The way leading to the secrets of existence
passed through a world of terrors, and woe to
him who tried to gain them unworthily.
There was no greater crime than the "be-
trayal" of secrets to the uninitiated. The
*' traitor" was punished with death and the
confiscation of his property. We know that
the poet y^schylus was accused of having
reproduced on the stage something from the
Mysteries. He was only able to escape
death by fleeing to the altar of Dionysos and
by legally proving that he had never been
initiated.

What the ancients say about these secrets
is significant, but at the same time ambigu-
ous. The initiate is convinced that it would

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 13

be a sin to tell what he knows and also that it
would be sinful for the uninitiated to listen.
Plutarch speaks of the terror of those about
to be initiated, and compares their state of
mind to preparation for death. A special
mode of life had to precede initiation, tend-
ing to give the spirit the mastery over the
senses. Fasting, solitude, mortifications, and
certain exercises for the soul were the means
employed. The things to which man clings
in ordinary life were to lose all their value
for him. The whole trend of his life of sen-
sation and feeling was to be changed.

There can be no doubt as to the meaning of
such exercises and tests. The wisdom which
was to be offered to the candidate for initia-
tion could only produce the right effect upon
his soul if he had previously purified the
lower life of his sensibility. He was intro-
duced to the life of the spirit. He was to
behold a higher world, but he could not enter
into relations with that world without pre-
vious exercises and tests. The relations thus
gained were the condition of initiation.

In order to obtain a correct idea on this
matter, it is necessary to gain experience of

14 Christianity as Mystical Fact

the intimate facts of the growth of knowledge.
We must feel that there are two widely di-
vergent attitudes towards that which the
highest knowledge gives. The world sur-
rounding us is to us at first the real one.
We feel, hear, and see what goes on in it,
and because we thus perceive things with our
senses, we call them real. And we reflect
about events, in order to get an insight into
their connections. On the other hand, what
wells up in our soul is at first not real to us
in the same sense. It is "merely" thoughts
and ideas. At the most we see in them only
images of reality. They themselves have no
reality, for we cannot touch, see, or hear
them.

There is another way of being connected
with things. A person who clings to the kind
of reality described above will hardly under-
stand it, but it comes to certain people at
some moment in their lives. To them the
whole connection with the world is completely
reversed. They then call the images which
well up in the spiritual life of their souls
actually real, and they assign only a lower
kind of reality to what the senses hear, touch,

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 15

feel, and see. They know that they cannot
prove what they say, that they can only
relate their new experiences, and that when
relating them to others they are in the posi-
tion of a man who can see and who imparts
his visual impressions to one born blind.
They venture to impart their inner expe-
riences, trusting that there are others round
them whose spiritual eyes, though as yet
closed, may be opened by the power of what
they hear. For they have faith in humanity
and want to give it spiritual sight. They
can only lay before it the fruits which their
spirit has gathered. Whether another sees
them, depends on his spiritual eyes being
opened or not.

There is something in man which at first
prevents him from seeing with the eyes of the
spirit. He is not there for that purpose. He
is what his senses are, and his intellect is only
the interpreter and judge of them. The senses
would ill fulfil their mission if they did not
insist upon the truth and infallibility of their
evidence. An eye must, from its own point
of view, uphold the absolute reality of its
perceptions. The eye is right as far as it goes,

1 6 Christianity as Mystical Fact

and is not deprived of its due by the eye of
the spirit. The latter only allows us to see
the things of sense in a higher light. Nothing
seen by the eye of sense is denied, but a new
brightness, hitherto unseen, radiates from
what is seen. And then we know that what
we first saw was only a lower reality. We see
that still, but it is immersed in something
higher, which is spirit. It is now a question
of whether we realise and feel what we see.
One who lives only in the sensations and
feelings of the senses will look upon impres-
sions of higher things as a Fata Morgana, or
mere play of fancy. His feelings are entirely
directed towards the things of sense. He
grasps emptiness when he tries to lay hold of
spirit forms. They withdraw from him when
he gropes after them. They are just "mere"
thoughts. He thinks them, but does not
live in them. They are images, less real to
him than fleeting dreams. They rise up like
bubbles while he is standing in his reality;
they disappear before the massive, solidly
built reality of which his senses tell him.

It is otherwise with one whose perceptions
and feelings with regard to reality have

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 17

changed. For him that reality has lost its
absolute stability and value. His senses and
feelings need not become numbed, but they
begin to be doubtful of their absolute author-
ity. They leave room for something else.
The world of the spirit begins to animate
the space left.

At this point a possibility comes in which
ma}^ prove terrible. A man may lose his
sensations and feelings of outer reality with-
out finding any new reality opening up before
him. He then feels himself as if suspended in
the void. He feels as if he were dead. The
old values have disappeared and no new ones
have arisen in their place. The world and
man no longer exist for him. This, however,
is by no means a mere possibility. It hap-
pens at some time or other to every one who
is seeking for higher knowledge. He comes
to a point at which the spirit represents all
life to him as death. He is then no longer in
the world, but under it, — in the nether world.
He is passing through Hades. Well for him
if he sink not ! Happy if a new world open
up before him ! Either he dwindles away or
he appears to himself transfigured. In the

1 8 Christianity as Mystical Fact

latter case he beholds a new sun and a new
earth. The whole world has been born
again for him out of spiritual fire.

It is thus that the initiates describe the
effect of the Mysteries upon them. Menippus
relates that he journeyed to Babylon in order
to be taken to Hades and to be brought back
again by the successors of Zarathustra. He
says that he swam across the great water on
his wanderings, and that he passed through
fire and ice. We hear that the Mystics were
terrified by a flashing sword, and that blood
flowed. We understand this when we know
from experience the point of transition from
lower to higher knowledge. We then feel as
if all solid matter and things of sense had dis-
solved into water, and as if the ground were
cut away from under our feet. Everything
is dead which we felt before to be alive. The
spirit has passed through the life of the senses,
as a sword pierces a warm body ; we have seen
the blood of sense-nature flow. But a new
life has appeared. We have risen from the
nether-world. Tlie orator Aristides relates
this: "I thought I touched the god and
felt him draw near, and I was then between

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 19

waking and sleeping. My spirit was so
light that no one who is not initiated can
speak of or understand it." This new
existence is not subject to the laws of
lower life. Growth and decay no longer
affect it. One may say much about the
Eternal, but words of one who has not
been through Hades are ''mere sound and
smoke." The initiates have a new concep-
tion of life and death. Now for the first time
do they feel they have the right to speak
about immortality. They know that one who
speaks of it without having been initiated
talks of something which he does not under-
stand. The uninitiated attribute immortal-
ity only to something which is subject to the
laws of growth and decay. The Mystics,
however, did not merely desire to gain the
conviction that the kernel of life is eternal.
According to the view of the Mysteries, such
a conviction would be quite valueless, for
this view holds that the Eternal is not present
as a living reality in the uninitiated. If such
an one spoke of the Eternal, he would be
speaking of something non-existent. It is
rather the Eternal itself that the Mystics are

20 Christianty as Mystical Fact

seeking. They have first to awaken the
Eternal within them, then they can speak of it.
Hence the hard saying of Plato is quite real
to them, that the uninitiated sinks into the
mire, and that only one who has passed
through the mystical life enters eternity. It
is only in this sense that the words in the
fragment of Sophocles can be understood:
"Thrice-blessed are the initiated who come
to the realm of the shades. They alone have
life there. For others there is only misery
and hardship."

Is one therefore not describing dangers when
speaking of the Mysteries? Is it not robbing
a man of happiness and of the best part of his
life to take him to the portals of the nether-
world? Terrible is the responsibility incurred
by such an act. And yet ought we to refuse
that responsibility? These were the ques-
tions which the initiate had to put to himself.
He was of opinion that his knowledge bore
the same relation to the soul of the people
as light does to darkness. But innocent hap-
piness dwells in that darkness, and the Mys-
tics were of opinion that that happiness
should not be sacrilegiously interfered with.

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 21

For what would have happened in the first
place if the Mystic had betrayed his secret?
He would have uttered words and only words.
The feelings and emotions which would have
evoked the spirit from the words would have
been absent. To do this preparation, exer-
cises, tests, and a complete change in the life
of sense were necessary. Without this the
hearer would have been hurled into emptiness
and nothingness. He would have been de-
prived of what constituted his happiness,
without receiving anything in exchange.
One may also say that one could take nothing
away from him, for mere words would change
nothing in his life of feeling. He would only
have been able to feel and experience reality
through his senses. Nothing but a terrible
misgiving, fatal to life, would be given him.
This could only be construed as a crime.

The wisdom of the Mysteries is like a hot-
house plant, which must be cultivated and
fostered in seclusion. Any one bringing it
into the atmosphere of everyday ideas brings
it into air in which it cannot flourish. It
withers away to nothing before the caustic
verdict of modern science and logic. Let us

22 Christianity as Mystical Fact

therefore divest ourselves for a time of the
education we gained through the microscope
and telescope and the habit of thought de-
rived from natural science, and let us cleanse
our clumsy hands, which have been too busy
with dissecting and experimenting, in order
that we may enter the pure temple of the
Mysteries. For this a candid and unbiassed
attitude of mind is necessary.

The important point for the Mystic is at
first the frame of mind in which he approaches
that which to him is the highest, the answers
to the riddles of existence. Just in our day,
when only gross physical science is recognised
as containing truth, it is difficult to believe
that in the highest things we depend upon the
key-note of the soul. Knowledge thereby
becomes an intimate personal concern. But
this is what it really is to the Mystic. Tell
some one the solution of the riddle of the uni-
verse ! Give it him ready-made ! The Mys-
tic will find it to be nothing but empty sound,
if the personality does not meet the solution
half-way in the right manner. The solu-
tion in itself is nothing; it vanishes if the
necessary feeling is not kindled at its contact.

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 23

A divinity approaches you. It is either
everything or nothing. Nothing, if you meet
it in the frame of mind with which you con-
front everyday matters. Everything, if you
are prepared, and attuned to the meeting.
What the Divinity is in itself is a matter
which does not affect you; the important
point for you is whether it leaves you as it
found you or makes another man of you.
But this depends entirely on yourself. You
must have been prepared by a special educa-
tion, by a development of the inmost forces
of your personality for the work of kindling
and releasing what a divinity is able to
kindle and release in you. What is brought
to you depends on the reception you give
to it.

Plutarch has told us about this education,
and of the greeting which the Mystic offers
the divinity approaching him; ''For the
god, as it were, greets each one who ap-
proaches him, with the words, 'Know thy-
self,* which is surely no worse than the
ordinary greeting, ' Welcome. ' Then we an-
swer the divinity in the words, 'Thou art,*
and thus we affirm that the true, primordial,

24 Christianity as Mystical Fact

and only adequate greeting for him is to
declare that he is. In that existence we really
have no part here, for every mortal being,
situated between birth and destruction, mere-
ly manifests an appearance, a feeble and un-
certain image of itself. If we try to grasp it
with our understanding, it is as when water
is tightly compressed and runs over merely
through the pressure, spoiling what it touches.
For the understanding, pursuing a too defi-
nite conception of each being that is subject
to accidents and change, loses its way, now
in the origin of the being, now in its destruc-
tion, and is unable to apprehend anything
lasting or really existing. For, as Heraclitus
says, we cannot swim twice in the same wave,
neither can we lay hold of a mortal being
twice in the same state, for, through the
violence and rapidity of movement, it is
destroyed and recomposed; it comes into
being and again decays; it comes and goes.
Therefore, that which is becoming can neither
attain real existence, because growth neither
ceases nor pauses. Change begins in the
germ, and forms an embryo; then there
appears a child, then a youth, a man, and an

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 25

old man; the first beginnings and successive
ages are continually annulled by the ensuing
ones. Hence it is ridiculous to fear one death,
when we have already died in so many ways,
and are still dying. For, as Heraclitus
says, not only is the death of fire the birth of
air, and the death of air the birth of water,
but the same change may be still more plainly
seen in man. The strong man dies when he
becomes old, the youth when he becomes a
man, the boy on becoming a youth, and the
child on becoming a boy. What existed
yesterday dies to-day, what is here to-day
will die to-morrow. Nothing endures or is a
unity, but we become many things, whilst
matter wanders around one image, one
common form. For if we were always the
same, how could we take pleasure in things
which formerly did not please us, how could
we love and hate, admire and blame opposite
things, how could we speak differently and
give ourselves up to different passions, unless
we were endowed with a different shape,
form, and different senses? For no one can
rightly come into a different state without
change, and one who is changed is no long'^.it

26 Christianity as Mystical Fact

the same; but if he is not the same, he no
longer exists and is changed from what he
was, becoming something else. Sense-per-
ception only led us astray, because we do not
know real being, and mistook for it that which
is only an appearance." '

Plutarch often describes himself as an
initiate. What he portrays here is a condi-
tion of the life of the Mystic. Man acquires
a kind of wisdom by means of which his
spirit sees through the illusive character
of sense-life. What the senses regard as
being, or reality, is plunged into the stream
of "becoming"; and man is subject to the
same conditions in this respect as all other
things in the world. Before the eyes of his
spirit he himself dissolves, the sum-total of
his being is broken up into parts, into fleeting
phenomena. Birth and death lose their dis-
tinctive meaning, and become moments of ap-
pearing and disappearing, just as much as any
other happenings in the world. The Highest
cannot be found in the connection between
development and decay. It can only be

, » Plutarch's Moral Works, On the Inscription EJ at

elphi, pp. 17-18.
ap

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 27

sought in what is really abiding, in what looks
back to the past and forward to the future.

To find that which looks (i. e. the spirit)
backwards and forwards is the first stage of
knowledge. This is the spirit, which is mani-
festing in and through the physical. It has
nothing to do with physical growth. It does
not come into being and again decay as do
sense-phenomena. One who lives entirely
in the world of sense carries the spirit latent
within him. One who has pierced through
the illusion of the world of sense has the spirit
within him as a manifest reality. The man
who attains to this insight has developed a
new principle within him. Something has
happened within him as in a plant when it
adds a coloured flower to its green leaves.
It is true the forces causing the flower to
grow were already latent in the plant before
the blossom appeared, but they only became
effective when this took place. Divine,
spiritual forces are latent in the man who
lives merely through his senses, but they
only become a manifest reality in the initi-
ate. Such is the transformation which takes
place in the Mystic. By his development

28 Christianity as Mystical Fact

he has added a new element to the world.
The world of sense made him a human be-
ing endowed with senses, and then left him
to himself. Nature had thus fulfilled her
mission. What she is able to do with the
powers operative in man is exhausted; not
so the forces themselves. They lie as though
spellbound in the merely natural man and
await their release. They cannot release
themselves. They fade away to nothing
unless man seizes upon them and develops
them, unless he calls into actual being what
is latent within him.

Nature evolves from the imperfect to the
perfect. She leads beings, through a long
series of stages, from inanimate matter,
through all living forms up to physical man.
Man looks around and finds himself a chang-
ing being with physical reality, but he also
perceives within him the forces from which
the physical reality arose. These forces are
not what change, for they have given birth
to the changing world. They are within man
as a sign that there is more life within him
than he can physically perceive. What they
may make man is not yet there. He feels

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 29

something flash up within him which created
everything, including himself, and he feels
that this will inspire him to higher creative
activity. This something is within him, it
existed before his manifestation in the flesh,
and will exist afterwards. By means of it
he became, but he may lay hold of it and
take part in its creative activity.

Such are the feelings animating the Mystic
after initiation. He feels the Eternal and
Divine. His activity is to become a part of
that divine creative activity. He may say
to himself: *'I have discovered a higher ego
within me, but that ego extends beyond the
bounds of my sense-existence. It existed
before my birth and will exist after my
death. This ego has created from all eternity,
it will go on creating in all eternity. My
physical personality is a creation of this
ego. But it has incorporated me within it,
it works within me, I am a part of it. What
I henceforth create will be higher than the
physical. My personality is only a means
for this creative power, for this Divine is
within me. " Thus did the Mystic experience
his birth into the Divine.

30 Christianity as Mystical Fact

The Mystic called the power that flashed
up within him a daimon. He was himself
the product of this daimon. It seemed to
him as though another being had entered
him and taken possession of his organs, a
being standing between his physical person-
ality and the all-ruling cosmic power, the
divinity.

The Mystic sought this — his daimon. He
said to himself: "I have become a human
being in mighty Nature, but Nature did not
complete her task. This completion I must
take in hand myself. But I cannot accom-
plish it in the gross kingdom of nature to
which my physical personality belongs. What
it is possible to develop in that realm has
already been developed. Therefore I must
leave this kingdom and take up the building
in the realm of the spirit at the point where
nature left off. I must create an atmosphere
of life not to be found in outer nature."

This atmosphere of life was prepared for
the Mystic in the Mystery temples. There
the forces slumbering within him were awak-
ened, there he was changed into a higher
creative spirit-nature. This transformation

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 31

was a delicate process. It could not bear the
un tempered atmosphere of everyday life.
But when once it was completed, its result
was that the initiate stood as a rock, rising
from the eternal and able to defy all storms.
But it was impossible for him to reveal his
experiences to any one unprepared to receive
them.

Plutarch says that the Mysteries gave deep
understanding of the true nature of the dai-
mons. And Cicero tells us that from the
Mysteries, "When they are explained and
traced back to their meaning, we learn the na-
ture of things rather than that of the gods." ^
From such statements we see clearly that
there were higher revelations for the Mystics
about the nature of things than that which
popular religion was able to impart. Indeed
we see that the daimons, i.e., spiritual beings,
and the gods themselves, needed explaining.
Therefore initiates went back to beings of a
higher nature than daimons or gods, and
this was characteristic of the essence of the
wisdom of the Mysteries.

' Plutarch, On the Decline of the Oracles; Cicero On the
Nature of the Gods.

32 Christianity as Mystical Fact

The people represented the gods and dai-
mons in images borrowed from the world of
sense-reality. Would not one who had pene-
trated into the nature of the Eternal doubt
about the eternal nature of such gods as
these? How could the Zeus of popular
imagination be eternal if he bore within him
the qualities of a perishable being? One
thing was clear to the Mystics, that man
arrives at a conception of the gods in a
different way from the conception of other
things. An object belonging to the outer
world compels us to form a very definite idea
of it. In contrast to this, we form our con-
ception of the gods in a freer and somewhat
arbitrary manner. The control of the outer
world is absent. Reflection teaches us that
what we conceive as gods is not subject to
outer control. This places us in logical un-
certainty; we begin to feel that we ourselves
are the creators of our gods. Indeed, we ask
ourselves how we have arrived at a concep-
tion of the universe that goes beyond physi-
cal reality. The initiate was obliged to ask
himself such questions; his doubts were justi-
Lfied. "Look at all representations of the

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 33

gods, " he might think to himself. "Are they
not Hke the beings we meet in the world of
sense? Did not man create them for him-
self, by giving or withholding from them, in
his thought, some quality belonging to beings
of the sense- world? The savage lover of the
chase creates a heaven in which the gods
themselves take part in glorious hunting,
and the Greek peopled his Olympus with
divine beings whose models were taken from
his own surroundings."

The philosopher Xenophanes (b.c. 575-480)
drew attention to this fact with a crude logic.
We know that the older Greek philosophers
were entirely dependent on the wisdom of
the Mysteries. We will afterwards prove
this in detail, beginning with Heraclitus.
What Xenophanes says may at once be taken
as the conviction of a Mystic. It runs
thus:

"Men who picture the gods as created in
their own human forms, give them human
senses, voices, and bodies. But if cattle and
lions had hands, and knew how to use them,
like men, in painting and working, they
would paint the forms of the gods and

34 Christianity as Mystical Fact

shape their bodies as their own bodies were
constituted. Horses would create gods in
horse-form, and cattle would make gods like
bulls."

Through insight of this kind, man may
begin to doubt the existence of anything
divine. He may reject all mythology, and
only recognise as reality what is forced upon
him by his sense-perception. But the Mystic
did not become a doubter of this kind. He
saw that the doubter would be like a plant
were it to say: "My crimson flowers are null
and futile, because I am complete within my
green leaves. What I may add to them is
only adding illusive appearance." Just as
little could the Mystic rest content with gods
thus created, the gods of the people. If the
plant could think, it would understand that
the forces which created its green leaves are
also destined to create crimson flowers, and
it would not rest till it had investigated those
forces and come face to face with them.
This was the attitude of the Mystic towards
the gods of the people. He did not deny
them, or say they were illusion; but he knew
they had been created by man. The same

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 35

forces, the same divine element, which are at
work in nature, are at work in the Mystic.
They create within him images of the gods.
He wishes to see the force that creates the
gods ; it comes from a higher source than these
gods. Xenophanes alludes to it thus : "There
is one god greater than all gods and men.
His form is not like that of mortals, his
thoughts are not their thoughts. "

This god was also the God of the Mysteries.
He might have been called a "hidden God,"
for man could never find him with his senses
only. Look at outer things around you, you
will find nothing divine. Exert your reason,
you may be able to detect the laws by which
things appear and disappear, but even your
reason will not show you anything divine.
Saturate your imagination with religious feel-
ing, and you may be able to create images
which you may take to be gods, but your
reason will pull them to pieces, for it will
prove to you that you created them yourself,
and borrowed the material from the sense-
world. So long as you look at outer things in
your quality of simply a reasonable being,
you must deny the existence of God ; for God

36 Christianity as Mystical Fact

is hidden from the senses, and from that rea-
son of yours which explains sense-perceptions.

God Hes hidden spellbound in the world,
and you need His own power to find Him.
You must awaken that power in yourself.
These are the teachings which were given to
the candidate for initiation.

And now there began for him the great
cosmic drama with which his life was bound
up. The action of the drama meant nothing
less than the deliverance of the spellbound
god. Where is God? This was the question
asked by the soul of the Mystic. God is not
existent, but nature exists. And in nature
He must be found. There He has found an
enchanted grave. It was in a higher sense
that the Mystic understood the words "God
is love." For God has exalted that love
to its climax, He has sacrificed Himself in
infinite love, He has poured Himself out,
fallen into number in the manifold of nature.
Things in nature live and He does not live.
He slumbers within them. We are able to
awaken Him; if we are to give Him exist-
ence, we must deliver Him by the creative
power within us.

Mysteries and Their Wisdom 37

The candidate now looks unto himself. As
latent creative power as yet without existence,
the Divine is living in his soul. In the soul
is a sacred place where the spellbound god
may wake to liberty. The soul is the mother
who is able to conceive the god by nature. If
the soul allows herself to be impregnated by
nature, she will give birth to the divine. God
is born from the marriage of the soul with
nature, — no longer a "hidden,*' but a mani-
fest god. He has life, a perceptible life,
wandering amongst men. He is the god
freed from enchantment, the offspring of the
God who was hidden by a spell. He is not
the great God, who was and is and is to
come, but yet he may be taken, in a certain
sense, as the revelation of Him. The Father
remains at rest in the unseen ; the Son is born
to man out of his own soul. Mystical know-
ledge is thus an actual event in the cosmic
process. It is the birth of the Divine. It is
an event as real as any natural event, only
enacted upon a higher plane.

The great secret of the Mystic is that he
himself creates his god, but that he first
prepares himself to recognise the god created

38 Christianity as Mystical Fact

by him. The uninitiated man has no feeling
for the father of that god, for that Father
slumbers under a spell. The Son appears to
be born of a virgin, the soul having seemingly
given birth to him without impregnation.
All her other children are conceived by the
sense-world. Their father may be seen and
touched, having the life of sense. The Divine
Son alone is begotten of the hidden, eternal,
Divine, Father Himself.

Ill

THE GREEK SAGES BEFORE PLATO IN THE
LIGHT OF THE WISDOM OF THE MYSTERIES

NUMEROUS facts combine to show us
that the philosophical wisdom of the
Greeks rested on the same mental basis as
mystical knowledge. We only understand
the great philosophers when we approach
them with feelings gained through study of
the Mysteries. With what veneration does
Plato speak of the "secret doctrines'* in the
Phcedo. "And it almost seems, " says he, "as
though those who have appointed the initia-
tions for us are not at all ordinary people,
but that for a long time they have been en-
joining upon us that any one who reaches
Hades without being initiated and sanctified
falls into the mire ; but that he who is purified
and consecrated when he arrives, dwells with
the gods. For those who have to do with

39

40 Christianity as Mystical Fact

initiations say that there are many thyrsus-
bearers, but few really inspired. These latter
are, in my opinion, none other than those who
have devoted themselves in the right way to
wisdom. I myself have not missed the oppor-
tunity of becoming one of these, as far as I
was able, but have striven after it in every
way."

It is only a man who is putting his own
search for wisdom entirely at the disposal of
the condition of soul created by initiation
who could thus speak of the Mysteries. And
there is no doubt that a flood of light is
poured on the words of the great Greek
philosophers, when we illustrate them from
the Mysteries.

The relation of Heraclitus of Ephesus
(535-475 B.C.) to the Mysteries is plainly
given us in a saying about him, to the effect
that his thoughts "were an impassable road, "
and that any one, entering upon them with-
out being initiated, found only "dimness and
darkness," but that, on the other hand, they
were "brighter than the sun" for any one
introduced to them by a Mystic. And when
it is said of his book, that he deposited it in

The Greek Sages Before Plato 41

the temple of Artemis, this only means that
initiates alone could understand him. (Ed-
mund Pfleiderer has already collected the his-
torical evidence for the relation of Heraclitus
to the Mysteries. Cf, his book Die Philosophie
des Heraklit von Ephesiis im Lichte der Mys-
terienidee. Berlin, 1886.) Heraclitus was
called "The Obscure,*' because it was only
through the Mysteries that light could be
thrown on his intuitive views.

Heraclitus comes before us as a man who
took life with the greatest earnestness. We
see plainly from his features, if we know how
to reconstruct them, that he bore within him
intimate knowledge which he knew that words
could only indicate, not express. Out of
such a temper of mind arose his celebrated
utterance, "All things fleet away," which
Plutarch explains thus: "We do not dip
twice into the same wave, nor can we
touch twice the same mortal being. For
through abruptness and speed it disperses
and brings together, not in succession but
simultaneously. "

A man who thus thinks has penetrated the
nature of transitory things, for he has felt

42 Christianity as Mystical Fact

compelled to characterise the essence of tran-
sitoriness itself in the clearest terms. Such
a description as this could not be given,
unless the transitory were being measured by
the eternal, and in particular it could not be
extended to man without having seen his
inner nature. Heraclitus has extended his
characterisation to man. "Life and death,
waking and sleeping, youth and age are the
same; this in changing is that, and that again
this." In this sentence there is expressed
full knowledge of the illusionary nature of
the lower personality. He says still more
forcibly, "Life and death are found in our
living even as in our dying. " What does this
mean but that it is only a transient point of
view when we value life more than death?
Dying is to perish, in order to make way for
new life, but the eternal is living in the new
life, as in the old. The same eternal appears
in transitory life as in death. When we grasp
this eternal, we look upon life and death
with the same feeling. Life only has a special
value when we have not been able to awaken
the eternal within us. The saying, "All
things fleet away," might be repeated a

The Greek Sages Before Plato 43

thousand times, but unless said in this feeling,
it is an empty sound. The knowledge of
eternal growth is valueless if it does not
detach us from temporal growth. It is the
turning away from that love of life which
impels towards the transitory, which Heracli-
tus indicates in his utterance, "How can we
say about our daily life, ' We are, ' when from
the standpoint of the eternal we know that
*We are and are not?' " (Cf. Fragments of
Heraclitus, No. 81.) "Hades and Dionysos
are one and the same," says one of the Frag-
ments. Dionysos, the god of joy in life, of
germination and growth, to whom the Dionys-
iac festivals are dedicated is, for Heraclitus,
the same as Hades, the god of destruction
and annihilation. Only one who sees death
in life and life in death, and in both the
eternal, high above life and death, can view
the merits and demerits of existence in the
right light. Then even imperfections become
justified, for in them too lives the eternal.
What they are from the standpoint of the
limited lower life, they are only in appear-
ance,— "The gratification of men's wishes is
not necessarily a happiness for them. Illness

44 Christianity as Mystical Fact

makes health sweet and good, hunger makes
food appreciated, and toil rest." "The sea
contains the purest and impurest water,
drinkable and wholesome for fishes, it is un-
drinkable and injurious to human beings."
Here Heraclitus is not primarily drawing
attention to the transitoriness of earthly
things, but to the splendour and majesty of
the eternal.

Heraclitus speaks vehemently against
Homer and Hesiod, and the learned men of
his day. He wished to show up their way of
thinking, which clings to the transitory only.
He did not desire gods endowed with quali-
ties taken from a perishable world, and he
could not regard as a supreme science, that
science which investigates the growth and
decay of things. For him, the eternal speaks
out of the perishable, and for this eternal he
has a profound symbol. "The harmony of
the world returns upon itself, like that of the
lyre and the bow. " What depths are hidden
in this image! By the pressing asunder of
forces, and again by the harmonising of these
divergent forces, unity is attained. How one
sound contradicts another, and yet, together,

The Greek Sages Before Plato 45

they produce harmony. If we apply this to
the Spiritual world, we have the thought of
Heraclitus, '' Immortals are mortal, mortals
immortal, living the death of mortals, dying
the life of the Immortals."

It is man's original fault to direct his cogni-
tion to the transitory. Thereby he turns
away from the eternal, and life becomes a
danger to him. What happens to him, comes
to him through life, but its events lose their
sting if he ceases to set unconditioned value
on life. In that case his innocence is restored
to him. It is as though he were from the
so-called seriousness of life able to return to
his childhood. The adult takes many things
seriously with which a child merely plays,
but one who really knows, becomes like a
child. "Serious" values lose their value,
looked at from the standpoint of eternity.
Life then seems like a play. On this account
does Heraclitus say, "Eternity is a child at
play, it is the reign of a child." Where does
the original fault lie? In taking with the
utmost seriousness what does not deserve to
be so taken. God has poured Himself into
the universe of things. If we take these

46 Christianity as Mystical Fact

things and leave God unheeded, we take them
in earnest as "the tombs of God." We
should play with them like a child, and should
earnestly strive to awaken forth from them
God, who sleeps spellbound within them.

Contemplation of the eternal acts like a
consuming fire on ordinary illusions about
the nature of things. The spirit breaks up
thoughts which come through the senses,
it fuses them. This is the higher meaning of
the Heraclitean thought, that fire is the pri-
mary element of all things. This thought is
certainly to be taken at first as an ordinary
physical explanation of the phenomena of
the universe. But no one understands Hera-
clitus who does not think of him in the same
way as Philo, living in the early days of
Christianity, thought of the laws of the Bible.
"There are people," he says, "who take the
written laws merely as symbols of spiritual
teaching, who diligently search for the latter,
but despise the laws themselves. I can only
blame such, for they should pay heed to both,
to knowledge of the hidden meaning and to
observing the obvious one." If the question
is discussed whether Heraclitus meant by

The Greek Sages Before Plato 47

*'fire" physical fire, or whether fire for him
was only a symbol of eternal spirit which
dissolves and reconstitutes all things, this is
putting a wrong construction upon his
thought. He meant both and neither of
these things. For spirit was also alive, for
him, in ordinary fire, and the force which is
physically active in fire lives on a higher
plane in the human soul, which melts in its
crucible mere sense-knowledge, so that out
of this the contemplation of the eternal may
arise.

It is very easy to misunderstand Heracli-
tus. He makes Strife the ' ' Father of things, "
but only of "things," not of the eternal. If
there were no contradictions in the world, if
the most multifarious interests were not
opposing each other, the world of becoming,
of transitory things, would not exist. But
what is revealed in this antagonism, what is
poured forth into it, is not strife but har-
mony. Just because there is strife in all
things, the spirit of the wise should pass
over them like a breath of fire, and change
them into harmony.

At this point there shines forth one of the

48 Christianity as Mystical Fact

great thoughts of Heraditean wisdom. What
is man as a personal being? From the above
point of view Heraditus is able to answer.
Man is composed of the conflicting elements
into which divinity has poured itself. In
this state he finds himself, and beyond this
becomes aware of the spirit within him, — the
spirit which is rooted in the eternal. But
the spirit itself is born, for man, out of the
conflict of elements, and it is the first which
has to calm them. In man, Nature surpasses
her natural limits. It is indeed the same
universal force which created antagonism
and the mixture of elements which is after-
wards, by its wisdom, to do away with the
conflict. Here we arrive at the eternal
dualism which lives in man, the perpetual
antagonism between the temporal and the
eternal. Through the eternal he has be-
come something quite definite, and out of
this, he is to create something higher. He is
both dependent and independent. He can
only participate in the eternal Spirit whom
he contemplates, in the measure of the com-
pound of elements which that eternal Spirit
has effected within him. And it is just on

The Greek Sages Before Plato 49

this account that he is called upon to fashion
the eternal out of the temporal. The spirit
works within him, but works in a special way.
It works out of the temporal. It is the
peculiarity of the human soul that a tem-
poral thing should be able to work like an
eternal one, should grow and increase in
power like an eternal thing. This is why the
soul is at once like a god and a worm. Man,
owing to this, stands in a mid-position be-
tween God and animals. The growing and
increasing force within him is his daimonic
element, — that within him which pushes out
beyond himself.

"Man's daimon is his destiny.*' Thus
strikingly does Heraclitus make reference
to this fact. He extends man's vital es-
sence far beyond the personal. The per-
sonality is the vehicle of the daimon, which
is not confined within the limit of the per-
sonality, and for which the birth and death
of the personality are of no importance.
What is the relation of the daimonic ele-
ment to the personality which comes and
goes? The personality is only a form for the
manifestation of the daimon.

50 Christianity as Mystical Fact

One who has arrived at this knowledge
looks beyond himself, backwards and for-
wards. The daimonic experiences through
w^hich he has passed are enough to prove
to him his own immortality. And he can no
longer limit his daimon to the one function
of occupying his personality, for the latter
can only be one of the forms in which the
daimon is manifested. The daimon cannot be
shut up within one personality, he has power
to animate many. He is able to transform
himself from one personality into another.
The great thought of reincarnation springs
as a matter of course from the Heraclitean
premises, and not only the thought but the
experience of the fact. The thought only
paves the way for the experience. One who
becomes conscious of the daimonic element
within him does not recognise it as innocent
and in its first stage. He finds that it has
qualities. Whence do they come? Why
have I certain natural aptitudes? Because
others have already worked upon my dai-
mon. And what becomes of the work which
I accomplish in the daimon if I am not to
assume that its task ends with my personal-

The Greek Sages Before Plato 51

ity? I am working for a future personality.
Between me and the Spirit of the Universe,
something interposes which reaches beyond
me, but is not yet the same as divinity. This
something is my daimon. My to-day is
only the product of yesterday, my to-morrow
will be the product of to-day; in the same
way my Hfe is the result of a former and will
be the foundation of a future one. Just as
mortal man looks back to innumerable yes-
terdays and forward to many to-morrows, so
does the soul of the sage look upon many
lives in his past and many in the future. The
thoughts and aptitudes I acquired yesterday
I am using to-day. Is it not the same with
life? Do not people enter upon the horizon
of existence with the most diverse capacities?
Whence this difference? Does it proceed
from nothing?

Our natural sciences take much credit to
themselves for having banished miracle from
our views of organic life. David Frederick
Strauss, in his Alter und Neuer Glaube, con-
siders it a great achievement of our day
that we no longer think that a perfect
organic being is a miracle issuing from no-

52 Christianity as Mystical Fact

thing. We understand its perfection when we
are able to explain it as a development from
imperfection. The structure of an ape is no
longer a miracle if we assume its ancestors to
have been primitive fishes which have been
gradually transformed. Let us at least sub-
mit to accept as reasonable in the domain
of spirit what seems to us to be right in the
domain of nature. Is the perfect spirit to
have the same antecedents as the imperfect
one? Does a Goethe have the same ante-
cedents as any Hottentot? The antecedents
of an ape are as unlike those of a fish as are
the antecedents of Goethe's mind unlike
those of a savage. The spiritual ancestry of
Goethe's soul is a different one from that of
the savage soul. The soul has grown as well
as the body. The daimon in Goethe has
more progenitors than the one in a savage.
Let us take the doctrine of reincarnation in
this sense, and we shall no longer find it
unscientific. We shall be able to explain
in the right way what we find in our souls,
and we shall not take what we find as if
created by a miracle. If I can write, it is
owing to the fact that I learned to write. No

The Greek Sages Before Plato 53

one who has a pen in his hand for the first
time can sit down and write offhand. But
one who has come into the world with "the
stamp of genius," must he owe it to a
miracle? No, even the "stamp of genius"
must be acquired. It must havebeen learned.
And when it appears in a person, we call it a
daimon. This daimon too must have been to
school ; it acquired in a former life what it puts
into force in a later one.

In this form, and this form only, did the
thought of eternity pass before the mind of
Heraclitus and other Greek sages. There
was no question with them of a continuance
of the immediate personality after death.
Compare some verses of Empedocles (b.c.
490-430). He says of those who accept the
data of experience as miracles:

Foolish and ignorant they, and do not reach

far with their thinking,
Who suppose that what has not existed can

come into being,
Or that something may die away wholly and

vanish completely;
Impossible is it that any beginning can come

from Not-Being,

54 Christianity as Mystical Fact

Quite impossible also that being" can fade into

nothing;
For wherever a being is driven, there will it

continue to be.
Never will any believe, who has been in these

matters instructed,
That spirits of men only live while what is

called life here endures,
That only so long do they live, receiving their

joys and their sorrows,
But that ere they were born here and when they

are dead, they are nothing.

The Greek sage did not even raise the
question whether there was an eternal part in
man, but only enquired in what this eternal
element consisted and how man can nourish
and cherish it in himself. For from the out-
set it was clear to him that man is an inter-
mediate creation between the earthly and the
divine. It was not a question of a divine
being outside and beyond the world. The
divine lives in man but lives in him only in a
human way. It is the force urging man to
make himself ever more and more divine.
Only one who thinks thus can say with
Empedocles :

The Greek Sages Before Plato 55

When leaving thy body behind thee, thou soar-

est into the ether,
Then thou becomest a god, immortal, not

subject to death.

What may be done for a human life from
this point of view? It may be introduced
into the magic circle of the eternal. For in
man there must be forces which merely
natural life does not develop. And the life
might pass away unused if the forces re-
mained idle. To open them up, thereby to
make man like the divine, — this was the task
of the Mysteries. And this was also the
mission which the Greek sages set before
themselves. In this way we can understand
Plato's utterance, that "he who passes un-
sanctified and uninitiated into the world
below will lie in a slough, but that he who
arrives there after initiation and purification
will dwell with the gods." We have to do
here with a conception of immortality, the
significance of which lies bound up within the
universe. Everything which man under-
takes in order to awaken the eternal within
him, he does in order to raise the value of the
world's existence. The fresh knowledge he

56 Christianity as Mystical Fact

gains does not make him an idle spectator
of the universe, forming images for himself
of what would be there just as much if he did
not exist. The force of his knowledge is a
higher one, it is one of the creative forces of
nature. What flashes up within him spiritu-
ally is something divine which was previously
under a spell, and which, failing the know-
ledge he has gained, must have lain fallow
and waited for some other exorcist. Thus a
human personality does not live in and for
itself, but for the world. Life extends far
beyond individual existence when looked at
in this way. From within such a point of
view we can understand utterances like that
of Pindar giving a vista of the eternal:
*' Happy is he who has seen the Mysteries
and then descends under the hollow earth.
He knows the end of life, and he knows the
beginning promised by Zeus."

We understand the proud traits and
solitary nature of sages such as Heraclitus.
They were able to say proudly of themselves
that much had been revealed to them, for
they did not attribute their knowledge to
their transitory personality, but to the eter-

The Greek Sages Before Plato 57

nal daimon within them. Their pride had as
a necessary adjunct the stamp of humihty
and modesty, expressed in the words, "All
knowledge of perishable things is in perpetual
flux like the things themselves." Heraclitus
calls the eternal universe a play, he could also
call it the most serious of realities. But the
word "earnest " has lost its force through being
applied to earthly experiences. On the other
hand, the realisation of "the play of the
eternal" leaves man that security in life of
which he is deprived by that earnest which
has come out of transitory things.

A different conception of the universe
from that of Heraclitus grew up, on the basis
of the Mysteries, in the community founded
by Pythagoras in the 6th century B.C. in
Southern Italy. The Pythagoreans saw the
basis of things in the numbers and geometri-
cal figures of which they investigated the
laws by means of mathematics. Aristotle
says of them: "They first studied mathe-
matics, and, quite engrossed in them, they
considered the elements of mathematics
to be the elements of all things. Now as
numbers are naturally the first thing in mathe-

58 Christianity as Mystical Fact

matics, and they thought they saw many
resemblances in numbers to things and to
development, and certainly more in numbers
than in fire, earth, and water, in this way one
quality of numbers came to mean for them
justice, another, the soul and spirit, another,
time, and so on with all the rest. Moreover
they found in numbers the qualities and
connections of harmony ; and thus everything
else, in accordance with its whole nature,
seemed to be an image of numbers, and
numbers seemed to be the first thing in
nature."

The mathematical and scientific study of
natural phenomena must always lead to a
certain Pythagorean habit of thought. When
a string of a certain length is struck, a par-
ticular sound is produced. If the string is
shortened in certain numeric proportions,
other sounds will be produced. The pitch
of the sounds may be expressed in figures.
Physics also expresses colour-relations in
figures. When two bodies combine into one
substance, it always happens that a certain
definite quantity of the one body, expressible
in numbers, combines with a certain definite

The Greek Sages Before Plato 59

quantity of the other. The Pythagoreans*
sense of observation was directed to such
arrangements of measures and numbers in
nature. Geometrical figures also play a sim-
ilar role. Astronomy, for instance, is mathe-
matics applied to the heavenly bodies. One
fact became important to the thought -life
of the Pythagoreans. This was that man,
quite alone and purely through his mental
activity, discovers the laws of numbers and
figures, and yet, that when he looks abroad
into nature, he finds that things are obeying
the same laws which he has ascertained for
himself in his own mind. Man forms the
idea of an ellipse, and ascertains the laws of
ellipses. And the heavenly bodies move ac-
cording to the laws which he has established.
(It is not, of course, a question here of the
astronomical views of the Pythagoreans.
What may be said about these may equally
be said of Copernican views in the connection
now being dealt with.) Hence it follows as
a direct consequence that the achievements
of the human soul are not an activity apart
from the rest of the world, but that in those
achievements the cosmic laws are expressed.

6o Christianity as Mystical Fact

The Pythagoreans said: "The senses show
man physical phenomena, but they do not
show the harmonious order which these things
follow." The human mind must first find
that harmonious order within itself, if it
wishes to behold it in the outer world. The
deeper meaning of the world, that which bears
sway within it as an eternal, law-obeying
necessity, this makes its appearance in the
human soul and becomes a present reality
there. THE meaning of the universe is
REVEALED in the soul. This meaning is not
to be found in what we see, hear, and touch,
but in what the soul brings up to the light
from its own unseen depths. The eternal
laws are thus hidden in the depths of the
soul. If we descend there, we shall find the
Eternal. God, the eternal harmony of the
world, is in the human soul. The soul-
element is not limited to the bodily substance
which is enclosed within the skin, for what is
born in the soul is nothing less than the laws
by which worlds revolve in celestial space.
The soul is not in the personality. The per-
sonality only serves as the organ through
which the order which pervades cosmic space

The Greek Sages Before Plato 6i

may express itself. There is something of the
spirit of Pythagoras in what one of the
Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, said: ''It is said
that human nature is something small and
limited, and that God is infinite, and it
is asked how the finite can embrace the
infinite. But who dares to say that the in-
finity of the Godhead is limited by the boun-
dary of the flesh, as though by a vessel?
For not even during our lifetime is the spirit-
ual nature confined within the boundaries of
the flesh. The mass of the body, it is true,
is limited by neighbouring parts, but the
soul reaches out freely into the whole of
creation by the movements of thought."

The soul is not the personality, the soul
belongs to infinity. From such a point of
view the Pythagoreans must have considered
that only fools could imagine the soul-force
to be exhausted with the personality.

For them, too, as for Heraclitus, the essen-
tial point was the awakening of the eternal
in the personal. Knowledge for them meant
intercourse with the eternal. The more
man brought the eternal element within him
into existence, the greater must he neces-

62 Christianity as Mystical Fact

sarily seem to the Pythagoreans. Life in
their community consisted in holding inter-
course with the eternal. The object of the
Pythagorean education was to lead the mem-
bers of the community to that intercourse.
The education was therefore a philosophical
initiation, and the Pythagoreans might well
say that by their manner of life they were
aiming at a goal similar to that of the cults
of the Mysteries.

IV

PLATO AS A MYSTIC

THE importance of the Mysteries to the
spiritual life of the Greeks may be
realised from Plato's conception of the uni-
verse. There is only one way of understand-
ing him thoroughly. It is to place him in
the light which streams forth from the
Mysteries.

Plato's later disciples, the Neo-Platonists,
credit him with a secret doctrine which he
imparted only to those who were worthy, and
which he conveyed under the ''seal of
secrecy." His teaching was looked upon as
mysterious in the same sense as the wisdom
of the Mysteries. Even if the seventh Pla-
tonic letter is not from his hand, as is al-
leged, it does not signify for our present
purpose, for it does not matter whether it
was he or another who gave utterance to the

63

64 Christianity as Mystical Fact

view expressed in this letter. This view is of
the essence of Plato's philosophy. In the
letter we read as follows: "This much I
may say about all those who have written
or may hereafter write as if they knew the
aim of my work, — that no credence is to be
attached to their words, whether they ob-
tained their information from me, or from
others, or invented it themselves. I have
written nothing on this subject, nor would
anything be allowed to appear. This kind
of thing cannot be expressed in words like
other teaching, but needs a long study of
the subject and a making oneself one with
it. Then it is as though a spark leaped
up and kindled a light in the soul which
thereafter is able to keep itself alight.'*
This utterance might only indicate the writ-
er's powerlessness to express his meaning
in words, — a mere personal weakness, — if the
idea of the Mysteries were not to be found
in them. The subject on which Plato had
not written and would never write, must be
something about which all writing would be
futile. It must be a feeling, a sentiment, an
experience, which is not gained by instan-

Plato as a Mystic 65

taneous communication, but by making one-
self one with it, in heart and soul. The
reference is to the inner education which
Plato was able to give those he selected.
For them, fire flashed forth from his words,
for others, only thoughts.

The manner of our approach to Plato's
Dialogues is not a matter of indifference.
They will mean more or less to us, accord-
ing to our spiritual condition. Much more
passed from Plato to his disciples than the
literal meaning of his words. The place where
he taught his listeners thrilled in the atmos-
phere of the Mysteries. His words awoke
overtones in higher regions, which vibrated
with them, but these overtones needed the
atmosphere of the Mysteries, or they died
away without having been heard.

In the centre of the world of the Platonic
Dialogues stands the personality of Socrates.
We need not here touch upon the historical
aspect of that personality. It is a question
of the character of Socrates as it appears in
Plato. Socrates is a person consecrated by
his dying for truth. He died as only an
initiate can die, as one to whom death is
5

66 Christianity as Mystical Fact

merely a moment of life like other moments.
He approaches death as he would any other
event in existence. His attitude towards it
was such that even in his friends the feelings
usual on such an occasion were not aroused.
Phasdo says this in the Dialogue on the Im-
mortality of the Soul: ''Truly I found myself
in the strangest state of mind. I had no
compassion for him, as is usual at the death
of a dear friend. So happy did the man
appear to me in his demeanour and speech,
so steadfast and noble was his end, that I
was confident that he was not going to Hades
without a divine mission, and that even there
it would be as well with him as it is with any
one anywhere. No tender-hearted emotion
overcame me, as might have been expected
at such a mournful event, nor on the other
hand was I in a cheerful mood, as is usual
during philosophical pursuits, and although
our conversation was of this nature; but I
found myself in a wondrous state of mind
and in an unwonted blending of joy and grief
when I reflected that this man was about to
die." The dying Socrates instructs his dis-
ciples about immortality. His personality,

Plato as a Mystic 67

which had learned by experience the worth-
lessness of Hfe, furnishes a kind of proof
quite different from logic and arguments
founded on reason. It seems as if it were not
a man speaking, for this man was passing
away, but as if it were the voice of eternal
truth itself, which had taken up its abode in
a perishable personality. Where a mortal
being is dissolving into nothing, there seems
to be a breath of the air in which it is possible
for eternal harmonies to resound.

We hear no logical proofs of immortality.
The whole discourse is designed to lead the
friends where they may behold the eternal.
Then they will need no proofs. Would it be
necessary to prove that a rose is red, to one
who has one before him? Why should it be
necessary to prove that spirit is eternal, to
one whose eyes we have opened to behold
spirit? Experiences, inner events, Socrates
points to them, and first of all to the ex-
perience of wisdom itself.

What does he desire who aspires after
wisdom? He wishes to free himself from
what the senses offer him in every-day per-
ception. He seeks for the spirit in the sense-

68 Christianity as Mystical Fact

world. Is not this a fact which may be
compared with dying? ** For, " according to
Socrates, "those who occupy themselves
with philosophy in the right way are really
striving after nothing else than to die and to
be dead, without this being perceived by
others. If this is true, it would be strange if,
after having aimed at this all through life,
when death itself comes they should be in-
dignant at that which they have so long
striven after and taken pains about."
To corroborate this, Socrates asks one of
his friends: "Does it seem to you befitting a
philosopher to take trouble about so-called
fleshly pleasures, such as eating and drink-
ing? or about sexual pleasures? And do you
think that such a man pays much heed to
other bodily needs? To have fine clothes,
shoes, and other bodily adornments, — do you
think he considers or scorns this more than
utmost necessity demands? Does it not
seem to you that it should be such a man's
whole preoccupation not to turn his thoughts
to the body, but as much as possible away
from it and towards the soul? Therefore
this is the first mark of the philosopher, that

Plato as a Mystic 69

he, more than all other men, relieves his
soul of association with the body. "

On this subject Socrates has something
more to say, i. e., that aspiration after wis-
dom has this much in common with dying,
that it turns man away from the physical.
But whither does he turn? Towards the
spiritual. But can he desire the same from
spirit as from the senses? Socrates thus
expresses himself on this point: "But how
is it with reasonable knowledge itself? Is the
body a hindrance or not, if we take it as a
companion in our search for knowledge? I
mean, do sight and hearing procure man any
truth? Or is what the poets sing meaningless,
that we see and hear nothing clearly? . . .
When does the soul catch sight of truth?
For when it tries to examine something with
the help of the body, it is manifestly deceived
by the latter."

Everything of which we are cognisant by
means of our bodily senses appears and dis-
appears. And it is this appearing and dis-
appearing which is the cause of our being
deceived. But when with our reasonable in-
telligence we look deeper into things, the

70 Christianity as Mystical Fact

eternal element in them is revealed to us.
Thus the senses do not offer us the eternal
in its true form. The moment we trust them
implicitly they deceive us. They cease to
deceive us if we confront them with our
thinking insight and submit what they tell
us to its examination.
^ But how could our thinking insight sit in
judgment on the declarations of the senses,
unless there were something living within it
which transcends sense-perception? There-
fore the truth or falsity in things is decided
by something within us which opposes the
physical body and is consequently not sub-
ject to its laws. First of all, it cannot be
subject to the laws of growth and decay.
For this something contains truth within it.
Now truth cannot have a yesterday and a
to-day, it cannot be one thing one day and
another the next, like objects of sense.
Therefore truth must be something eternal.
And when the philosopher turns away from
the perishable things of sense and towards
truth, he is turning towards an eternal ele-
ment that lives within him. If we immerse
ourselves wholly in spirit, we shall live wholly

Plato as a Mystic 71

in truth. The things of sense around us are
no longer present merely in their physical
form. ''And he accomplishes this most per-
fectly," says Socrates, "who approaches
everything as much as possible with the
spirit only, without either looking round
when he is thinking, or letting any other
sense interrupt his reflecting; but who, mak-
ing use of pure thought only, strives to grasp
everything as it is in itself, separating it as
much as possible from eyes and ears, in
short from the whole body, which only dis-
turbs the soul and does not allow it to attain
truth and insight when associated with the
soul. . . . Now is not death the release and
separation of the soul from the body? And
it is only true philosophers who are always
striving to release the soul as far as they can.
This, therefore, is the philosopher's vocation,
to deliver and separate the soul from the
body. . . . Therefore it would be foolish if
a man, who all his life has taken measures to
be as near death as possible, should, when it
comes, rebel against it. . . . In truth the
real seekers after wisdom aspire to die, and
of all men they are those who least fear

^2 Christianity as Mystical Fact

death." Moreover Socrates bases all higher
morality on liberation from the body. He
who only follows what his body ordains is
not moral. Who is valiant? asks Socrates.
He is valiant who does not obey his body but
the demands of his spirit when these de-
mands imperil the body. And who is tem-
perate? Is not this he who "does not let
himself be carried away by desires, but who
maintains an indifferent and moral demean-
our with regard to them. Therefore are not
those alone temperate who set least value
on the body and live in the love of wisdom?"
And so it is, in the opinion of Socrates, with
all virtues.

Thence Socrates goes on to characterise
intellectual cognition. What is it after all, to
cognise? Undoubtedly we arrive at it by
forming judgments. I form a judgment
about some object; for instance, I say to
myself, what is in front of me is a tree. How
do I arrive at saying that? I can only do it
if I already know what a tree is. I must
remember my conception of a tree. A tree
is a physical object. If I remember a tree, I
therefore remember a physical object. I say

Plato as a Mystic 73

of something that it is a tree, if it resembles
other things which I have previously ob-
served and which I know to be trees. Mem-
ory is the medium for this knowledge. It
makes it possible for me to compare the
various objects of sense. But this does
not exhaust my knowledge. If I see two
similar things, I form a judgment and
say, these things are alike. Now, in real-
ity, two things are never exactly alike. I
can only find a likeness in certain re-
spects. The idea of a perfect similarity
therefore arises within me without having
its correspondence in reality. And this
idea helps me to form a judgment, as mem-
ory helps me to a judgment and to know-
ledge. Just as one tree reminds me of
others, so am I reminded of the idea of simi-
larity by looking at two things from a certain
point of view. Thoughts and memories there-
fore arise within me which are not due to
physical reality.

All kinds of knowledge not borrowed from
sense-reality are grounded on such thoughts.
The whole of mathematics consists of them.
He would be a bad geometrician who could

4

74 Christianity as Mystical Fact

only bring into mathematical relations what
he can see with his eyes and touch with his
hands. Thus we have thoughts which do not
originate in perishable nature, but arise out
of the spirit. And it is these that bear in them
the mark of eternal truth. What mathe-
matics teach will be eternally true, even if
to-morrow the whole cosmic system should
fall into ruins and an entirely new one
arise. Conditions might prevail in another
cosmic system, to which our present ma-
thematical truths would not be applicable,
but these would be none the less true in
themselves.

It is only when the soul is alone with itself
that it can bring forth these eternal truths.
It is at these times related to the true and
eternal, and not to the ephemeral and appar-
ent. Hence Socrates says: "When the soul
returning into itself reflects, it goes straight
to what is pure and everlasting and immortal
and like unto itself; and being related to this,
cleaves unto it when the soul is alone, and is
not hindered. And then the soul rests from
its mistakes, and is like unto itself, even as
the eternal is, with whom the soul is now

Plato as a Mystic 75

in touch. This state of soul is called wisdom.
. . . Look now whether it does not follow
from all that has been said, that the soul is
most like the divine, immortal, reasonable,
unique, indissoluble, what is always the
same and like unto itself; and that on the
other hand the body most resembles what
is human and mortal, unreasonable, multi-
form, soluble, never the same nor remain-
ing equal to itself. ... If, therefore, this
be so, the soul goes to what is like itself,
to the immaterial, to the divine, immor-
tal, reasonable. There it attains to bliss,
freed from error and ignorance, from fear
and undisciplined love and all other hu-
man evils. There it lives, as the initiates
say, for the remaining time truly with
God."

It is not within the scope of this book to
indicate all the ways in which Socrates leads
his friends to the eternal. They all breathe
the same spirit. They all tend to show that
man finds one thing when he goes the way
of transitory sense-perception, and another
when his spirit is alone with itself. It is to
this original nature of spirit that Socrates

76 Christianity as Mystical Fact

points his hearers. If they find it, they
see with their own spiritual eyes that it is
eternal. The dying Socrates does not prove
the immortality of the soul, he simply lays
bare the nature of the soul. And then it
comes to light that growth and decay, birth
and death, have nothing to do with the soul.
The essence of the soul lies in the true, and
this can neither come into being nor perish.
The soul has no more to do with the becom-
ing than the straight has with the crooked.
But death belongs to the becoming. There-
fore the soul has nothing to do with
death. Must we not say of what is im-
mortal, that it admits of mortality as
little as does the straight of the crooked?
Starting from this point, "must we not
ask," adds Socrates, "that if the immortal
is imperishable, is it not impossible for
the soul to come to an end when death
arrives? For from what has been already
shown, it does not admit of death, nor
can it die any more than three can be an
even number."

Let us review the whole development of
this dialogue, in which Socrates brings his

Plato as a Mystic 77

hearers to behold the eternal in human
personality. The hearers accept his thoughts,
and they look into themselves to see if they
can find in their inner experiences something
which assents to his ideas. They make the
objections which strike them. What has
happened to the hearers when the dialogue
is finished? They have found something
within them which they did not possess
before. They have not merely accepted an
abstract truth, but they have gone through
a development. Something has come to life
in them which was not living in them before.
Is not this to be compared with an initiation?
And does not this throw light on the reason
for Plato's setting forth his philosophy in the
form of conversation? These dialogues are
nothing else than the literary form of the
events which took place in the sanctuaries
of the Mysteries. We are convinced of this
from what Plato himself says in many pas-
sages. Plato wished to be, as a philosophical
teacher, what the initiator into the Mysteries
was, as far as this was compatible with the
philosophical manner of communication. It
is evident how Plato feels himself in harmony

78 Christianity as Mystical Fact

with the Mysteries ! He only thinks he is on
the right path when it is taking him where
the Mystic is to be led. He thus expresses
himself on the subject in the Timceus.
*' All those who are of right mind invoke
the gods for their small or great enterprises;
but we who are engaged in teaching about
the universe, — how far it is created and un-
created,— have the special duty, if we have
not quite lost our way, to call upon and im-
plore the gods and goddesses that we may
teach everything first in conformity with
their spirit, and next in harmony with our-
selves." And Plato promises those who fol-
low this path, that divinity, as a deliverer,
will grant them illuminating teaching as the
conclusion of their devious and wandering
researches.

It is especially the TimcBus that reveals to
us how the Platonic cosmogony is connected
with the Mysteries. At the very beginning
of this dialogue there is mention of an
initiation. Solon is initiated by an Egyptian
priest into the formation of the worlds, and
the way in which eternal truths are symboli-

Plato as a Mystic 79

cally expressed in traditional myths. "There
have already been many and various de-
structions of part of the human race," says
the Egyptian priest to Solon, ''and there will
be more in the future; the most extensive by
fire and water, other lesser ones through
countless other causes. It is also related in
your country that Phaethon, the son of Helios,
once mounted his father's chariot, and as he
did not know how to drive it, everything on
the earth was burnt up, and he himself slain
by lightning. This sounds like a fable, but
it contains the truth of the change in the
movements of the celestial bodies revolving
round the earth and of the annihilation of
everything on the earth by much fire. This
annihilation happens periodically, after the
lapse of certain long periods of time." This
passage in the Timceus contains a plain indi-
cation of the attitude of the initiate towards
folk-myths. He recognises the truths hidden
in their images.

The drama of the formation of the world
is brought before us in the Timceus, Any one
who will follow up the traces which lead to
this formation of the cosmos arrives at a

8o Christianity as Mystical Fact

dim apprehension of the primordial force
from which all things proceeded. "Now it is
difficult to find the Creator and Father of the
universe, and when we have found Him, it is
impossible to speak about Him so that all
may understand." The Mystic knew what
this "impossibility" means. It points to the
divine drama. God is not present in what
belongs merely to the senses and understand-
ing. In those He is only present as nature.
He is under a spell in nature. Only one who
awakens the divine within himself is able to
approach Him. Thus He cannot at once be
made comprehensible to all. But even to
one who approaches Him, He does not appear
Himself. The Timceus says that also. The
Father made the universe out of the body
and soul of the world. He mixed together,
in harmony and perfect proportions, the
elements which came into being when He,
pouring Himself out, gave up His separate
existence. Thereby the body of the world
came into being, and stretched upon it, in the
form of a cross, is the soul of the world. It
is what is divine in the world. It found the
death of the cross so that the world might

Plato as a Mystic 8i

come into existence. Plato may therefore
call nature the tomb of the divine, a grave,
however, in which nothing dead lies but
the eternal, to which death only gives the
opportunity of bringing into expression the
omnipotence of life. And man sees nature
in the right light when he approaches it in
order to release the crucified soul of the
world. It must rise again from its death,
from its spell. Where can it come to life
again? Only in the soul of initiated man.
Then wisdom finds its right relation to the
cosmos. The resurrection, the liberation of
God, that is wisdom. In the Timceus the
development of the world is traced from the
imperfect to the perfect. An ascending pro-
cess is represented imaginatively. Beings
are developed. God reveals Himself in their
development. Evolution is the resurrection
of God from the tomb. Within evolution,
man appears. Plato shows that in man there
is something special. It is true the whole
world is divine, and man is not more divine
than other beings. But in other beings God
is present in a hidden way, in man he is
manifest. At the end of the Timceus we

6

82 Christianity as Mystical Fact

read: "And now we might assert that our
study of the universe has attained its end,
for after the world was provided and filled
with mortal and immortal living beings, it,
this one and only begotten world, has itself
become a visible being embracing every-
thing visible, and an image of the Creator. It
has become the God perceptible to the senses,
and the greatest and best world, the fairest
and most perfect which there could be.'*
But this one and only begotten world would
not be perfect if the image of its Creator were
not to be found amongst the images it con-
tains. This image can only be engendered
in the human soul. Not the Father Himiself,
but the Son, God's offspring, living in the
soul, and being like unto the Father, him
man can bring forth.

Philo, of whom it was said that he was the
resurrected Plato, characterised as the "Son
of God" the wisdom born out of man, which
lives in the soul and contains the reason
existing in the world. This cosmic reason,
or Logos, appears as the book in which
"everything in the world is recorded and
delineated." It also appears as the Son of

Plato as a Mystic 83

God, "following in the paths of the Father,
and creating forms, looking at their arche-
types." The platonising Philo addresses
this Logos as Christ, "As God is the first and
only king of the universe, the way to Him
is rightly called the ' Royal Road. ' Consider
this road to be philosophy . . . the road
which the company of the ancient ascetics
took, who turned away from the entangling
fascination of pleasure and devoted them-
selves to the noble and earnest cultivation
of the beautiful. The law names this Royal
Road, which we call true philosophy, God's
word and spirit."

It is like an initiation to Philo when he
enters upon this path, in order to meet the
Logos w^ho, to him, is the Son of God. "I
do not shrink from relating what has hap-
pened to me innumerable times. Often when
I wished to put my philosophical thoughts
in writing, in my accustomed way, and saw
quite clearly what was to be set down, I
nevertheless found my mind barren and rigid,
so that I was obliged to desist without hav-
ing accomplished anything, and seemed to
be hampered with idle fancies. At the same

84 Christianity as Mystical Fact

time I could not but marvel at the power
of the reality of thought, with which it
rests to open and to close the womb of the
human soul. Another time, however, I
would begin empty and arrive, without any
trouble, at fulness. Thoughts came flying
like snowflakes or grains of corn invisibly
from above, and it was as though divine
power took hold of me and inspired me, so
that I did not know where I was, who was
with me, who I was, or what I was saying or
writing; for just then the flow of ideas was
given me, a delightful clearness, keen insight,
and lucid mastery of material, as if the inner
eye were able to see everything with the
greatest distinctness."

This is a description of a path to knowledge
so expressed that we see that any one taking
this path is conscious of flowing in one
current with the divine, when the Logos
becomes alive within him. This is also ex-
pressed clearly in the words: "When the
spirit, moved by love, takes its flight into
the most holy, soaring joyously on divine
wings, it forgets everything else and itself.
It only clings to and is filled with that of

Plato as a Mystic 85

which it is the satellite and servant, and to
this it offers the incense of the most sacred
and chaste virtue."

There are only two ways for Philo. Either
man follows the world of sense, that is, what
observation and intellect offer, in which case
he limits himself to his personality and with-
draws from the cosmos; or he becomes con-
scious of the universal cosmic force, and
experiences the eternal within his personal-
ity. ''He who wishes to escape from God
falls into his own hands. For there are two
things to be considered, the universal Spirit
which is God, and one's own spirit. The
latter flees to and takes refuge in the uni-
versal Spirit, for one who goes beyond his
own spirit says that it is nothing and con-
nects everything with God; but one who
avoids God, abolishes the First Cause, and
makes himself the cause of everything which
happens."

The Platonic view of the universe sets out
to be knowledge which by its very nature is
also religion. It brings knowledge into rela-
tion with the highest to which man can
attain through his feelings. Plato will only

86 Christianity as Mystical Fact

allow knowledge to hold good when feeling
may be completely satisfied in it. It is then
more than science, it is the substance of life.
It is a higher man within man, that man of
which the personality is only an image.
Within man is born a being who surpasses
him, a primordial, archetypal man, and this
is another secret of the Mysteries brought to
expression in the Platonic philosophy. Hip-
polytus, one of the Early Fathers, alludes to
this secret. "This is the great secret of the
Samothracians (who were guardians of a cer-
tain Mystery-cult), which cannot be ex-
pressed and which only the initiates know.
But these latter speak in detail of Adam, as
the primordial, archetypal man."

The Platonic Dialogue on Love, or the Sym-
posium, also represents an initiation. Here
love appears as the herald of wisdom. If
wisdom, the eternal word, the Logos, is the
Son of the Eternal Creator of the cosmos,
love is related to the Logos as a mother.
Before even a spark of the light of wisdom
can flash up in the human soul, a dim im-
pulse or desire for the divine must be present
in it. Unconsciously the divine must draw

Plato as a Mystic 87

man to what afterwards, when raised into his
consciousness, constitutes his supreme happi-
ness. What Heraclitus calls the ''daimon"
in man (see p. 49) is connected with the idea
of love. In the Symposium, people of the
most various ranks and views of life speak
about love, — the ordinary man, the politi-
cian, the scientific man, the satiric poet
Aristophanes, and the tragic poet Agathon.
They each have their own view of love, in
keeping with their different experiences of
life. The way in which they express them-
selves shows the stage at which their "dai-
mon" has arrived {cf. p. 49). By love one
being is attracted to another. The multi-
plicity, the diversity of the things into which
divine unity was poured, aspires towards
unity and harmony through love. Thus love
has something divine in it, and owing to this,
each individual can only understand it as far
as he participates in the divine.

After these men and others at different
degrees of maturity have given utterance to
their ideas about love, Socrates takes up
the word. He considers love from the point
of view of a man in search of knowledge. For

88 Christianity as Mystical Fact

him, it is not a divinity, but it is something
which leads man to God. Eros, or love,
is for him not divine, for a god is perfect, and
therefore possesses the beautiful and good;
but Eros is only the desire for the beautiful
and good. He thus stands between man
and God. He is a "daimon," a mediator
between the earthly and the divine.

It is significant that Socrates does not
claim to be giving his own thoughts when
speaking of love. He says he is only relating
what a woman once imparted to him as a
revelation. It was through mantic art that
he came to his conception of love. Diotima,
the priestess, awakened in Socrates the dai-
monic force which was to lead him to the
divine. She initiated him.

This passage in the Symposium is highly
suggestive. Who is the "wise woman" who
awakened the daimon in Socrates? She is
more than a merely poetic mode of expres-
sion. For no wise woman on the physical
plane could awaken the daimon in the soul,
unless the daimonic force were latent in the
soul itself. It is surely in Socrates' own soul
that we must also look for this " wise woman.'*

Plato as a Mystic 89

But there must be a reason why that which
brings the daimon to Ufe within the soul
should appear as an outward being on the
physical plane. The force cannot work in the
same way as the forces which may be ob-
served in the soul, as belonging to and native
to it. We see that it is the soul-force which
precedes the coming of wisdom which Socra-
tes represents as a "wise woman." It is the
mother-principle which gives birth to the
Son of God, Wisdom, the Logos. The un-
conscious soul-force which brings the divine
into the consciousness is here represented as
the feminine element. The soul which as
yet is without wisdom is the mother of what
leads to the divine. This brings us to an
important conception of mysticism. The
soul is recognised as the mother of the divine.
Unconsciously it leads man to the divine,
with the inevitableness of a natural force.

This conception throws light on the view
of Greek mythology taken in the Mysteries.
The world of the gods is born in the soul.
Man looks upon what he creates in images as
his gods (cf. p. 33). But he must force his
way through to another conception. He must

90 Christianity as Mystical Fact

transmute into divine images the divine
force which is active within him before the
creation of those images. Behind the divine
appears the mother of the divine, which is
nothing else than the original force of the
human soul. Thus side by side with the
gods, man represents goddesses.
^^ f Let us look at the myth of Dionysos in this
.©X.^ /light. Dionysos is the son of Zeus and a
, *^^ f mortal mother, Semele. Zeus wrests the still
immature child from its mother w^hen she is
slain by lightning, and shelters it in his own
side till it is ready to be born. Hera, the
mother of the gods, incites the Titans against
Dionysos, and they tear him in pieces. But
Pallas Athene rescues his heart, which is
still beating, and brings it to Zeus, Out of it
he engenders his son for the second time.

In this myth we can accurately trace a
process which is enacted in the depths of the
human soul. Interpreting it in the manner
of the Egyptian priest who instructed Solon
about the nature of myths {cf. p. 78 et seq.),
we might say, it is related that Dionysos
was the son of a god and of a mortal mother,
that he was torn in pieces and afterwards

Plato as a Mystic 91

born again. This sounds like a fable, but it
contains the truth of the birth of the divine
and its destiny in the human soul. The di-
vine unites itself with the earthly, temporal
human soul. As soon as the divine, Dionysiac
element stirs within the soul, it feels a violent
desire for its own true spiritual form. Ordi-
nary consciousness, which once again appears
in the form of a female goddess, Hera, be-
comes jealous at the birth of the divine out
of the higher consciousness. It arouses the
lower nature of man (the Titans). The still
immature divine child is torn in pieces. Thus
the divine child is present in man as intellec-
tual science broken up. But if there be
enough of the higher wisdom (Zeus) in man
to be active, it nurses and cherishes the im-
mature child, which is then born again as a
second son of God (Dionysos). Thus from
science, which is the fragmentary divine force
in man, is born undivided wisdom, which is
the Logos, the son of God and of a mortal
mother, of the perishable human soul, which
unconsciously aspires after the divine. As
long as we see in all this merely a process in
the soul and look upon it as a picture of this

92 Christianity as Mystical Fact

process, we are a long way from the spiritual
reality which is enacted in it. In this spiritual
reality the soul is not merely experiencing
something in itself, but it has been released
from itself and is taking part in a cosmic
event, which is not enacted within the soul,
in reality, but outside it.

Platonic wisdom and Greek myths are
closely linked together, so too are the myths
and the wisdom of the Mysteries. The
created gods were the object of popular re-
ligion, the history of their origin was the
secret of the Mysteries. No wonder that it
was held to be dangerous to "betray" the
Mysteries, for thereby the origin of the gods
of the people was ''betrayed." And a right
understanding of that origin is salutary, a
misunderstanding is injurious.

V

THE WISDOM OF THE MYSTERIES AND THE

MYTH

THE Mystic sought forces and beings
within himself which are unknown to
man as long as he remains in the ordinary
attitude towards life. The Mystic puts the
great question about his own spiritual forces
and the laws which transcend the lower
nature. A man of ordinary views of life,
bounded by the senses and logic, creates gods
for himself, or when he gets to the point of
seeing that he has made them, he disclaims
them. The Mystic knows that he creates
gods, he knows why he creates them, he
sees, so to say, behind the natural law which
makes man create them. It is as though
a plant suddenly became conscious, and
learned the laws of its growth and develop-
ment. As it is, it develops in lovely uncon-

93

94 Christianity as Mystical Fact

sciousness. If it knew about the laws of its
own being, its relation to itself would be
completely changed. What the lyric poet
feels when he sings about a plant, what the
botanist thinks when he investigates its laws,
this would hover before a conscious plant as
an ideal of itself.

It is thus with the Mystic with regard to
the laws, the forces working within him. As
one who knew, he was forced to create some-
thing divine beyond himself. And the in-
itiates took up the same attitude to that
which the people had created beyond nature;
that is to the world of popular gods and
myths. They wanted to penetrate the laws
of this world of gods and myths. Where
the people saw the form of a god, or a myth,
they looked for a higher truth.

Let us take an example. The Athenians
had been forced by the Cretan king Minos to
deliver up to him every eight years seven
boys and seven girls. These were thrown as
food to a terrible monster, the Minotaur.
When the mournful tribute was to be paid for
the third time, the king's son Theseus accom-
panied it to Crete. On his arrival there,

Mysteries and the Myth 95

Ariadne, the daughter of Minos inter-
ested herself in him. The Minotaur dwelt
in the labyrinth, a maze from which no one
could extricate himself who had once got in.
Theseus desired to deliver his native city
from the shameful tribute. For this purpose
he had to enter the labyrinth into which the
monster's booty was usually thrown, and to
kill the Minotaur. He undertook the task,
overcame the formidable foe, and succeeded
in regaining the open air with the aid of a
ball of thread which Ariadne had given him.

The Mystic had to discover how the
creative human mind comes to weave such
a story. As the botanist watches the growth
of plants in order to discover its laws, so did
the Mystic watch the creative spirit. He
sought for a truth, a nucleus of wisdom
where the people had invented a myth.

Sallust discloses to us the attitude of a
mystical sage towards a myth of this kind.
''We might call the whole world a myth,"
says he, ''which contains bodies and things
visibly, and souls and spirits in a hidden
manner. If the truth about the gods were
taught to all, the unintelligent would disdain

96 Christianity as Mystical Fact

it from not understanding it, and the more
capable would make light of it. But if
the truth is given in a mystical veil, it is
assured against contempt and serves as a
stimulus to philosophic thinking,"

When the truth contained in a myth was
sought by an initiate, he was conscious of
adding something which did not exist in the
consciousness of the people. He was aware
of being above that consciousness, as a
botanist is above a growing plant. Some-
thing was expressed which was different from
what was present in the mythical conscious-
ness, but it was looked upon as a deeper truth,
symboHcally expressed in the myth. Man is
confronted with his own sense-nature in the
form of a hostile monster. He sacrifices to
it the fruits of his personality, and the
monster devours them, and continues to
do so till the conqueror (Theseus) awakes
in man. His intuition spins* the thread by
means of which he finds his way again
when he repairs to the maze of the senses
in order to slay his enemy. The mystery
of human knowledge itself is expressed
in this conquering of the senses. The

Mysteries and the Myth 97

initiate knows that mystery. It points to a
force in human personality unknown to or-
dinary consciousness, but nevertheless active
within it. It is the force which creates the
myth, v/hich has the same structure as mys-
tical truth. This truth finds its symbol in
the myth.

What then is to be found in the myths?
In them is a creation of the spirit, of the un-
consciously creative soul. The soul has well-
defined laws. In order to create beyond
itself, it must work in a certain direction.
At the mythological stage it does this in
images, but these are built up according to
the laws of the soul. We might also say that
when the soul advances beyond the stage of
mythological consciousness to deeper truths,
these bear the same stamp as did the myths,
for one and the same force was at work in
their formation.

Plotinus, the philosopher of the Neo-
Platonic school (a.d. 204-269), speaks of this
relation of mythical representation to higher
knowledge in reference to the priest-sages of
Egypt. ''Whether as the result of rigorous
investigations, or whether instinctively when
7

98 Christianity as Mystical Fact

imparting their wisdom, the Egyptian sages
do not use, for expressing their teaching and
precepts, written signs which are imitations
of voice and speech; but they draw pictures,
and in the outUnes of these they record, in
their temples, the thought contained in each
thing, so that every picture contains know-
ledge and wisdom, and is a definite truth and
a complete whole, although there is no ex-
planation nor discussion. Afterwards the
contents of the picture are drawn out of it
and expressed in words, and the cause is
found why it is as it is, and not otherwise."
If we wish to find out the connection of
mysticism with mythical narratives, we must
see what relationship to them there is in the
views of the great thinkers, those who knew
their wisdom to be in harmony with the meth-
ods of the Mysteries. We find such harmony
in Plato in the fullest degree. His explana-
tions of myths and his application of them in
his teaching may be taken as a model {cj. p.
78 et seq.). In the PhcBdrtis, a dialogue on
the soul, the myth of Boreas is introduced.
This divine being, who was seen in the rush-
ing wind, one day saw the fair Orithyia,

Mysteries and the Myth 99

daughter of the Attic king Erectheus, gather-
ing flowers with her companions. Seized
with love for her, he carried her off to his
grotto. Plato, by the mouth of Socrates,
rejects a rationalist interpretation of this
myth. According to this explanation, an
outward, natural fact is poetically symbolised
by the narrative. A hurricane seized the
king's daughter and hurled her over the
rocks. "Interpretations of this sort," says
Socrates, "are learned sophistries, however
popular and usual they may be. . . . For
one who has pulled to pieces one of these
mythological forms must, to be consistent,
elucidate sceptically and explain naturally
all the rest in the same way. . . . But even
if such a labour could be accomplished, it
would in any case be no proof of superior
talents in the one carrying it out, but only
of superficial wit, boorish wisdom, and ridicu-
lous haste. . . . Therefore I leave on one
side all such enquiries, and believe what is
generally thought about the myths. I do
not examine them, as I have just said, but I
examine myself to see whether I too may
perhaps be a monster, more complicated

^^/,o. /r\x 00

100 Christianity as Mystical Fact

and therefore more disordered than the chi-
maera, more savage than Typhon, or whether
I represent a more docile and simple being,
to whom some particle of a virtuous and
divine nature has been given."

We see from this that Plato does not
approve of a rationalistic and merely intel-
lectual interpretation of myths. This atti-
tude must be compared with the way in
which he himself uses myths in order to
express himself through them. When he
speaks of the life of the soul, when he leaves
the paths of the transitory and seeks the
eternal in the soul, when, therefore, images
borrowed from sense-perception and reason-
ing thought can no longer be used, then
Plato has recourse to the myth. Phcedriis
treats of the eternal in the soul, which is
portrayed as a car drawn by two horses
winged all over, and driven by a charioteer.
One horse is patient and docile, the other
wild and headstrong. If an obstacle comes
in the way of the car the troublesome horse
takes the opportunity of impeding the docile
one and defying the driver. When the car
arrives where it has to follow the gods up the

Mysteries and the Myth loi

celestial steep, the intractable horse throws
the team into confusion. If it is less strong
than the good horse, it is overcome, and the
car is able to go on into the supersensible
realm. It thus happens that the soul can
never ascend without difficulties into the
kingdom of the divine. Some souls rise more
to the vision of eternity, some less. The
soul which has seen the world beyond re-
mains safe until the next journey. One who,
on account of the intractable horse, has not
seen beyond, must try again on the next
journey. These journeys signify the various
incarnations of the soul. One journey signifies
the life of the soul in one personality. The
wild horse represents the lower nature, the
docile one the higher nature; the driver,
the soul longing for union with the divine.

Plato resorts to the myth in order to de-
scribe the course of the eternal spirit through
its various transformations. In the same
way he has recourse, in other writings, to
symbolical narrative, in order to portray the
inner nature of man, which is not perceptible
to the senses.

Plato is here in complete harmony with the

I02 Christianity as Mystical Fact

mythical and allegorical manner of expres-
sion used by others. For instance there is in
ancient Hindu literature a parable attributed
to Buddha.

A man very much attached to life, who seeks
sensuous pleasures and will die at no price
is pursued by four serpents. He hears a
voice commanding him to feed and bathe
the serpents from time to time. The man
runs away, fearing the serpents. Again he
hears a voice, warning him that he is pur-
sued by five murderers. Once more he
escapes. A voice calls his attention to a
sixth murderer, who is about to behead him
with a sword. Again he flees. He comes to a
deserted village. There he hears a voice
telling him that robbers are shortly going to
plunder the village. Having again escaped,
he comes to a great flood. He feels unsafe
where he is, and out of straw, wood, and
leaves he makes a basket in which he ar-
rives at the other shore. Now he is safe, he
is a Brahmin.

The meaning of this allegory is that man
has to pass through the most various states
before attaining to the divine. The four

Mysteries and the Myth 103

serpents represent the four elements, fire,
water, earth, and air. The five murderers are
the five senses. The deserted village is the
soul which has escaped from sense-impres-
sions, but is not yet safe if it is alone with
itself, for if its lower nature lays hold of it, it
must perish. Man must construct for him-
self the boat which is to carry him over the
flood of the transitory from the one shore,
the sense-nature, to the other, the eternal,
divine world.

Let us look at the Egyptian mystery of
Osiris in this light. Osiris had gradually
become one of the most important Egyptian
divinities; he supplanted other gods in cer-
tain parts of the country; and an important
cycle of myths was formed round him and
his consort Isis.

Osiris was the son of the Sun-god, his
brother was Typhon-Set, and his sister was
Isis. Osiris married his sister, and together
they reigned over Egypt. The wicked
brother, Typhon, meditated killing Osiris.
He had a chest made which was exactly the
length of Osiris' body. At a banquet this
chest was offered to the person whom it

104 Christianity as Mystical Fact

exactly fitted. This was Osiris and none
other! He entered the chest. Typhon and
his confederates rushed upon him, closed
the chest, and threw it into the river. When
Isis heard the terrible news she wandered far
and wide in despair, seeking her husband's
body. When she had found it, Typhon again
took possession of it, and tore it in fourteen
pieces which were dispersed in many differ-
ent places. Various tombs of Osiris were
shown in Egypt. In many places, up and
down the country, portions of the god were
said to be buried. Osiris himself, however,
came forth from the nether-world and van-
quished Typhon. A beam shone from him
upon Isis, who in consequence bore a son,
Harpocrates or Horus.

And now let us compare this myth with the
view which the Greek philosopher, Emped-
ocles (B.C. 490-430) takes of the universe.
He assumes that the one original primeval
being was once broken up into the four
elements, fire, water, earth, and air, or into
the multiplicity of being. He represents two
opposing forces, which within this world of
existence bring about growth and decay,

Mysteries and the Myth 105

love and strife. Empedocles says of the
elements :

They remain ever the same, but yet by com-
bining their forces

Become transformed into men and the number-
less beings besides.

These are now joined into one, love binding the
many together,

Now once again they are scattered, dispersing
through hatred and strife.

What then are the things in the world from
Empedocles' point of view? They are the
elements in different combinations. They
could only come into being because the
Primeval Unity was broken up into the four
essences. Therefore this primordial unity
was poured into the elements. Anything
confronting us is part of the divinity which
was poured out. But the divinity is hidden
in the thing; it first had to die that things
might come into being. And what are these
things? Mixtures of divine constituents
effectuated by love and hatred. Empedocles
says this distinctly:

io6 Christianity as Mystical Fact

See, for a clear demonstration, how the limbs of

a man are constructed.
All that the body possesses, in beauty and pride

of existence,
All put together by love, are the elements there

forming one.
Afterwards hatred and strife come, and fatally

tear them asunder.
Once more they wander alone, on the desolate

confines of life.
So it is with the bushes and trees, and the water-
inhabiting fishes.
Wild animals roaming the mountains, and ships

swiftly borne by their sails.

Empedocles therefore must come to the
conclusion that the sage finds again the
Divine Primordial Unity, hidden in the world
by a spell, and entangled in the meshes of
love and hatred. But if man finds the
divine, he must himself be divine, for
Empedocles takes the point of view that
a being is only cognised by its equal.
This conviction of his is expressed in
Goethe's lines: ''If the eye were not of
the nature of the sun, how could we be-
hold light? If divine force were not at

Mysteries and the Myth 107

work in us, how could divine things de-
light us?"

These thoughts about the world and man,
which transcend sense-experience, were found
by the Mystic in the myth of Osiris. Divine
creative force has been poured out into the
universe; it appears as the four elements;
God (Osiris) is killed. Man is to raise him
from the dead with his cognition, which is of
divine nature. He is to find him again as
Horus (the Son of God, the Logos, Wisdom),
in the opposition between Strife (Typhon)
and Love (Isis). Empedocles expresses his
fundamental conviction in Greek form by
means of images which border on myth.
Love is Aphrodite, and strife is Neikos.
They bind and unbind the elements.

The portrayal of the content of a myth in
the manner followed here must not be con-
fused with a merely symbolical or even alle-
gorical interpretation of myths. This is not
intended. The images forming the contents
of a myth are not invented symbols of
abstract truths, but actual soul-experiences
of the initiate. He experiences the images
with his spiritual organs of perception, just

io8 Christianity as Mystical Fact

as the normal man experiences the images
of physical things with his eyes and ears.
But as an image is nothing in itself if it is
not aroused in the perception by an outer
object, so the mythical image is nothing
unless it is excited by real facts of the spiritual
world. Only in regard to the physical world,
man is at first outside the exciting causes,
whereas he can only experience the images
of myths when he is within the corresponding
spiritual occurrences. In order, however,
to be within them, he must have gone through
initiation. Then the spiritual occurrences
within which he is perceiving are, as it were,
illustrated by the myth-images. Any one
who cannot take the mythical element as
such illustration of real spiritual occurrences,
has not yet attained to the understanding of
it. For the spiritual events themselves are
supersensible, and images which are reminis-
cent of the physical world are not themselves
of a spiritual nature, but only an illustration
of spiritual things. One who lives merely in
the images lives in a dream. Only one who
has got to the point of feeling the spiritual
element in the image as he feels in the sense-

Mysteries and the Myth 109

world a rose through the image of a rose,
really lives in spiritual perceptions. This is
the reason why the images of myths cannot
have only one meaning. On account of their
illustrative character, the same myths may
express several spiritual facts. It is not
therefore a contradiction when interpreters
of myths sometimes connect a myth with one
spiritual fact and sometimes with another.
From this standpoint, we are able to find
a thread to conduct us through the labyrinth
of Greek myths. Let us consider the legend
of Heracles. The twelve labours imposed
upon Heracles appear in a higher light when
we remember that before the last and most
difficult one, he is initiated into the Eleusin-
ian mysteries. He is commissioned by King
Eurystheus of Mycenae to bring the hell-
hound Cerberus from the infernal regions
and take it back there again. In order to
undertake the descent into hell, Heracles
had to be initiated. The Mysteries con-
ducted man through the death of perishable
things, therefore into the nether-world, and
by initiation they rescued his eternal part
from perishing. As a Mystic, he could

no Christianity as Mystical Fact

vanquish death. Heracles having become a
Mystic overcomes the dangers of the nether-
world. This justifies us in interpreting his
other ordeals as stages in the inner develop-
ment of the soul. He overcomes the Nemaean
lion and brings him to Mycenae. This means
that he becomes master of purely physical
force in man; he tames it. Afterwards he
slays the nine-headed Hydra. He overcomes
it with firebrands and dips his arrows in
its gall, so that they become deadly. This
means that he overcomes lower knowledge,
that which comes through the senses. He
does this through the fire of the spirit, and
from what he has gained through the lov/er
knowledge, he draws the power to look at
lower things in the light which belongs to
spiritual sight. Heracles captures the hind
of Artemis, goddess of hunting: everything
which free nature offers to the human soul,
Heracles conquers and subdues. The other
labours may be interpreted in the same way.
We cannot here trace out every detail, and
only wish to describe how the general sense
of the myth points to inner development.
A similar interpretation is possible of the

Mysteries and the Myth in

expedition of the Argonauts. Phrixus and
his sister Helle, children of a Bceotian king,
suffered many things from their step-mother.
The gods sent them a ram with a golden
fleece, which flew away with them. When
they came to the straits between Europe and
Asia, Helle was drowned. Hence the strait
is called the Hellespont. Phrixus came to the
King of Colchis, on the east shore of the
Black Sea. He sacrificed the ram to the gods,
and gave its fleece to King ^Eetes. The
king had it hung up in a grove and guarded
by a terrible dragon. The Greek hero Jason
undertook to fetch the fleece from Colchis,
in company with other heroes, Heracles,
Theseus, and Orpheus. Heavy tasks were
laid upon Jason by ^etes for the obtaining
of the treasure, but Medea, the king's daugh-
ter, who was versed in magic, aided him.
He subdued two fire-breathing bulls. He
ploughed a field and sowed in it dragon's
teeth from which armed men grew up out of
the earth. By Medea's advice he threw a
stone into their midst, whereupon they killed
each other. Jason lulls the dragon to sleep
with a charm of Medea's and is then able

112 Christianity as Mystical Fact

to win the fleece. He returns with it to
Greece, Medea accompanying him as his
wife. The king pursues the fugitives. In
order to detain him, Medea slays her Httle
brother Absyrtus, and scatters his Hmbs in
the sea. ^etes stays to collect them, and the
pair are able to reach Jason's home with the
fleece.

Each of these facts requires a deep elucida-
tion. The fleece is something belonging to
man, and infinitely precious to him. It is
something from which he was separated in
times of yore, and for the recovery of which
he has to overcome terrible forces. It is
thus with the eternal in the human soul. It
belongs to man, but man is separated from
it by his lower nature. Only by overcoming
the latter, and lulling it to sleep, can he
recover the eternal. This becomes possible
when his own consciousness (Medea) comes
to his aid with its magic power. Medea is
to Jason what Diotima was to Socrates, a
teacher of love {cf. p. 88). Man's own wis-
dom has the magic power necessary for at-
taining the divine after having overcome the
transitory. From the lower nature there can

Mysteries and the Myth 113

only arise a lower human principle, the armed
men who are overcome by spiritual force,
the counsel of Medea. Even when man has
found the eternal, the fleece, he is not yet
safe. He has to sacrifice part of his con-
sciousness (Absyrtus). This is exacted by
the physical world, which we can only appre-
hend as a multiple (dismembered) world.
We might go still deeper into the description
of the spiritual events lying behind the
images, but it is only intended here to indi-
cate the principle of the formation of myths.
Of special interest, when interpreted in
this way, is the legend of Prometheus, He
and his brother Epimetheus are sons of the
Titan lapetus. The Titans are the offspring
of the oldest generation of gods, Uranus
(Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). Kronos, the
youngest of the Titans, dethroned his father
and seized upon the government of the world.
In return, he was overpowered, with the
other Titans, by his son Zeus, who became
the chief of the gods. In the struggle with
the Titans, Prometheus was on the side of
Zeus. By his advice, Zeus banished the
Titans to the nether- world. But in Prome-

114 Christianity as Mystical Fact

theus there still lived the Titan spirit, he was
only half a friend to Zeus. When the latter
wished to exterminate men on account of
their arrogance, Prometheus espoused their
cause, taught them numbers, writing, and
everything else which leads to culture, es-
pecially the use of fire. This aroused the
wrath of Zeus against Prometheus. Heph-
aistos, the son of Zeus, was commissioned
to make a female form of great beauty, whom
the gods adorned with every possible gift.
She was called Pandora, the all-gifted one.
Hermes, messenger of the gods, brought her
to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus.
She brought him a casket, as a present from
the gods. Epimetheus accepted the present,
although Prometheus had warned him against
receiving any gift from the gods. When the
casket was opened, every possible human
evil flew out of it. Hope alone remained,
and this because Pandora quickly closed the
box. Hope has therefore been left to man,
as a doubtful gift of the gods. By order of
Zeus, Prometheus was chained to a rock on
the Caucasus, on account of his relation to
man. An eagle perpetually gnaws his liver,

Mysteries and the Myth 115

which is as often renewed. He has to pass
his hfe in agonising loneliness till one of the
gods voluntarily sacrifices himself, i. e., de-
votes himself to death. The tormented Pro-
metheus bears his sufferings steadfastly. It
had been told him that Zeus would be de-
throned by the son of a mortal unless Zeus
consented to wed this mortal woman. It was
important for Zeus to know this secret. He
sent the messenger Hermes to Prometheus,
in order to learn something about it. Pro-
metheus refused to say anything. The legend
of Heracles is connected with that of Pro-
mictheus. In the course of his wanderings
Heracles comes to the Caucasus. He slays
the eagle which was devouring the liver of
Prometheus. The centaur Chiron, who can-
not die, although suffering from an incurable
wound, sacrifices himself for Prometheus,
who is thereupon reconciled with the gods.

The Titans are the force of will, proceeding
as nature (Kronos) from the original univer-
sal spirit (Uranus). Here we have to think
not merely of will-forces in an abstract form,
but of actual will-beings. Prometheus is
one of them, and this describes his nature^-

ii6 Christianity as Mystical Fact

But he is not altogether a Titan. In a cer-
tain sense he is on the side of Zeus, the
Spirit, who enters upon the rulership of the
world after the unbridled force of nature
(Kronos) has been subdued. Prometheus is
thus the representative of those worlds which
have given man the progressive element,
half nature-force, half spiritual force, man's
wdll. The will points on the one side towards
good, on the other, towards evil. Its fate is
decided according as it leans to the spiritual
or the perishable. This fate is that of man
himself. He is chained to the perishable,
the eagle gnaws him, he has to suffer. He
can only reach the highest by seeking his
destiny in solitude. He has a secret which
is that the divine (Zeus) must marry a mor-
tal (human consciousness bound up with the
physical body), in order to beget a son,
human wisdom (the Logos) which will de-
liver the deity. By this means consciousness
becomes immortal. He must not betray this
secret till a Mystic (Heracles) comes to him,
and annihilates the power which was per-
petually threatening him with death. A
being half animal, half human, a centaur, is

Mysteries and the Myth 117

obliged to sacrifice ifself to redeem man.
The centaur is man himself, half animal, half
spiritual. He must die in order that the
purely spiritual man may be delivered. That
which is disdained by Prometheus, human
will, is accepted by Epimetheus, reason or
prudence. But the gifts offered to Epime-
theus are only troubles and sorrows, for
reason clings to the transitory and perish-
able. And only one thing is left — the hope
that even out of the perishable the eternal
may some day be born.

The thread running through the legends
of the Argonauts, Heracles and Prometheus, is
continued in Homer's Odyssey, Here we find
ourselves compelled to use our own method
of interpretation. But on closer considera-
tion of everything which has to be taken into
account, even the sturdiest doubter must lose
all scruples about such an interpretation. In
the first place, it is a startling fact that it is
also related of Odysseus that he descended
into the nether- world. Whatever we may
think about the author of the Odyssey in
other respects, it is impossible to imagine his
representing a mortal descending to the in-

ii8 Christianity as Mystical Fact

femal regions, without his bringing him into
connection with what the journey into the
nether-world meant to the Greeks. It meant
the conquest of the perishable and the
awakening of the eternal in the soul. It must
therefore be conceded that Odysseus accom-
plished this, and thereby his experiences
and those of Heracles acquire a deeper sig-
nificance. They become a delineation of the
non-sensuous, of the soul's progress of de-
velopment. Hence the narrative in the
Odyssey is different from what is demanded
by a history of outer events. The hero makes
voyages in enchanted ships. Actual geo-
graphical distances are dealt with in most
arbitrar}^ fashion. It is not in the least a
question of what is physically real. This
becomes comprehensible, if the physically
real events are only related for the sake of
illustrating the development of a soul. More-
over the poet himself at the opening of the
book says that it deals with a search for the
soul:

"O Muse, sing to me of the man full of
resource, who wandered very much after he
had destroyed the sacred city of Troy, and

Mysteries and the Myth 119

saw the cities of many men, and learned their
manners. Many griefs also in his mind did
he suffer on the sea, although seeking to
preserve his own soul, and the return of his
companions."

We have before us a man seeking for the
soul, for the divine, and his wanderings
during this search are narrated. He comes
to the land of the Cyclopes. These are un-
couth giants, with only one eye and that in
the centre of the forehead. The most terrible,
Polyphemus, devours several of Odysseus*
companions. Odysseus himself escapes by
blinding the Cyclopes. Here we have to do
with the first stage of life's pilgrimage.
Physical force or the lower nature has to be
overcome. It devours any one who does not
take away its power, who does not blind
it. Odysseus next comes to the island of the
enchantress Circe. She changes some of his
companions into grunting pigs. She also is
subdued by Odysseus. Circe is the lower
mind-force, which cleaves to the transitory.
If misused, it may thrust men down even
deeper into bestiality. Odysseus has to over-
come it. Then he is able to descend into the

120 Christianity as Mystical Fact

nether- world. He becomes a Mystic. Now
he is exposed to the dangers which beset the
Mystic on his progress from the lower to the
higher degrees of initiation. He comes to
the Sirens, w^ho lure the passer-by to death
by sweet magic sounds. These are the forms
of the lower imagination, which are at first
pursued by one who has freed himself from
the power of the senses. He has got so far
that his spirit acts freely, but is not initiated.
He pursues illusions, from the power of which
he must break loose. Odysseus has to accom-
plish the awful passage between Scylla and
Charybdis. The Mystic, at the beginning of
the path wavers between spirit and sensuous-
ness. He cannot yet grasp the full value of
spirit, yet sensuousness has already lost its
former attraction. All Odysseus' companions
perish in a shipwreck; he alone escapes
and comes to the nymph Calypso, who
receives him kindly and takes care of him
for seven years. At length, by order of
Zeus, she dismisses him to his home. The
Mystic has arrived at a stage at which all his
fellow-aspirants fail; he alone, Odysseus, is
worthy. He enjoys for a time, which is de-

Mysteries and the Myth 121

fined by the mystically symbolic number
seven, the rest of gradual initiation. Before
Odysseus arrives at his home, he comes to the
isle of the Phaeaces, where he meets with
a hospitable reception. The king's daughter
gives him sympathy, and the king, Alcinous,
entertains and honours him. Once more does
Odysseus approach the world and its joys,
and the spirit which is attached to the world,
Nausicaa, awakes within him. But he finds
the way home, to the divine. At first noth-
ing good awaits him at home. His wife,
Penelope, is surrounded by numerous suitors.
Each one she promises to marry, when she
has finished weaving a certain piece of work.
She avoids keeping her promise by undoing
every night what she has woven by day.
Odysseus is obliged to vanquish the suitors
before he can be reunited to his wife in
peace. The goddess Athene changes him
into a beggar so that he may not be recog-
nised at his entrance; and thus he overcomes
the suitors. Odysseus is seeking his own
deeper consciousness, the divine powers of
the soul. He wishes to be united with thern^
Before the Mystic can find them, he mi^e

122 Christianity as Mystical Fact

overcome everything which sues for the
favour of that consciousness. The band of
suitors spring from the world of lower reality,
from perishable nature. The logic directed
against them is a spinning which is always
undone again after it has been spun. Wis-
dom (the goddess x\thene) is the sure guide
to the deepest powers of the soul. It changes
man into a beggar, i. c, it divests him of
everything of a transitory nature.

The Eleusinian festivals, which were cele-
brated in Greece in honour of Demeter and
Dionysos, were steeped in the wisdom of the
Mysteries. A sacred road led from Athens to
Eleusis. It was bordered with mysterious
signs, intended to bring the soul into an ex-
alted mood. In Eleusis were mysterious tem-
ples, served by families of priests. The dignity
and the wisdom which was bound up with it
were inherited in these families from genera-
tion to generation. (Instructive information
about the organisation of these sanctuaries
will be found in Karl Botticher's Ergdn-
"Mfigen zu den letzten Untersuchungen auf der
^^kropolis in A then, Philologus, Supplement,

Mysteries and the Myth 123

vol. iii, part 3.) The wisdom, which quali-
fied for the priesthood, was the wisdom of
the Greek Mysteries. The festivals, which
were celebrated twice a year, represented
the great world-drama of the destiny of the
divine in the world, and of that of the human
soul. The lesser Mysteries took place in
February, the greater in September. Initia-
tions were connected with the festivals. The
symbolical presentation of the cosmic and
human drama formed the final act of the
initiations of the Mystics, which took place
here.

The Eleusinian temples had been erected
in honour of the goddess Demeter. She was
a daughter of Kronos. She had given to
Zeus a daughter, Persephone, before his mar-
riage with Hera. Persephone, while playing,
was carried away by Hades (Pluto), the god
of the infernal regions. Demeter wandered
far and wide over the earth, seeking her
with lamentations. Sitting on a stone in
Eleusis, she was found by the daughters of
Keleus, ruler of the place ; in the form of an
old woman she entered the service of his
family, as nurse to the queen's son. She

124 Christianity as Mystical Fact

wished to endow this boy with immor-
tahty, and for this purpose hid him in fire
every night. When his mother discovered
this, she wept and lamented. After that the
bestowal of immortality was impossible. De-
meter left the house. Keleus then built a
temple. The grief of Demeter for Persephone
was limitless. She spread sterility over the
earth. The gods had to appease her, to
prevent a great catastrophe. Then Zeus in-
duced Hades (Pluto) to release Persephone
into the upper world, but before letting her
go, he gave her a pomegranate to eat. This
obliged her to return periodically to the
nether-world for evermore. Henceforward
she spent a third of the year there, and two-
thirds in the world above. Demeter was
appeased and returned to Olympus; but at
Eleusis, the place of her suffering, she founded
the cult which should keep her fate in
remembrance.

It is not difficult to discover the meaning
of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. It
is the soul which lives alternately above and
below. The immortality of the soul and its
perpetually recurring transformation by birth

Mysteries and the Myth 125

and death are thus symbolised. The soul origi-
nates from the immortal — Demeter. But it is
led astray by the transitory, and even pre-
vailed upon to share its destiny. It has par-
taken of the fruits in the nether- world, the
human soul is satisfied with the transitory,
therefore it cannot permanently live in the
heights of the divine. It has always to return
to the realm of the perishable. Demeter is
the representative of the essence from which
human consciousness arose; but we must
think of it as the consciousness which was
able to come into being through the spiritual
forces of the earth. Thus Demeter is the
primordial essence of the earth, and the
endowment of the earth with the seed-forces
of the produce of the fields through her,
points to a still deeper side of her being.
This being wishes to give man immortality.
She hides her nursling in fire by night. But
man cannot bear the pure force of fire (the
spirit). Demeter is obliged to abandon the
idea. She is only able to found a temple
service, through which man is able to partici-
pate in the divine as far as this is possible.
The Eleusinian festivals were an eloquent

126 Christianity as Mystical Fact

confession of the belief in the immortahty
of the human soul. This confession found
symbolic expression in the Persephone myth.
Together with Demeter and Persephone
Dionysos was commemorated in Eleusis. . As
Demeter was honoured as the divine creatress
of the eternal in man, so in Dionysos was
honoured the ever-changing divine in the
w^orld. The divine poured into the world
and torn to pieces in order to be spiritually
reborn {cj. p. 90) had to be honoured together
with Demeter. (A brilliant description of
the spirit of the Eleusinian Mysteries is
found in Edouard Schure's book, Sanctuaires
d' Orient. Paris, 1898.)

VI

THE MYSTERY WISDOM OF EGYPT

When leaving thy body behind thee, thou soar-

est into the ether,
Then thou becomest a god, immortal, not subject

to death. .

IN this utterance of Empedocles {cf. p. 55)
is epitomised what the ancient Egyptians
thought about the eternal element in man
and its connection with the divine. The
proof of this may be found in the so-called
Book of the Deady which has been deciphered
by the diligence of nineteenth-century in-
vestigators {cf. Lepsius, Das Totenbuch der
alien Agypter, Berlin, 1842). It is "the
greatest continuous literary work which has
come down to us from ancient Egypt." All
kinds of instructions and prayers are con-
tained in it, which were put into the tomb

127

128 Christianity as Mystical Fact

of each deceased person to serve as a guide
when he was released from his mortal tene-
ment. The most intimate ideas of the Egyp-
tians about the Eternal and the origin of the
world are contained in this work. These
ideas point to a conception of the gods
similar to that of Greek mysticism.

Osiris gradually became the favourite and
most universally recognised of the various
deities worshipped in different parts of
Egypt. In him were comprised the ideas
about the other divinities. Whatever the
majority of the Egyptian people may have
thought about Osiris, the Book of the Dead
indicates that the priestly wisdom saw in
him a being that might be found in the
human soul itself. Everything said about
death and the dead shows this plainly. While
the body is given to earth, and kept by it,
the eternal part of man enters upon the path
to the primordial eternal. It comes before
the tribunal of Osiris, and the forty-two
judges of the dead. The fate of the eternal
part of man depends on the verdict of these
judges. If the soul has confessed its sins and
been deemed reconciled to eternal justice,

Mystery Wisdom of Egypt 129

invisible powers approach it and say: "The
Osiris N. has been purified in the pool which
is south of the field of Hotep and north of
the field of Locusts, where the gods of
verdure purify themselves at the fourth hour
of the night and the eighth hour of the
day with the image of the heart of the gods,
passing from night to day." Thus, within
the eternal cosmic order, the eternal part of
man is addressed as an Osiris. After the
name Osiris comes the deceased person's own
name. And the one who is being united with
the eternal cosmic order also calls himself
"Osiris." "I am the Osiris N. Growing
under the blossoms of the fig-tree is the name
of the Osiris N. " Man therefore becomes an
Osiris. Being Osiris is only a perfect stage
in human development. It seems obvious
that even the Osiris who is a judge within
the eternal cosmic order is nothing else but
a perfect man. Between being human and
divine, there is a difference in degree and
number. The mystic view of the mystery of
"number" underlies this. Osiris as a cosmic
being is One, yet on this account he exists
undivided in each human soul. Each person

130 Christianity as Mystical Fact

is an Osiris, yet the One Osiris must be repre-
sented as a separate being. Man is in course
of development; at the end of his evolution-
ary career, he becomes divine. In taking this
view, we must speak of divinity, or becom-
ing divine, rather than of a separate divine
being, complete in himself.

It cannot be doubted but that according
to this view only he can really enter upon
the Osiris existence, who has reached the
portals of the eternal cosmic order as an
Osiris. Thus, the highest life which man
can lead must consist in his changing himself
into Osiris. Even during mortal life, a true
man will live as a perfect Osiris as far as he
can. He becomes perfect when he lives as
an Osiris, when he passes through the ex-
periences of Osiris. In this way, we see the
deeper significance of the Osiris myth. It
becomes the ideal of the man who wishes to
awaken the eternal within him.

Osiris is torn to pieces and killed by Ty-
phon. The fragments of his body are pre-
served and cared for by his consort, Isis.
After his death he let a ray of his own light
fall upon her, and she bore him Horus. This

Mystery Wisdom of Egypt 131

Horus takes up the earthly tasks of Osiris.
He is the second Osiris, still imperfect, but
progressing towards the true Osiris.

The true Osiris is in the human soul, which
at first is of a transitory nature; but as such,
it is destined to give birth to the eternal.
Man may, therefore, regard himself as the
tomb of Osiris. The lower nature (Typhon)
has killed the higher nature in him. Love in
his soul (Isis) must take care of the dead
fragments of his body, and then the higher
nature, the eternal soul (Horus) will be born,
which can progress to Osiris life. The man
who is aspiring to the highest kind of exis-
tence must repeat in himself, as a microcosm,
the macrocosmic universal Osiris process.
This is the meaning of Egyptian initiation.
What Plato {c}. p. 80) describes as a cosmic
process, i. e., that the Creator has stretched
the soul of the world on the body of the world
in the form of a cross, and that the cosmic
process is the release of this crucified soul, —
this process had to be enacted in man on a
smaller scale if he was to be qualified for
Osiris life. The candidate for initiation had
to develop himself in such a way that his

132 Christianity as Mystical Fact

soul-experience, his becoming an Osiris, be-
came blended into one with the cosmic
Osiris process.

If we could look into the temples of initia-
tion in which people underwent the trans-
formation into Osiris, we should see that
what took place represented microcosmically
the building of the cosmos. Man who pro-
ceeded from the "Father" was to give birth
to the Son in himself. What he actually
bears within him, divinity hidden under a
spell, was to become manifest in him. This
divinity is kept down in him by the power of
the earthly nature; this lower nature must
first be buried in order that the higher nature
may arise.

From this we are able to interpret what we
are told about the incidents of initiation.
The candidate was subjected to mysterious
processes, by means of which his earthly
nature was killed, and his higher part awak-
ened. It is not necessary to study these
processes in detail, if we understand their
meaning. This meaning is contained in the
confession possible to every one who went
through initiation. He could say: "Before

Mystery Wisdom of Egypt 133

me was the endless perspective at the end of
v/hich is the perfection of the divine. I felt
that the power of the divine is within me.
I buried what in me keeps down that power.
I died to earthly things. I was dead. I had
died as a lower man, I was in the nether-
world. I had intercourse with the dead, i. e.,
with those who have already become part
of the chain of the eternal cosmic order.
After my sojourn in the nether- world, I arose
from the dead. I overcame death, but now
I have become different. I have nothing more
to do with perishable nature. It has in me
become saturated with the Logos. I now
belong to those who live eternally, and who
will sit at the right hand of Osiris. I myself
shall be a true Osiris, part of the eternal
cosmic order, and judgment of life and death
will be placed in my hands. " The candidate
for initiation had to submit to the experience
which made such a confession possible to
him. Thus this was an experience of the
highest kind.

Let us now imagine that a non-initiate
hears of such experiences. He cannot know
what has really taken place in the initiate's

134 Christianity as Mystical Fact

soul. In his eyes, the initiate died physically,
lay in the grave, and rose again. What
is a spiritual reality at a higher stage of
existence appears when expressed in the form
of sense-reality as an event which breaks
through the order of nature. It is a "mira-
cle." So far initiation was a miracle. One
who really wished to understand it must have
awakened within him powers to enable him
to stand on a higher plane of existence. He
must have approached these higher expe-
riences through a course of life specially
adapted for the purpose. In whatever way
these prepared experiences were enacted in
individual cases, they are always found to be
of quite a definite type. And so an initiate's
life is a typical one. It may be described
independently of the single personality. Or
rather, an individual could only be de-
scribed as being on the way to the divine
if he had passed through these definite
typical experiences.

Such a personality was Buddha, living in
the midst of his disciples. As such an one
did Jesus appear to his community. Nowa-
days we know of the parallelism that exists

Mystery Wisdom of Egypt 135

between the biographies of Buddha and of
Jesus. Rudolf Seydel has convincingly proved
this parallelism in his book, Buddha und
Christus, (Compare also the excellent essay
by Dr. Hiibbe-Schleiden, "Jesus ein Bud-
dhist.") We have only to follow out the
two lives in detail in order to see that all
objections to the parallelism are futile.

The birth of Buddha is announced by a
white elephant, which descends from heaven
and declares to the queen, Maya, that she
will bring forth a divine man, who "will
attune all beings to love and friendship, and
will unite them in a close alliance. " We read
in St. Luke's Gospel: ''To a virgin espoused
to a man whose name was Joseph, of the
house of David; and the virgin's name was
Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and
said, 'Hail, thou that art highly favoured.
. . . Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy
womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call
his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall
be called the Son of the Highest.' "

The Brahmins, or Indian priests, who
know what the birth of a Buddha means,
interpret Maya's dream. They have a defi-

136 Christianity as Mystical Fact

nite, typical idea of a Buddha, to which the
life of the personality about to be born will
have to correspond. Similarly we read in
Matthew ii. et seq., that when Herod "had
gathered all the chief priests and scribes of
the people together, he demanded of them
w^here Christ should be born." The Brah-
min Asita says of Buddha: "This is the child
which will become Buddha, the redeemer, the
leader to immortality, freedom, and light."
Compare with this Luke ii. 25: "And, behold,
there w^as a man in Jerusalem, whose name
was Simeon; and the same man w^as just and
devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel:
and the Holy Ghost was upon him. . . . And
when the parents brought in the child Jesus,
to do for him after the custom of the law,
then took he him up in his arms, and blessed
God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy
servant depart in peace, according to thy
word : for mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
which thou hast prepared before the face
of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles,
and the glory of thy people Israel."

It is related of Buddha that at the age of
twelve he was lost, and found again under a

Mystery Wisdom of Egypt 137

tree, surrounded by poets and sages of the
olden time, whom he was teaching. With this
incident the following passage in St. Luke
corresponds: "Now his parents went to
Jerusalem every year at the feast of the pass-
over. And when he was twelve years old,
they went up to Jerusalem after the custom
of the feast. And when they had fulfilled
the days, as they returned, the child Jesus
tarried behind in Jerusalem ; and Joseph and
his mother knew not of it. But they, sup-
posing him to have been in the company,
went a day's journey; and they sought him
among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And
when they found him not, they turned back
again to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it
came to pass that after three days they found
him in the temple, sitting in the midst of
the doctors, both hearing them, and asking
them questions. And all that heard him
were astonished at his understanding and
answers" (Luke ii. 41-47).

After Buddha had lived in solitude, and
returned, he was received by the benediction
of a virgin, "Blessed is thy mother, blessed
is thy father, blessed is the wife to whom

138 Christianity as Mystical Fact

thou belongest." But he replied, "Only
they are blessed who are in Nirvana," i. e.,
who have entered the eternal cosmic order.
In St. Luke's Gospel (xi. 27), we read: "And
it came to pass, as he spake these things,
a certain woman of the company lifted up
her voice and said unto him, ' Blessed is the
womb that bare thee, and the paps which
thou hast sucked.' But he said, 'Yea
rather, blessed are they that hear the word of
God, and keep it.'"

In the course of Buddha's life, the tempter
comes to him and promises him all the king-
doms of the earth. Buddha refuses every-
thing in the words: "I know well that I am
destined to have a kingdom, but I do not
desire an earthly one. I shall become Bud-
dha and make all the world exult with joy."
The tempter has to own that his reign is over.
Jesus answers the same temptation in the
words: " Get thee hence, Satan, for it is writ-
ten. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and
him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil
leaveth him" (Matthew iv. 10, 11). This
description of the parallelism might be exten-
ded to many other points with the same result.

Mystery Wisdom of Egypt 139

The life of Buddha ended sublimely. On
a journey, he felt ill; he came to the river
Hiranja, near Kuschinagara. There he lay
down on a carpet which his favourite disciple,
Ananda, spread for him. His body began
to be luminous from within. He died trans-
figured, his body irradiating light, saying,
"Nothing endures."

The death of Buddha corresponds with the
transfiguration of Jesus. "And it came to
pass about eight days after these sayings,
he took Peter and John and James, and
went up into a mountain to pray. And as
he prayed, the fashion of his countenance
was altered, and his raiment was white and
glistering."

Buddha's earthly life ends at this point,
but it is here that the most important part of
the life of Jesus begins, — His suffering, death,
and resurrection. Other accounts of Bud-
dha's death need not here be considered,
even though they reveal profound aspects.

The agreement in these two redemptive
lives leads to the same conclusion. The nar-
ratives themselves indicate the nature of this
conclusion. When the priest-sages hear what

140 Christianity as Mystical Fact

kind of birth is to take place, they know
what is involved. They know that they
have to do with a Divine man; they know
beforehand what kind of personality it is
who is appearing. And therefore his course
of life can only correspond with what they
know about the life of a Divine man. In the
wisdom of their Mysteries such a life is
traced out for all eternity. It can only be as
is must be; it comes into manifestation like
an eternal law of nature. Just as a chemical
substance can only behave in a certain
definite way, so a Buddha or a Christ can
only live in a certain definite way. His life
is not described merely by writing a casual
biography; it is much better described by
giving the typical features which are con-
tained for all time in the wisdom of the Mys-
teries. The Buddha legend is no more a
biography in the ordinary sense than the
Gospels are meant to be a biography in the
ordinary sense of the Christ Jesus. In neither
is the merely accidental given; both relate
the course of life marked out for a world-
redeemer. The source of the two accounts is
to be found in the mystery traditions and

Mystery Wisdom of Egypt 141

not in outer physical history. Jesus and
Buddha are, to those who have recognised
their Divine nature, initiates in the most
eminent sense. Hence their Hves are Hfted
out of things transitory, and what is known
about initiates appHes to them. ' The casual
incidents in their lives are not narrated. Of
such it might be announced "In the begin-
ning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was a God and the Word
was made flesh and dwelt among us."

But the life of Jesus contains more than
that of Buddha. Buddha's ends with the
Transfiguration; the most momentous part
of the life of Jesus begins after the Trans-
figuration. In the language of initiates this
means that Buddha reached the point at

* The great initiates raised themselves through initiation
up into the sphere of the Logos and carried this Logos
influence with them in their human Hfe. The fundamental
difference between them and Jesus was the fact that the
Logos in the course of its evolution individualised itself
into One Divine Individuality who descended into Jesus
of Nazareth at the Baptism, and so that the Logos mani-
fested its whole EHvine individuality through the person-
ality of Jesus as far as it was possible to express Divinity
by human means. Such was the unique character of the
Christ Jesus.

142 Christianity as Mystical Fact

which divine Hght begins to shine in men.
He faces mortal death. He becomes the
light of the world. Jesus goes farther. He
does not physically die at the moment when
the light of the world shines through him.
At that moment he is a Buddha. But at that
very moment he enters upon a stage which
finds expression in a higher degree of initia-
tion. He suffers and dies. What is earthly
disappears. But the spiritual element, the
light of the world, does not. His resurrec-
tion follows. He is revealed to his followers
as Christ. Buddha, at the moment of his
Transfiguration, flows into the blissful life of
the Universal Spirit. Christ Jesus awakens
the Universal Spirit once more, but in a hu-
man form, in present existence. Such an event
had formerly taken place at the higher stages
of initiation. Those initiated in the spirit
of the Osiris myth attained to such a resur-
rection. In the life of Jesus, this "great"
initiation was added to the Buddha initiation.
Buddha demonstrated by his life that man
is the Logos, and that he returns to the
Logos, to the light, when his earthly part
dies. In Jesus, the Logos himself became

Mystery Wisdom of Egypt 143

a person. In him, the Word was made
flesh.

Therefore, what was enacted in the inner-
most recesses of the temples by the guardians
of the ancient Mysteries has been appre-
hended, through Christianity, as a historical
fact. The followers of Christ Jesus confessed
their belief in Him, the initiate, of imique and
supreme greatness. He proved to them that
the world is divine. In the Christian com-
munity, the wisdom of the Mysteries was
indissolubly bound up with the personality
of Christ Jesus. That which man previously
had sought to attain through the Mysteries
was now replaced by the belief that Christ
had lived on earth, and that the faithful
belonged to him.

Henceforward, part of what was formerly
only to be gained through mystical methods,
could be replaced, in the Christian com-
munity, by the conviction that the divine
had been manifested in the Word present
amongst them. Not that for which each
individual soul underwent a long preparation
was now decisive, but what those had heard
and seen who were with Jesus, and what

144 Christianity as Mystical Fact

was handed down by them. "That which
was from the beginning, which we have heard,
which . . . our hands have handled, of the
Word of Hfe . . . that which we have seen
and heard declare we unto you, that ye also
may have fellowship with us." Thus do we
read in the first Epistle of St. John. And
this immediate reality is to embrace all
future generations in a living bond of union,
and as a church is mystically to extend from
race to race. It is in this sense that the words
of St. Augustine are to be understood, "I
should not believe the Gospels unless the
authority of the Catholic Church induced
me to do so." Thus the Gospels do not
contain within themselves testimony to their
truth, but they are to be believed because
they are founded on the personality of Jesus,
and because the Church from that personal-
ity mysteriously draws the power to make
the truth of the Gospels manifest.

The Mysteries handed down traditionally
the means of arriving at truth; the Christian
community itself propagates the truth. To
the confidence in the mystical forces which
spring up in the inmost being of man, during

Mystery Wisdom of Egypt 145

initiation, was added the confidence in the
One, primordial Initiator.

The Mystics sought to become divine,
they wished to experience divinity. Jesus
was divine, we must hold fast to Him, and
then we shall become partakers of His divin-
ity, in the community founded by Him; this
became Christian conviction. What became
divine in Jesus was made so for all His fol-
lowers. **Lo, I am with you alway, even
unto the end of the world." The one who
was born in Bethlehem has an eternal charac-
ter independent of time. The Christmas
anthem thus speaks of the birth of Jesus,
as if it took place each Christmas, ''Christ
is bom to-day, the Saviour has come into
the world to-day, to-day the angels are sing-
ing on earth."

In the Christ-experience is to be seen
a definite stage of initiation. When the
Mystic of pre-Christian times passed through
this Christ -experience, he was, through his
initiation, in a state which enabled him to
perceive something spiritually, — in higher
worlds, — to which no fact in the world of
sense corresponded. He experienced that

10

146 Christianity as Mystical Fact

which surrounds the Mystery of Golgotha
in the higher world. If the Christian Mystic
goes through this experience by initiation,
he at the same time beholds the historical
event which took place on Golgotha, and
knows that in that event, enacted within the
physical world, there is the same content
as was formerly only in the supersensible
facts of the Mysteries. Thus there was
poured out on the Christian community,
through the "Mysteries of Golgotha," that
which formerly had been poured out on the
Mystics within the temples. And initiation
gives Christian Mystics the possibility of be-
coming conscious of what is contained in
the "Mystery of Golgotha," whereas faith
makes man an unconscious partaker of the
mystical stream which flowed from the events
depicted in the New Testament, and which
has ever since been pervading the spiritual
life of humanity.

VII

THE GOSPELS

THE accounts of the life of Jesus which
can be submitted to historical exam-
ination are contained in the Gospels. All
that does not come from this source might,
in the opinion of one of those who are con-
sidered the greatest historical authorities on
the subject (Harnack), be "easily written
on a quarto page."

But what kind of documents are these
Gospels? The fourth, that of St. John, differs
so much from the others, that those who
think themselves obliged to follow the path
of historical research in order to study the
subject, come to the conclusion: "If John
possesses the genuine tradition about the
life of Jesus, that of the first three Evangelists
(the Synoptists) is untenable. If the Synop-
tists are right, the Fourth Gospel must be

147

148 Christianity as Mystical Fact

rejected as a historical source" (Otto
Schmiedel, Die Haiiptprohleme dcr Leben
Jesu Forschungy p. 15). This is a statement
made from the standpoint of the historical
investigator.

In the present work, in which we are
dealing with the mystical contents of the
Gospels, such a point of view is neither to be
accepted nor rejected. But attention must
certainly be drawn to such an opinion as the
following: "Measured by the standard of
consistency, inspiration, and completeness,
these writings leave very much to be de-
sired, and even measured by the ordinary
human standard, they suffer from not a
few imperfections." This is the opinion of
a Christian theologian (Harnack, Wesen des
Christentums) .

One who takes his stand on a mystical
origin of the Gospels easily finds an explana-
tion of what is apparently contradictory, and
also discovers harmony between the fourth
Gospel and the three others. For none of
these writings are meant to be mere historical
tradition in the ordinary sense of the word.
They do not profess to give a historical

The Gospels 149

biography (c/. p. 140 et seq.). What they
intended to give was already shadowed forth
in the traditions of the Mysteries, as the
typical life of a Son of God. It was these
traditions which were drawn upon, not his-
tory. Now it was only natural that these
traditions should not be in complete verbal
agreement in every Mystery centre. Still,
the agreement was so close that the Bud-
dhists narrated the life of their divine man
almost in the same way in which the Evangel-
ists narrated the life of Christ. But natur-
ally there were differences. We have only to
assume that the four Evangelists drew from
four different mystery traditions. It testifies
to the extraordinary personality of Jesus
that in four writers, belonging to different
traditions, he awakened the belief that he
was one who so perfectly corresponded with
their type of an initiate, that they were able
to describe him as one who lived the typical
life marked out in their Mysteries. They
each described his life according to their own
mystic traditions. And if the narratives of
the first three Evangelists resemble each
other, it proves nothing more than that they

I50 Christianity as Mystical Fact

drew from similar mystery traditions. The
fourth Evangelist saturated his Gospel with
ideas which are, in many respects, reminiscent
of the religious philosopher, Philo {cf. p. S2).
This only proves that he was rooted in the
same mystic tradition as Philo.

There are various elements in the Gospels.
Firstly, facts are related, which seem to lay
claim to being historical. Secondly, there
are parables, in which the narrative form is
only used to symbolise a deeper truth. And,
thirdly, there are teachings characteristic of
the Christian conception of life. In St. John's
Gospel there is no real parable. The source
from which he drew was a mystical school
which considered parables unnecessary.

The part played by ostensibly historical
facts and parables in the first three Gospels
is clearly shown in the narrative of the
cursing of the fig tree. In St. Mark xi. 11-
14, we read: "And Jesus entered into Jeru-
salem, and into the temple: and when he
had looked round about upon all things, and
now the eventide was come, he went out
unto Bethany with the twelve. And on the
morrow, when they were come from Bethany,

The Gospels 151

he was hungry: and seeing a fig tree afar off
having leaves, he came, if haply he might
find any thing thereon: and when he came
to it, he foimd nothing but leaves; for the
time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered
and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee
hereafter for ever." In the corresponding
passage in St. Luke's Gospel, he relates a
parable (xiii. 6, 7): "He spake also this
parable ; A certain man had a fig tree planted
in his vineyard; and he came and sought
fruit thereon, and found none. Then said
he imto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold
these three years I come seeking fruit on this
fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why
cumbereth it the ground? " This is a parable
symbolising the uselessness of the old teach-
ing, represented by the barren fig tree. That
which is meant metaphorically, St. Mark
relates as a fact appearing to be historical.
We may therefore assume that, in general,
facts related in the Gospels are not to be
taken as only historical, or as if they were
only to hold good in the physical world, but
as mystical facts; as experiences, for the
recognition of which spiritual vision is neces-

152 Christianity as Mystical Fact

sary, and which arise from various mystical
traditions. If we admit this, the difference
between the Gospel of St. John and the
Synoptists ceases to exist. For mystical
interpretation, historical research has not to
be taken into account. Even if one or
another Gospel were written a few decades
earlier or later than the others, they are all
of like historical value to the mystic, St.
John*s Gospel as well as the others.

And the "miracles" do not present the
least difficulty when interpreted mystically.
They are supposed to break through the
laws of nature. They only do this when
they are considered as events which have
so come about on the physical plane, in the
perishable world, that ordinary sense-per-
ception could see through them offhand. But
if they are experiences which can only be
fathomed on a higher stage of existence,
namely the spiritual, it is obvious that they
cannot be understood by means of the laws
of physical nature.

It is thus first of all necessary to read the
Gospels correctly; then we shall know in
what way they are speaking of the Founder

The Gospels 153

of Christianity. Their intention is to relate
his life in the manner in which communica-
tions were made through the Mysteries. They
relate it in the way in which a Mystic would
speak of an initiate. Only, they give the
initiation as the unique characteristic of one
unique being. And they make salvation
depend on man's holding fast to the initiate
of this unique order. What had come to the
initiates was the "kingdom of God." This
unique being has brought the kingdom to all
who will cleave to him. What was formerly
the personal concern of each individual has
become the common concern of all those
who are willing to acknowledge Jesus as their
Lord.

We can understand how this came about
if we admit that the wisdom of the Mysteries
was imbedded in the popular religion of the
Jews. Christianity arose out of Judaism.
We need not therefore be surprised at find-
ing engrafted on Judaism, together with
Christianity those mystical ideas which we
have seen to be the common property of
Greek and Egyptian spiritual life. If we
examine national religions, we find various

154 Christianity as Mystical Fact

conceptions of the spiritual; but if, in each
case, we go back to the deeper wisdom of
the priests, which proves to be the spir-
itual nucleus of them all, we find agree-
ment everywhere. Plato knows himself to
be in agreement with the priest-sages of
Egypt when he is trying to set forth the
main content of Greek wisdom in his philo-
sophical view of the universe. It is related
of Pythagoras that he travelled to Egypt
and India, and was instructed by the sages
in those countries. Thinkers who lived in
the earlier days of Christianity found so
much agreement between the philosophical
teachings of Plato and the deeper meaning
of the Mosaic writings, that they called
Plato a Moses with Attic tongue.

Thus Mystery wisdom existed everywhere.
In Judaism it acquired a form which it had
to assume if it was to become a world-religion.

Judaism expected the Messiah. It is not
to be wondered at that when the personality
of an unique initiate appeared, the Jews
could only conceive of him as being the
Messiah. Indeed this circumstance throws
light on the fact that what had been an

The Gospels 155

individual matter in the Mysteries became
an affair of the whole nation. The Jewish
religion had from the beginning been a
national religion. The Jewish people looked
upon itself as one organism. Its Jao was
the God of the whole nation. If the son of
this God were to be born, he must be the
redeemer of the whole nation. The individual
Mystic was not to be saved apart from others,
the whole nation was to share in the redemp-
tion. That one is to die for all is founded on
the fundamental ideas of the Jewish religion.
It is also certain that there were mysteries
in Judaism, which could be brought out of
the dimness of a secret cult into the popular
religion. A fully-developed mysticism ex-
isted side by side with the priestly wisdom
which was attached to the outer formalism of
the Pharisees. This mystery wisdom is spok-
en of among the Jews just as it is elsewhere.
When one day an initiate was speaking of it,
and his hearers sensed the secret meaning of
his words, they said: ''Old man, what hast
thou done? Oh, that thou hadst kept silence!
Thou thinkest to navigate the boundless
ocean without sail or mast. This is what

156 Christianity as Mystical Fact

thou art attempting. Wilt thou fly upwards?
Thou canst not. Wilt thou descend into
the depths? An immeasurable abyss is yawn-
ing before thee." And the Kabbalists, from
whom the above is taken, also speak of four
Rabbis; and these four Rabbis sought the
secret path to the divine. The first died;
the second lost his reason; the third caused
monstrous evils, and only the fourth, Rabbi
Akiba, went in and out of the spiritual world
in peace.

We thus see that within Judaism also there
was a soil in which an initiate of an unique
kind could develop. He had only to say to
himself: "I will not let salvation be limited
to a few chosen people. I will let all people
participate in it." He was to carry out into
the world at large what the elect had ex-
perienced in the temples of the Mysteries.
He had to be willing to take upon himself to
be, in spirit, to his community, through his
personality, that which the cult of the Mys-
teries had heretofore been to those who took