THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

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"They talked of "humanity," of nobility - but it was / the spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely di-vorced from nature, largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. In man's spirit, then, resided his true nobility and his merit - in his state of dIsease, as it were; in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he the more man. The genius of disease was more human than the genius of health. How, then, could one who posed as the friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths concerning man's humanity? Herr Set-tembrini had progress ever on his lip: was he aware.that all prog-ress, insofar as there was such a tliing, was due to illness, and to illness alone? In other words, to genius, which was the same thing? Had not the:normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atone-ment.

"Aha! "thought Hans Castorp. "You unorthodox Jesuit, you, with your interpretations of the Crucifixion! It's plain why you never became a priest, joli jesuite a la petite tache humide! Now roar, lion! " he mentally addressed Herr Settembrini. And the lion roared. He characterized all Naphta had said as quibbling, sophis-try, and confusion.

" Say it! " he cried to his opponent, " say it in your character as schoolmaster, say it in the hearing of plastic youth, say straight out, that the soul is - disease! Verily you will thereby encourage them to a belief in the spiritual. Disease and death as nobility, life "and health as vulgarity - what a doctrine whereby to hold fast the neophyte to the service of humanity! Davvero, e criminoso! "And like a crusader he entered the lists in defence of the nobility of life and health, of that which nature gave, for the soul of which one did not need to fear. "The Form," he said; and Naphta rejoined bombastically: "The Logos." But he who would have none of the Logos answered: "The Reason," and the "man of the Logos re-torted with " The Passion."

It was confusion worse confounded.

"The Object," cried one, the other: "The Ego! " " Art " and " critique" were bandied back and forth, then once more "na-ture" and "soul," and as to which was the nobler, and concern- ing the " aristocratic problem." But there was no order nor clarity, not even of a dualistic and militant kind. Things went not only by contraries, but also all higgledy-piggledy. The disputant not only / Page 467 / . contradicted each other, they contradicted themselves. How often had Settembrini not spent his oratory in praise of criticism, as being the aristocratic principle? Yet now it was for its opposite, for "art," that he made the same claim. How often had Naphta not stood for instinct, what time Settembrini called nature a blind force, mere " factum et fatum," before which reason and human pride must never abdicate! But here now was Naphta on the side of the soul and disease, wherein alone true nobility and humanity resided, while Settembrini flung himself into advocacy of nature and her noble sanity, regardless of his inconsistency on the score of emancipation from her. The" Object" and the "Ego " were no less involved in confusion - yes, and here the confusion, more-over, remained constant, was the most literal and incorrigible; so that nobody any longer knew who was the devout and who the free-thinker. Naphta sharply forbade Settembrini to call himself an individualist, for so long as he denied the antithesis between God and nature, saw in the problem of man's inward conflict no more than the struggle between individual and collective interest, and was vowed to a materialistic and bourgeois ethic, in which life be-came an end in itself, limited to utilitarian aims, and the moral law subserved the interest of the State. He, Naphta, was well aware that man's inner conflict based upon the antagonism between the sensible and the supra-sensible; It was he, not Settembrini, who represented the true, the mystical individualism. He, not Settem- brini, was in reality the free-thinker, the man who looked for guid-ance within himself. Hans Castorp reflected that if that were true, then what about the" anonymous and communal " - not to men-tion any other contradiction? And what about those striking-comments he had made to Father Unterpertinger on the subject of Hegel's Catholicism, and the affinity between Catholicism and politics, and the category of the objective which they together .comprised? Had not statecraft and education always been the spedlal province of the Society to which Naphta belonged? And what an education! Herr Settembrini himself was certainly a zeal-ous pedagogue, zealous to the point of tedium; but he could simply not:compete with Naphta in.the matter of ascetic, self:-mortifying objectivity. Absolute authorIty, lion discipline, coercion, submis-sion, the Terror! All that might have its own value, but it paid scant homage to the individual and the dignity of his critical faculty. It was the army regulations of the Prussian Frederick, the Exercise-book of the Spanish Loyola all over again; it was rigid, it was devout, to the very marrow. But one question remained to be asked: how had Naphta arrived at this savage absolutism, he who, / Page 468 / by his own account, believed not at all in pure knowledge or un-fettered research, in other words not in truth, the objective, scien-tific truth, to strive after which was for Ludovico Settembrini the highest law of human morality. Here was the object of his rigid devotion, whereas Naphta with reprehensible looseness referred truth back to mankind itself, and declared that that was truth which advantaged man, Wasn't it the most utter bourgeoisiedom, the sheerest utilitarian Philistinism, to make truth depend on the interest of mankind? It certainly could not be considered strict objectivity, there was much more free-thinking and subjectivity about it than Leo Naphta would admit - it was, indeed, quite as much politics as Herr Settembrini's didactic phrase: "Freedom is the law of love of one's kind." That, obviously, was to make free- dom, as Naphta made truth, depend upon man, and thus was more orthodox than liberal. But here again were distinctions that tended to disappear in the process of definition.

Ah, this Settembrini - it was not for nothing he was a man of letters, son of a politician and grandson of a humanist! He had lofty ideas ,about emancipation and criticism -: and chirped to the girls m the street. On the other hand, knIfe-edged little Naphta was bound by the strictest sort of vows; yet in thought he was almost a libertine, :whereas the other was a very fool o! virtue, in a manner of speaking. Herr Settembnrn was afraid of 'Absolute Spirit," and would like to see it everyw!tere wedded to democratic progress; he was simply outraged at the religious licence of his militant opponent, which would jumble up together God and the Devil, sanctification and bad behaviour, genius and disease, and which knew no standards of value, no rational judgment, no exer- cise of the will. But who then was the orthodox, who the free-thinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into the all-consuming all-equalizing chaos, that ascetic-libertine state; or should he take his stand on the " Critical-Subjec- tive," where empty bombast and a bourgeois strictness of morals contradicted each other? Ah, the principles and points of view constantly did that; it became so hard for Hans Castorp's civilian responsibility to distinguish between opposed positions, or even to keep the premisses apart from each other and clear in his mind, that the temptation grew well-nigh irresistible to plunge head foremost into Naphta's "morally chaotic All." The confusion, the cross- purposes, became general, and Hans Castorp suspected that the antagonists would have been less exacerbated had not the dispute bitten into their very souls.

They had got up meantime to the Berghof. Then the three who / Page 469 / lived there walked back with the others as f:ar as their door, where they stood about in the Snow for some furtherwhile, and Sette-brini and Naphta continued to dispute. It was apparent to Hans Castorp that their zeal was the zeal of the schoolmaster, bent on making an impression upon his plastic mind. Herr Ferge reiterated that it was all too much for him; while Wehsal, so soon as they had got off the themes of torture and corporal punishment, showed small interest. Hans Castorp stood wth bent head and bur-rowed with his stick in the snow, pondering the vasty confusion of it all.

They broke off at last, There were no limits to the subject - but they could not go on for ever. The three guests of the Berghof took their way home, and the'two disputants had to go into the cottage together, the one to seek his silken cell, the other his humanistic cubby-hole wi,th the pulpit-desk and the water-bottle. Hans Castorp betook himself to his balcony, his ears full of the hurly-burly and the clashing of arms, as the army of Jerusalem and that of Babylon, under the dos banderas, came on in battle array, and met each other midst tumult and shoutings.

DAILY, five times a. day, the guests expressed unanimous dissatisfaction with the kind of winter they were having. They felt it was not what they had a right to expect of these altitudes. It failed to deliver the renowned meteorological specific in anything like the quantity indicated by the prospectus, quoted by old inhabitants, or anticipated by new, There was a very great failure in the supply of sunshine, an element so important in the cures achieved up here that without it they were distinctly retarded. And whatever Herr Settembrini might think of the sincerity of the patients' desire to finish their cure, leave " home " and return to the flat-land, at any rate they insisted on their just dues, They wanted what they were entitled to, what their parents or husbands had paid for, and they grumbled unceasingly, at table, in lift, and in the hall. The manage-ment showed a consciousness of what it owed them by installing a new apparatus for heliotherapy. They had two already, but these did not suffice for the demands of those who wished to get sun- burnt by electricity - it was so becoming to the ladies, young and old, and made all the men, though confirmed horizontallers, look irresistibly athletic. And the ladies, even though aware of the mechanico-cosmetical origin of this conquering-hero air, were foolish enough to be carried away by it. There was Frau Schon / Page 470 / feld, a red-haired, red-eyed patient from Berlin. In the salon she looked thirstily at a long-legged, sunken-chested gallant, who de-scribed himself on his visiting-card as "Aviateur diplome et Enseigne de la Marine allemande." He was fitted out with the pneumo-thorax and wore "smoking" at the midday meal but not in the evening, saying this was their custom in the navy. "My God," breathed Frau Schonfeld at him," what a tan this demon has - he gets it from the helio- it makes him look like a hunter of eagles! " " Just wait, nixie! " he whispered in her ear, in the lift, " I'll make you pay for looking at me like that! " It made goose-flesh and shivers run over her. And along the balconies, past the glass par- titions, the demon eagle-hunter found his his way to the nixie.

But the artificial sun was far from making up for the lack of the real one. Two or three days of full sunshine in the month - it was not good enough, gorgeous though these were with deep, deep velvety blue sky behind the white mountain summits, a glitter as of diamonds and a fine hot glow on the face and the back of the neck, when they dawned resplendent from the prevailing thick mantle of grey mist. Two or three such days In. the course of weeks could not satisfy people whose lot might be said to Justify extraor- dinary demands from the external world. They had made an in-ward compact, by the terms of which they resigned the common joys and sorrows proper to flat-land humanity, and in exchange were made free of a life that was, to be sure, inactive, but on the other hand very lively and diverting, and care-free to the point of making one forget altogether the flight of time. Thus it was not much good for the Hofrat to tell them how favourably the Berg-hof compared with a Siberian mine or a penal settlement, nor to sing the praises of the atmosphere, so thin and light, well-nigh as rare as the empty universal ether, free of earthly admixture whether good or bad, and even without actual sunshine to be pre-ferred to the rank vapours of the plain. Despite all he could say, the gloomy disaffection gained grourid, threats of unlicensed departure were the order of the day, were even put into execution, without regard for the warning afforded by the melancholy return of Frau Salomon to the fold, now a " life member," her tedious but not serious case having taken that turn by reason of her self~willed visit to her wet and windy Amsterdam.

But if they had no sun, they had snow. Such masses, of snow as Hans Castorp had never till now in all his life beheld. The previous winter had done fairly well in that respect, but it had been as nothing compared to this one. The snow-fall was monstrous and im- measurable, it made one realize the extravagant, outlandish nature / Page 471 / of the place. It snowed day in, day out, and all through the night. The few roads kept open were like tunnels, with towering walls of snow on either side, crystal and alabaster surfaces that were pleasant to look at, and on which the guests scribbled all sorts of messages, jokes and personalities. But even this path between walls was above the lever of the pavement, and made of hard-packed snow, as one could tell by certain places where it gave way, and let one suddenly sink in up to the knee. One might, unless one were careful break a leg. The benches had disappeared, except for the high back of one emerging here and there. In the town, the street level was so raised that the shops had become cellars, into which one descended by steps cut in the snow.

And on all these lying masses more snow fell, day in, day out. It fell silently, through air that was moderately cold, perhaps ten to fifteen degrees of frost. One did not feel the cold, it might have been much less, for the dryness and absence of wind deprived it of sting. The mornings were very dark, breakfast was taken by the light of the artificial moon that hung from the vaulted ceiling of the dining-room, above the gay stencilled border. Outside was the reeking void, the world enwrapped in grey-white cotton-wool, packed to the window-panes in snow and mist. No sight of the mountains; of the nearest evergreen now and again a glimpse through the fog, standing laden, arid from time to time shaking free a bough of its heavy load, that flew into the air, and sent a cloud of white against the grey. At ten o'clock the sun, a wan wisp of light, came up behind its mountain, and gave the indistinguish-able scene some shadowy hint of life, some sallow glimmer of reality; yet even so, it retained its delicate ghostliness, its lack of any definite line for the eye to follow.. The contours. of the peaks dIssolved, disappeared; were dissipated In the mist, while the vision, led on from one pallidly gleaming slope of snow to another, lost itself in the void. Then a single cloud, like smoke, lighted up by the sun, might spread out before a wall. of rock and hang tliere for long, motionless.

At midday the sun would half break through, and show signs of banishing the inist. In vain - yet a shred of blue would be visible, and suffice to make the scene, in its strangely falsified contours, sparkle marvellously far and wide. Usually, at this hour, the snow- fall stopped, as though to have a look at what it had done; a like effect was produced by the rare days when the storm ceased, and the uninterrupted power of the sun sought to thaw away the pure and lovely surface from the new-fallen masses. The sight was at once fairylike and comic, an infantine fantasy; The thick light / Page 472 / cushions plumped up on the boughs of trees, the humps and mounds of snow-covered rock-cropping or undergrowth, the droll, dwarfish, crouching disguise all ordinary objects wore, made of the scene a landscape in gnome-land, anillustration for a fairy-tale. Such was the Immediate view - wearisome to move in, quaintly ,roguishly stimulating to the fancy. But when one looked across the intervening space, at the towering marble statuary of the high Alps in full snow, one felt a quite different emotion, and that was awe of their majestic sublimity.

Afternoons betweeen three and four, HansCastorp lay in his bal-cony box, well wrapped, his head against the cushion, not too high or too low, of his excellent chair, and looked out at forest and mountain over his thick-upholstered balustrade. The snow-laden firs, dark-green to blackness, went marching up the sides of the valley, and beneath them the snow lay soft like down pillows. Above the tree line, the mountain walls reared themselves Into the grey-white air: huge surfaces of snow, with softly veiled crests, and here and there a black jut of rock. The snow came silently down. The scene blurred more and more, it inclined the eye, gazing thus into woolly vacuity, to slumber. At the moment of slipping off one might give a start - yet what sleep could be purer than this in the icy air? It was dreamless. It was as free from the burden - even the unconscious burden - of organic life, as little aware of an effort to breathe this contentless, weightless, imper-ceptible air as is the breathless sleep of the dead. When Hans Ca-storp stirred again, the mountains would be wholly lost in a cloud of snow; only a pinnacle, a jutting rock, might show one instant, to be rapt away the next. It was absorbing to watch these ghostly pranks; one needed to keep alert to follow the transmutations; the veiling and unveiling. One moment a great space of snow-covered rock would reveal itself, standing out bold and free, though of base or peak naught was to be seen. But if one ceased to fix one's gaze upon it, it was gone, in a breath..

Then there were storms so violent as to prevent one's sitting on the balcony for the driven snow which blew in, in such quantity as to cover floor and chair with a thick mantle. Yes, even in this sheltered valley it knew how to storm. The thin air would be in a hurly';burly, so whirling full of snow one could not see a hand's breadth before one's face. Gusts strong enough to take one's breath away flung the snow about, drew it up cyclone-fashion from the valley floor to the upper air, whisked it about in the maddest dance; no longer a snow-storm, it was a' blinding chaos, a white dark, a monstrous dereliction on the part of this inordinate and violent region; no living creature save the snow - bunting - which suddenly appeared in troops - could flourish in it."

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body of similarities that there remained hardly any significant elements in the biography of Jesus that we did not find prefigured by the Mysteries. On top of this, we discovered that even Jesus' teachings were not original, but had been anticipated by the Pagan sages! If there was a 'real' Jesus somewhere underneath all this, we would have to acknowledge that we could know absolutely nothing about him, for all that remained for us was later Pagan accretions! Such a position seemed absurd. Surely there was a more elegant solution to this conundrum?

Whilst we were puzzling over these discoveries, we began to question the received picture of the early Church and have a look at the evidence for ourselves. We discovered that far from being the united congregation of saints and martyrs that traditional history would have us believe, the early Christian community was actually made up of a whole spectrum of different groups. These can be broadly categorized into two different schools. On the one hand there were those we will call 'Literalists', because what defines them is that they take the Jesus story as a literal account of historical events. It was this school of Christianity that was adopted by the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE, becoming Roman Catholicism and all its subsequent offshoots. On the other hand, however, there were also radically different Christians known as 'Gnostics'.⁵

These forgotten Christians were later persecuted out of existence by the Literalist Roman Church with such thoroughness that until recently we knew little about them except through the writings of their detractors. Only a handful of original Gnostic texts survived, none of which were published before the nineteenth century. This situation changed dramatically, however, with a remarkable discovery in 1945 when an Arab peasant stumbled upon a whole library of Gnostic gospels hidden in a cave near Nag / Page9 / Hammadi in Egypt. This gave scholars access to many texts which were in wide circulation amongst early Christians, but which were deliberately excluded from the canon of the New Testament - gospels attributed to Thomas and Philip, texts recording the acts of Peter and the 12 disciples, apocalypses attributed to Paul and James; and so on.

It seemed to us extraordinary that a whole library of early Christian documents could be discovered, containing what purport to be the teachings of Christ and his disciples, and yet so few modem followers of Jesus should even know of their existence. Why hasn't every Christian rushed out to read these newly discovered words' of the Master? What keeps them confined to the small number of gospels selected for inclusion in the New Testament? It seems that even though 2,000 years have passed since the Gnostics were purged, during which time the Roman Church has split into Protestantism and thousands of other alternative groups, the Gnostics are still not regarded as a legitimate voice of Christianity. .

Those who do explore the Gnostic gospels discover a form of Christianity quite alien to the religion with which they are familiar. We found ourselves studying strange esoteric tracts with titles such as Hypostasis of the Archons and The Thought of Norea. It felt as if we were in an episode of Star Trek - and in a way we were. The Gnostics truly were 'psychonauts' who boldly explored the final frontiers of inner space, searching for the origins and meaning of life. These people were mystics and creative free-thinkers. It was obvious to us why they were so hated by the bishops of the Literalist Church hierarchy.

To Literalists, the Gnostics were dangerous heretics. In volumes of anti-Gnostic works - an unintentional testimony to the power and influence of Gnosticism within early Christianity - they painted them as Christians who had 'gone native'. They claimed they had become contaminated by the Paganism that surrounded them and had abandoned the purity of the true faith. The Gnostics, on the other hand, saw / Page 10 / themselves as the authentic Christian tradition and the orthodox bishops as an 'imitation church'.⁶ They claimed to know the secret Inner Mysteries of Christianity which the Literalists did not possess.

As we explored the beliefs and practices of the Gnostics we became convinced that the Literalists had at least been right about one thing: the Gnostics were little different from Pagans. Like the philosophers of the Pagan Mysteries, they believed in reincarnation, honoured the goddess Sophia and were immersed in the mystical Greek philosophy of Plato. 'Gnostics' means 'Knowers', a name they acquired because, like the initiates of the Pagan Mysteries, they believed that their secret teachings had the power to impart 'Gnosis' - direct experiential 'Knowledge of God'. Just as the goal of a Pagan initiate was to become a god, so for the Gnostics the goal of the Christian initiate was to become a Christ.

What particularly struck us was that the Gnostics were not concerned with the historical Jesus. They viewed the Jesus story in the same way that the Pagan philosophers viewed the myths of Osiris-Dionysus - as an allegory which encoded secret mystical teachings. This insight crystallized for us a remarkable possibility. Perhaps the explanation for the similarities between Pagan myths and the biography of Jesus had been staring us in the face the whole time, but we had been so caught up with traditional ways of thinking that we had been unable to see it.

The traditional version of history bequeathed to us by the authorities of the Roman Church is that Christianity developed from the teachings of a Jewish Messiah and that Gnosticism was a later deviation. What would happen, we wondered, if the picture were reversed and Gnosticism viewed as the authentic Christianity, just as the Gnostics themselves claimed? Could it be that orthodox Christianity was a later deviation from Gnosticism and that Gnosticism was a / Page 11 / synthesis of Judaism and the Pagan Mystery religion? This was the beginning of the Jesus Mysteries Thesis.

Boldly stated, the picture that emerged for us was as follows. We knew that most ancient Mediterranean cultures had adopted the ancient Mysteries, adapting,them to their own national tastes and creating their own version of the myth of the dying and resurrecting godman. Perhaps some of the Jews had, likewise, adopted the Pagan Mysteries and created their own version of the Mysteries, which we now know as Gnosticism. Perhaps initiates of the Jewish Mysteries had adapted the potent symbolism of the Osiris-Dionysus myths into a myth of their own, the hero of which was the Jewish dying and resurrecting godman Jesus.

If this was so, then the Jesus story was not a biography at all but a consciously crafted vehicle for encoded spiritual teachings created by Jewish Gnostics. As in the Pagan Mysteries, initiation into the Inner Mysteries would reveal the myth's allegorical meaning. Perhaps those uninitiated into the Inner Mysteries had mistakenly come to .regard the Jesus myth as historical fact and in this way Literalist Christianity had been created. Perhaps the Inner Mysteries of Christianity, which the Gnostics taught but which the Literalists denied existed, revealed that the Jesus story was not a factual account of God's one and only visit to planet Earth, but a mystical teaching story designed to help each one of us become a Christ.

The Jesus story does have all the hallmarks of a myth, so could it be that that is exactly what it is? After all, no one has read the newly discovered Gnostic gospels and taken their fantastic stories as literally true; they are readily seen as myths. It is only familiarity and cultural prejudice which prevent us from seeing the New Testament gospels in the same light. If those gospels had also been lost to us and only recently discovered, who would read these tales for the first time and believe they were historical accounts of a man bom of a virgin, who had walked on water and returned from the dead? Why should we consider the stories of Osiris, / Page 12 / Dionysus, Adonis, Attis, Mithras and the other Pagan Mystery saviours as fables, yet come across essentially the same story told in a Jewish context and believe it to be the biography of a carpenter from Bethlehem?

We had both been raised as Christians and were surprised to find that, despite years of open-minded spiritual exploration, it still felt somehow dangerous to even dare think such thoughts. Early indoctrination reaches very deep. We were in effect saying that Jesus was a Pagan god and that Christianity was a heretical product of Paganism! It seemed outrageous. Yet this theory explained the similarities between the stories of Osiris- Dionysus and Jesus Christ in a simple and elegant way. They are parts of one developing mythos.

The Jesus Mysteries Thesis answered many puzzling questions, yet it also opened up new dilemmas. Isn't there indisputable historical evidence for the existence of Jesus the man? And how could Gnosticism be the original Christianity when St Paul, the earliest Christian we know about, is so vociferously anti-Gnostic? And is it really credible that such an insular and anti-Pagan people as the Jews could have adopted the Pagan Mysteries? And how could it have happened that a consciously created myth came to be believed as history? And if Gnosticism represents genuine Christianity, why was it Literalist Christianity that came to dominate the world as the most influential religion of all time? All of these difficult questions would have to be satisfactorily answered before we could wholeheartedly accept such a radical theory as the Jesus Mysteries Thesis.

Our new account of the origins of Christianity only seemed improbable because it contradicted the received view. As we pushed further with our research, the traditional picture began to completely unravel all around us. We found ourselves embroiled in a world of schism and power struggles, of forged documents and false identities, of letters / Page 13 / that had been edited and added to, and of the wholesale destruction of historical evidence. We focused forensically on the few facts we could be confident of, as if we were detectives on the verge of cracking a sensational 'whodunnit', or perhaps more accurately as if we were uncovering an ancient and unacknowledged miscarriage of justice. For, time and again, when we critically examined what genuine evidence remained, we found that the history of Christianity bequeathed to us by the Roman Church was a gross distortion of the truth. Actually the evidence completely endorsed the Jesus Mysteries Thesis! It was becoming increasingly obvious that we had been deliberately deceived, that the Gnostics were indeed the original Christians, and that their anarchic mysticism had been hijacked by an authoritarian institution which had created from it a dogmatic religion - and then brutally enforced the greatest cover-up in history.

One of the major players in this cover-up operation, was a character called Eusebius who, at the beginning of the fourth century, compiled from legends, fabrications and his own imagination the only early history of Christianity that still exists today. All subsequent histories have been forced to base themselves on Eusebius' dubious claims, because there has been little other information to draw on. All those with a different perspective on Christianity were branded as heretics and eradicated. In this way falsehoods compiled in the fourth century have come down to us as established facts.

Eusebius was employed by the Roman Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion of the Empire and gave Literalist Christianity the power it needed to begin the final eradication of Paganism and Gnosticism. Constantine wanted 'one God, one religion' to consolidate his claim of 'one Empire, one Emperor'. He oversaw the creation of the Nicene creed - the article of faith repeated in churches to this day - and Christians who refused to assent to this creed were banished from the Empire or otherwise silenced.

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This 'Christian' Emperor then returned home from Nicaea and had his wife suffocated and his son murdered. He deliberately remained unbaptized until his deathbed so that he could continue his atrocities and still receive forgiveness of sins and a guaranteed place in heaven by being baptized at the last moment, Although he had his 'spin doctor' Eusebius compose a suitably obsequious biography for him, he was actually a monster -just like many Roman Emperors before him. Is it really at all surprising that a 'history' of the origins of Christianity created by an employee in the service of a Roman tyrant should turn out to be a pack of lies?

Elaine Pagels, one of the foremost academic authorities on early Christianity, writes:

'It is the winners who write history - their way. No wonder, then, that the traditional accounts of the origins of Christianity first defined the terms (naming themselves "orthodox" and their opponents "heretics"); then they proceeded to demonstrate - at least to their own satisfaction - that their triumph was historically inevitable, or, in religious terms, "guided by the Holy Spirit". But the discoveries [of the Gnostic gospels] at Nag Hammadi reopen fundamental questions.'⁷

History is indeed written by the victors. The creation of an appropriate history has always been part of the arsenal of political manipulation. The Roman Church created a history of the triumph of Literalist Christianity in much the same partisan way that, two millennia later, Hollywood created tales of 'cowboys and Indians' to relate 'how the West was won' not 'how the West was lost'. History is not simply related, it is created. Ideally, the motivation is to explain historical evidence and come to an accurate understanding of how the present has been created by the past. All too often, however, it is simply to glorify and justify the status quo. Such histories conceal as much as they reveal.

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To dare to question a received history is not easy. It is difficult to believe that something which you have been told is true from childhood could actually be a product of falsification and fantasy. It must have been hard for those Russians brought up on tales of kindly 'Uncle Joe' Stalin to accept that he was actually responsible for the deaths of millions. It must have strained credibility when those opposing his regiIne claimed that he had in fact murdered many of the heroes of the Russian revolution. It must have seemed ridiculous when they asserted that he had even had the images of his rivals removed from photographs and completely fabricated historical events, Yet all these things are true.

It is easy to believe that,something must be true because everyone else believes it. But the truth often only comes to light by daring to question the unquestionable, by doubting notions which are so commonly believed that they are taken for granted. The Jesus Mysteries Thesis is the product of such an openness of mind. When it first occurred to us, it seemed absurd and impossible. Now it seems obvious and ordinary. The Vatican was constructed upon the site of an ancient Pagan sanctuary because the new is always built upon the old. In the same way Christianity itself has as its foundations the Pagan spirituality that preceded it. What is more plausible than to posit the gradual evolution of spiritual ideas, with Christianity emerging from the ancient Pagan Mysteries in a seamless historical continium? It is only because the conventional history has been so widely believed for so long that this idea could be seen as heretical and shocking.

As the final pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, we came across a small picture tucked away in the appendices of an old academic book. It was a drawing of a third-century CE amulet. We have used it as the cover of this book. It shows a / Page 16/ crucified figure which most people would immediately recognize as Jesus. Yet the Greek words name the figure 'Orpheus Bacchus', one of the pseudonyms of Osiris-Dionysus. To the author of the book in which we found the picture, this amulet was an anomaly. Who could it have possibly belonged to? Was it a crucified Pagan deity or some sort of Gnostic synthesis of Paganism and Christianity? Either way it was deeply puzzling.For us, however, this amulet was perfectly understandable. It was an unexpected confirmation of the Jesus Mysteries Thesis. The image could be that of either Jesus or Osiris-Dionysus. To the initiated, these were both names for essentially the same figure.

The 'chance' discovery of this amulet made us feel as though the universe itself was encouraging us to make our findings public. In different ways the Jesus Mysteries Thesis has been proposed by mystics and scholars for centuries, but has always ended up being ignored. It now felt like an idea whose moment had come. We did, however, have misgivings about writing this book. We knew that it would inevitably upset certain Christians, something which we had no desire to do. Certainly it has been hard to be constantly surrounded by lies and injustices without experiencing a certain amount of outrage at the negative misrepresentation of the Gnostics, and to have become aware of the great riches of Pagan culture without feeling grief that they were so wantonly destroyed. Yet we do not have some sort of anti-Christian agenda. Far from it.

Those who have read our other works will know that our interest is not in further division, but in acknowledging the unity that lies at the heart of all spiritual traditions - and this present book is no exception. Early Literalist Christians mistakenly believed that the Jesus story was different from other stories of Osiris-Dionysus because Jesus alone had been an historical rather than a mythical figure. This has left Christians feeling that their faith is in opposition to all others - which it is not. We hope that by understanding its true origins in the ongoing evolution of a universal human / Page 17 / spirituality, Christianity may be able to free itself from this self-imposed isolation.

Whilst the Jesus Mysteries Thesis clearly rewrites history, we do not see it as undermining the Christian faith, but as suggesting that Christianity is in fact richer than we previously imagined. The Jesus story is a perennial myth with the power to impart the saving Gnosis which can transform each one of us into a Christ, not merely a history of events that happened to someone else 2,000 years ago. Belief in the Jesus story was originally the first step in Christian spirituality - the Outer Mysteries. Its significance was to be explained by an enlightened teacher when the seeker was spiritually ripe. These Inner Mysteries imparted a mystical Knowledge of God beyond mere belief in dogmas. Although many inspired christian mystics throughout history have intuitively seen through to this deeper symbolic level of understanding, as a culture we have inherited only the Outer Mysteries of Christianity. We have kept the form, but lost the meaning. Our hope is that this book can play some small part in reclaiming the true mystical Christian inheritance.

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'Blest is the happy man

Who knows the Mysteries the gods ordain,

And sanctifies his life,

Joins soul with soul in mystic unity,

And, by due ritual made pure,

Enters the ecstasy of mountain solitudes;

Who observes the mystic rites

Made lawful by the Great Mother;

Who crowns his head with ivy,

And shakes his wand in worship of Dionysus.'¹

Euripides

Paganism is a 'dead' religion - or more accurately an 'exterminated' religion. It did not simply fade away into oblivion. It was actively suppressed and annihilated, its temples and shrines desecrated and demolished, and its great sacred books thrown onto bonfires. No living lineage has been left to explain its ancient beliefs. So, the Pagan worldview has to be reconstructed from the archaeological evidence and texts that have survived, like some giant metaphysical jigsaw puzzle.

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'Pagan' was originally a derogatory term meaning 'country-dweller', used by Christians to imply that the spirituality of the ancients was some primitive rural superstition. But this is not true. Paganism was the spirituality which inspired the unequalled magnificence of the Giza pyramids, the exquisite architecture of the Parthenon, the legendary sculptures of Phideas, the powerful plays of Euripides and Sophocles, and. the sublime philosophy of Socrates and Plato.

Pagan civilization built, vast libraries to house hundreds of thousands of works of literary and scientific genius. Its natural philosophers speculated that human beings had evolved from animals.² Its astronomers knew the Earth was a sphere³ which, along with the planets, revolves around the sun.⁴ They had even estimated its circumference to within one degree of accuracy.⁵ The ancient Pagan world sustained a population not matched again in Europe until the eighteenth century.⁶ In Greece, Pagan culture gave birth to the concepts of democracy, rational philosophy, public libraries, theatre and the Olympic Games, creating a blueprint for our modern world. What was the spirituality that inspired these momentous cultural achievements?

Most people associate Paganism with either rustic witchcraft or the myths of the gods of Olympus as recorded by Hesiod and Homer. Pagan spirituality did indeed embrace both. The country people practised their traditional shamanic nature worship to maintain the fertility of the land and the city authorities propped up formal state religions, such as the worship of the Olympian gods, to maintain the power of the status quo.

It was, however, a third, more mystical, expression of the Pagan spirit which inspired the great minds of the ancient world. The thinkers, artists and innovators of antiquity were initiates of various religions known as 'Mysteries'. These remarkable men and women held the Mysteries to be the heart and soul of their culture. The Greek historian Zosimos writes that without the Mysteries 'life for the Greeks would / Page 20/ be unlivable' for' the sacred Mysteries hold the whole human race together'.⁷ The eminent Roman statesman Cicero enthuses:

'These Mysteries have brought us from rustic savagery to a cultivated and refined civilisation. The rites of the Mysteries are called "initiations" and in truth we have learned from them the first principles of life. We have gained the understanding not only to live happily but also to die with better hope.'⁸

Unlike the traditional rituals of the official state religions, which were designed to aid social cohesion, the Mysteries were an individualistic form of spirituality which offered mystical visions and personal enlightenment.⁹ Initiates underwent a secret process of initiation which profoundly transformed their state of consciousness. The poet Pindar reveals that an initiate into the Mysteries 'knows the end of life and its God-given beginning'.¹⁰ Lucius Apuleius, a poet- philosopher, writes of his experience of initiation as a spiritual rebirth which he celebrated as his birthday, an experience for which he felt a 'debt of gratitude' that he 'could never hope to repay'.¹¹ Plato, the most influential philosopher of all time, relates:

'We beheld the beatific visions and were initiated into the Mystery which may be truly called blessed, celebrated by us in a state of innocence. We beheld calm, happy, simple, eternal visions, resplendent in pure light.'¹²

The great Pagan philosophers were the enlightened masters of the Mysteries. Although they are often portrayed today as dry 'academic' intellectuals, they were actually enigmatic 'gurus'. Empedocles, like his master Pythagoras, was a charismatic miracle-worker. ¹³ Socrates was an eccentric / Page 21 / mystic prone to being suddenly overcome by states of rapture during which his friends would discover him staring off into space for hours.¹⁴ Heraclitus was asked by the citizens of Ephesus to become a lawmaker, but turned the offer down so that he could continue playing with the children in the temple.¹⁵ Anaxagoras shocked ordinary citizens by completely abandoning his farm to fully devote his life to 'the higher philosophy' .¹⁶ Diogenes owned nothing and lived in a jar at the entrance of a temple.¹⁷ The inspired playwright Euripides wrote his greatest tragedies during solitary retreats in an isolated cave.¹⁸

All of these idiosyncratic sages were steeped in the mysticism of the Mysteries, which they expressed in their philosophy. Olympiodorus, a follower of Plato, tells us that his master paraphrased the Mysteries everywhere.¹⁹ The works of Heraclitus were renowned even in ancient times for being obscure and impenetrable, yet Diogenes explains that they are crystal clear to an initiate of the Mysteries. Of studying Heraclitus he writes:

'It is a hard road to follow, filled with darkness and gloom; but if an initiate leads you on the way, it becomes brighter than the radiance of the sun.'²⁰

At the heart of Pagan philosophy is an understanding that all things are One. The Mysteries aimed at awakening within the initiate a sublime experience of this Oneness. Sallustius declares: 'Every initiation aims at uniting us with the World and with the Deity.²¹ Plotinus describes the initiate transcending his limited sense of himself as a separate ego and experiencing mystical union with God:

'As if borne away, or possessed by a god, he attains to solitude in untroubled stillness, nowhere deflected in his being and unbusied with self, utterly at rest and become very rest. He does not converse with a statue or image but with Godhead / Page 21 / itself. And this is no object of vision, but another mode of seeing, a detachment from self, a simplification and surrender of self, a yearning for contact, and a stillness and meditation directed towards transformation. Whoever sees himself in this way has attained likeness to God; let him abandon himself and find the end of his journey.'²²

No wonder the initiate Sopatros poetically mused, 'I came out of the Mystery Hall feeling like a stranger to myself.'²³

What were these ancient Mysteries that could inspire such reverent awe and heartfelt appreciation? The Mystery religion was practised for thousands of years, during which time it spread throughout the ancient world, taking on many different forms. Some were frenzied and others meditative. Some involved bloody animal sacrifice, while others were presided over by strict vegetarians. At certain moments in history the Mysteries were openly practised by whole populations and were endorsed, or at least tolerated, by the state. At other times they were a small-scale and secretive affair, for fear of persecution by unsympathetic authorities. Central to all of these forms of the Mysteries, however, was the myth of a dying and resurrecting godman.

The Greek Mysteries celebrated at Eleusis in honour of the Great Mother goddess and the godman Dionysus were the most famous of all the Mystery cults. The sanctuary of Eleusis was finally destroyed by bands of fanatical Christian monks in 396 CE, but up until this tragic act of vandalism the Mysteries had been celebrated there for over 11 centuries.²⁴ At the height of their popularity people were coming from all over the then known world to be initiated: men and women, rich and poor, slaves and emperors²⁵ - even a Brahmin priest from India.²⁶

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Each year some 30,000 Athenian citizens embarked on a 30-kilometre barefoot pilgrimage to the sacred site of Eleusis on the coast to celebrate the autumn Mysteries of Dionysus.²⁷ For days they Would have been preparing for this important religious event by fasting; offering sacrifices and under-going ritual purification. As. those about to be initiated danced along the 'Sacred Way' to Eleusis, accompanied by the frenzied beat of cymbals and tambourines, they were accosted by masked men who abused and insulted them, while others beat them with sticks.²⁸ At the head of the procession was carried the statue of Dionysus himself, leading them ever onwards. After ritual naked bathing in the sea and other purification ceremonies the crowd reached the great doors of the Telesterion, a huge purpose-built initiation hall. Only the chosen few who were already initiated or about to be initiated into the secret Mysteries could enter here.

What awesome ceremony was held behind these closed doors that touched the great philosophers, artists, statesmen and scientists of the ancient world so deeply? All initiates were sworn to secrecy and held the Mysteries so sacred that they kept this oath.²⁹ From large numbers of hints and clues, however, we know that they witnessed a sublime theatrical spectacle. They were awed by sounds and dazzled by lights. They were bathed in the blaze of a huge fire and trembled to the nerve-shattering reverberations of a mighty gong. The Hierophant, the high priest of the Mysteries, was quite literally a 'showman' who orchestrated a terrifyingly transformative dramatic reenactment of sacred myth. He himself was dressed as the central character - the godman Dionysus.³⁰

A modem scholar writes:

'A Mystery Religion was thus a divine drama which portrayed before the wondering eyes of the privileged observers the story of the struggles, sufferings, and victory of a patron deity, the travail / Page 24 / of nature in which life ultimately triumphs over death, and joy is born of pain. The whole ritual of the Mysteries aimed especially at quickening the emotional life. No means of exciting the emotions was neglected in the passion-play, either by way of inducing careful predispositions or of supplying external stimulus. Tense mental anticipations heigtened by a.period of abstinence, hushed silences, imposing processions and elaborate pageantry, music loud and violent or soft and enthralling, delirious dances, the drinking of spirituous liquors, physical macerations, alternations of dense darkness and dazzling light, the sight of gorgeous ceremonial vestments, the handling of holy emblems, auto- suggestion and the promptings of the Hierophant - these and many secrets of emotional exaltation were in vogue.'³¹

This dramatization of the myth of Dionysus is the origin of theatre.³² But the initiates were not a passive audience. They were participants who shared in the passion of the godman whose death and rebirth symbolically represented the death and spiritual rebirth of each one of them. As a modem authority explains:

'Dionysus was the god of the most blessed ecstasy and the most enraptured love. But he was also the persecuted god, the suffering and dying god, and all whom he loved, all who attended him, had to share his tragic fate.'³³

By witnessing the awesome tragedy of Dionysus, the initiates at Eleusis shared in his suffering, death and resurrection, and so experienced a spiritual purification known as 'catharsis'.³⁴

The Mysteries did not offer religious dogmas to simply be believed, but a myth to be entered into. Initiation was not / Page 25 / about learning something, but about experiencing an altered state of awareness. Plutarch, a Pagan high priest, confesses that those who had been initiated could produce no proof of the beliefs that they acquired. Aristotle maintains, 'It is not necessary for the initiated to learn anything, but to receive impressions and to be put in a certain frame of mind:³⁵ The philosopher Proclus talks of the Mysteries as evoking a 'sympathy of the soul with the ritual in a way that is unintelligible to us and divine, so that some of the initiates are stricken with panic, being filled with divine awe, others assimilate themselves to the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine possession.'³⁶

Why did the myth enacted by the Mysteries have such a profound effect?

In antiquity the word mythos did not mean something 'untrue', as it does for us today. Superficially a myth was an entertaining story, but to the initiated it was a sacred code that contained profound spiritual teachings.³⁷ Plato comments, 'It looks as if those also who established rites of initiation for us were no fools, but that there is a hidden meaning in their teachings.'³⁸ He explains that it is 'those who have given their lives to true philosophy' who will grasp the 'hidden meaning' encoded in the Mystery myths, and so become completely identified with the godman in an experience of mystical enlightenment.³⁹

The ancient philosophers were not so foolish as to believe that the Mystery myths were literally true, but wise enough to recognize that they were an easy introduction to the profound mystical philosophy at the heart of the Mysteries. Sallustius writes:

'To wish to teach all men the truth of the gods causes the foolish to despise, because they cannot /Page26 / learn, and the good to be slothful, whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the former from despising philosophy and compels the latter to study it.'⁴⁰

It was the role. of the priests and philosophers of the Mysteries to decode the hidden depths of spiritual meaning contained within the Mystery myths. Heliodorus, a priest of the Mysteries, explains:

'Philosophers and theologians do not disclose the meanings embedded in these stories to laymen but simply give them preliminary instruction in the form of a myth. But those who have reached the higher grades of the Mysteries they initiate into clear knowledge in the privacy of the holy shrine, in the light cast by the blazing torch of truth."⁴¹

The Mysteries were divided into various levels of initiation, which led an initiate step by step through ever deepening levels of understanding. The number of levels of initiation varied in different Mystery traditions, but essentially the initiate was led from the Outer Mysteries, in which the myths were understood superficially as religious stories, to the Inner Mysteries, in which the myths were revealed as spiritual allegories. First the initiate was ritually purified. Then they were taught the secret teachings on a one-to-one basis.⁴² The highest stage was when the initiate understood the true meaning of the teachings and finally experienced what Theon of Smyrna calls 'friendship and interior communion with God'.

The Mysteries dominated the Pagan world. No other deity is represented on the monuments of ancient Greece and Italy as much as Dionysus, godman of the Eleusinian Mysteries.⁴³ / Page 27 / He is a deity with many names: Iacchos, Bassareus, Bromios, Euios, Sabazius, Zagreus, Yhyoneus, Lenaios, Eleuthereus, and so the list goes on.⁴⁴ But these are just some of his Greek names! The godman is an omnipresent mythic figure throughout the ancient Mediterranean, known in different ways by many cultures.

Five centuries before the birth. of Christ, the Greek historian Herodotus, known as 'the father of history', discovered this when he travelled to Egypt. On the shores of a sacred lake in the Nile delta he witnessed an enormous festival, held every year, in which the Egyptians performed a dramatic spectacle before 'tens of. thousands of men and women', representing the death and resurrection of Osiris. Herodotus was an initiate into the Greek Mysteries and recognized that what he calls 'the Passion of Osiris' was the very same drama that initiates saw enacted before them at Eleusis as the Passion of Dionysus.⁴⁵ The Egyptian myth of Osiris is the primal myth of the Mystery godman and reaches back to prehistory. His story is so ancient that it can be found in pyramid texts written over 4,500 years ago!⁴⁶

In travelling to Egypt Herodotus was following in the footsteps of another great Greek. Before 670 BCE Egypt had been a closed country, in the manner of Tibet or Japan more recently, but in this year she opened her borders and one of the first Greeks who travelled there in search of ancient wisdom was Pythagoras.⁴⁷ History remembers Pythagoras as the first 'scientist' of the Western world, but although it is true that he brought back many mathematical theories to Greece from Egypt, to his contemporaries he would have seemed anything but 'scientific' in the modem sense.

A wandering charismatic sage dressed in white robes and crowned with a gold coronet, Pythagoras was part scientist, part priest and part magician.⁴⁸ He spent 22 years in the temples of Egypt, becoming an initiate of the ancient Egyptian Mystertes.⁴⁹ On returning to Greece he began to preach the wisdom he had learned, performing miracles, / Page28 / raising the dead and giving oracles.

Inspired by Pythagoras, his disciples created a Greek Mystery religion modelled on the Egyptian Mysteries. They took the indigenous wine god Dionysus, who was a minor deity all but ignored by Hesiod and Homer, and transformed him into a Greek version of the mighty Egyptian Osiris, godman of the Mysteries. This initiated a religious and cultural revolution that was to transform Athens into the centre of the civilized world.⁵⁰

The followers of Pythagoras were models of virtue and learning, regarded as puritans by their neighbours. Strict vegetarians, they preached non-violence towards all living things and shunned the temple cults that practised the sacrifice of animals. This made it impossible for them to participate in the traditional Olympian religion of Athens. Forced to live on the fringes of acceptability, they often organized themselves into communities that shared all possessions in common, leaving them free to devote themselves to their mystical studies of mathematics, music, astronomy and philosophy.⁵¹ Nevertheless, the Mystery religion spread quickly amongst the ordinary people and within a few generations the Egyptian Mysteries of Osiris, now the Mysteries of Dionysus, inspired the glory of Classical Athens.

In the same way that Osiris was synthesized by the Greeks with their indigenous god Dionysus to create the Greek Mysteries, other Mediterranean cultures which adopted the Mystery religion also transformed one of their indigenous deities into the dying and resurrecting Mystery godman. So, the deity who was known as Osiris in Egypt and became Dionysus in Greece was called Attis in Asia Minor, Adonis in Syria, Bacchus in Italy, Mithras in Persia, and so on. His forms were many, but essentially he was the same perennial figure, whose collective identity was referred to as Osiris-Dionysus.⁵²

Because the ancients recognized that all the various Mystery godmen were essentially the same mythic being, / Page 29 / elements from different myths and rites were continually combined and recombined to create new forms of the Mysteries. In Alexandria, for example, a charismatic sage called Timotheus consciously fused Osiris and Dionysus to produce a new deity for the city called Serapis.⁵³ He also gave an elaborate account of the myth ot the Mystery godman Attis. Lucius Apuleius received his initiation into the Egyptian Mysteries from a high priest named after the Persian godman Mithras. Coins were minted with Dionysus represented on one side and Mithras on the other. ⁵⁴ One modem authority tells us that 'possessed by the knowledge of his own secret rites', the initiate of the Mysteries 'found no difficulty in conforming to any religion in vogue'.⁵⁵

Like the Christian religion which superseded it, the Mysteries reached across national boundaries, offering a spirituality which was relevant to all human beings, regardless of their racial origins or social status. Even as early as the fifth century BCE philosophers such as Diogenes and Socrates called themselves 'cosmopolitans' - 'citizens of the cosmos' - rather than of any particular country or culture, which is testimony to the international nature of the Mysteries.⁵⁶

One modem scholar, commenting on the merging and combining of different mystery traditions, writes:

'This went a long way towards weaning the minds of men from the idea of separate gods from the different nations, and towards teaching them that all national and local deities were but different forms of one great Power. But for the rise of Christianity and other religions, there can be little doubt but that the whole of the Graeco-Roman deities would continually have merged into Dionysus.'⁵⁷

Osiris-Dionysus had such universal appeal because he was seen as an 'Everyman' figure who symbolically represented / Page30 / each initiate. Through understanding the allegorical myth of the Mystery godman, initiates could become aware that, like Osiris-Dionysus, they were also 'God made flesh'. They too were immortal spirit trapped within a physical body. Through sharing in the death of Osiris-Dionysus initiates symbolically 'died' to their lower earthly nature. Through sharing in his resurrection they were spiritually reborn and experienced their eternal and divine essence. This was the profound mystical teaching that the myth of Osiris-Dionysus encoded for those initiated into the Inner Mysteries, the truth of which initiates directly experienced for themselves.

Writing of the Egyptian Mystery godman Osiris, Sir Wallis Budge, who was keeper of antiquities in the British Museum, explains:

'The Egyptians of every period in which they are known to us believed that Osiris was of divine origin, that he suffered death and mutilation at the hands of the power of evil, that after great struggle with these powers he rose again, that he became henceforth the king of the underworld and judge of the dead, and that because he had conquered death the righteous might also conquer death.⁵⁸

'He represented to men the idea of a man who was both God and man, and he typified to the Egyptians in all ages the being who by reason of his sufferings and death as a man could sympathise with them in their own sickness and death. The idea of his human personality also satisfied their cravings and yearnings for communion with a being who, though he was partly divine, yet had much in common with themselves. Originally they looked upon Osiris as a man who lived on the earth as they lived, who ate and drank, who suffered a cruel death, who by help of certain gods triumphed over death, and attained unto everlasting life. But what Osiris did they could also do.'⁵⁹

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These are the key motifs that characterize the myths of all the Mystery godmen. What Budge writes of Osiris could equally be said of Dionysus, Attis,Adonis, Mithras and the rest. It also describes the Jewish dying and resurrecting godman Jesus Christ. Like Osiris-Dionysus, he is also God Incarnate and God of the Resurrection. He also promises his followers spiritual rebirth through sharing in his divine Passion.

The Mysteries were clearly an extremely powerful force in the ancient world. Let's review what we've discovered about them:

* The Pagan Mysteries inspired the greatest minds of the ancient world.

* They were practised in different forms by nearly every culture in the Mediterranean.

* They comprised Outer Mysteries which were open to all and secret Inner Mysteries known only to those who had undergone a powerful process of mystical initiation.

* At the heart of the Mysteries was the myth of a dying and resurrecting godman - Osiris-Dionysus.

* The Inner Mysteries revealed the myths of Osiris- Dionysus to be spiritual allegories encoding spiritual teachings.

The question which intrigued us was whether the Mysteries could have somehow influenced and shaped what we have inherited as the 'biography' of Jesus? Unlike the various Pagan Mystery godmen, Jesus is traditionally viewed as an historical rather than a mythical figure, literally a man who was an incarnation of God, who suffered, died and resurrected to bring salvation to all humankind. But could these elements of the Jesus story actually be mythical stories inherited from the Pagan Mysteries?

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We began investigating the myths of Osiris-Dionysus more closely, searching for resemblances with the Jesus story. We were not prepared for the overwhelming number of similarities that we uncovered.

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'Having heard it proclaimed through the prophets that the Christ was to come and that the ungodly among men were to be punished by fire, the wicked spirits put forward many to be called Sons of God, under the impression that they would be able to produce in men the idea that the things that were said with regard to Christ were merely marvellous tales, like the things that were said by the poets.'¹

Justin Martyr

Although the remarkable similarities between the myths of Osiris-Dionysus and the supposed 'biography' of Jesus Christ are generally unknown today, in the first few centuries CE they were obvious to Pagans and Christians alike. The Pagan philosopher and satirist Celsus criticized Christians for trying to pass off the Jesus story as a new revelation when it was actually an inferior imitation of Pagan myths. He asks:

'Are these distinctive happenings unique to the Christians - and if so, how are they unique? Or are ours to be accounted myths and theirs believed? What reasons do the Christians give for the / Page 34 / distinctiveness of their beliefs? In truth there is nothing at all unusual about what the Christians believe, except that they believe it to the exclusion of more comprehensive truths about God.²

The early Christians were painfully aware of such criticisms.³ How coud Pagan myths which predated Christianity by hundreds of years have so much in common with the biography of the one and only saviour Jesus? Desperate to come up with an explanation, the Church fathers resorted to one of the most absurd theories ever advanced. From the time of Justin Martyr in the second century onwards, they declared that the Devil had plagiarized Christianity by anticipation in order to lead people astray!⁴ Knowing that the true Son of God was to literally come and walk the Earth, the Devil had copied the story of his life in advance of it happening and created the myths of Osiris-Dionysus.

The Church father Tertullian writes of the Devil's 'diabolical mimicry' in creating the Mysteries of Mithras:

'The devil, whose business is to pervert the truth, mimics the exact circumstances of the Divine Sacraments. He baptises his believers and promises forgiveness of sins from the Sacred Fount, and thereby initiates them into the religion of Mithras. Thus he celebrates the oblation of bread, and brings in the symbol of the resurrection. Let us therefore acknowledge the craftiness of the devil, who copies certain things of those that be Divine.'⁵

Studying the myths of the Mysteries it becomes obvious why these early Christians resorted to such a desperate explanation. Although no single Pagan myth completely parallels the story of Jesus, the mythic motifs which make up the story of the Jewish godman had already existed for centuries in the various stories told of Osiris-Dionysus and his greatest prophets. Lets make a journey through the 'biography' of Jesus and explore some of these extraordinary similarities

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"Despite Christianity's claim that Jesus is the 'only begotten Son of God'," Osiris-Dionysus, in all his many forms, is also hailed as the Son of God, Jesus is the Son of God, yet equal with the Father. Dionysus is the 'Son of Zeus, in his full nature God, most terrible, although most gentle to mankind',⁷ Jesus is 'Very God of Very God'," Dionysus is 'Lord God of God born!'⁹

Jesus is God in human form, St John writes of Jesus as 'the Word made flesh',¹⁰ St Paul explains that 'God sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh,'¹¹ Dionysus was also known as Bacchus, hence the tide of Euripides' play The Bacchae, in which Dionysus is the central character, In this play, Dionysus explains that he has veiled his 'Godhead in a mortal shape' in order to make it 'manifest to mortal men'.¹²

He tells his disciples, 'That is why I have changed my " immortal form and taken the likeness of a man,'¹³

Like Jesus, in many of his myths the Pagan godman is born of a mortal virgin mother, In Asia Minor, Attis' mother is the virgin Cybele,¹⁴ In Syria, Adonis' virgin mother is called Myrrh, In Alexandria, Aion is born of the virgin Kore,¹⁵ In Greece, Dionysus is born of a mortal virgin Semele who wishes to see Zeus in all his glory and is mysteriously impregnated by one of his bolts of lightning.¹⁶

It was a popular tradition, recorded in the most quoted non-canonical text of early Christianity, that Jesus spent only seven months in Mary's womb.¹⁷ The Pagan historian Diodorus relates that Dionysus' mother Semele likewise was said to have also had only a seven-month pregnancy.¹⁸

Justin Martyr acknowledges the similarities between Jesus' virgin birth and Pagan mythology, writing:

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'In saying that the Word was born for us without sexual union as Jesus Christ our teacher, we introduce nothing beyond what is said of those called the Sons of Zeus.'¹⁹

Nowhere was the myth of the 'Son of God' more developed than in Egypt, the ancient home of the Mysteries. Even the Christian Lactantius acknowledged that the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus had 'arrived in some way at the truth, for on God the Father he had said everything, and on the Son'.²⁰ In Egypt, the Pharaoh had for thousands of years been regarded as an embodiment of the godman Osiris and praised in hymns as the Son of God.²¹ As an eminent Egyptologist writes,

'Every Pharaoh had to be the Son of God and a human mother in order that he should be the Incarnate God, the Giver of Fertility to his country and people.'²²

In many legends the great prophets of Osiris-Dionysus are also portrayed as saviours and sons of God. Pythagoras was said to be the son of Apollo and a mortal woman called Parthenis, whose name derives from the word parthenos, meaning 'virgin'.²³ Plato was also posthumously believed to be the son of Apollo.²⁴ Philostratus relates in his biography of Apollonius that the great Pagan sage was regarded as the 'Son of Zeus'. Empedocles was thought to be a godman and saviour who had come down to this world to help confused souls, becoming 'like a madman, calling out to people at the top of his voice and urging them to reject this realm and what is in it and go back to their own original, sublime, and noble world'.²⁵

Mythic motifs from the Mysteries even became associated with Roman Emperors who, for political reasons, cultivated legends about their divine nature which would link them to Osiris-Dionysus. Julius Caesar, who did / Page 37 / himself even believe in personal immortality²⁶ was hailed as 'God made manifest, the common saviour of human life'²⁷ His successor, Augustus, was likewise the 'saviour of the universal human race'²⁸ and even the tyrannical Nero is addressed on an altar piece as 'God the deliverer for ever'.²⁹

In 40 BCE, drawing on Mystery myths, the Roman poet and initiate Virgil wrote a mystical 'prophesy' that a virgin would give birth to a divine child.³⁰ In the fourth century CE Literalist Christians would claim that it foretold the coming of Jesus, but at the time this myth was interpreted as referring to Augustus, said to be the 'Son of Apollo', preordained to rule the Earth and bring peace and prosperity.³¹ In his biography of Augustus, Suetonius offers a cluster of 'signs' that indicated the Emperor's divine nature. One modern authority writes:

'They include some striking points of similarity to the gospel narratives of the birth of Christ. The senate is supposed, with ludicrous implausibility, to have decreed a ban on rearing male Roman babies in the year of Augustus' birth because of a portent indicating that a king of Rome had been born. On top of this slaughter of the innocents, we are offered an Annunciation: his mother Atia dreamed during a visit to the temple of Apollo that the god had visited his favour on her in the form of a snake; Augustus was born nine months later.'³²

An inscription written around the time that Jesus is supposed to have lived reads:

'This day has given the earth an entirely new aspect. The world would have gone to destruction had there not streamed forth from him who is now born a common blessing. Rightly does he judge who recognises in this birthday the beginning of life; now is that time ended when men pitied / Page 38 / themselves for being born. From no other day does the individual or the community receive such benefit as from this natal day, full of blessing to all. The Providence which rules over all has filled this man with such gifts for the salvation of the world as designate him as saviour for us and for the coming generations; of wars he will make an end, and establish all things worthily. By his appearing are the hopes of our forefathers fulfilled; not only has he surpassed the good deeds of earlier times, but it is impossible that one greater than he can ever appear. The birthday of God has brought to the world glad tidings that are bound up in him. From his birthday a new era begins.'³³

But this is not a Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus. It is not even a eulogy to the Mystery godman. It is in honour of Augustus. These mythic motifs were clearly so common by the first century BCE that they were used to fabricate legends politically helpful to a living Emperor.

Celsus catalogues numbers of figures to whom legend similarly attributes divine parentage and a miraculous birth, and accuses Christianity of clearly using Pagan myths 'in fabricating the story of Jesus' virgin birth'³⁴, He is disparaging of Christians who interpret this myth as historical fact and regards the notion that God could literally father a child on a mortal woman as plainly absurd.³⁵

Just as Christians celebrate the nativity of Jesus, initiates of the Mysteries celebrated the birth of Osiris-Dionysus, who was 'The wondrous babe of God, the Mystery'³⁶ and 'He of the miraculous birth'³⁷ (see plates 1 and 2). The Church father Hippolytus tells about the loud voice of the Hierophant of the Eleusinian Mysteries who, 'screaming', proclaims the divine birth.³⁸

Page 39

A modem Classicist writes:

'The mystic child at Eleusis was born of a maiden; these ancients made for themselves the sacred dogma "A virgin shall conceive and bear a son",³⁹ by night there was declared "Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given".'⁴⁰

On the birth of Osiris a voice was said to have proclaimed: 'The Lord of the all the Earth is born."⁴¹ An ancient Egyptian hymn proclaims: 'Thou divine man-child, King of the Earth, Prince of the Underworld.'⁴² Another glorious Egyptian poem, reminiscent of many Christian carols, exults:

He is born! He is born! O come and adore Him!

Life-giving mothers, the mothers who bore Him,

Stars of the heavens the daybreak adorning.

Ancestors, ye, of the Star of the Morning.

Women and Men, O come and adore Him,

Child who is born in the night.

He is born! He is born! O come and adore Him!

Dwellers in Duat,⁴³ be joyful before Him,

Gods of the heavens come near and behold Him,

People of Earth, O come and adore Him!

Bow down before Him, kneel down before Him,

King who is born in the night.

He is born! He is born! O come and adore Him!

Young like the Moon in its shining and changing,

Over the heavens His footsteps are ranging,

Stars never-resting and stars never-setting,

Worship the child of God's own begetting!

Heaven and Earth, O come and adore Him!

Bow down before Him, kneel down before Him!

Worship, adore Him, fall down before Him!

God who is born in the night.⁴⁴

Page 48

" 'The power of effecting miracles of this kind was achieved by Empedocles of Agrigentum, Epimenides the Cretan, and Abaris the Hyperborean, and these they performed in many places.'⁹⁵

In the Gospel of John, Jesus miraculously helps his disciples land a large catch of fish.⁹⁶ This supernatural feat was also performed by Pythagoras in a legend recorded by Porphyry⁹⁷ Pythagoras miraculously predicted the exact number of fish that would be caught, but the story does not record what this number was. In the gospel account Jesus makes no such prediction, but we are told that the catch numbers exactly 153 fish. This seems on the face of it to be an irrelevant fact that the gospel writer included just for dramatic colour. But scholars have concluded that it is mentioned deliberately and is highly significant.⁹⁸

It is likely that the number of fish that Pythagoras predicted would be caught was precisely 153. The Pythagoreans were renowned for their knowledge of mathematics and regarded 153 as a sacred number.⁹⁹ It is used in a mathematical ratio which Archimedes called 'the measure of the fish' to produce the mystical symbol of the vesica piscis or 'sign of the fish' - the intersection of two circles which yields a fish- like shape. This was an ancient Pythagorean symbol that was used by early Christians to represent their faith. The fact that this mystical fish symbol can be produced from the number of fish that were caught in the account of Jesus' miracle strongly suggests it has been adapted from the original miracle of Pythagoras and that this miracle story encoded sacred geometrical formulae.'¹⁰⁰

Page 49

The sign of the fish is widely used today as a symbol of Christianity, but originated in Pagan sacred geometry. Two circles, symbolic of spirit and matter, are brought together in a sacred marriage. When the circumference of one touches the centre of the other they combine to produce the fish shape known as the vesica piscis. The ratio of height to length of this shape is 153:265, a formula known to Archimedes in the third century BCE as the 'measure of the fish'. It is a powerful mathematical tool, being the nearest whole number approximation of the square root of three and the controlling ratio of the equilateral triangle.

Pythagoras' disciple Empedocles was another wandering wonder-worker. Like Pythagoras and Jesus, he was a self- proclaimed godman, announcing himself to the people of Acragas as 'an immortal god, no longer a mortal'. People followed him in droves, adorning him with ribbons and asking for miracles.¹⁰¹ Like Jesus, he was said to have knowledge of the future. Like Jesus, he taught spiritual truths and cured sickness. He was known as 'The Wind Stiller' and, like Jesus, had the ability to control the wind and rain^.l02 He assured his disciples that, as a result of what he would teach them, they would be able to fetch from the Underworld the life force of a man who had died.lm Empedocles himself was said to have raised back to life a woman who had been dead for 30 days, just as Jesus was said to have raised Lazarus 500 years later.¹⁰⁴

Page 50

Apollonius of 1YaDa was another wandering godman who healed the sick,. predicted the future and raised the dead.l~ Although not physically present, he was said to have brought back to life the daughter of a Roman consul in exactly the same way as Jesus is said to have brought back to life the daughter of Jairus, a president of the synagogue, without even visiting her.'O6 Like Jesus, Apollonius also exorcised eTil spirits. He even describes witnessing a feeding miracle similar to Jesus' 'feeding of the five thousand', a supernatural feat which Celsus tells us is an 'illusion' performed by many holy men.IO? Yet, like Jesus, who claims that a prophet is never recognized in his own country, 11M the divine men of Pagan legends are commonly represented as rejected by their homeland. Apollonius of 1Yana writes in a letter, 'What wonder is it if, while other men consider me equal to God, my native place, so far, ignores me?'I09

The gospels tell us that on one occasion Jesus exorcized a man of demons who called themselves 'Legion', because there were 'about 2,000 of them'. These demons are cast by Jesus into a large herd of pigs which rush over the edge of a hillside and are drowned.llo Exactly the same motif is found in the rites of the Mysteries at Eleusis.111 As part of the purification ceremony before initiation, some 2,000 initiates all bathed in the sea with young pigS.112 This bathing ritual banished all evil into the pigs, which were then sacrificed, as a symbol of the initiates' own impurities, by being chased over a chasm. 113

Even the Pentecostal miracle of 'speaking in tongues' is prefigured by Pagan myth. After Jesus' death the disciples found themselves miraculously speaking in strange tongues

which others heard as their own native language.¹¹⁴ The same phenomenon was reported centuries earlier at Trophonius and Delos, where the oracular priestesses seemed to some to speak unintelligibly, while other witnesses heard them speaking in

their own differing mother tongues.¹¹⁵ Burkert, one of the foremost modem classical scholars, asserts that these Pagan and Christian miracles 'have justly been compared'.¹¹⁶ Christians asserted that Jesus' claim to being the one and / Page 51 / Only Son of God was proven by his miracles. To Celsus this was plainly ridiculous. He tells us, 'Miracles and wonders have indeed occurred everywhere and in all times,' and lists a number of Pagan sages and godmen renowned as wonder- workers.¹¹⁷ The standard Christian response to such Pagan critics was to claim that whilst Jesus' miracles were a sign of his divinity, Pagan miracles were the works of the Devil. Celsus replies indignantly:

Page 113

Gnostic writings are full of figures from Greek mythology and concepts from Pagan philosophy, astrology and magic." The Books of the Saviour, for example, states that leou (the Supreme God) has the assistance of five other Great Rulers -

the Pagan deities Kronos, Ares, Hermes, Aphrodite and Zeus.U

Gnostic texts also mix together Pagan and Jewish mythological motifs. A Gnostic text called Baruch presents a synthesis of Pagan astrology and the Jewish concept of angels, God the Father creates 12 angels who circle and govern the universe, as do the signs of the Pagan zodiac.'7 The text uses the Jewish name for God, 'Elohim', but equates Elohim with the Greek Zeus. It describes Elohim choosing as a prophet the Pagan hero HeracleslB and even calls God 'Priapus', another name for Dionysus, claiming,

'The Good is Priapus who was created before there was anything; he is called Priapus because he pre- fabricated everything. For this reason he is erected in every temple, is honoured by all creation.n9

Page 114

Hippolytus tells us of a group of Gnostic Christians called the Naassenes who claimed to teach a philosophy that underlies all mythologies - Pagan, Jewish and Christian.30 The Naassenes saw Jesus as identical to the mythical figure of the young dying sen of the Great Mother they called 'the many shaped Attis'.3! This figure was also known in their hymns as Adonis, Osiris, Pan, Bacchus and Shepherd of White Stars, - an; of ~hich are names for Osiris-Dionysus!32 Not only did these Gnostic Christians see Jesus as identical to Osiris-Dionysus, but Hippolytus also claims they were actually initiates in the Pagan Mysteries. He writes:

'It is said, they were all initiated into the Mysteries of the Great Mother, because they found that the whole Mystery of rebirth was taught in these rites.'33

The Great Mother goddess was a towering figure who dominated the ancient world. In Egypt she was known as Isis and in Greece as Demeter. She was the mother or sister or spouse of Osiris-Dionysus or often, in that magical way that only myth allows, all three.

When we explored the Pagan Mysteries we did not investigate the nature of the goddess very deeply, because we were looking for parallels between Paganism and Christianity, and orthodox Christianity does not have a goddess. It has only God the Father, God the Son and a rather vague androgynous God the Holy Spirit. Gnostic mythology included a more natural and balanced Holy Trinity of God the Father, God the Son and the Mother goddess Sophia.3'

In Gnostic texts the goddess is called by many names, including' All-Mother', 'Mother of the Living', 'Shining Mother', 'the Power Above', 'the Holy Spirit'35 and 'She of the Left-hand', as the complement of Christ who is 'Him of

Ithe Right-hand'.'"

Like the Pagan goddess, as well as being a divine heavenly i

being, Sophia is portrayed in Gnostic myth as a tragic figure. j She searches desperately for her redeemer/brother lover

Page 115

Jesus in the same way that the Egyptian goddess Isis searches the world for her redeemerfbrotherflover Osiris. The Gnostics poetically imagined that 'all ,watery substances' were tears shed by Sophia. In so doing theY:fere echoing the Pagan sage Empedocles, who five centuries previously had described all water as the tears of the goddeSs Persephone.a,

Sophia was so important to spme Gnostics that they taught that it was only in the Out:er Mysteries that the Eucharist celebrated the passion of Jesus. For the 'spiritual' Christians initiated into the Inner Mysteries, the Eucharist recalled the passion and suffering of the goddess. Sophia!38

THE GOD OF PLATO.

As we have already discussed, although the Pagan sages talked of gods and goddesses they maintained a completely mystical and transcendent understanding of the supreme God. Since the time of Plato, they had criticized viewing God as a divine 'personality'. The supreme God of the Pagan Mysteries was an ineffable Oneness beyond all qualities, which could not be described in words.a. This abstract and mystical conception of God was also adopted by the Gnostics. God was not seen as some sort of big person in the sky, but was understood as the Mind of the Universe which expresses itself through all beings.40

This was not the picture of God held by Literalist Christians. Their God was Jehovah, the god of the Jews, who the Old Testament reveals as a partisan, capricious and sometimes tyrannical tribal deity.

In the same way that Plato had attacked the traditional Greek picture of God as the domineering Zeus, so the Gnostics attacked this traditional Jewish picture of God,4! teaching that Jehovah was in reality only the image of the true God. The Gnostic sage Valentinus used Plato's term 'demiurge'42 to describe Jehovah, signifying him to be a subordinate divine being who serves as the instrument of the true God.43 Jehovah was pictured as a presumptuous lesser

Page 62

"To this point, we have referred to the community of the Nephilim gods as being the Elohim, by which name they were collectively known in the Canaanite and Hebrew traditions. Now we are going further back in time to the world of ancient Sumer, where the collective term for the divine Lofty Ones was Anunnaki,¹ which meant 'Heaven came to Earth' (An- unna-ki).² In the Sumerian era, the Grand Assembly of the Anunnaki met at the Temple of Nippur.³ This was the Court of the Most High - the prototype of the Court attended by Jehovah in the Old Testament's Psalm 82 - and its recorded president was the supreme Lord of the Sky, the great Anu."

Page 48

"In the Gospel of John, Jesus miraculously helps his disciples land a large catch of fish.⁹⁶ This supernatural feat was also performed by Pythagoras in a legend recorded by Porphyry⁹⁷ Pythagoras miraculously predicted the exact number of fish that would be caught, but the story does not record what this number was. In the gospel account Jesus makes no such prediction, but we are told that the catch numbers exactly 153 fish. This seems on the face of it to be an irrelevant fact that the gospel writer included just for dramatic colour. But scholars have concluded that it is mentioned deliberately and is highly significant.⁹⁸

It is likely that the number of fish that Pythagoras predicted would be caught was precisely 153. The Pythagoreans were renowned for their knowledge of mathematics and regarded 153 as a sacred number.⁹⁹ It is used in a mathematical ratio which Archimedes called 'the measure of the fish' to produce the mystical symbol of the vesica piscis or 'sign of the fish' - the intersection of two circles which yields a fish- like shape. This was an ancient Pythagorean symbol that was used by early Christians to represent their faith. The fact that this mystical fish symbol can be produced from the number of fish that were caught in the account of Jesus' miracle strongly suggests it has been adapted from the original miracle of Pythagoras and that this miracle story encoded sacred geometrical formulae.'^{100 ..."}

Page 367

The defination of the (same) year as ending a period of 1530 years - numerically ten times the number of fishes symbolising the gathering in of mankind for the kingdom of heaven - from the 1st year of the Messiah's ministry

Page 51

"Jesus surrounds himself with 12 disciples. This is usually taken to be symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel. This notion of 12 tribes, however, is itself a symbolic reference to the 12 signs of the zodiac in Babylonian astrology, which the Jews adopted whilst in exile in Babylon.¹¹⁹ The zodiac was an extremely important symbol in the Pagan world. Osiris- Dionysus is symbolically represented as the still spiritual centre of the turning wheel of change represented by the 12 signs. As Mithras, Dionysus, Aion and Helios, he is often depicted at the centre of the circling zodiac.¹²⁰ During the initiation ceremony in the Mysteries of Mithras 12 disciples surrounded the godman, just as the 12 disciples surrounded Jesus. The Mithraic disciples were dressed up to represent the 12 signs of the zodiac and circled the initiate, who represented Mithras himself

Page 24

"A manifestly artificial signal-even if it were as boring as lists of prime numbers, or the digits of 'pi' - would imply that 'intelli-gence' wasn't unique to the Earth and had evolved elsewhere. The nearest potential sites are so far away that signals would take many years in transit. For this reason alone, transmission would be primarily one-way. There would be time to send a me~sured response, but no scope for quick repartee!

Any remote beings who could communicate with us would have some concepts of mathematics and logic that paralleled our own. And they would also share a knowledge of the basic particles and forces that govern our universe. Their habitat may be very different (and the biosphere even more different) from ours here on Earth; but they, and their planet, would be made of atoms just like those on Earth. For them, as for us, the most important particles would be protons and electrons: one electron orbiting a proton makes a hydrogen atom, and electric currents and radio transmitters involve streams of electrons. A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence' able and motivated to transmit radio signals. All the basic forces and natural laws would be the same. Indeed, this uniformity - without which our universe would be a far more baffling place - seems to extend to the remotest galaxies that astronomers can study. (Later chapters in this book will, however, speculate about other 'universes', forever beyond range of our telescopes, where different laws may prevail.)

Clearly, alien beings wouldn't use metres, kilograms or seconds. But we could exchange information about the ratios of two masses (such as thc ratio of proton and electron masses) or of two lengths, which are 'pure numbers' that don't depend on what units are used: the statement that one rod is ten times as long as another is true (or false) whether we measure / Page 25 / lengths in feet or metres or some alien units

lengt,hs in feet or metres or some alien units. As Richard Feynman noted, he could tell extraterrestrials that he was 'seventeen billion hydrogen atoms high' and they should understand him.

Some 'intelligences' could exist with rio intellectual affinity to us whatsoever. But any beings who transmitted a si~al to us must have achieved some mastery over their physical surroundings. If they had any powers of reflection, they would surely share Qur curiosity about the cosmic 'genesis event' from which we've all emergcd. They would be likely to be interested in how our universe is structured into stars and galaxies, what it contains, how it is expanding, and its eventual destiny. These things would be part of the common culture that we would share with any aliens. They would note, as we do, that a few key numbers are crucial to our shared cosmic environment.

Six of these numbers are the theme of the present book. They determine key features of our universe: how it expands; whether planets, stars and galaxies can form; and whether there can be a 'chemistry' propitious for evolution. Moreover, the nature of our universe is remarkably sensitive to these numbers. If you imagine setting up a universe by adjusting six dials, then the tuning must be precise in order to yield a universe that could harbour life. Is this providence? Is it coincidence? Are these numbers the outcome of a 'theory of everything' that uniquely fixes them? None of these interpre- tations seems compelling. Instead, I believe that the apparent 'tuning' intimates something even more remarkable: that our

observable universe - all we can see out to the limits of our

telescopes - is just one part of an ensemble, among which there is even a diversity of physical laws. This is speculation, but it is compatible with the best theories we have."

Page 193

Anderson's.constitutians of the Freemasons (1723) comments:

Page193

"The centre of Solomon's courtyard contained in a perfect cube, the ' holy of holies' the solid gold Oracle' encrusted in Jewels. The inner / Page194 ...

temple was a marvel of courtyards and balconies, adorned with 1,453 magnificently sculpted Parisian-marble columns, 2,906 decorated pilasters and statues of stone and metal. The buildings and courtyards could hold an estimated gathering of 300,000.

Anderson's.constitutians of the Freemasons (1723) comments:

. . . the finest structures of Tyre and Sidon could not be compared with the EterrialGod's Temple atJerusalem. . . there were employed 3,600 Princes, or 'Master Masons', to conduct the work according to Solomon's directions, with 80,000 hewers of stone in the mountains ('Pellow Craftsmen'), and 70,000 labourers, in all 153,600, besides the levy under Adoniram to work in the mountains of Lebanon by turns with the Sidonians, viz 30,000 being in all 183,600.

According to the Biblical account, Chiram returned home following completion of the temple, although according to A. E. Waite (Mew Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry):

The legend of the Master Builder is the greatest allegory of Masonry. It happens that this figurative story is grounded on the fact of a personality mentioned in Holy Scripture, but this historical background is of the accident and not of the essence; the significance is in the allegory and not in any point of history which may lie behind it.

Page 152

had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.

And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

And he doth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by means of those miracles which he had power to ~o in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword and did live.

And he had power to give life unto .the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of the name.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man and his number is six hundred threescore and six.

Author Peter Lorie, in his book Revelation (pp. 160--6), provides an unusual and interesting interpretation to these words:

Perhaps the number 666 and the extraordinary verse in Revelation concerned with the beast may have nothing to do with evil. . . In almost all non-Christian religions the number 6 is not seen as bad. In the Kabbalah, the secret Jewish mystical tradition, it is regarded as the perfection of numbers, it relates to the six days of creation, and to the six letters of the Jewish name of God, the six orders of angels, the six heavenly bodies, and so on. In the Hebrew Gematria the number 666 does not signify anything particularly evil, but means a MESSIAH - an individual who has a particularly divine message to relate.. ..the word apocalypse actually means A PROPHEnc

DISCLOSURE, A REVEALING OF THE TRU1H . . . We might therefore consider

the possibility that the apocalyptic animal numbered 666 might actually be human, and one who brings a revelation, A MESSIAH (who could be an anti-Christ, insofar as he would not preach the old word / Page 153 / of God but a new word). Thus, our new me~siah could be a GOOD messiah and still be an anti-Christ. . . Of course he will 'blaspheme' because he will be against conventional Christianity but still preach the word of God (my italics). .

Could the decoding of Egyptian treasures, from the tomb of Tutankhamun, shed light on the undoubted allegory of the Book of Revelation? (Italics in this section refer to quotations from the verses in Revelation quoted above.)

The beast. . . was like unto a leopard with the feet of a bear. . .

See plate 6a and b, which shows Lord Pacal as Two Faces, the

god of evil and darkness. He was god of the north, who was part-

bear and part-tiger.

. . . and his mouth as the mouth of a lion. . .

See the alabaster lion jar (plate 29b) and the carving of Tonatiuh on The Amazing Lid of Palenque (plate 29a). .

And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death, and his deadly wound was healed; and all the world wondered after the. beast.

Tutankhamun was wounded to the head and lives on as the star

Orion. Lorie's interpretation of this point is that 'The messiah evidently dies; but after his death, his memory remains alive, and some bad is put right (healed), the world continuing to wonder at him . . . The messiah touches the whole world with his message,

just as we might expect a messiah to do . . . and then we learn that

. . . there will in fact be another messiah, who will come after the first has died, and will, so to speak, bring the first again to public awareness.'

It seems that this second messiah refers to Lord Pacal.

And he does great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down to earth

from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.

See plate 9c. Lord Pacal told how Xiuhtechutli, god of the east,

carried two sticks for making fire on earth. The decoding of the

Mural of Bonampak (plate 3) shows Xiuhtechutli (Xipe Totec) on

stage with his sticks, bowing to the audience.

And he deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by means of those miracles"

Page 51

"Jesus surrounds himself with 12 disciples. This is usually taken to be symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel. This notion of 12 tribes, however, is itself a symbolic reference to the 12 signs of the zodiac in Babylonian astrology, which the Jews adopted whilst in exile in Babylon.¹¹⁹ The zodiac was an extremely important symbol in the Pagan world. Osiris- Dionysus is symbolically represented as the still spiritual centre of the turning wheel of change represented by the 12 signs. As Mithras, Dionysus, Aion and Helios, he is often depicted at the centre of the circling zodiac.¹²⁰ During the initiation ceremony in the Mysteries of Mithras 12 disciples surrounded the godman, just as the 12 disciples surrounded Jesus. The Mithraic disciples were dressed up to represent the 12 signs of the zodiac and circled the initiate, who represented Mithras himself.¹²¹

The circle of 12 around a central one derives from sacred geometry and for the followers of Pythagoras contained profound mystical meaning. Pythagoreans, who were renowned in the ancient world for their knowledge of mathematics, conceived of God as a perfect sphere.¹²² The ancients discovered that if a sphere is surrounded by others of exactly the same dimensions, so that all the spheres are / Page 52 / in contact with each other, the central sphere will be surrounded by exactly 12 others.¹²³ The image of the godman and his 12 disciples encodes such teachings from sacred geometry.

In the gospels Jesus is not at first recognized by his disciples as the Son of God, but later is transfigured before Peter, John and James, revealing himself in all his divine glory.'" Likewise in Euripides' The Bacchae, Dionysus first appears to his disciples as a wandering holy man, but later is gloriously transfigured. When they perceive his true divinity, they exclaim:

'But look! Who is this, rising above the palace door? It is he Dionysus come himself, no more disguised

As mortal, but in the glory of his divinity!'^l25

To his disciples, Jesus is the saviour. Dionysus is likewise 'He who came to bring salvation'.¹²⁶ His followers call to him: 'Come, thou saviour.'¹²⁷ In The Bacchae they rejoice:

'We are saved! Oh, what a joy to hear your Bacchic call ring out!

We were all alone, deserted; you have come, and we rejoice.'^l28

During his mission Jesus is attacked for his seemingly licentious behaviour. In the Gospel of Luke he reproaches 'the people of this generation' for first condemning John the Baptist who came 'neither eating bread nor drinking wine' for being 'possessed' and then also condemning the 'Son of Man' who comes 'eating and drinking' for being 'a glutton and a drinker, a friend of tax gatherers and sinners',¹²⁹ The followers of Dionysus were likewise often accused of both possession and licentious behaviour. Their 'orgies' were infamous, although in fact these were no more sexual affairs than were the comparable 'love feasts' celebrated by early

/ Page 54 /shouted the praises of Dionysus and waved bundles of branches. ¹³⁸ In this way, like Jesus entering Jerusalem, Dionysus rode in triumph to his death.

The mythical motif of 'riding on a donkey' is often taken as a sign of humility. It also has a more mystical meaning, however. To the ancients the donkey typified lust, cruelty and wickedness. It symbolically represented the lower 'animal' self : which must be overcome and subdued by an initiate of the Mysteries. Lucius Apuleius wrote a story called The Golden Ass, which was an allegorical tale of initiation. In it Lucius is transformed into a donkey through his own foolishness and endures many adventures which represent stages of initiation. At his final initiation he is transformed back into a human being. This story is symbolic of the initiate being overcome by his lower nature and then, through initiation into the Mysteries, rediscovering his true identity.¹³⁹

The Egyptian goddess Isis tells Lucius that the donkey is the most hateful to her of all beasts.¹⁴⁰ This is because it is sacred to the god Set, who in Egyptian mythology is the murderer of Osiris.¹⁴¹ Plutarch recorded an Egyptian festival in which donkeys were triumphantly pushed over cliffs in vengeance for Osiris' murder. Set is symbolic of the initiate's lower self, which slays the spiritual Higher Self (Osiris) and must be metaphorically put to death for the spiritual Self to be reborn.

 The donkey was also a common symbol of the lower 'animal' nature in the Greek Mysteries of Dionysus. A vase painting represents a ridiculous donkey with an erect phallus dancing among the disciples of Dionysus.¹⁴² A design on a wine pitcher shows donkeys having sex.¹⁴³ In another design a pilgrim is shown stopping to pull the tail of a donkey.¹⁴⁴ A favourite representation of afterlife sufferings in the Underworld was the figure of a man condemned to forever plait a rope which his donkey continually eats away, symbolic of the lower self constantly trying to eat away the spiritual achievements of the Higher Self.¹⁴⁵ The figure of the godman riding in triumph on a donkey symbolized that he was master of his lower 'animal' nature.

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According to the gospels, Jesus is an innocent and just man who, at the instigation of the Jewish high priests, is hauled before the Roman governor Pilate and condemned to die on spurious charges. Exactly the same mythological motif is found five centuries earlier in Euripides' play The Bacchae, about Dionysus. Like Jesus in Jerusalem, Dionysus is a quiet stranger with long hair and a beard who brings a new religion. In the gospels, the Jewish high priests don't believe in Jesus and allege that 'His teachings are causing disaffection amongst the people.'¹⁴⁶ They plot to bring about his death. In The Bacchae, King Pentheus is a tyrannical ruler who does not believe in Dionysus. He berates him for bringing 'this new disease which fouls the land' and sends out his men to capture the innocent godman, announcing:

'And once you catch him, he shall be stoned to death.

He'll wish he'd never brought his Bacchic rites to Thebes.'¹⁴⁷

Like the Jewish high priests who are appalled at Jesus' blasphemous claim to be the Son of God,¹⁴⁸ King Pentheus rants in anger at stories of Dionysus' divine parentage:

'Whatever the man may be, is not his arrogance

An outrage? Has he not earned a rope around his neck?'¹⁴⁹

Like Jesus, Dionysus passively allows himself to be caught and imprisoned. The guard who apprehends him tells King Pentheus: / Page 56 /

'We hunted him, and here he is. But Sir, we found

The beast was gentle; made no attempt to run away,

Just held his hands out to be tied; didn't turn pale,

But kept his florid colour, smiling, telling us .

To tie him up and run him in; gave us no trouble

At all, just waited for us. Naturally I felt

A bit embarrassed. "You'll excuse me, Sir," I said,

I don't want to arrest you; it's the king's command."¹⁵⁰

The guard relates the wondrous things he had witnessed Dionysus perform and warns King Pentheus: 'Master, this man has come here with a load of miracles.' The king, however, proceeds to interrogate Dionysus who, like Jesus before Pilate, will not bow to his authority. When Pilate reminds Jesus that he has the power to crucify him, Jesus replies, 'You would have no authority at all over me, had it not been granted you from above.'^l5l Likewise Dionysus answers the threats of Pentheus with: 'Nothing can touch me that is not ordained.'^l52 Like Jesus, who said of his persecutors, 'They know not what they are doing,'^l53 Dionysus tells Pentheus, 'You know not what you are doing, nor what you are saying, nor who you are.'^l54

As Jesus is led away to crucifixion, he warns the crowd not to weep for him, but for themselves and their children, who will suffer for the crime of his execution, saying,

'For the days are surely coming when they will say, "Happy are the barren wombs that never bore a child, the breasts that never fed one." Then they will say to the mountains, "Fall on us" and to the hills, "Cover us Up"¹⁵⁵

/ Page 57 /As he is led away, Dionysus, likewise, threatens divine vengeance, announcing:

'But I warn you: Dionysus who you say is dead,

Will come in swift pursuit. to avenge this sacrilege.'¹⁵⁶

Many of the great philosophers of the Mystery tradition were also 'just men' who suffered an unjust death at the hands of tyrannical authorities. One such is Socrates who, like Jesus, was accused of heresy. Under Athenian law the penalty for this 'crime' was death, unless the defendant offered an alternative penalty acceptable to the judges. Like Pilate, who offers to set Jesus free because it is a custom to release one prisoner at the Passover, the Athenian authorities hoped that Socrates would escape death on a technicality by paying a fine and going quietly into exile. ¹⁵⁷ Like Jesus, refusing to compromise with his persecutors and seeming to deliberately court his own death, Socrates offered to pay a single mina, an insultingly small sum, which forced the authorities to impose the death sentence.¹⁵⁸

Some of Socrates" followers offered to pay 'thirty pieces of silver' on his behalf, which was a betrayal of Socrates' own desire to remain true to his principles.¹⁵⁹ This motif appears in the gospel story as the 30 pieces of silver paid to Judas to betray Jesus. Socrates is executed by drinking a cup of poison. In the garden of Gethsemane, when he is contemplating his forthcoming execution, Jesus prays, 'My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass me by.'¹⁶⁰ Socrates was fearless before death for he had been told in a dream that three days after his death he would be reborn.¹⁶¹ Jesus, likewise, goes to his death with confidence and foretells that after three days he will be resurrected.¹⁶²

Jesus' behaviour at his trial is exactly what would be expected of a sage of the Mysteries.¹⁶³ He is not afraid to openly condemn those in authority for hypocrisy. Likewise, Cynic and Stoic philosophers were renowned for being / Page 58 / 'hostile to authority and resistant to discipline, disdainful of kings, magistrates or public officials'.¹⁶⁴ There were numbers of such philosophers whose lack of respect for Roman authority earned them martyrdom which, like Jesus, they willingly accepted.¹⁶⁵ The Stoic sage Epictetus writes: 'Take my body, or property, but do not try to rule my moral purpose.'¹⁶⁶ He describes a philosopher facing execution announcing to an Emperor: 'You will do your part and I mine, which is to go without complaint.'¹⁶⁷ As early as the fourth century BCE, Plato had laid down the expected fate of the 'just man', writing, 'The just man will have to endure the lash and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he will be crucified.'¹⁶⁸ The gospels portray the 'just man' Jesus as conforming to these expectations.

The 'just man unjustly accused' was so familiar a figure in the ancient world that Celsus ridicules the Christians for trying to claim that Jesus was in any way unique. With wit and biting satire, he suggests that if they wanted to create a new religion they would have been better to have based it around one of the many famous Pagan sages who also 'died a hero's death', writing:

'It would have been better had you in your zest for a new teaching formed your religion around one of the men of old who died a hero's death and was honoured for it - someone who at least was already subject of a myth. You could have chosen Heracles or Asclepius, or if these were too tame, there was always Orpheus, who as every one knows, was good and holy and yet died a violent death. Or had he already been taken? Well, then you had Anaxarchus, a man who looked death right in the eye when being beaten and said to his persecutors, "Beat away. Beat the pouch of Anaxarchus; for it is not him you are beating." But I recall that some philosophers have already claimed him as their master. Well, what of Epictetus? When his leg was being twisted he / Page 59/ smiled and said with complete composure, "You are breaking it." And when it was broken, he smiled and said, "1 told you so." Your God should have uttered such a saying when he was being punished!'¹⁶⁹

Before his death, Jesus celebrates a. symbolic 'Last Supper' of bread and wine. In The Bacchae, Euripides calls bread and wine the 'two powers which are supreme in human affairs', the one substantial and preserving the body, the other liquid and intoxicating the mind.¹⁷⁰ The ancients credited the Mystery godman with bringing to humanity the arts of cultivating corn and the vine to produce bread and wine.

In the gospels, Jesus proclaims: 'I am the bread of Life' and during the Last Supper he breaks bread and offers it to his disciples, saying, 'Take this, this is my body.'¹⁷¹ The Mystery godman was, likewise, symbolically associated with bread and with the corn from which it comes.¹⁷² Osiris was said to have met his death by being torn limb from limb, which is symbolic of the corn being threshed to produce flour. The bones of the dead Adonis were said to be ground on a mill then scattered to the wind.¹⁷³

In the gospels Jesus also proclaims: '1 am the true vine'¹⁷⁴ and during the Last Supper he offers his disciples a cup of wine, saying, 'This is my blood.'¹⁷⁵ Like Jesus, Dionysus was also associated with the vine and with wine. He was known as the 'god of wine' and in some myths he dies by being dismembered, which is symbolic of the grapes being trodden to produce wine.

By partaking of the bread and wine offered by Jesus, his disciples symbolically eat his body and drink his blood, so communing with the Christ. The idea of divine communion through eating the god is a rite so ancient that it is found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in which the deceased are portrayed as eating the gods and so imbuing their powers.¹⁷⁶ The ritual of eating and drinking the 'body' and 'blood' of / Page 60 / Jesus is celebrated by Christians as the Eucharist.¹⁷⁷ Such a 'holy communion' was also practised in the Mysteries, as a means of becoming one with Osiris-Dionysus.¹⁷⁸ The uninitiated who misunderstood these rites accused the Mysteries of practising cannibalism - exactly the same accusation that was later levelled at early Christians who celebrated the Eucharist.^l79

Pagan practices which parallel the Christian communion appalled Justin Martyr, who complains that when Jesus told his disciples, to drink of the cup, saying, 'This is my blood,' he gave this ritual to them alone, yet 'the wicked demons in imitation, in the Mysteries of Mithras, also delivered the command to do so'. He relates with horror that in these Mysteries, as in the Christian Eucharist, mystic formulas are pronounced over bread and a cup which are then given to one about to be initiated.¹⁸⁰ As in Christianity, participants in the Mysteries of Mithras had to undergo a long period of preparation before being allowed to partake in the 'holy communion'.¹⁸¹ When they did, they were offered a sacrament of water mixed with wine and bread or consecrated wafers bearing the sign of a cross!¹⁸² No wonder poor old Justin Martyr found this Pagan holy communion so disturbing.

An inscription reads:

'He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation.'¹⁸³

This may sound like a Biblical quotation from Jesus, but it is actually the Mystery godman Mithras speaking! It is, however, uncannily similar to a passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus likewise announces:

'Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have not life in yourselves.¹⁸⁴ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood will live in me and I in him.'¹⁸⁵

/ Page 61 / The holy communion in the Mysteries of Mithras was developed from older rites which used consecrated bread and water mixed with the intoxicating juice of a psychedelic plant called Haoma.¹⁸⁶ The Mysteries of Mithras replaced the Haoma, a plant unknown in the Occident, with the juice of the vine. Wine probably affected the ancients far more powerfully than it does us, however, for they seldom drank it unmixed with water. Plato enthuses about its revelationary power in the Mysteries of Dionysus,¹⁸⁷ writing, 'Rather the madness of the god than the sobriety of men.'¹⁸⁸

As one eminent Classicist writes, 'To drink wine in the rites of Dionysus is to commune with the god and take his power and physical presence into one's body.'¹⁸⁹ In the Christian rites of the Eucharist Jesus is said to symbolically become the wine drunk by the participant in the ritual. Likewise, Euripides tells us that Dionysus becomes the wine and is himself 'poured out' as an offering.¹⁹⁰ In some vase representations, bread and wine are shown before the idol of Dionysus (see plate 5).¹⁹¹ Just as in the Eucharist a Chnstian is given 'redemption' in the symbolic form of a wafer biscuit, in the Mysteries of Dionysus the initiate was presented with makaria ('blessedness') in the form of a cake.^l92

An inscription relates that in the Samothracian Mysteries the priest 'shall break and offer the food and pour out the cup to the initiate'.¹⁹³ Initiates of the Mysteries of Attis also had some form of communion, for they declared: 'I have eaten from the tambourine, I have drunk from the cymbal.' What they ate and drank from these sacred instruments is not recorded, but most likely it was also bread and wine.¹⁹⁴

From the time of Justin Martyr right up to the present day, Catholic Christians have believed that the bread and wine of the Eucharist literally become 'the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh',¹⁹⁵ Some initiates of the Mysteries seemed to have shared this rather strange literal interpretation of their 'holy communion'. The more enlightened initiate Cicero felt forced to explain to them that equating the god with corn and the vine was symbolic only. / Page 62 / Impatient with such foolishness, he writes, 'Is anybody so mad as to believe that the food which he eats is actually a god?'¹⁹⁶

Jesus is generally believed to have been crucified on a cross, but the word translated by 'cross' in the New Testament has a general rneaning of a 'stake'. It was the custom of the Jews to expose on a stake the bodies of those that they had stoned to death, as a warning to others.¹⁹⁷ In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter does not say that Jesus was crucified, but 'hung on a tree',¹⁹⁸ as does St Paul in his Letter to the Galatians.¹⁹⁹ The Church father Firmicus Matemus tells us that in the Mysteries of Attis a youthful image of the godman was tied to a pine tree ²⁰⁰ Adonis was known as 'He on the tree'.²⁰¹

In the Mysteries of Dionysus, a large bearded mask representing the godman was hung on a wooden pole (see plates 4 and 5).²⁰² Like Jesus, who at his crucifixion is given a crown of thorns, Dionysus was given a crown of ivy. Just as Jesus is dressed up in purple robes when he is ridiculed by the Roman soldiers, so Dionysus was also dressed in purple robes and initiates at Eleusis wore a purple sash wrapped around their bodies.²⁰³ Just before he dies Jesus is given wine mixed with gall to drink.²⁰⁴ Wine was ritually imbibed by celebrants in the Mysteries of Dionysus, and the Hierophant, who represented Dionysus himself, was given gall to drink.²⁰⁵

Jesus meets his death alongside two thieves, one of whom ascends with him to heaven, whilst the other goes to hell. A comparable mythical motif is found in the Mysteries. A common icon pictures two torchbearers either side of Mithras. One of these figures has his torch pointing upwards, symbolizing the ascent to heaven, and the other has his torch pointing downwards, symbolizing the descent to hell.²⁰⁶ In the Mysteries of Eleusis we also find two torchbearers with their torches pointing upwards and downwards respectively, standing either side of Dionysus, but this time they are / Page 63 / women.²⁰⁷ The torchbearers in the Mysteries of Mithras are thought to have developed from the earlier Greek mythical brothers Castor and Pollux. On alternate days, one of the brothers would be alive and the other dead. They represented the Higher Self and lower self, which cannot both be 'alive' at the same time. Castor and Pollux were known as 'The Sons of Thunder' - a title which, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus inexplicably gives to two of his disciples, the brothers James and John!²⁰⁸

In some myths it is Dionysus' adversary, representing the initiate's lower self, who dies the godman's death in his stead. In The Bacchae, King Pentheus sets out to kill Dionysus, but is himself lifted up on a tree.²⁰⁹ In a similar Sicilian myth, Dionysus' adversary King Lycurgus is crucified.²¹⁰

This suggests that whilst in some Mystery traditions Dionysus was hung on a tree, in others his fate was crucifixion. Perhaps initiates of the Mysteries of Dionysus built on the image of 'the just man crucified' suggested by Plato in order to bring about this development of the myth?²¹¹ Or perhaps Plato was referring to an already existing secret myth of initiation in which the godman was crucified?'²¹² In a chapter of one of his books actually entided 'Plato's Doctrine of the Cross', Justin Martyr acknowledges that the Pagan philosopher had centuries earlier taught the doctrine that the 'Son of God' was 'placed crosswise in the universe'.²¹³

The cross was a sacred symbol to the ancients. Its four arms represented the four elements of the physical world - earth, water, air and fire. The fifth element, spirit, was bound to materiality by these four elements. The figure of a man nailed to a four-armed cross would, therefore, naturally have signified the predicament of the initiate as a soul bound to a physical body. Plato refers to the desires of the body as nails that one by one fasten the soul to the body.²¹⁴ The four nails used to crucify a man through the hands and feet would have been symbolic of our sensual desires which attach the soul to the world of the four elements.

/ Page 64 / It seems incredible that Osiris-Dionysus could have been portrayed as meeting exactly the same death as Jesus, but this is what the evidence suggests. The Church father Arnobius is scandalized that in the Mysteries of Dionysus initiates passed around a holy cross.²¹⁵ On some vase representations the idol of Dionysus is shown hanging from a cross.²¹⁶ A sarcophagus of the second or third centuries CE from Rome pictures an aged disciple bringing the divine child Dionysus a large cross.²¹⁷ One modem scholar describes this cross as 'an intimation of the child's ultimately tragic fate'²¹⁸ (see plate 3).

From the same period comes the remarkable talisman which shows a crucified figure immediately recognizable as Jesus but who is actually Osiris-Dionysus (see front cover and plate 6). The inscription under this figure reads 'Orpheus- Bakkikos', which means 'Orpheus becomes a Bacchoi'. Orpheus was a great legendary prophet of Dionysus who was so respected that he was often regarded as the godman himself. A Bacchoi was an enlightened disciple of Dionysus who had become completely identified with the god. The talisman, therefore, represents Dionysus dying by crucifixion, symbolizing the initiate's mystical death to his lower nature and rebirth as a god.

We also have a seemingly strange piece of ancient graffiti carved behind a pillar in Rome sometime between 193 and 235 CE (see plate 7). It sketches a man with a donkey's head crucified on a cross, with the caption' Alexmenos worships his god'. This has been interpreted as a Pagan insult towards Christianity, but it is far more likely that it is a Dionysian representation of the crucifixion of the lower 'animal' nature, which, as we have already discussed, was symbolized by a donkey.²¹⁹

It is a remarkable fact that we have no representations of the crucified Jesus before the fifth century CE. If this piece of graffiti and the talisman of Orpheus are taken as references to Christianity, we are in the bizarre position of saying that the first portrayals of the crucifixion of Christ are a Pagan joke and a talisman in which Jesus is called Orpheus - both / Page 65 / of which date to centuries before any genuine Christian portrayals! This does not seem very credible. The simple and obvious solution to these puzzles is that in certain myths of Osiris-Dionysus, the godman was portrayed as meeting his death by crucifixion.

Christians believe that Jesus died for the sins of the world. In ancient Greece there was a tradition of making a particular individual into a 'scapegoat', who symbolically took on the sins of the people and was expelled from the city or put to death. Such an individual was called a pharmakos, which simply means 'magic man'²²⁰ His persecution was clearly a religious event, since before his death he was fed at public expense on especially pure foods and was clad in holy garments and wreathed with sacred plants.²²¹ Through his sacred sacrifice the sins of the city were banished.

Osiris-Dionysus was a sacred pharmakos, who, like Jesus, died to atone for the sins of the world.²²² The fate of a pharmakos was to be insulted, beaten and put to death,²²³ and those who walked the Sacred Way towards Eleusis to share in Dionysus' sacrificial death were likewise beaten, insulted and terrorized by masked men.²²⁴ In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus predicts a similar fate for the Son of Man: 'They will make fun of him and spit at him and whip him and kill him.²²⁵

St Paul writes: 'Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.'²²⁶ Jesus is portrayed as the sacrificial 'Lamb of God'. Christians talk of being 'born again' through being 'washed in the blood of the lamb'. Such metaphors echo the ancient Mysteries of Attis. These were bloody rites in which an animal was the sacrificial victim. In the modern world we do not see our own animals butchered for food, so this can seem a very primitive ritual. To those who regularly killed animals in order to eat, it would have seemed much less distasteful. In the rites of the Taurobolium, or bull-sacrifice, / Page 66 / a bull was slaughtered on a perforated platform, through which the blood poured down to bathe the initiate standing in a pit beneath. Afterwards the initiate was considered 'born again'. Poorer people made do with a Criobolium, in which a sheep was sacrificed, and were literally 'washed in the blood of the lamb'²²⁷

The Mysteries of Mithras, like Christianity, celebrated these sacrificial rites symbolically rather than literally. An icon of Mithras slaying a bull was used as an altar-piece, rather than enacting the actual sacrifice. This may seem a rather gruesome icon but, upon consideration, is less violent than the Christian altar-piece of a man being tortured to death on a cross.

'Thou hast saved us by shedding the eternal blood' reads an inscription - not to Jesus, but to Mithras,²²⁸ although centuries later Christians would express gratitude to their saviour god- man in exactly the same language. An anonymous Egyptian poet also adores his sacrificed and resurrecting saviour Osiris with words that could equally well be addressed to Jesus:

Have they sacrificed thee? Do they say that thou hast died for them? He is not dead! He lives for ever! He is alive more than they, for he is the mystic one of sacrifice. He is their Lord, living and young for ever!.²²⁹

Like Christianity, the Mysteries had a doctrine of 'original sin'. Plato teaches that the soul is banished into the body as a punishment for some unnamed ancient crime.²³⁰ According to Empedocles, we are wandering through the four elements to atone for guilt incurred in the divine world.²³¹ The Mysteries taught that the original sin was separation from God.²³² The sacrificial death of the godman, or the sacrificial animal he kills, represents the initiate's own symbolic 'death' to their lower 'animal' nature and rebirth into their divine nature, which unites them with God and so atones for this original crime.

Page 67

In the fourth century an anonymous author tells us that Christians and followers of the Mystery godman Attis were both struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities. This gave rise to bitter controversy betweeri the adherents of the rival religions.²³³ The Pagans contended that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of Attis and the Christians that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ.²³⁴

The Megalensia was a spring festival in the Mysteries of Attis which, like Easter, lasted for three days.²³⁵ During this time the myth of Attis was performed as a passion play, just as the story of Jesus was performed as a passion play in the Middle Ages. An effigy of the corpse of Attis was tied to a sacred pine-tree and decorated with flowers sacred to both Attis and his Syrian counterpart Adonis.²³⁶ It was then buried in a sepulchre.²³⁷ But like Jesus, on the third day Attis rose again.²³⁸ In the darkness of the night a light was brought to his open grave, while the presiding priest anointed the lips of the initiates with holy oil, comforting them with the words: 'To you likewise there shall come salvation from your trouble.'²³⁹ The mythologist Sir James Frazer writes:

'But when night had fallen, the sorrow of the worshippers was turned to joy. For suddenly a light shone in the darkness: the tomb was opened; the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest touched the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The resurrection of the god was hailed by his disciples as a promise that they too would issue triumphantly from the corruption of the grave. On the morrow, the twenty-fifth day of March, which was reckoned the vernal equinox, the divine resurrection was celebrated with a wild outburst of glee. At Rome, and probably elsewhere, / Page 68/ the celebration took the form of a carnival. It was the festival of Joy (Hilaria).²⁴⁰

According to an ancient and widespread Christian tradition Jesus died on 25 March, the same day that the resurrection of Attis was officially celebrated at Rome.²⁴¹ However, another ancient Christian tradition, reported by the Church father Lactantius, places the death of Christ on 23 March and his resurrection on 25 March, which coincides exactly with the death and resurrection of Attis.²⁴²

The Anthesteria, the spring festival of the Mysteries of Dionysus, was another three-day festival, of which one modem authority comments, 'A certain similarity with the sequence of Good Friday and Easter cannot be overlooked.²⁴³

Easter rites observed in Greece, Sicily and southern Italy still bear a striking resemblance to the Mystery rites of Adonis^.244 At the festival of Adonis the air was infused with the sweet aromas of incense and filled with loud lamentation at the death of the godman. The embalmed image of Adonis was then laid in a coffin and borne to his grave,²⁴⁵ but the faithful afterwards consoled themselves with the assurance that the godman was alive.²⁴⁶ The Pagan writer Lucian records:

'They make offerings to Adonis as to one dead, and the day after the morrow they tell the story that he lives.'²⁴⁷

In the gospels we are told that Jesus' corpse was 'wrapped in a linen sheet' and anointed with 'more than half a hundred weight of a mixture of myrrh and aloes'.²⁴⁸ According to Plutarch, a representation of Osiris was also wrapped with linen and anointed with myrrh.²⁴⁹ Likewise, in the Mysteries of Adonis an image of the corpse of the godman was washed, anointed with spices and wrapped around with linen or wool.²⁵⁰

After his death Jesus descends to hell, then resurrects on the third day. Plutarch tells us that Osiris, likewise, is said to /Page 69 / have descended to hell and then arisen from the dead on the third day.²⁵¹ An ancient Egyptian inscription promises an initiate that he will also be resurrected with his Lord: 'As truly as Osiris lives shall he live; as truly as Osiris is not dead shall he not die.'²⁵²

Having resurrected, Jesus ascends to heaven. The Church father Origen refers to Osiris as a young god, who was 'restored to life, and went up toheaven'.²⁵³ In the Mysteries of Adonis, initiates annually mourned the death of the godman with the shrill notes of the flute, weeping and beating of breasts, but on the third day he was believed to be resurrected and to ascend up to heaven in the presence of his worshippers.²⁵⁴ According to some myths acted out as part of the Mysteries of Dionysus, shortly after his death Dionysus also rose from the grave and ascended to heaven.²⁵⁵

In the Mysteries of Mithras initiates enacted a similar resurrection scene.²⁵⁶ Having accomplished his mission on Earth, Mithras was said to have ascended to heaven in a sun- chariot.²⁵⁷ Like Jesus, who sits at the right hand of the father after his ascension, Mithras was believed to have been enthroned by the God of Light as ruler of the world. Also like Jesus, Mithras was said to be waiting in heaven for the End of Time, when he would return to Earth to awaken the dead and pass judgement.²⁵⁸

Echoes of these mythological motifs are, once again, found in the legends of the sages of the Mysteries. Seneca tells us that, like Jesus, the philosopher Canus foretold that he would reappear three days after his death and did indeed return from the grave to one of his friends to 'discourse on the survival of the spirit'.²⁵⁹ Heraclides tells us that after a banquet to celebrate one of Empedocles' miracles, the great sage suddenly ascended to heaven accompanied by glorious celestial lights.²⁶⁰ It was said that Pythagoras descended to Hades in search of wisdom,²⁶¹ and after his death reappeared to his disciples and ascended into heaven.²⁶² The ritual sequence of death, descent into the Underworld and regeneration is known to have been an important analogy of / Page 70 / initiation in the Pythagorean Mysteries from the earliest times.

Given all these dying, resurrecting and ascending Pagan godmen and sages, it is not surprising to find Celsus indignant at Christian claims that Jesus is unique. He is amazed at the Christians' literal interpretation of what to him are obviously myths, writing,

'Is your belief based on the "fact" that this Jesus told in advance that he would rise again after his death? That your story includes his predictions of triumphing over the grave? Well, let it be so. Let's assume for the present that he foretold his resurrection. Are you ignorant of the multitudes who have invented similar tales to lead simple- minded hearers astray? It is said that Zamolix, Pythagoras' servant, convinced the Scythians that he had risen from the dead, having hidden himself away in a cave for several years, and what about Pythagoras himself in Italy - or Phampsinitus in Egypt? Now then, who else: What about Orpheus among the Odrysians, Protesilaus in Thessaly and above all Heracles and Theseus? But quite apart from all these risings from the dead, we must look carefully at the question of the resurrection of the body as a possibility given to mortals. Doubtless you will freely admit that these other stories are legends, even as they appear to me; but you will go on to say that your resurrection story, this climax to your tragedy, is believable and noble.'²⁶³

Like her divine son, Jesus' mother Mary is also said to have ascended bodily to heaven and is honoured as the 'Mother of God'. In the same way Semele, the mortal mother of Dionysus, is later raised up to heaven and honoured as an / Page 71 / immortal alongside her illustrious son.²⁶⁴

In Christianity, Mary takes on many of the roles of the Great Mother goddess of the Pagan Mysteries. Indeed, the Christian festival of the Assumption of the Virgin in August has ousted an ancient Pagan festival of the goddess.²⁶⁵ Statues of the Egyptian goddess Isis holding the divine child have been the models for many Christian representations of Mary and the baby Jesus (see plates 1 and 2). They are so like those of the Madonna and child that they have sometimes received the adoration of ignorant Christians. Statues of the black virgin, so highly venerated in certain French cathedrals during the Middles Ages, have proved upon examination to be basalt statues of Isis!²⁶⁶

Talking of the influence of the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis on Christianity, one authority writes:

'Her stately ritual, with its shaven and tonsured priests, its matins and vespers, its tinkling music, its baptism and aspersions of holy water, its solemn processions, its jewelled images of the mother god, presented many points of similarity to the pomps and ceremonies of Catholicism. And to Isis in her later character of patroness of Mariners the Virgin Mary perhaps owes her beautiful epithet of Stella Maris, "Star of the Sea", under which she is adored by tempest-tossed sailors.'²⁶⁷

It was a very early tradition in Christianity that Jesus' women followers, rather than the male disciples, were the first witnesses of the empty tomb and the resurrected Christ. In the original ending of Mark's gospel it is only Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome who see the risen Jesus - a tradition which the Pagan critic Celsus acknowledges.²⁶⁸

According to another early Christian tradition all three women are called Mary - Mary Magdalene, Jesus' companion, Mary his mother, and Mary her sister.²⁶⁹ In the / Page 72 / Gospel of John the same three Marys are pictured at the foot of the cross.²⁷⁰ The fact that we are given three Marys is a clear indication that we are in ancient mythological territory - the triple goddess Was a familiar figure in the Pagan world. At Eleusis she appears as Demeter, Persephone and Hecate. We find her appearing as the three fates, three charities and three graces.

Like Jesus, Dionysus is often associated with three women followers. When a new sanctuary of Dionysus was founded three priestesses called maenads would go there to establish the cult. Each one of them would assemble one of the three women choirs that helped celebrate the Mysteries.²⁷¹ The Oinotropio were three women disciples of Dionysus said to have the ability to miraculously turn water into wine at the festivals of the godman.²⁷² Amongst the most common of ancient sacred sculptures are representations of the cave of Pan, in which three women are being led into an empty cave by Hermes the messenger of the gods, like the three Marys being led by the angel into the empty cave which was Jesus' tomb.²⁷³

Jesus is born to Mary in a cave and resurrects from a cave before three Marys. Such 'circular' mythic motifs were important in the Mysteries. In some myths of Osiris- Dionysus, his miraculous resurrection and miraculous birth were one and the same event. Having died his sacrificial death, he would immediately be born once again as the divine child. So, the cave in which he was born and laid out is symbolic of both womb and tomb.²⁷⁴ Minucius Felix, a Christian writer, tells us that in the Mysteries of Osiris priests acted out the sorrowful search of Isis for the dead Osiris, which afterwards turned to celebration upon the emergence of a small boy, representing the godman reborn, ²⁷⁵ thus he says, 'They never cease year by year to lose what they find and to find what they lose.'²⁷⁶

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The key to understanding the myth of the resurrection, both in the Mysteries and the story of Jesus, is that mystically death is rebirth. Plutarch tells us that sharing in the passion of Dionysus was intended to bring about a palingenesis, or 'rebirth' ²⁷⁷ lnitiates of the Mysteries underwent what Lucius Apuleius Calls a 'voluntary death' from which they emerged spiritually reborn.²⁷⁸ Just as Jesus offers his followers the opportunity to be 'born again', Osiris is 'He who giveth birth unto men and women a second time'²⁷⁹ and 'He who maketh mortals to be born again'²⁸⁰

When he 'dies' to his lower self, the initiate of the Mysteries is also in labour giving birth to his Higher Self. Perhaps this is why gall, which was given to women in labour, was drunk by the Hierophant in the Eleusinian Mysteries and offered to Jesus on the cross.

Jesus mystically equates death and birth in the Gospel of John when he predicts:

'A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me. In very truth I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will be glad. But though you are plunged into grief, your grief will be turned to joy. A woman in labour is in pain because her time has come; but when the child is born she forgets the anguish in her joy that a man has been born into the world.'²⁸¹

To die to the lower self is to be spiritually reborn - this is the central secret teaching encoded by the myths of Osiris- Dionysus. Could the Jesus story also be a myth which encodes the same perennial spiritual teaching?

Either the Devil really has perfected the art of diabolical mimicry or there is a mystery to solve here. Let's review the evidence:

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* Jesus is the saviour of mankind, God made man, the Son of God equal with the Father; so is Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus is born of a mortal virgin who after her death ascends to heaven and is honoured as a divine being; so is Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus is born in-a cave on 25 December or 6 January, as is Osiris-Dionysus.

* The birth of Jesus-is prophesied by a star; so is the birth of Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus is born in Bethlehem, which was shaded by a grove sacred to Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus is visited by the Magi, who are followers of Osiris- Dionysus.

* The Magi bring Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, which a sixth-century BCE Pagan tells us is the way to worship God.

* Jesus is baptized, a ritual practised for centuries in the Mysteries.

* The holy man who baptizes Jesus with water has the same name as a Pagan god of water and is born on the summer solstice celebrated as a Pagan water festival.

* Jesus offers his followers elemental baptisms of water, air and fire, as did the Pagan Mysteries.

* Jesus is portrayed as a quiet man with long hair and a beard; so is Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus turns water into wine at a marriage on the same day that Osiris-Dionysus was previously believed to have turned water into wine at a marriage.

* Jesus heals the sick, exorcises demons, provides miraculous meals, helps fishermen make miraculous catches of fish and calms the water for his disciples; all of these marvels had previously been performed by Pagan sages.

* Like the sages of the Mysteries, Jesus is a wandering wonder-worker who is not honoured in his home town.

* Jesus is accused of licentious behaviour, as were the followers of Osiris-Dionysus.

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* Jesus is not at first recognized as a divinity by his disciples, but then is transfigured before them in all his glory; the same is true of Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus is surrounded by 12 disciples; so is Osiris- Dionysus.

* Jesus rides triumphantly into town on a donkey while crowds wave branches, as does Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus is a just man unjustly accused of heresy and bringing a new religion, as is Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus attacks hypocrites, stands up to tyranny and willingly goes to his death predicting he will rise again in three days, as do Pagan sages.

* Jesus is betrayed for 30 pieces of sllver, a motif found in the story of Socrates.

* Jesus is equated with bread and wine, as is Osiris- Dionysus.

* Jesus' disciples symbolically eat bread and drink wine to commune with him, as do the followers of Osiris- Dionysus.

* Jesus is hung on a tree or crucified, as is Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus dies as a sacrifice to redeem the sins of the world; so does Osirisi Dionysus.

* Jesus' corpse is wrapped in linen and anointed with myrrh, as is the corpse of Osiris-Dionysus.

* After his death Jesus descends to hell, then on the third day resurrects before his disciples and ascends into heaven, where he is enthroned by God and waits to reappear at the end of time as a divine judge, as does Osiris-Dionysus.

* Jesus was said to have died and resurrected on exactly the same dates that the death and resurrection of Osiris- Dionysus were celebrated.

* Jesus' empty tomb is visited by three women followers; Osiris-Dionysus also has three women followers who visit an empty cave.

* Through sharing in his passion Jesus offers his disciples the chance to be born again, as does Osiris-Dionysus.

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Discounting the 'diabolical mimicry' argument, as all sane people must, how are we to explain these extraordinary similarities between Pagan myth and the story of Jesus?

The first possibility we considered was that the true biography of Jesus had been overlaid with Pagan mythology at a later date. This is a common idea often advanced to account for those aspects of the Jesus story which seem obviously mythical, such as the virgin birth. But we had found so many resemblances between the myths of Osiris- Dionysus and the supposed 'biography' of Jesus that this theory seemed inadequate. If all the elements of the Jesus story that had been prefigured by Pagan myths were later accretions, what would be left of the 'real' Jesus? If this theory is true then the Jesus we know is a myth and the historical man has been completely eclipsed.

The other possibility that occurred to us was more radical and challenging. Could it be that the story of Jesus was actually yet another version of the myth of Osiris-Dionysus? If we had not been brought up in a Christian culture, would we ever have interpreted the incredible stories related by the gospels as anything other than profound myths? No one believes the myths of Osiris-Dionysus are literally true, so why should we take as historical fact the same events related in a Jewish setting?

Not knowing quite what to believe, we turned our attention to Jesus' spiritual teachings, wondering if here we might glimpse something of the man beneath the myth.

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'Many of the ideas of the Christians have been expressed better - and earlier - by the Greeks.' Behind these views is an ancient doctrine that has existed from the beginning."

Celsus

Just as Pagan critics of Christianity saw the story of Jesus as an adaptation of the myth of Osiris-Dionysus, so they also viewed Christian teachings as a poor copy of the ancient and perennial philosophy of the Pagan Mysteries. Celsus writes of the Christians dismissively:

'Let's speak about their systematic corruption of the truth, their misunderstanding of some fairly simple philosophical principles - which of course they completely botch."

Most early Christian intellectuals had been educated in Pagan philosophy and were well aware of its profound similarities with their own doctrines. Clement of Alexandria regarded the gospels as 'perfected Platonism'.' Justin Martyr calls Heraclitus, Socrates and other Greek philosophers / Page 78 /

.

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Initiation into the Mysteries was seen as a source of moral purification and preparation for death. Aristophanes declares: 'All those who participated in the Mysteries led an innocent, calm and holy life; they died looking for the light of the Elysian fields.'¹⁵ Porphyry adds, 'At the moment of death the soul must be as it is in the Mysteries; free from any blemish, passion, envy or anger.'¹⁶ Celsus tells us that it was announced that initiation was only open to 'whoever is holy from every defilement and whose soul is conscious of no evil' and that 'No one should approach unless he was conscious of his innocence.'¹⁷

Jesus taught his followers to strive for moral purity, not only in deed, but even in thought. The Church father Clement of Alexandria writes: 'He who would enter the shrine must be pure, and purity is to think holy things.'¹⁸ But Clement is merely echoing the ancient inscription over the Pagan shrine of Asclepius, which also read: 'Purity is thinking only holy thoughts.'¹⁹ Likewise, in the sayings of the Pagan sage Sextus, we read: 'Do not even think of that which you are unwilling God should know.'²⁰ Celsus writes:

'What ought really to occupy our minds, day and night, is the Good: publicly and privately, in every word and deed and in the silence of reflection.'²¹

The Stoic philosophers developed the idea of the 'conscience' which Christianity inherited.²² 'Conscience' means 'with knowledge'. For the Pagan sages, to listen to one's conscience was to follow the inner spiritual Knowledge, or Gnosis, possessed by the Higher Self. The followers of Pythagoras were required every night to remember all the events of the day and judge themselves morally from the standpoint of their Higher Self. The initiate Seneca describes his constant striving for moral perfection in simple homely language that could be that of a modem Christian:

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'Every day I plead my case before myself. When the light is extinguished, and my wife, who knows my habit, keeps silence, I examine the past day, go over and weigh all my deeds and words. I hide nothing, I omit nothing: why should I hesitate to face my shortcomings when I can say, "Take care not to repeat them, and also I forgive you today"?'²³

The need to confess one's sins was taught by Jesus and is still an essential element of Christianity. This idea was far from new, however. Initiates into the Mysteries were required to purify themselves by making a public confession of all their failings and misdeeds. In the Mysteries of Eleusis, the priest asked the initiate to confess the worst deed that he had ever committed in his life.²⁴ This was not an empty formality,but a truly pious act. The despotic Roman Emperor Nero turned back from seeking initiation into the Mysteries when he realized he would have to openly admit murdering his mother. Even a tyrant accepted this loss of face, rather than lie before the most sacred institution of the ancient world.²⁵ A modem classical scholar writes that the Mysteries 'anticipated Catholicism in the establishment of a Confessional - but less rigid - with the elements of a penitential system and absolution for uneasy devotees. The priests acted as representatives of the Mystery-god, exacting auricular confession.'²⁶ A 'Negative Confession' of the evils one had avoided committing is found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead as long ago as 1500 BCE.²⁷

Contrary to Christian claims that the Mysteries were morally degenerate, the evidence clearly shows that initiation was designed to bring about moral regeneration.

Despite this, of course, the Pagan Mysteries were no less open to hypocrisy and abuse than any other religion. The Jewish Pythagorean Philo complains: 'It often happens that good men are not initiated, but that robbers and murderers, and lewd women are, if they pay money to the initiators and hierophants.'²⁸ But as a modem scholar remarks,

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'Such passages show that abuses existed, but also that it was felt to be a scandal if the initiated person failed to exhibit any moral improvement.'²⁹

In contrast to the traditional Jewish God of justice, Jesus preaches a revolutionary new conception of a God of love. Jesus' first and central commandment is that his followers should love God, and to this day having a personal loving relationship with God is at the heart of Christianity. This was also at the heart of the Mysteries. A modem scholar writes:

'If one had to single out one paramount feature that distinguished all the Mystery cults from other religions of their period, it would be that they sought a personal relationship with their gods. Consequently the attitude of their devotees to the gods was one of love rather than fear or indifferent manipulation. The motive of much primitive religion seems to be to get rid of the gods, and by fair means or foul to prevent them from troubling mankind. For the Mystery religions the motive is quite the contrary: it is to get closer to them, recognising them as man's best friends.'³⁰

The Christian sentiment of 'brotherly love' was also a feature of the Mysteries six centuries before there were any Christians. Initiates at Eleusis were called adelphoi, meaning 'brothers'. A philadelphian was someone who practised 'brotherly love'. The followers of Mithras were also called 'brothers'. Adherents of the Mysteries of Jupiter Dolichenus were fratres carissimi, or 'most loving brothers'.³¹

However, Jesus taught his followers not only to love their fellow Christians, but also to love all their neighbours. In the Gospel of Matthew he instructs his followers: 'Treat others / Page 83 / as you wish to be treated.'³² But this teaching was nothing new either. It is a perennial and ubiquitous precept found in nearly all religious traditions.³³ Amongst the sayings of the Pagan philosopher Sextus, we find: 'Such as you wish your neighbour to be to you, such also be to your neighbour.'³⁴

But Jesus goes further than this. He teaches that we should even love our enemies. We should forgive those who wrong us and 'turn the other cheek'.³⁵ These beautiful and profound teachings are usually seen as a revolution in spirituality, replacing the old Jewish Law of 'an eye for an eye'. They were indeed a radical departure from such Jewish sentiments, but they were perfectly familiar to initiates of the ancient Pagan Mysteries! In The Sayings of Sextus the Pythagorean we find the same teachings: 'Wish that you may be able to benefit your enemies.³⁶ Pythagoras himself had taught that even if abused, one should not defend oneself.³⁷

Epictetus similarly writes:

'This is the philosopher's way; to be flogged like an ass and to love those who beat him, to be father and brother of all humanity.'³⁸

But most famously in the ancient world, these teachings had been expressed by Socrates and recorded by his disciple Plato. Celsus writes:

'You Christians have a saying that goes something like this: "Don't resist a man who insults you; even if he strikes you, offer him the other cheek as well." This is nothing new, and it's been better said by others, especially by Plato.'³⁹

In one of Plato's dialogues, Socrates leads Crito, step by step, to exactly the same profound understanding that 500 years later appears in the gospels. We pick up the argument as Socrates is reaching his conclusion:

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'Socrates: "Then we should never do wrong?"

Crito: "Never."

Socrates: "And should we not even try to avenge a wrong if we are wronged ourselves, as most would do, on the premise that we should never do wrong?"

Crito: "So it seems."

Socrates: "So, should we do harm, Crito, or not?"

Crito: "I should say not, Socrates."

Socrates: "Well then, is it just or unjust to repay injury with injury?"

Crito: "Unjust, I would think."

Socrates: "Because doing harm to men is no different from doing wrong?"

Crito: "Exactly so."

Socrates: "So, we should never take revenge and never hurt anyone, even if we have been hurt." ,

Socrates concludes:

'It is never right to do wrong and never right to take revenge; nor is it right to give evil, or in the case of one who has suffered some injury, to attempt to get even.⁴⁰

Celsus comments caustically:

'This was Plato's opinion, and as he says, it was not new to him but was pronounced by inspired men long before him. What I have said about it may serve, part for whole, as an example of the sort of ideas the Christians mutilate.'⁴¹

The great sages of the Mysteries even expanded their ethic of / Page 85 / universal love to include animals. Although some Mystery religions practised animal sacrifice, Pythagoras was a vegetarian and Empedocles looked back to a golden age 'when no altar was wet with the unholy slaughter of bulls'.⁴² The enlightened Pagan sages, like the enlightened masters of any religious tradition, tried constantly to lead initiates away from out-of-date practices towards understanding the spiritual meaning of their rites.'⁴³ A modem classical scholar writes of the Mysteries of Orpheus as 'imposing - perhaps for the first time in the Western world - a lofty ethic of purity and non- injury'. He continues:

'The Orphics and Pythagoreans were truly the first Christians in the ethical sense, and a few Christians like St Francis have extended their compassion in Pythagorean fashion to the animal kingdom.'⁴⁴

Jesus teaches his followers to emulate his own humility and poverty. He sends out his disciples, saying,

'Go and announce that the kingdom of heaven is approaching. Cure the sick, raise the dead, wash lepers, throw out demons. Accept free gifts, and give for free. Don't have gold, silver or brass in your belts. Don't take a knapsack on the road, or a second tunic or shoes, or a cane.'⁴⁵

In doing so, his followers became indistinguishable from the Pagan Cynic philosophers, who travelled from place to place giving spiritual teachings.'⁴⁶ A modem scholar writes:

'Among the familiar sights during the first century of the Roman Empire were the Cynics wearing rough cloaks, carrying begging bags and thorn-sticks. They / Page 86/ used to wander from town to town preaching to the people, and hammering in their platitudes. When the apostles went preaching the gospel, they travelled about in a similarly unencumbered manner.'⁴⁷

Both Cynics and early Christians wore the same rough garments and both called their religion 'the Way'.⁴⁸ Describing a Cynic, Epictetus writes in words that could equally describe Jesus and his disciples:

'He is a herald from God to men, declaring to them the truth about good and evil things; that they have erred, and are seeking the reality of good and evil where it is not; and where it is they do not consider. He must then be able, if so it chance, to go up impassioned, as on the tragic stage, and speak that word of Socrates, "0 men, whither are ye borne away? What do ye? Miserable as ye are! Like blind men ye wander up and down. Ye have left the true road, and are going by a false; ye are seeking peace and happiness where they are not, and if another shall show where they are, ye believe him not."'⁴⁹

Celsus sees Christian humility as an enforced copy of the voluntary humility of the Pagan sages. He rants indignantly:

'Not surprisingly, they emphasise the virtue of humility, which in their case is to make a virtue of necessity! Here again prostituting the noble ideas of Plato. Not only do they misunderstand the words of the philosophers; they even stoop to assigning words of the philosophers to their Jesus. For example, we are told that Jesus judged the rich with the saying "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Yet we know that Plato expressed this very idea in a purer form when he said, "It is / Page 87 / impossible for an exceptionally good man to be exceptionally rich." Is one utterance more inspired than the other?'⁵⁰

Celsus is right to be critical of Christian claims that Jesus' teachings are original and distinctive. Jesus teaches, 'Lay up your treasure in heaven where no thief can get near it, no moth destroy it.'⁵¹ Sextus likewise exhorts, 'Possess those things that no one can take away from you.'⁵²

Jesus is the king of the world because he is wise, not because he is powerful. A popular Stoic maxim was 'The only true king is the wise man'.⁵³

Jesus teaches, 'Keep awake, for you do not know when the master of the house will come. If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you asleep.'⁵⁴ Epictetus writes, 'Go not far from the ship at any time, lest the master should call and thou not be ready.'⁵⁵

Jesus teaches, 'I assure you, anyone who doesn't receive the Kingdom of God like a little child, will never get into it. 'so Heraclitus writes, 'The Kingdom belongs to the child.'⁵⁷

Jesus teaches, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good, only God.'⁵⁸ Four centuries previously Plato had defined God as 'the Good', a quality which, by definition, only God could fully manifest. In similar fashion to Jesus, Pythagoras had refused to be called wise, explaining that no one is wise except God; Pythagoras preferred to call himself a 'lover of wisdom' or 'philosopher' - a term he was the first person to use.

When the Mysteries were first introduced to Greece from Egypt, the notion of an afterlife was a new and heretical doctrine to the Greeks. Likewise, the concept of heaven and hell is not found in the Old Testament, yet is a central idea in the gospels.⁵⁹ Where did these notions come from? Just as in ancient Greece, these new ideas were introduced by the Mysteries.

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In a Gnostic text called Pistis Sophia, he teaches his followers: 'Cease not seeking day and night, until ye have found the purifying Mysteries,'⁵⁰ and Mary Magdalene praises him, saying:

'Now we know, O Master, freely, surely, plainly that Thou hast brought the keys of the Mysteries of. the Kingdom of Light.'⁵¹

The Gnostic Jesus leads his disciples in Mystery initiations, including one recorded in a text called The Acts of John, using a 'round dance'. Such initiation dances were extremely common in the Pagan Mysteries. As one modem authority puts it, 'Not a single ancient initiation festival can be found that is without dancing.'⁵² In the Mysteries at Eleusis the candidate for initiation was seated while others danced around him in a circle, mimicking the orbits of the planets and the stars.⁵³ In the Mysteries of Mithras, as already mentioned, the initiate representing Mithras stood in the middle of a circle of 12 dancers representing the signs of the zodiac.⁵⁴

The Acts of John describes the disciples holding hands in a circle around Jesus in similar fashion. Jesus sings and in response the disciples intone the sacred word: 'Amen.' Jesus teaches that in this 'round dance' he reveals 'the passion' and desires that it is 'called a Mystery'.⁵⁵ As one scholar notes, the round dance 'is evidently some echo of the Mysteries, and the ceremony is that of a sacred dance initiation'.⁵⁶ In the hymn accompanying the dance initiation three voices can clearly be distinguished: Christ, who is the initiator or hierophant, his assistants and the candidate for initiation. In the following extract the voices have been allocated to one of these three figures to clearly demonstrate the initiatory nature of the text:⁵⁷

Initiate 'I would be saved.'

Christ 'And I would save.'

Assistants 'Amen.'

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Initiate 'I would be freed.'

Christ 'And I would free.'

Assistants 'Amen.'

Initiate 'I would be pierced.'

Christ 'And I would pierce.'

Assistant 'Amen.'

Initiate 'I would be born.'

Christ. 'And I would bring to birth.'

Assistants' Amen.'

Initiate 'I would eat.'

Christ 'And I would be eaten.'

Assistants' Amen.'

Initiate 'I would hear.'

Christ 'And I would be heard.'

Assistants' Amen.'

Christ 'I am a lamp to thee who beholdst Me.'

Assistants' Amen.'

Christ 'I am a mirror to thee who perceivest Me.'

Assistants' Amen.'

Christ 'I am a door to thee who knockest at Me.'

Assistants' Amen.'

Christ 'I am a way to thee, a wayfarer.'

Assistants' Amen.'

Christ 'Now respond thou to my dancing. See thyself in Me who speaks; and when thou hast seen what I do, keep silence on My Mysteries.'⁵⁸

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The Pagan Mysteries contained both exoteric' or 'outer' Mysteries which were open to all, and esoteric' or 'inner' Mysteries which were revealed only to the chosen few who had undergone a lengthy period of puiification and spiritual preparation. Clement tells us that in early Christianity there were likewise 'Lesser Mysteries' for beginners on the spiritual path and 'Greater Mysteries' which were a secret higher knowledge which led to full 'initiation'.⁵⁹ 'The secret traditions of true Gnosis,' he explains, had been transmitted 'to a small number, by a succession of masters, and not in writing'⁶⁰

Origen recognizes that in having Outer Mysteries and Inner Mysteries Christianity was following the example of Paganism. He writes:

'The existence of certain doctrines which are beyond those which are openly taught and do not reach the multitude is not a peculiarity of Christianity only, but is shared by the philosophers. For they had soine doctrines which were exoteric and some esoteric.'⁶¹

Like Pagan initiates, Gnostic initiates were required to keep the Inner Mysteries a profound secret. The heresy-hunter Hippolytus tells us that the followers of the Gnostic sage Basilides 'may not speak of their Mysteries aloud, but must preserve them in silence',⁶² Indeed, they were required to undergo an initial five-year period of silence, just as were initiates in the Pythagorean schools of the Pagan Mysteries.⁶³ The Book of the Great Logos instructs: ".

'These Mysteries are to be guarded with utmost secrecy, and revealed to none who are unworthy; neither to father or mother, to sister nor brother, nor to any relative; neither for meat nor drink

/ Page 140 / Devil. Jesus is taken up a high mountain where he is shown all the kingdoms of the world, which the Devil offers him if he will only fall down and worship him. Origen pours scorn on the idea that anyone could actually see all the kingdoms of the world from the top of a mountain and affirms that this is meant to be understood allegorically. He tells us:

'The careful reader will detect thousands of other passages like this in the gospels.'¹⁴

Clement also regarded the true Christian as 'the Gnostic' who can penetrate to the allegorical meaning of scripture by understanding 'the involutions of words and the solutions of enigmas'.¹⁵ He teaches that the initiate who has experienced Gnosis grasps the complete truth, piercing to the depths of scripture of which the 'believer' tastes only the surface.¹⁶

In this spirit, Gnostics did not interpret the Jesus story literally as an historical account, but as a spiritual allegory encoding profound mystical teachings. In a text called The navels of Peter Jesus himself is made to decode some of the allegorical teachings hidden in the accounts of his crucifixion. He explains:

'The Logos is symbolised by that straight stem on which I hang. The cross-piece of the cross represents that human nature which suffered the fault of change in the first man, but by the help of God-and-man, received again its real mind. Right in the centre, joining twain in one, is set the nail of discipline, conversion and repentance.'¹⁷

The immense challenge we face today in attempting to decode both the myths of the Pagan Mysteries and the Jesus story can only be understood when the complexity and subtlety of the code is appreciated. The Gnostics, like their / Page 141 / predecessors the Pythagoreans, not only used symbols and images, but also numbers and mathematical formulae to encode their mystical teachings. Mathematics and geometry were regarded by the Pagan sages as sacred sciences that reveal the workings of the Mind of God. Pythagoras called numbers 'immortal gods'.¹⁸ Over Plato's Academy were written the words 'Let no man who knows no mathematics enter here'.¹⁹

The Literalist Christian Hippolytus calls the Gnostics 'disciples of Pythagoras and Plato' and accuses them of likewise taking 'arithmetical science' as 'the fundamental principle of their doctrine'.²⁰ Clement was fascinated by Pythagorean mathematics and even applied the ratios revealed in the mathematical laws underlying harmony in music to the interpretation of scripture.²¹ The Gnostic sage Monoimos instructed his students in the sacred mathematics of Plato and Pythagoras.²² Gnostics used the image of the heavens divided into seven spheres, forming a sort of mystic ladder composed of an octave of eight gates which the initiate could ascend, which is identical to teachings found in the Pagan Mysteries.²³

Scholars have concluded that Gnostic gospels such as the Pistis Sophia and the Book of Ieou, rather than being compendiums of mystifying nonsense, are actually based on a sophisticated form of number symbolism.²⁴ One central element in this symbolism is gematria - the expression of numbers and mathematical relationships through words.

In the ancient Greek alphabet, each letter also signified a number. Thus any word also had a numerical value and could be used to convey mathematical information. The Greek names of the gods were more than just words, their numerical values were also significant. For example, in its most common Greek spelling, the name of the Pagan godman Mithras expresses '360', which in some places was regarded as the number of days in a year. Several ancient writers deliberately add an extra letter, however, to make the name's numerical value equal 365, the more accurate / Page 142 / reckoning of the solar year.²⁵ Thus, as St Jerome points out, Mithras is numerically revealed as a solar deity.

Gematria was also adopted by the Gnostic Christians. Gnostic myth even represents the youthful Jesus instructing scholars at the Jerusalem Temple in the mystical meaning of the Greek alphabet!²⁶ Like the Pagan Mithras, the name of Abraxas, the Gnostic solar' divinity, also expresses the number 365. The most striking example of Christian gematria, however, is the name 'Jesus' itself.

The early Christians maintained that 'Iesous', the original Greek name we translate as 'Jesus', was 'a name above all names'.²⁷ Origen boasted that it possesses more magical efficacy than the names of the Pagan divinities.²⁸ It is well known that according to the Revelation of John the number of the 'Beast' is 666.²⁹ What is less well known is that according to gematria, the Greek name

This number was regarded as sacred and magical by the ancients for a number of reasons, including the fact that if all the numbers associated with each of the 24 letters in the Greek alphabet are added together they come to 888. It is surely also significant that in musical harmony, which for the Pythagorens was a sacred science: 666 is the string ratio of the perfect fifth and 888 is the string ratio of the whole tone!³¹

The fact that Jesus' name equals 888 is no lucky accident. The Greek name 'Iesous' is an artificial and forced transliteration of the Hebrew name 'Joshua' which has been deliberately constructed by the gospel writers to make sure that it expresses this symbolically significant number.³²

Even Literalists are aware of the number symbolism of Jesus' name. Irenaeus states: / Page 143 / 'Iesous is a name arithmetically symbolical, consisting of six letters, as is known by all those that belong to the called.'³³

Other names in the Jesus story also have significance when translated into numbers using gematria. Jesus gives his disciple Simon the name 'Cephas', meaning 'Rock', often translated as 'Peter'. In the original Greek Cephas expresses 729, which was an important number to Pagans. Plutarch, a priest of Apollo at Delphi, notes that 729 is a number of the sun, being the number of days and nights in a year. Socrates remarks that it is 'a number that is closely concerned with human life, if human life is concerned with days and nights and months and years'.³⁴

Scholars have even found that the New Testament story of Jesus helping his disciples make a miraculous catch of 153 fish is a mathematical puzzle which reveals an 'underlying and unfolding geometrical diagram'.³⁵ As already discussed, this miracle story is based on a similar miracle performed by Pythagoras, the great Pagan guru of sacred mathematics. Both these stories encode sacred mathematical formulae understood by the initiated as revealing esoteric teachings.

The New Testament stories of the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000 have also been shown to yield mystical geometrical diagrams. This is clearly hinted at in Mark's gospels, where an impatient Jesus leads his disciples through what he clearly intends to be some mystical mathematical puzzle that, alas, his disciples do not understand:

'Jesus said, "Though you have eyes, you do not see, and though you have ears, you do not hear! Don't you remember, when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of scraps you cleared away?"

They said unto him, "Twelve."

" And when I broke the seven loaves for the four / Page 144 / thousand, how many basketfuls of scraps did you clear away?"

And they said, "Seven."

And he said to them, "And you still don't understand?"³⁶

It would seem that, like his confused disciples in the story, the Christian Church has failed to understand for 2,000 years that what it has taken as literal events are in fact carefully constructed mystical allegories. With the destruction of the Inner Mysteries of the Gnostics, the keys to decode the allegories have been lost and we can only guess at much of the profound metaphor at work in the Jesus story."

For Gnostics, the godman Jesus symbolized the Daemon, the immortal Self. Often the eidolon, the incarnate self, is represented in Gnostic myths by Jesus' 'twin brother' Thomas. In The Book of Thomas the Contender Jesus (the Daemon) teaches his disciple and twin brother Thomas (the eidolon):

'Brother Thomas, while you have time in the world, listen to me, and I will reveal to you the things you have pondered in your mind. Now since it has been said that you are my twin and true companion, examine yourself and learn who you are, in what way you exist, and how you will come to be. Since you will be called my brother, it is not fitting that you be ignorant of yourself. And I know that you have understood, because you have already understood that I am the knowledge of the truth. So while you accompany me, although you are uncomprehending, you have in fact already come to know, and you will be called "the one who knows' himself".³⁷

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It was a widespread tradition amongst early Christians that Jesus had a twin brother who resembled him in every detail This caused Literalists a great many problems, as the obvious objection to their claims that Jesus had literally resurrected from the dead was that his twin brother had been crucified in his place. This has led some scholars to conclude that this legend must be based on historical fact, for 'what Christian would have been foolish enough to invent such a legend, seeing that it is most apt to undermine the very basis of the orthodox tradition concerning the resuscitation of Jesus?'³⁸ The answer is that the Gnostics invented the tradition of Jesus' twin brother as an allegory for the ancient Daemon/eidolon doctrine.

The authorship of The Gospel of Thomas is attributed to Didymos Judas Thomas. The Aramaic name Thomas and the Greek name Didymos both mean 'twin'. The author's name is thus 'Judas the twin'.³⁹ This suggests that in the original Jesus story, Judas the betrayer of Jesus symbolized. the eidolon which betrays the Daemon.

Another encoded reference to the Daemon/eidolon doctrine in the New Testament is during Matthew's account of Jesus' trial, when Pontius Pilate offers to spare one of two Jesuses - either Jesus Messiah or Jesus Barabbas.⁴⁰ One Jesus is an innocent man who is murdered and the other a murderer who goes free. These two Jesuses symbolize the Higher Self and lower self in each human being.

The Pagan Daemon/eidolon doctrine casts light on the otherwise baffling Gnostic teaching known as 'Docetism' or 'illusionism'.⁴¹ The opponents of Gnosticism have portrayed this as a rather strange belief that Jesus did not actually have a flesh and blood body, but only seemed to exist physically, and that he magically made it appear as if he was dying on the cross although in reality he was not. As usual, however, by taking the Gnostics literally, the Literalists completely miss the point.

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The Gnostic 'illusionist' view of the crucifixion was not meant to be taken as an historical account of events. It is a myth which encodes the perennial mystical teachings that a human being is made up of two parts: an earthly part which suffers and dies (the eidolon), and an eternal spiritual witness (the Daemon) which is untouched by suffering and experiences this world as a passing illusion.

A Letter of Peter to Philip explains that although from the time of his incarnation Jesus suffered, yet he suffered as one who was 'a stranger to this suffering'.⁴² This teaches that the incarnate Higher Self (represented by Jesus) seems to suffer when the eidolon suffers, but in reality is always the untouched witness. In The Acts of John Jesus explains:

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"To write all that is known about numbers would fill volumes. We have not space to do more than take this glance at the primary numbers. They, of course, each belong to their Colour, Planet and Sound. When, after some study, it is seen how com- pletely all these facets of life dove-tail and fit into their places like an intricate vast Chinese puzzle it will be realized that these marvellous 'theories' are too perfect and too near to the truth to have been invented by the brains of human beings. This indeed is the reward of a study of these matters-a gradual realization of the amazing fact that there really is a whole universe of marvels and of sublime promise for those who seek.

The science of numbers is exhaustive, instructive, and useful if applied with an honest desire for progress and understanding. Modem scientists are busily expressing the ancient beliefs in their own manner. They are measuring the vibrations of diseases, of thoughts, of will-power and of many other activities and getting them all numbered. They are numerologists in their own way, although they still turn their backs rigidily upon the ancient sciences. Nevertheless, they are bringing to light one funda- mental fact, and that is that everything exists through the forma- tion of a different number, and therefore that numbers must constitute a language, a key, and a clue to many secrets in life, if we can learn to decipher them.

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"How is it that Jesus can both suffer and not suffer? Because, as he explains, 'I distinguish the man from myself.'⁴⁴ He identifies with his transcendent Higher Self, the Daemon, not his suffering lower self, the eidolon.

The purpose of Gnostic initiation was to free initiates from all suffering through the realization that their true identity is not the eidolon bound to the cross of matter, but the Daemon which witnesses life as a passing illusion."⁴⁵ Thus the Gnostic Jesus teaches:

'Had you known how to suffer, you would have been able not to suffer. See through suffering, and you will have non-suffering.'⁴⁶

So, the eidolon of Jesus seems to suffer and die, but the real Jesus - the Daemon - cannot suffer or die.⁴⁷

Five hundred years previously Euripides portrayed King / Page 147 / Pentheus as binding Dionysus, while actually he was not. As Dionysus says:

'There I made a mockery of him. He thought he was binding me; But he neither held nor touched me, save in his deluded mind.'⁴⁸

In The Apocalypse of Peter, Peter sees Jesus 'glad and laughing' on the cross while the nails are bring driven into his hands and feet, and Jesus explains:

'He whom you see on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive nails is his fleshy part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness. But look at him and me."⁴⁹

In some Pagan myths it is not the godman who suffers and dies, but a substitute figure who represents the eidolon. In The Bacchae, King Pentheus, whose name means 'Man of Suffering', is raised up on a tree and torn to shreds in the place of Dionysus.⁵⁰ Similarly, in certain Gnostic myths it is Simon of Cyrene who dies on the cross, while Jesus watches laughing from a distance.⁵¹ In The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Jesus explains:

'It was another, Simon, who bore the cross on his shoulder. It was another upon whom they placed the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the height and laughing at their ignorance.'⁵²

Simon of Cyrene, like King Pentheus in the Pagan version of the myth, represents the eidolon which suffers and dies. The laughing figure of Jesus, like the triumphant Dionysus, represents the Daemon, the witnessing Spirit. The Gnostic sage Basilides teaches that 'because he was Mind, Jesus did / Page 148 / not suffer' but Simon of Cyrene suffered in his stead, while Jesus laughed 'because he could not be held and was invisible to all'.⁵³

The Gnostics did not believe that Jesus only seemed to exist, or that he magically avoided suffering on the cross, or, more sinisterly, that he had himself replaced by Simon of Cyrene, who was crucified instead while Jesus stood safely at a distance laughing. Such doctrines would, as the Literalists claimed, be distasteful and ridiculous. But this is a misunderstanding (or more likely a conscious distortion!!) of Gnostic teachings. In fact, 'illusionism' is simply part of understanding the crucifixion story as an initiation allegory which encodes the ancient Pagan Daemon/eidolon doctrine.

A fragment of these teachings has survived in the New Testament Gospel of Mark in which Simon of Cyrene is inexplicably dragooned into carrying Jesus' cross for him.⁵⁴ The name Simon here links this figure symbolically to the disciple called Simon 'Peter' or 'Rock', who also symbolizes the eidolon in many Gnostic myths.

An echo of this Gnostic doctrine also survives in the Muslim Qur'an which, when dealing with the supposed death of Jesus, declares:

'But they did not kill him, neither did they crucify him, but a similitude was made for them.'⁵⁵

According to the Pagan sages, we are each made up of a mortal eidolon and the immortal Daemon. If we are alive to our personal identity as the eidolon, we are dead to our eternal identity as the Daemon.⁵⁶ Initiation in the Mysteries was a way of bringing the soul back to life. By undergoing the mystical death of the eidolon the initiate could arise reborn as the Daemon.⁵⁷ The Gnostics taught the same Mystery doctrine.

The anonymous teacher of the Gnostic sage Rheginos explains that ordinary human existence is spiritual death / Page 149 / and, therefore, we all need to be 'resurrected from the dead,.⁵⁸

Just as Pagan initiates who witnessed the grand Mystery pageant at Eleusis metaphorically suffered with Dionysus and were spiritually reborn, likewise, initiates in the Gnostic Mysteries metaphorically shared in the suffering and triumph of their godman Jesus. Rheginos' teacher explains:

'We suffered with him, and we arose with him, and we went to heaven with him.'⁵⁹

Initiates who shared in Jesus' passion as an allegory for their own mystical death and resurrection could say along with Jesus in the Gospel of John:

'That's why my Father loves me, because I lay down my life to get it back again.'⁶⁰

Literalist Christians "rested their faith entirely on the supposed miracle that an historical Jesus had physically come back from the dead and that this was some sort of proof that those who believed that Jesus was the Son of God would also be resurrected physically at the 'Day of Judgement'. The Gnostics, in contrast, called taking the resurrection literally the 'faith of fools'!⁶¹ The resurrection, they insisted, was neither an historical event that happened once only to someone else, nor a promise that corpses would rise from the dead after some future apocalypse. The Gnostics understood the resurrection as a mystical experience that could happen to anyone of us right here and now through the recognition of our true identity as the Daemon.⁶²

For Literalists any personal experience of the resurrection was a distant hope of bodily immortality after the Second Coming. The Gnostic Gospel of Philip, however, ridicules such Christians, explaining, 'Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error' since we should 'receive the resurrection whilst alive'.⁶³

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For the Gnostics the resurrection was simply 'the revealing of what truly exists'.⁶⁴ For initiates with 'eyes to see', therefore this mystical resurrection had 'already taken place'.⁶⁵ It could not possibly be a future event, because it was an awareness of what was real in the present moment. An initiate's true identity did not become the Daemon through the process of initiation. It had always been the Daemon. The resurrection was actually only a change in awareness. The teacher of Rheginos proclaims:

'Already you have the resurrection. Consider yourself as risen already.⁶⁶ Are you - the real you - mere corruption? Why do you not examine your own Self, and see that you have arisen?'⁶⁷

The Treatise of the Resurrection teaches:

Everything is prone to change. The world is an illusion! The resurrection is the revelation of what is, and the transformation of things, and a transition into newness. Flee from the divisions and the fetters, and already you have the resurrection.'⁶⁸

Although the Gnostics saw the resurrection as an allegory, they did not see it as unreal. On the contrary, to the initiated the mystical experience of spiritual resurrection was more real than the so-called reality of normal consciousness. The teacher of Rheginos explains:

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An important mythical motif in the Pagan Mysteries was the sacred marriage between the godman and the goddess, symbolizing the mystical union of opposites.⁷⁰ In Crete they celebrated the marriage of the goddess Demeter and the god- man Iasion.⁷¹ Upon his yearly 'arrival' in Athens, Dionysus was hailed as 'Bridal One'⁷² and his marriage to the queen of the city, who represented the goddess; was ritually celebrated.⁷³

In Mystery initiations, the initiate was often portrayed as the bride of Osiris-Dionysus. Initiations were carried out in special 'bridal chambers' which have been found at Pagan sanctuaries.⁷⁴ An ancient fresco shows scenes of those preparing for initiation being dressed in the attire of brides.⁷⁶ After their initiation they were hailed as 'brides'.⁷⁶

The bride represented the incarnate self or eidolon and Osiris-Dionysus represented the disincarnate Self or Daemon. The sacred marriage ritually united these two opposing parts of the initiate. Epiphanius tells us:

'Some prepare a bridal chamber and perform a mystic rite accompanied by certain words used to the initiated, and they allege that it is a spiritual marriage.'⁷⁷

The Pagan Mystery motif of the sacred marriage is missing from orthodox Christianity,⁷⁸ but was important in Gnostic Christianity, which celebrated the sacred marriage between Jesus and Sophia. In Gnostic myth, Sophia is portrayed in a 'fallen' state as representing the incarnate self. She is pictured as lost in the world searching for the ineffable Source. Looking for love in all the wrong places, she becomes a prostitute. Finally she begs God the Father for help and He sends her as a bridegroom the Firstborn Son of God, her brother Jesus.⁷⁹ When the bridegroom arrives they make love passionately to become One.⁸⁰

This is an allegory of the Daemon or Spirit coming to the rescue of the incarnate self or psyche. According to / Page152 / The Gospel of Philip, only the person who has 'remarried' the psyche with the Spirit becomes capable of withstanding physical and emotional impulses that, unchecked, could drive them towards self-destruction and evil.⁸¹

The sacred marriage is a symbol of mystical unity, which was the goal of Gnosticism. In The Gospel of Thomas Jesus teaches his disciples:

'When you make the two one, and when you make the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male be not male nor the female female then will you enter the kingdom."⁸²

Some Gnostics groups ritually celebrated the sacred marriage as part of their rites of initiation. Irenaeus tells us: 'They prepare a bridal chamber and celebrate Mysteries.'⁸³ The followers of the Gnostic sage Marcus performed an initiatory rite 'with certain formulae, and they term this a spiritual marriage'.⁸⁴ We are told that the followers of the Gnostic poet Valentinus practised the rite of a spiritual marriage with angels in a nuptial chamber.⁸⁵ The Naassenes taught that the initiated 'must cast off their garments and all become brides pregnant by the Virgin Spirit'.⁸⁶ The Gospel of Philip explains that the process of initiation climaxed in the 'bridal chamber' of mystical union, for 'The holy of the holies is the bridal chamber. The redemption takes place in the bridal chamber."⁸⁷

In the Jesus story, the fallen Sophia (the psyche) is represented by the figure of Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus (the Daemon) redeems from prostitution.⁸⁸ According to the Gnostic sage Heracleon, this motif of a sacred marriage also appears in the Jesus story as the marriage feast in Cana where Jesus, like Dionysus before him, changes water into intoxicating wine. This miracle, Heracleon tells us, symbolizes that 'divine marriage' which transforms what is merely human into the divine.⁸⁹ The motif also occurs in a passage from the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus explains / Page 153 / that reaching the kingdom of Heaven will be like a maiden going to meet 'the Bridegroom'.⁹⁰

In The Gospel of Thomas Jesus teaches that to experience this final level of initiation into mystical union, each initiate must enter the bridal chamber alone:

'Many are standing at the door, but it is the solitary who will enter the bridal chamber.'⁹¹

The Pagan sages taught that in the Inner Mysteries an initiate discovered that what appeared to be their individual Daemon was actually the Universal Daemon, which they pictured as having been torn into fragments and distributed amongst all conscious beings. Epictetus teaches: 'You are a fragment torn from God. You have a portion of him within you.'⁹² Osiris-Dionysus represents this Universal Daemon, the Mind of God conscious in all living things.

In many myths Osiris-Dionysus meets his death by dismemberment.⁹³ This is often taken to mean the threshing of the corn to produce bread and the trampling of grapes to produce wine. Initiates of the Inner Mysteries, however, understood this motif on a more mystical level, as encoding teachings about the dismemberment of the Universal Daemon by the power of evil. In the myth of Osiris, for example, the godman is murdered and dismembered by his evil brother Set, and then the goddess Isis collects together all of Osiris' limbs and reconstitutes him. This myth encodes the Mystery teaching that God needs to be 'remembered', that the spiritual path is the process of the reuniting the fragments of the Universal Daemon, of perceiving One in all.

Describing Osiris' death, Plutarch writes:

'Set scatters and destroys the sacred Logos which the goddess Isis collects and puts together and delivers to those undergoing initiation.'⁹⁴

/ Page154 / This Pagan motif of dismemberment is completely foreign to Christianity as we now know it, but was fundamental to Gnosticism. Like their Pagan predecessors, Gnostic Christians believed each individual human self to be a fragment of one single heavenly being which had been dismembered by evil forces, robbed of all memory of its heavenly origins and forced into individual physical bodies.⁹⁵

Like the Pagan godman Osiris-Dionysus, the Christian godman Jesus symbolically represents the Universal Daemon or Logos which has been dismembered. In the Pistis Sophia, Jesus declares: 'I have torn myself asunder and come into the world.'⁹⁶ In The Acts of John, he teaches that 'the multitude that is about the cross' represents the 'Limbs of Him' that have yet to be 'gathered together'.⁹⁷ In The Book of the Logos Jesus says:

'Save all my Limbs, which since the foundation of the world have been scattered abroad, and gather them all together and receive them into the Light.'⁹⁸

A Gnostic hymn to be sung on the 'great day of supreme initiation', beseeches Jesus:

The Pagan sage Proclus explains that the 'most secret of all initiations' reveals 'the Spirit in us' as 'a veritable image of Dionysus'¹⁰⁰ A Pagan initiate who achieved Gnosis or Self-knowledge, realized their identity as an expression of Osiris-Dionysus, the Universal Daemon. Such an initiate was known in the Mysteries as an 'Osiris' or a 'Dionysus'.¹⁰¹

In the same way, the Gnostic Gospel of Philip teaches that a true Gnostic is 'no longer a Christian, but a Christ'.¹⁰² Origen also teaches that a follower of Jesus could become 'a Christ'. ¹⁰³ In an untitled Gnostic apocalypse Jesus calls out to his / Page 155 / 'children' with whom he is working until 'the Christ' is formed within them^.l04 In the Pistis Sophia he teaches that only someone who has become a Christ will know the supreme Gnosis of the Whole.¹⁰⁵ In a collection of Gnostic sayings, he explains, 'As ye see yourself in water or a mirror, so see ye Me in yourselves.'^l06 In The Gospel of Philip he proclaims:

'You saw the Spirit, you became Spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw the Father, you shall become the Father.'¹⁰⁷

This teaching is even found in the New Testament Gospel of Luke, where Jesus promises that 'the initiated student will become like his teacher'.¹⁰⁸

A common phrase in the Pagan Mysteries, often quoted by Plato, was Soma sema, 'The body is a tomb.'^l09 Gnostic initiates also understood that those who identified with the incarnate physical self were spiritually dead and needed to be reborn into eternal Life. Initiates who experienced mystical resurrection realized their true identity as the Christ and discovered, like the women in the Jesus story, that 'the tomb is empty'. The body is not their identity. They are not the eidolon that lives and dies, but the eternal witness that is forever unborn and undying.

Both Pagan and Gnostic philosophical systems described four levels of human identity: physical, psychological, spiritual and mystical. Gnostics called these four levels of our being the body, the counterfeit-spirit, the Spirit and the Light-power. The body and the counterfeit-spirit (our physical and psychological identities) make up the two aspects of the eidolon or lower self. The Spirit and Light- power (our spiritual and mystical identities) make up the two aspects of the immortal Daemon - the individual Higher Self and the shared Universal Self.

/ Page 156 / The Gnostics called those who identified with their body 'Hylics', because they were so utterly dead to spiritual things that they were like unconscious matter, or hyle. Those who identified with their personality, or psyche, were known as 'Psychics'. Those who identified with their Spirit were known as 'Pneumatics', which means 'Spirituals'.¹¹⁰ Those who completely ceased to identify with any level of their separate identity and realized their true identity as the Christ or Universal Daemon experienced, Gnosis.¹¹¹ This mystical enlightenment transformed the initiate into a true 'Gnostic' or 'Knower' .¹¹²

In both Paganism and Christianity these levels of awareness were symbolically linked with the four elements: earth, water, air and fire.¹¹³ The initiations leading from one level to the next were symbolized by elemental baptisms.¹¹⁴ In The Book of the Great Logos Jesus offers his disciples 'the Mysteries of the three baptisms' by water, air and fire.¹¹⁵ Baptism by water symbolizes the transformation of the Hylic person, who identifies solely with the body, into a Psychic initiate who identifies with the personality or psyche. Baptism by air symbolizes the transformation of the Psycic initiate into a Pneumatic initiate who Identifies with their Higher Self. Baptism by fire represents the final initiation which reveals to Pneumatic initiates their true identity as the Universal Daemon, the Logos, the Christ within, the 'Light-power' - 'the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world', as John's gospel puts it.¹¹⁶ Such an initiate had realized Gnosis.

These, then are the levels of initiation in Gnostic Christianity.

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A Pagan initiate of the Outer Mysteries viewed the myth of Osiris-Dionysus enacted in the Mystery pageant as a marvellous and emotionally compelling spectacle. An initiate of the Inner Mysteries was instructed in the allegorical meaning encoded in the myth. A master of the Mysteries embodied these teachings in their own being. Likewise, a Gnostic initiate's relationship with the Jesus story changed as they progressed towards Gnosis. These three levels of understanding can be characterized as literal, mythical and mystical:

*Literal: Psychic Christians had experienced the first baptism by water and been initiated into the Outer Mysteries of Christianity. They understood the story of Jesus as an historical account of a person who literally returned from the dead.

*Mythical: Pneumatic Christians had experienced the second baptism of air (holy breath or holy spirit) and been initiated into the secret Inner Mysteries of Christianity. They understood the Jesus story as an allegorical myth encoding teachings about the spiritual path travelled by each initiate.

*Mystical: Gnostics had experienced the final baptism of fire and realized their identity as the Christ (the Logos or Universal Daemon). They transcended the need for any teachings, including the Jesus story.

As Origen writes:

'Very many mistakes have been made, because the right method of examining the holy texts has not been discovered by the greater number of readers.'¹¹⁷

The right method, according to Origen, is to understand the three levels on which scripture works. The lowest level is the obvious literal interpretation. The next level, for 'one / Page 158 / who has advanced somewhat', is an allegorical level which edifies the soul. The'final level, which reveals Gnosis, is for 'one who is perfected by the spiritual law'. Origen taught that through following this threefold path, the Christian initiate progresses from faith to Gnosis.¹¹⁸

The pseudo-history of Jesus' life was an essential part of the Outer Mysteries of Christianity, which were designed to attract new would-be initiates, so the Gnostics did not necessarily deny the historicity of the gospels. But any literal interpretation of the Jesus story was only the first step presented to spiritual beginners. The true meaning of this myth was revealed to initiates in the secret Inner Mysteries.

Origen is dismissive of Literalist Christianity which does not progress beyond viewing the Jesus story as historical fact, calling it a 'popular, irrational faith' which leads to 'somatic Christianity'. As one scholar remarks:

'He makes it only too clear that by "somatic Christianity" he means that faith which is based on the gospel history. Of teachings founded upon the historical narrative, he says "What better method could be devised to assist the masses?" The Gnostic or sage no longer needs the crucified Christ. The "eternal" or "spiritual" Gospel, which is in his possession, "shows clearly all things concerning the Son of God Himself, both the Mysteries shown by His words, and the things of which His acts were the symbols".¹¹⁹

The Naassene Gnostics taught that Literalist Christians who understood only the Outer Mysteries were 'bewitched' by Jehovah the false God, whose spell has the opposite effect of the 'divine enchantment' of the Logos.!'" Basilides, likewise, teaches:

'Those who confess Jesus as the crucified one are still enslaved to the God of the Jews. He who denies / Page159 / it has been freed and knows the plan of the unbegotten Father.'¹²¹

As Origen puts it with startling bluntness: 'Christ crucified is teaching for babes.'¹²²

For the Gnostics Jesus is a figure who must be understood on many levels. Since the destruction of Gnosticism we have only been taught the lowest level of understanding and have been denied access to the secret Inner Mysteries of the Gnostics which reveal the true allegorical nature of the Jesus story. Has this led us to mistake Jesus for an historical figure? Let's examine some of the evidence again:

*As in the Pagan Mysteries, Gnostics initiated into the Inner Mysteries understood scripture as mythical allegory, which could be altered and improved upon, not literal history, which must be preserved intact.

*Like the Pagan philosophers, the Gnostics used gematria and number symbolism to encode complex sacred mathematical teachings. The name 'Iesous', which we translate as 'Jesus', is an artificial transliteration of the Jewish name 'Joshua' into Greek to make sure that it equals the mystically significant number 888. This remarkable fact was even acknowledged by Literalists.

*Like Osiris-Dionysus, Jesus symbolizes the Daemon of the initiate. As in Pagan myth, sometimes another figure representing the eidolon is symbolically portrayed as dying the godman's death as a substitute.

*In the same way that the Pagan sages understood the myths of Osiris-Dionysus as allegorical teaching stories, so the Gnostics understood the Jesus story to be a mystical initiation myth leading to spiritual resurrection.

*As in the Pagan Mysteries, the Gnostics practised a/ Page 160 / ritual sacred marriage of the Daemon and eidolon as part of their initiations.

*Like Osiris-Dionysus, the Gnostic Jesus represents the universal Daemon which has been dismembered and needs to be re-membered.

*Initiates in the Pagan Mysteries who realized their true nature as the Universal Daemon became an 'Osiris' or a 'Dionysus'. Likewise, Gnostic initiates became a 'Christ'; .

*Like the Pagan Mysteries, Gnosticism viewed a human being as having four levels of identity: physical, psychological, spiritual and mystical. As in the Pagan Mysteries, these were linked to the four elements - earth, water, air and fire - and initiates were led through these levels of identity by elemental baptisms.

*The Gnostics did not necessarily deny the historicity of the gospels, but viewed taking the Jesus story literally as only the first stage in their Mysteries.

Could the Jesus story have been taught as a history to beginners in the faith as part of the Outer Mysteries and then revealed in the secret Inner Mysteries to be an initiatory myth? Could this myth of Jesus have been based on the ubiquitous myths of Osiris-Dionysus? Could Gnosticism have been the original Christianity, which developed as a Jewish version of the Pagan Mysteries? Could Literalist Christianity be a later 'heresy' which maintained only the Outer Mysteries of Christianity? At first such possibilities seemed outrageous, but only by rethinking the whole of the traditional history of Christianity could we begin to make sense of the evidence before us.

Seeing the Jesus story as a myth developed from Pagan mythology explained its uncanny resemblances to the myths of Osiris-Dionysus. Seeing Christianity as a Jewish version of the Pagan Mysteries explained why the teachings put into the mouth of Jesus in the gospels resemble the teachings of the Pagan sages. Seeing Gnosticism as existing before / Page 161 / Literalism actually made more sense of the historical evidence than the traditional view that Gnosticism was a later deviation.

Even by their own evidence, the Literalists' account makes no sense. All the Literalist heresy-hunters trace the so-called 'heresy' of Gnosticism back to a Gnostic sage called Simon Magus, whom they:regard as the arch-heretic. Irenaeus tells us: 'The falsely so-called Gnosis took its beginnings, as one may learn from their own assertions, from the followers of Simon."¹²³ Yet Simon Magus is meant to have been a contemporary of Jesus and is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.¹²⁴ More reliable sources suggest that Simon was a Samarian who received his education in Alexandria where, according to some scholars, he was directly influenced by the Jewish Pythagorean Philo. ¹²⁵ Could the original teachings of an historical Jesus really have been so quickly perverted by his contemporary Simon, as the traditional picture requires? If Simon had wanted to preach an utterly different doctrine from Jesus, why would he not have simply set up his own cult which was nothing to do with Christianity?

Moreover, the heresy-hunters tell us of a Gnostic sage called Dositheus who was the precursor of Simon and lived around 100 BCE or earlier!¹²⁶ If by the evidence of the Literalists themselves, Gnosticism predates when Jesus is supposed to have lived, how can it have been a later perversion of his teachings? Not only this, but we know that even the name 'Jesus' has been deliberately constructed to equal in gematria the mystical number 888, which strongly suggests it was invented by Gnostics. Faced with all of this evidence it seemed to us that we had no choice but to completely reverse the traditional picture and see Literalism as a degenerate form of the original 'Jesus Mysteries' of the Gnostics.

A radically new picture of the origins of Christianity was emerging, which we called 'the Jesus Mysteries Thesis'. In essence it is this. Nearly all the peoples around the / Page 162 / Mediterranean had at some point adopted the Pagan Mysteries and adapted them to their own national taste. At some point in the first few centuries BCE a group of Jews had done likewise and produced a Jewish version of the Mysteries. Jewish initiates adapted the myths of Osiris-Dionysus to produce the story of a Jewish dying and resurrecting godman , Jesus the Messiah. In time this myth came to be interpreted as historical fact and Literalist Christianity was the product.

These ideas seemed revolutionary, but nothing else explained the facts. But before adopting a theory as radical as the Jesus Mysteries Thesis we knew there was more important research to be done. Wasn't there incontrovertible proof that there had been a Jewish teacher called Jesus? If there was then the Jesus story obviously could not be a Jewish adaptation of the myth of Osiris-Dionysus. We therefore began looking for evidence for the existence of Jesus the man. This was someone who had supposedly thrown money-lenders out of the temple in Jerusalem, miraculously fed thousands of people and raised the dead; at his death the whole Earth was said to have quaked and split open, the dead had risen from their graves and a great unnatural darkness had covered the land.¹²⁷ If he really was more than mythical, surely someone somewhere would have mentioned it in the records of the times?"

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/ Page 177 / the whole incident were made up by one of the hundreds of of thousands of Greek-speaking Jews who no longer spoke their native tongue and could not read their scriptures untranslated, hence attributing to Jesus their own misunderstandings.⁵⁸

One thing is surely indisputable from all of this: the gospels are not, as some Christians claim, the divine words of God.⁵⁹ For if they are, God is extremely confused. As, by his very nature, God is unlikely to be confused, it seems safe to conclude that we are dealing with the words of fallible men. So, can the gospels be relied on to tell us anything about an historical Jesus? What light can scholarship shed on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?

WeIl, first of all, the gospels were not originally even known by these names. They were not attributed to any particular author, each gospel being regarded as 'the gospel' of a particular Christian sect. Only later did they acquire the names of their supposed authors.⁶⁰ The gospels are actually anonymous works, in which every thing, without exception is written in capital letters, with no headings, chapter or verse divisions, and practically no punctuation or spaces between words.⁶¹ They were not even written in the Aramaic of the Jews but in Greek.⁶²

The gospels have also been added to and altered over time. The Pagan critic Celsus complains that Christians 'altered the original text of the gospels three or four times, or even more, with the intention of thus being able to destroy the arguments of their critics'.⁶³ Modem scholars have found that he was right. A careful study of over 3,000 early manuscripts has shown how scribes made many changes.⁶⁴ The Christian philosopher Origen, writing in the third century, acknowledges that manuscripts have been edited and interpolated to suit the needs of the changing theological climate:

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"The New Testament stories of the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000 have also been shown to yield mystical geometrical diagrams. This is clearly hinted at in Mark's gospels, where an impatient Jesus leads his disciples through what he clearly intends to be some mystical mathematical puzzle that, alas, his disciples do not understand:

'Jesus said, "Though you have eyes, you do not see, and though you have ears, you do not hear! Don't you remember, when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of scraps you cleared away?"

They said unto him, "Twelve."

" And when I broke the seven loaves for the four / Page 144 / thousand, how many basketfuls of scraps did you clear away?"

And they said, "Seven."

And he said to them, "And you still don't understand?"³⁶

It would seem that, like his confused disciples in the story, the Christian Church has failed to understand for 2,000 years that what it has taken as literal events are in fact carefully constructed mystical allegories. With the destruction of the Inner Mysteries of the Gnostics, the keys to decode the allegories have been lost and we can only guess at much of the profound metaphor at work in the Jesus story.

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