THE
BLAZING STAR.
BY
WILLIAM B. GREENE.
BOSTON:
1871.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, By WILLIAM B. GREENE, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
Boston:
Hand, Avery, & Frye, Stereotypers and Printers.
THE BLAZING STAR.
Some men — not all men — see always before them an ideal, a mental picture if you will, of what they ought to be, and are not. Whoso seeks to follow this ideal revealed to the mental vision, whoso seeks to attain to conformity with it, will find it enlarge itself, and remove from him. He that follows it will improve his own moral character; but the ideal will remain always above him and before him, prompting him to new exertions. What is the natural conscience if it be not a condemnation of ourselves as we are, mean, pitiful, weak, and a comparison of ourselves with what we ought to be, wise, powerful, holy?
It is this Ideal of what we ought to be, and are not, that is symbolically pictured in the Blazing Star.
The abject slave on an East-African rice plantation, brutal, ignorant, and a devil-worshipper, sees this Day-Star rising in his heart, and straightway he becomes intellectually of age. For it is the soul, not the body, that attains to the age of discretion. They who see this Star, have attained to their majority: all other persons are minors. Before the rays of this Star, voudouism and devil-worship, whether in refined societies, or among barbarous peoples, vanish into night; for immersion into the rays of this Star, is the beginning of the baptism of repentance, and penance for the remission of sin — and of the penalties of sin.
* * * * *
Whoso beholds this Star acquires FAITH. Faith is conviction born from the consciousness of aspiration. Faith is the active principle of intellectual progress.
The Blazing Star is the transfigured image of man — the Ideal that removes farther and farther, making always higher and higher claims, until, at the last, it becomes lost in infinity; and faith affirms that this same Blazing Star may be, perhaps, the shadowy, imperfect, and inadequate image of some unknown and invisible God.
Now, if it be true that God and man are in one image or likeness (and the affirmation that they are so is not unplausible) then it is the duty of man to bring out into its full splendor that Divine Image which is latent, on one side, in the complexity of his own nature. This conclusion confirms itself.
You say you will never believe in God until the fact of his existence is proved to you! Then you will never believe in him at all; for, in the face of positive knowledge, faith is no longer possible. Faith affirms in the presence of the unknown. If science should ever demonstrate the existence of God (which it never can) faith would become lost in sight, and men would no longer believe, but know. The reason why science is intrinsically incompetent to either prove or disprove the existence of God, is simply this, that the subject-matter transcends the reach of scientific instruments and processes. The dispute is, therefore, not between faith and science, but between faith and unbelief. Unbelief is a disease, not of the human understanding, but of the human will, and is susceptible of cure.
Saint Paul says, “We walk by faith, and not by sight;” again, “We see through a glass darkly;” and again, “We are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not hope.” Do what we will, we are under the necessity of walking, much more than half our time, not by sight, but by faith. The better half of our life upon the earth, and the happier half, is the part that is spent in advance of positive knowledge.
Science is constantly encroaching on the domains of faith, by showing that postulates of faith are demonstrably correct. But whenever any postulate of faith is proved, and thus becomes a truth of science, and no longer a truth of faith, faith immediately passes again to the front, with the affirmation of a new, and a higher, postulate. Faith keeps always well in advance of science.
Legitimate science never arrays itself in a hostile attitude against genuine faith. Science, it is true, often successfully refutes dogmas that are alleged to be of faith; but, in such cases, it is always found, upon due observation and inquiry, that the dogmas so refuted were born, not at all of faith, but of political or clerical ambition, or of fear, or of self-interest, or of the presumption of ignorance, or of some other human passion, — or, perhaps, of sheer stupidity. Superstition, fanaticism and bigotry are signs and marks showing that the soul is not yet intellectually of age. They never result from convictions born of the consciousness of aspiration, and are, therefore, never of faith.
Faith does not say, Is there a God? It is doubt that says that. Faith says, Why should there not be a God? Absolute perfection is no natural obstacle to existence, but the contrary. Faith says, Figure to yourself, if you can, that there is no God! You cannot do it.
Faith is the affirmation respecting things unknown, that is implied in the practical recognition of known absurdity as such. Faith is reason denying absurdity in the face of the unknown.
An admissible definition of God must be in the form of a negative pregnant — an affirmation of God as that unknown Absolute and Infinite, which is the reason of the existence of the known finite and relative that we ourselves are.
Faith is from within; it is the outbreaking of human spontaneity; it is force of soul, grandeur of sentiment, magnanimity, generosity, courage. Its formulas are naturally unintelligible in their literal tenor; for, otherwise, they would represent that which is scientifically known, and would not be the mere provisional clothing of that which is not objectively given, but subjectively [1] projected from the inmost depth of the soul. Man, having an ideal before him of that which he ought to be, and is not, and acting as though he possessed the character he ought to have, but has not, comes, by the very virtue of his aspiration, to possess the character he imagines. Thus the world is leavened. Materialism, the spiritual death which is consequent upon the subordination of the subject to the object in thought, is the very soil from which faith springs; for every thing that stands by itself alone, makes way, through the necessity of the principle of contradictions, for its correlative opposite. Stoicism has always its birth in Sybaritic cities, and among over-civilized and effete peoples. Men learn, through faith, to do always the very thing they are afraid to do, and thus come to fear no longer. Unbelief naturally gives emptiness of heart; and emptiness of heart surprises itself with spontaneity of worship; and spontaneous worship gives the worshipper something of the high nature of that which is worshipped; and, in this way, unbelief transfigures itself, and loses itself in faith. Faith may always be acquired. Whoso is devoid of faith, and desires to have it, may acquire it by living for a few days (sometimes for a few hours only) as though he already possessed it. It is by practical, not theoretical, religion, that men transform their lives. By the practice of faith, man grows strong in faith. The moral coward becomes a moral hero as soon as he acquires faith. Weak women, among the early martyrs, learned by faith to face the wild beasts. When they were thrown to the lions, the lions trembled; for the women were more lion-like than the lions, and the lions knew it.
* * * * *
Man has a threefold nature. He is, therefore, symbolically represented under the similitude of a triangle. Saint Paul says that man is body, soul, and spirit; and Saint Augustin says that he is will, understanding, memory. One philosopher says that man is intelligence, activity, and sensibility; another says that he is sensation, sentiment, cognition; and other philosophers give other formulas. But there exists no extant denial (at the least, none such exists to our knowledge) of the essential triplicity of man’s nature.
The Ideal is the invisible Sun which is always on the meridian of the soul. As the ever-revolving earth rises and sets upon the sun, which is steadfast, and not the sun on the earth, so the soul rises or sets on the Ideal; which is what it is whether man behold it or not, and is itself unaffected by man’s attitude in respect to it, since it is the fixed centre, and the Day-Star of spiritual existences. It was for this reason that the temples were always opened in the ancient times, for purposes of initiation, at what was mystically called ” high noon,” although, in point of practical fact, that same “high noon” often occurred at the dead of night. This Day-Star was ‘known in the temples as Bel-samen, the Lord of Heaven, — as Mithras also, or as Osiris, or Apollo, or, more mystically, as Abrasax, and by a thousand other names. In the public worship, it was recognized as the visible sun; but in the esoteric work, after the avenues of the temples were duly guarded against cowans and eavesdroppers, as the Ideal-Man, and as the Star of souls.
*****
The five-rayed Blazing Star — the Pentacle — Abrak— is the special star of the great Aryan (or Indo-Germanic, or Japhetic [2]) race. [The Shemite knows it not.] This Star — Abrak — is a disguised image or likeness of man. The superior ray represents the head; the horizontal rays, the two arms; and the inferior rays, the two legs. This Star, being unsymmetrical, is capable of being turned upside down. It is our intention to explain, at some future time, the terrible meaning that is presented by the five-rayed Star, when its point is turned downward.
Let it suffice to say, here, in passing, that this detestable sign (the inverted Star) execrated by the more intelligent adepts themselves in perverted mysteries, and excluded from their midnight orgies, is the head of the famous goat that plays so important a part in the ceremony of obscene initiations. The two ascending rays are the goat’s horns, the horizontal rays are his two ears, and the descending ray is his beard. [3]
*****
The Shemitic race, the equal of the Aryan, and in some respects its superior, knows not Abrak: it sees not that inner light which the Aryan sees, and of which we have all along been speaking. But, instead, the Shemite hears inwardly — as the Aryan does not — mysterious and unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter. To the Shemite, conscience is not at all a comparison, as it is to the Aryan, of what man makes real in himself, with the ideal always before him of what he ought to so make real, but is, on the contrary, the actual voice of God speaking inwardly to the soul. The Aryan objectivizes all things. He forms conceptions tangible to the imagination; and what he is incompetent to clearly conceive, he discards as unreal. He naturally gives form and expression, through symbolic art, to his inward thought; and, until his thought is expressed in form, it is, to him, as though it existed not. To the Shemite, on the contrary, all visible symbols, whether discernible to the outward or to the inward eye, are worse than worthless. The poetry of the Aryans is objective and descriptive; that of the Shemites is sometimes didactic, sometimes lyrical, but never objective. The Shemite has no plastic and no pictorial art. The religion of the Aryan is that of the revealed Ideal; the religion of the Shemite is that of the revealed Word. The conscience is the essential religious faculty of man; and it is in the divergent natures of the Aryan and Shemitic consciences, that the root of the divergencies of the Aryan and Shemitic religions is to be sought and found. The spirit of the Shemite continually groans and travails within itself, waiting for the utterance of unspoken words; and it revels in the consciousness of that which it knows to be at once real and inconceivable. When the great wind rent the mountains, and broke the rocks in pieces before Elijah (a Hebrew Shemite) the prophet could not see God in the wind. Neither could he see God in the earthquake that followed the wind, or in the fire that followed the earthquake. But, after the fire, there came “a still small voice;” and, when Elijah heard that, he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went to the mouth of the cave, and stood up before Jehovah. It was the “word” of the Lord that came to the greater Hebrew prophets; and it was only by prophets of lesser note that “visions” were seen in deep sleep, when they were upon their beds. The greater prophets heard in ecstatic trances; but they seldom saw clairvoyantly. It would seem that God is nearer to the Shemite than he is to the Aryan. When the Aryan, bewildered in his reasonings, turns round and says, ” There is no God!” the Shemite, hearing him, answers, “God exists. I know him personally. I have talked with him, and he has talked with me.” And the Shemitic affirmation of faith has always carried the day against the Aryan suggestion of doubt. For whenever, in the great march of mankind — humanity — the collective Adam [4] — from the mystical Eastern gate of Eden, an Aryan religion has come in contact with a Shemitic religion, the Aryan religion has at once gone to the wall, waned pale, wilted, and subsided.
*****
In the year 606 B. C, Nebuchadnezzar, the Shemitic King of Shemitic-Hamitic Babylon, utterly and definitively defeated Joachim, the Shemitic king of Shemitic Jerusalem, and transplanted the mass of the Jewish people, as captives, to the neighborhood of Babylon.
During their captivity, the chiefs of the Jews, already initiated into the profound mysteries of the Hebrew religion, were further initiated into the occult science of the Chaldeans, — a science of Hamitic origin, akin to that of Tyre and Sidon, and to that which had its mysterious colleges on Mount Gebal.
About seventy years after the fall of Jerusalem, Cyrus, king of the Turanian and Aryan Medes, and of the Aryan Persians, having first turned the Euphrates aside, took Babylon by storm, on the night of a drunken and frantic Chaldean festival. He entered the city by the way of the empty river-bed, bringing with him, as official chaplains of his army, the more illustrious of the Median Magi, and the Aryan chiefpriests of Ormudz.
The captive Jews, who had been all along conspirators in Babylon, and secret allies of the Persians, furnished guides, spies and scouts to the invading Aryan army. After the taking of the city, Cyrus rewarded the Jews with his personal friendship, and sent them back to their own country, with instructions to rebuild Jerusalem; which latter city remained, after its restoration, for several generations, as much from gratitude as policy, a Persian stronghold.
At the solemn conferences that took place in the East of Babylon, near the great Tower, at the time of the Persian conquest, between the Median Magi, the Chaldean soothsayers, the Aryan priests of Ormudz, and the Hebrew Prophets, the facts were clearly verified, that, on one side, man aspires towards God, and, on the other, that the Supreme condescends to take up’his abode, and to utter his oracles, in the secret temple of the human heart. These facts had, it is true, been well known for centuries to the generality of simple and pious men and women in private station, and also to prophets [5] and inspired poets ; but they had never before been so verified to the conviction of kings and statesmen, in the presence of concurring and confessing sacerdotal corporations.
At these conferences, the three constituent elements of the universal consciousness of the collective Adam, were severally and respectively represented. The Aryan priests of Ormudz maintained the claims of the object in thought. The Hamitic-Chaldean soothsayers (Hamitic Egypt had no delegate at the synod) maintained the claims of the human subject. And the Hebrew Prophets from the Holy Land maintained the claims of the relation which subsists between the subject and the object in thought. For, where the Aryan sees inwardly, and affirms the reality of the object, and the Shemite hears inwardly, and affirms the reality of the relation between the subject and the object, the Hamite feels inwardly, but very darkly, and affirms the reality of the human subject. [6]
In these conferences were also verified the foundations of that sublime and universal science, which, six centuries afterwards, was published among adepts, as the Holy Kabbala, and which had been known, but fragmentarily only, and in its essential principles, long before, to men of the stamp of Abraham, Zoroaster, Moses, Solomon king of Jerusalem, and Hiram king of Tyre.
The Orient of Babylon was not intellectually competent to co-ordinate the principles of the Kabbala, and to present the completed synthetic doctrine in a definitive form. There was a necessity that the materials should remain unsystematized until the human intellect could have an opportunity to become sharpened by the practice of Greek metaphysical dialectics. Many Greek words occur in the Zohar, or Book of Splendor; and it is difficult to believe that certain essential passages of the Idra Suta (the third tract in the collection of the lesser Zohar) could have been written by any one unacquainted with Aristotle’s treatise of Metaphysics. [7] Careful investigators have decided, from what they regard as internal evidence, that the definitive compilation of the Kabhala dates from some period between the year 200 B.C. and the year 150 of the Christian era. It is the internal form of the Kabbala, however, its substance only, that is systematic: its exposition in words has been left, apparently with deliberate intention, in an exceedingly chaotic state. To the majority of readers, the Kabbala is, as it ought to be, completely unintelligible.
*****
At an unknown and remote epoch, it was affirmed, probably by some Hamite, as a postulate of faith, that God and man are in the same likeness or image. It was also affirmed, as a logical consequence of this fundamental affirmation, (1) that, since man is triune, the Supreme is also triune, and (2) that, since man may be denoted by an ascending triangle, the Supreme may be denoted by a descending triangle. The figure in the margin is not at all idolatrous; for it is not, as Abrak is, a disguised image or likeness. It is a reminder only, — a sign or symbol,— not a resemblance. It is a pictorial word, suggesting a thought, — such as were in common and necessary use before the alphabet was invented.
It was also affirmed, perhaps at the same unknown epoch, that the interlacing of the Divine triangle with the human triangle, in the six-rayed Blazing Star, is the authentic symbol of the revelation of God to man, and of the abode of the Supreme in the human heart, as well as of the aspiration of man towards God. Jacob Behmen asserts that the junction of these two triangles is the most significant and mystical figure in nature. The reality denoted by this symbol is neither God nor man: it is distinct from man, before him, and above him, as the human Ideal; and it is apart from God, as one of the Revelations of Himself that the Supreme sees fit to make to man, — as one of the NAMES of Him who, in his own essence, is NAMELESS.
Sometimes the six-rayed Blazing Star is portrayed as a mystic Rose with six leaves. But the ordinary form is that of the two interlacing triangles, with the Divine Name inscribed in the middle of the figure. The interlacing triangles are often indicated by a junction of the square and compasses: to which, sometimes, the plumb and the level are added, forming a cross in the centre, and giving a ten-rayed Star, with four of the rays (those formed by the extremities of the plumb and level) occulted. This is the prophetic Star; and the ten rays stand for the ten Kabbalistic Sephiroth. Without a preliminary understanding of the ten Sephiroth, the Kabbala, as a Philosophy of History, and consequently as a Practical Art for the forecasting of future events, cannot be appreciated. We will do our best at some future time, if occasion offers, to explain these ten rays, ray by ray, from the Kabbalistic point of view.
*****
The ordinary, every-day man or woman, that is to say, the man or woman who has not yet reached perfection, — and who is there that has reached perfection? — may be symbolically represented, if he or she be morally of age, by an equilateral triangle with one angle pointing upward to the Blazing Star. Whoso recognizes the virtue of that Star, at once acknowledges the Divine Law in its threefold applications, and strives after conformity with the Ideal, not according to the spirit only, but also according to the soul and the body.
Man’s duty to himself and to his fellow-man, under the rays of the Blazing Star, is threefold: (1) the achievement of his own Liberty; (2) the definitive establishment of relations of Equality between himself and other men; and (3) the fusion of himself, in the solidarity of Brotherhood, with all human beings who, like himself, recognize the Blazing Star.
Liberty is the power which every human being ought to possess of acting according to the dictates of his own private conscience, under the rays of that 3 Blazing Star which is seen by him, secretly, from the centre of his individual heart.
Equality is the condition that obtains in every society where no special or artificial privilege is granted to any one, or to any set, of its members.
Brotherhood is that strict solidarity between the members of a social body, which causes, under the rays of the Blazing Star, the welfare of each to be seen as involved in that of every other, and of all, and that of all in that of each.
Liberty is the right of each member against every other member, and against all the members. Equality is the right of every other member, and of all the members, against each member. Liberty and Equality find their harmony in the synthetic principle of Fraternity. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: this is the mystical triangle that ought to be inscribed on the banners of every truly-constituted social organism.
Liberty alone may lead to anarchy, or to the tyranny of individuals over the mass; but the dangers from Liberty vanish in the presence of Equality. Equality alone may lead to the tyranny of the general mass over individuals or over minorities; but the dangers from Equality vanish in the presence of Liberty, fraternity is never alone; for it is, in its essence, the synthesis of Liberty and Equality.
*****
What is it to be a Slave? It is to have the inward knowledge of that which is great and holy, and to be constrained to do things that are small and base. It is to be a person consciously capable of self-government, and to be, at the same time, subject to the will of another person. It is to be a full-grown person whose actual rights are those of a child only. It is to see the Blazing Star, and not be permitted to follow it.
Slavery is a factitious and arbitrarily-imposed prolongation of the term of moral minority. Paternal government, actual or constructive, is just and legitimate when exercised over persons who are morally under age; but, to such as know the Blazing Star, it is, when exercised to the confiscation of their initiative, the most infernal of all tyrannies. Paternal government, exercised by the natural father over his own minor children, is tempered by affection, and justifies itself; but paternal government, exercised by usurpers over their natural equals and superiors, is an oppressive wrong, and the most intolerable of all outrages, — at the least, it is so in the estimation of such as have seen the Blazing Star.
It is neither the experience of physical want and privation, nor the fact of subordination to legitimate authority, that makes a man to be a slave; for saints and soldiers suffer hardships, and obey their superiors, and are not slaves. On the contrary, it is by the token of the conscious moral penury which a soul feels when it finds itself helpless and hopeless under the domination of an alien soul, — it is by the sentiment of a confiscated individuality, by the consciousness of being annexed, as a base appendage, to another soul, — it is by the consciousness of being sacrificed to a foreign personality, — it is by the darkening of the moral firmament, and by the occultation of the Blazing Star, through the intervention of an extraneous usurping will, — that a man comes to know that he is a slave. And it is, on the other hand, the insolent, lying hypocrisy, the false professions of morality, the transparently-spurious philanthropy, the limitless and blinding arrogance of self-conceit, under which the usurper half-conceals, half-reveals, his unnatural lust to wipe out human souls, and to obliterate every individuality except his own, — that gives energy to slaves, and renders conspiracies, risings, strikes, and revolutions, deadly and chronic.
The fundamental right of a man is the right to be himself; and this right is his sovereignty. No man has a right to confiscate the sovereignty of any other man. No man can delegate to another man, or to society, any right which he does not himself possess. A man may wickedly forfeit his sovereignty by the commission of crime ; he may perversely turn his back upon the Blazing Star, and abdicate his individuality and his manhood. But no man can rightfully abdicate his sovereignty. It is the duty of every man of sane mind, who supports himself, and is not convicted of crime, to vindicate his essential dignity as rightful sovereign of himself and of every thing that pertains to his individuality. Every able-bodied man has a natural right, and a natural duty, to forcibly repel, and to combine with others to forcibly repel, any and all wrongful invasions of his sovereignty. Society exists for the individual, and not the individual for society. Institutions are made for man, and not man for institutions.
*****
The French Free Masons claim, in their Constitutions, that the formula Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, has been, from the beginning, the device of their order.
The writer of these pages is, and has been for many years, a member of one of the Masonic Lodges (we are told there were a hundred and twenty of them) that recently planted their banners, under the fire of the Versailles troops, upon the ramparts in front of Paris. He knows not by what authority the demonstration was made. He supposes, however, that it was made by the authority of the Paris Lodges only, and that the consent of the Grand Orient of France was neither requested nor deemed necessary.
It is easy, at this moment, to apply abusive epithets, either to the Commune or to its enemies. The Great Architect of the Universe will, at the proper time, judge both parties.
The French word commune is the equivalent of our English word town. The word communiste may denote, in French, either (1) an advocate of the doctrine that women and property ought to be held in common, or (2) an upholder of the principle of municipal self-government. The Commune of Paris fought, in its recent great fight, not for a community of women and goods, but for municipal self-government. It was well known, both at Paris and at Versailles, while the fighting was going on, that M. Thiers could have made peace with the insurgents, at any moment, b}’ simply guaranteeing to the city of Paris an amount of municipal liberty equal to that which has always been enjoyed by the city of Boston. This fact, which cannot with any plausibility be denied, and which probably will not be denied, suffices, of itself alone, to put the merits of the dispute between the Commune of Paris and the Versailles government, in its true light, and to fully expose the calumnious misrepresentations of the Versailles party.
We are of the opinion, that, taking fighting as it rises, the Commune made a passably good fight. We are especially proud of the heroic women with whom the honor of arms has definitively rested.
We, nevertheless, take the liberty to recommend the Commune to be more circumspect, hereafter, in the matter of summary executions. Better things were expected of the Commune than of the Versailles government; for the Commune represents advancing civilization, while the Versailles government represents the commercial, industrial, and financial feudalism of the present and the past. It will never do for men who have seen the Blazing Star, to follow evil examples, and meet murder with murder. The execution of spies and traitors, and the use of petroleum for incendiary purposes, [8] are perfectly justifiable under the laws of war; but the civilized world does not look with approval, and ought not to look with approval, upon the military execution of priests and other non-combatants. We know (or, at the least, we have been informed) that the Commune offered to exchange the Archbishop of Paris for Blanqui, and that the offer was not accepted. This fact (if it be a fact) consigns the memory of M. Thiers to the execration of posterity; but it does not excuse the Commune.
The existing French Assembly was elected, not at all to govern France, but to consult on the possibilities of a reconciliation between France and Prussia, and also, if advisable, to conclude and authenticate a treaty of peace. The Assembly has, therefore, no lawful governmental powers. When the treaty of peace between France and Prussia was signed, the mandate of the Assembly expired. The government of M. Thiers is a government of usurpers. It has belligerent rights, and it has no other rights. Consequently, every disarmed prisoner of war, male or female, shot in cold blood after a combat, in pursuance of M. Thiers’s policies, whether sentenced or not sentenced by court-martial, is — from a legal point of view — simply a person assassinated. And the moral aspect of the question is coincident with the legal aspect. If the Communists committed excesses (and it seems they were human), they did so in defending themselves, their families, and their homes, against thieves and usurpers. Thiers fought to confiscate the liberties and control the money of the people of Paris; and Paris fought in defence of the natural rights of its own people.
Three times the heroic people of Paris have been cheated out of their Republic: once in the great revolution; afterwards in 1830; and, again, in 1848. To-day the scales are still oscillating, and the result is yet undetermined. In the next great fight, or in the fight after the next, the Republic will prevail. The Blazing Star as Paris sees it, now struggling with obscurantism and secular wrong, tinges the whole horizon of the East with the glories of the coming day. The Kabbalistic synthesis is nearer than it was!
*****
The Shemitic principle and the Japhetic principle are to-day represented in human civilization, — the first by the Israelitish Church, and the second by the Christian Church. Both of these Churches are true Churches, and therefore neither of them is capable of erring in things essential. The Blazing Star burns in both of them: the junction of the two triangles, one Divine and the other human, — the regeneration of the individual soul, — takes effect in both of them. Yet these two Churches excommunicate each other! Why? Because these Churches are two Churches only, and not three. Because one whole side of the mystical triangle is lacking in modern civilization. Because the Hamitic principle is to-day occulted. Because the Hamitic Church is nowhere visibly organized, and speaking with authority, among men. Because Man, the natural mediator between heaven and earth, is officially absent from the religious organizations of the period.
Now there are three holy cities, — not two of them only: Jerusalem, Rome, Paris. But the holiness of Paris is virtual merely as yet. The religion of Humanity reaches higher than the Commune and the International Labor Union seem to think. Paris is Bar-Isis, Parisis, Paris. It is the sacred boat of Isis that bears to-day the destinies of the world.
[1] That is subject which calls itself Ego, I. That is object which the I contradistinguishes from itself, calling it non-Ego. That is subjective which belongs to the subject; and that objective which belongs to the object.
[2] “These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man, and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with the Elohim. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet.”—Gen. vi. 9-10.
[3] The human hand, with the thumb and fingers, is the five-rayed Star; but with the three larger fingers closed, and the thumb and little finger protruding (the common counter-charm to the evil-eye) it is that Star inverted, or the goat’s head. The hand with the three larger fingers closed, is the negation of the ternary, and the affirmation of the antagonistic natural forces only. The thumb represents generative power, and the little finger denotes insinuating tact: the hand, therefore, that, shows the thumb and little finger only, denotes passion united with address. The thumb is the synthesis of the whole hand. A morally strong man has always a strong thumb; and a weak man, a weak thumb. A long thumb denotes obstinacy. Blessings are conferred with two of the larger fingers, or with all three of them. The thumb and little finger are used in cursing.
[4] Saint Paul, that great Kabbalist, shows clearly (Romans v. 12-19, and 1 Corinthians xiv. 22), that by the word “Adam” is to be understood the original Collective Man. The Collective Man may very well have once existed in a single person, or, rather, in a single couple; and, in fact, tradition informs us that it has twice so existed, — once in Adam and Eve, and once in Noah and his wife.
[5] “This commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not In heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it. and do it. Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us. and bring it unto us, that we may hear it. and do it. But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” — Deut. xxx. 11-14.
[6] Of course, the synod took no cognizance of the metaphysical distinction of the subject, the object, and the relation, in thought, under its modern abstract form. What we now call the object, was then darkly cognized as the Japhetic characteristic, tendency, and inspiring natural principle; what we call the subject, as the Hamitic characteristic, tendency, and inspiring natural principle; and what we call the relation, as the Shemitic, &c.
[7] “The thought which is most, is thought concerning that which is most; and mind knows itself through the perception of that which is intelligible; and mind becomes intelligible to itself through reflection and thought: so that intelligence itself becomes intelligible. . . . Thus God possesses in perfection what we possess for a time only. He possesses more than we have stated; for he possesses, in addition, life. The action of intelligence is life; and God is that action.” — Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book xii.
[8] We should like to know whether the Union Army, acting under orders, did, or did not, ever set fire to any thing in the valley of the Shenandoah; and whether shells loaded with incendiary composition were, or were not, thrown from our ships and batteries into the city of Charleston.
