Luniolatry ancient and modern; a lecture

I

Massey
Luniolatry

-.•IJl'I'llIilf

THE LIBRARY
OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

LUNIOLATRY;

"CIENT AND MODERN.

A LBCTXJTIB

^«•«.('^l'^l•<■<'>«>^a'M^,f^^'^.»•l.»•,,M,l•^,«

BY

GEEALD MASSEY.

PRICE ONE SHILLING.

ILLA BORDIGHIERA, KEW SOUTHGATE, LONDON, N

i

ll^^'XSQTVl.

^^■i

LTJNIOLATEY,
ANCIENT AND MODERN

For thirty years past Professor Max Miiller has been teaching in his
books and lectures, in the Times, Saturday Revieiv, and various
magazines, from the platform of the Royal Institution, the pulpit of
Westminster Abbey, and his chair at Oxford, that Mythology is a
disease of language, and that the ancient symbolism was a result of
something like a primitive mental aberration.

" We know," says Renouf, echoing Max Miiller, in his Hibbert
lectures, " We know that mythology is the disease which springs up
at a peculiar stage of human culture." Such is the shallow explanation
of the non-evolutionists, and such explanations are still accepted by
the British public, that gets its thinking done for it by proxy. Pro-
fessor Max Miiller, Cox, Gubernatis and other propounders of the
Solar Mythos have portrayed the primitive myth-maker for us as a
sort of Germanised-Hindu metaphysician, projecting his own shadow
on a mental mist, and talking ingeniously concerning smoke, or, at
least, cloud ; the sky overhead becoming like the dome of dreamland,
scribbled over with the imagery of aboriginal nightmares ! They
conceive the early man in their own likeness, and look upon him as
perversely prone to self-mystification, or, as Fontenelle has it, " sub-
ject to beholding things that are not there!" They have misrepresented
primitive or archaic man as having been idiotically misled from the
first by an active but untutored imagination into believing all sorts of
fallacies, which were directly and constantly contradicted by his own
daily experience ; a fool of fancy in the midst of those grim realities
that were grinding his experience into him, like the griding icebergs
making their imprints upon the rocks submerged beneath the sea. It
remains to be said, and will one day be acknowledged, that these
accepted teachers have been no nearer to the beginnings of mythology
and language than Burns's poet Willie had been near to Pegasus. My
reply is, 'Tis but a dream of the metaphysical theorist that mythology
was a disease of language, or anything else except his own brain. The
origin and meaning of mythology have been missed altogether by
these solarites and weather-mongers ! Mythology was a primitive
mode of thinging the early thought. It \VUs^_unded_en_natural facts,

?42"^S^

aarl is still verifiable in phenomena. There is nothing insane, nothing
irrational in it, when considered in the light of evolution, and when
its mode of expression by sign-language is thoroughly understood.
The insanity lies in mistaking it for human history or Divine
Revelation. Mythology is the repository of man's most ancient
science, and what concerns us chiefly is this — when truly interpreted
once more it is destined to be the death of those false theologies to
which it has unwittingly given birth!

In modern phraseology a statement is sometimes said to be
mythical in proportion to its being untrue; but the ancient mythology
was not a system or mode of falsifying in that sense. Its fables were
the means of conveying facts ; they were neither forgeries nor fictions.
Nor did mythology originate in any intentional double-dealing what-
ever, although it did assume an aspect of duality when direct expression
in words had succeeded the primitive mode of representation by means
of things as signs and symbols. For example, when the Egyptians
portrayed the moon as a Cat, they were not ignorant enough to
suppose that the moon was a cat ; nor did their wandering fancies see
any likeness in the moon to a cat ; nor was a cat-myth any mere
expansion of verbal metai^hor ; nor had they any intention of making
puzzles or riddles to mislead others by means of such enigmatical
sign-language, at a time when they could not help themselves, having
no choice in the matter. They had observed the simple fact that the
cat saw in the dark, and that her eyes became full-orbed and grew

most luminous by night. Th^ moon was the sepr V>y nioht. in hoavpn^

and the cat was its equivalent on theearth ; and so the familiar cat
was~adoptecl as a representativeTT'naEural sign, a living pictograph of
the lunar orb ! Where wa-fihould make a comparison, and say^the
moon saw in th-? dnrt^ lil''^ a cat, -^r th^ f?at srw like the moon by night,
they identifipd tha-Qj^ft-xvifli ihp nf.Vipr (g mode of metaphor which still
characterises the great style in poetry), and said the cat up there can
see by nigliL- And so it followed that the sun which saw down in the
under-world at night, could also be called the cat, as it was, because it
also satv in the dark. The name of the cat in Egyptian is mau, which
denotes the seer, from mau, to see. One writer on mythology asserts
that the Egyptians " imagined a great cat behind the sun, which is the
pupil of the cat's eye." But this imagining is all modern. It is the
MllUerite stock in trade ! The moon as cat ivas the eye of the sun,
because it reflected the solar light, and because the eye gives back the
image in its mirror. In the form of the Goddess Pasht the cat keeps
watch for the sun, with her paw holding down and bruising the head
of the serpent of darkness, called his eternal enemy ! The cat was the
eye of night in the same symbolical sense that our daisy, which opens
and shuts with the rising and setting of the sun, is called the eye of
day. Moreover, the cat saw the sun, had it in its eye by night, when
it was otherwise unseen by men. We might say the moon mirrored
the solar light, because we have looking glasses. With them the cat's
eye ivas the mirror.

ThA-hav^ was annt.hftr fypp. of the eye that opened in heaven and
sa^UiiJJie_d^r^ Consequently, we find the hare in the moon is a
myth that gave birth to a common and wide-spread superstition. In
later times the symbol is literalized, and it is supposed that primi-
tive men were always on the look-out for likenesses, like a youthful
poet in search of comparisons, and that they saw some resemblance
to the form of a hare in the dark shadows of the lunar orb. Whereas
in mythology things are not what they seem to anybody ; that w^ould
lead to no consensus of agreement, nor establish any science of know-
ledge. A learned man once remarked to me on the strange fact that
the ancients should have selected the least observable of all the planets,
Mercurj^, to make so much of, as the messenger. He was entirely
ignorant of the fact that mythology includes a system of time-keeping,
and that Mercury was made the planetary messenger (in addition to
his lunar character), because his revolution round the sun is performed
in the shortest space of planetary time. In like manner. Max Mliller
will tell you that the moon was called by the name of Sasanka in
Sanskrit, from sasa, the hare, because the common people in India
think the black marks in the moon look like a hare ! But this is
mere fool's work or child's play with the surface appearances of things
which has little or no relation to true myth or ancient symbolism ;
and all such interpretation is entirely misleading ! Egypt, as I con-
tend, has left us the means of determining the original nature and
significance of these types.

When Iha Egyptians would denote an opening, says Hor- Apollo,
they_d£line5Jta.a hare, because this animal always has its-ey^a^ojjt^.
The name of the hare in Egyptian is Un, which signifies open, to open,
the o^ner, especially— cnnnpr'ted with~ period i pity, a-^i thg_JEQIlL3^^"
mean.s ,the^ hour. _ Tliis will explain how the wide, open-eyed hare
V.ppijr<2p a typp of th*^ moon, whvf'-fr'-^^ps wi^-"^^ ^Ts" ri^^7^^gI'JEj^ri£^_3
month, as th£-iiajp. in beavpn,.. The hare is the hieroglyphic sign of
the opener, which can be variously applied to the phenomena of open-
ing ; to the sun as well as the moon. The hare is an especial emblem
of the god Osiris in the character of Un-Nefer, the good opener ; in
later phrase, the good revealer ! It is as the seer that both hare and
cat are associated with the witch as types of abnormal seership.
The^iai^e also denoted the openingL_time,_aa_the_period of pubescence,
when irwas lawful for the sexes to come together. Hence it was
the type of pei^o^dicity^nd legality^m^heZhuman pbas^ For this
reason, the youths among the Namaqua Hottentots are (or were)
not allowed to eat the hare — which is meat for mature men only !
The type of periodicity was thus utilised as a mode of distinguish-
ing those who had come of age, the reproducers only being permitted
to eat the hare. With the Chinese the-i'abbit^ takes the place of the
hare as a lunar_type. Itfejeriod of gestation beingjbhirty da3\s, tliat
would "T«T?^Jji.gi^_g,pp^'^pyi«tp rpjiresentative oTjhe lunation, of open-
i fi »_.aneWj anJ-of-xe^bictjL

The Selish Indians have a myth of the frog in the moon. They

tell how the wolf, in love with the frog, was pursuing her by night
when she leaped into the moon, and escaped. Amongst the super-
stitions of our English folk-lore, we also have one respecting the
frog or toad, that is supposed to be visible in- the moon. Now
it can he shown how the frog got deposited there ; but only as a
type, not in reality, nor as a mere appearance. Tly,,frng isa natural
trans£Q£4aer-'frmn th» tadpole .phase in_thewater Jo the four-legged
stage on land! TH^-mnnn 1i1cp.wispjbrans^rms7"and th^^metamorpEosis
of the lunar^orb_jQQiiM^be_J;ypififidJiy_JJia cha^ the frog^^fld

so the frog as picture-object, natural type and living demonstrator
for the moon, ultimately became the frog in the moon. The, m^on
ros$ up JBpnthly,from^be--eelestial - waters, renewed like the frog,
and asLthe iior»ed__Qne-grew full-orbed it might be thought of as
losing th^ tail 6f~itsHad-pole_cQnditipn. The -^og. was.^gured_as_tKe
headja£-the— E^fvptian goddess Hek^ti[= Greek Hecate), th£L_consort
of-JOteefr-opg-ofnyh^se^tles is the " king of frogsJ' ffplcai. bping a.
lunaT_,gQdiiess_.aind_JKhnef a solar god, this title would denote that he

wg,s Inifd nf f.hft nnmprnns t.rflnsfnrmafinnH of light in the mOOn,

described as being the father, and she as the mother, of frogs, because
the frog was the typical transformer, as representative of the moon.
The Chinese have a three-legged frog in the moon that was an ancient
beauty, named Chang Ngo, who lives there because she once drank the
amrita of immortality. I have elsewhere suggested that the original
Phryne of Greece was a form of the frog-goddess who transformed !
The name of Phryne denotes the frog ; and in the most famous statue
of her, carved by Apelles, she was portrayed as Venus transfiguring
from the foam, as did the fwg-goddes&Hek^.of Egypt, who was the
lemoon. Only by reading these types, which preceded letters,
can we at alFunderstand the thought and intention of the primitive
thingers or thinkers.

Another example : the dung-beetle in Egypt was a type of Khepr-
Ptah, the creator by transformation, who is said to have been begotten
by his own becoming, and to have been born without a mother,
through repetition of himself. Khep, the root of the name, signifies
to transform. External nature was thej^ne^ of^eternal transf oroja-
tiarLand-ne^z^r-e^img metamorphosis. And itTiad been observed that

Khepr, the beetleTwas^ likewise a transformer, inasmuch as it laid its
eggs in dung found on the banks of the Nile, rolled it up into a ball,
and buried itself deep in the dry sand along with its seed, where, qua
beetle, it transformed, the old beetle into the young one, and so con-
tinued as the same beetle by transformation ! Thus the beetle served
to typify that being or existence which could not be expressed, but
which was seen to continue forever by self -repetition in phenomenal
manifestation. They knew nothing of beginning, and did not pretend
to know, but only of becoming, and of repetition or " renewal coming
of itself." So the beetle was adopted as a type of transformation,
whether of the old moon into the new one, of the sun out of the lower
into the upper heaven, or, in the latter times, of the dead mummy into

a living soul. Hor- Apollo says the scarabseus deposits his ball of seed
in the earth for the space of^^8jlajs^J.lieJfing^thjDf^tijTQe during which
the moon passes through the 12 signs of _ the zodiac, and on the 29th
day it opens the IbaTT.' The day on whi^h the conjunction^of sun and
moon ^curred waj_jthe day of resurrection f or— th£„ new-Jif q. The
beetle m heaven had once more transformed, and there was another
new moon !

The orbjiLJih^.-aiiKMLwithJts_chajiges jijgl^^
longer even than any performed by the Chinese now-a-days, its. drop-
seen^ ofjLhfi- darkness at the end, and the transformation into the new
life -of ligbt-ifi-tl^ beginning, presented the earliest form of the primi-
tive theatre, which offered its celestial show in heaven, gratis to all
eyes that gazed up from below. This must have been one of the
earliest educators in natural phenomena ! There is nothing more in-
teresting to me than to watch the nascent mind of man making its
infantile clutch, and trying to catch on and lay hold of external
things — to lay hold, as it were, of the skirts of the passing powers,
that were held to be superior to itself : nothing more instructive than
to follow the primitive ways of keeping touch with the life of ex-
ternal nature, and of sharing in the operations going on, so as to be
on the right and safe side, and get on the true line for deriving some
benefit from the way in which things were seen to be going ! This is
very touching in its simplicity, and will teach us more concerning the
past of man than all the metaphysical interpretation hitherto at-
tempted. The proper time for prayer, wishing or invoking aid, was
at first sight of the new moon, just as it started visibly on the way to
fulfilment, the mental attitude being, "■ May my wish be fulfilled like
the light in thy orb, oh moon ! May my life be renewed like thy
light!" Such was the prayer of the Congo negroes. The full moon
being the mother-moon, the eye that mirrored or reproduced the light
of the sun, that will account for the day of the full moon being-
accounted — as it was by the Greeks, Britons, and others — the most
propitious time for the marriage ceremony. The full moon was held
to come forth great with good luck ! Boy-children ought to be
weaned when the horned moon was waxing, and girls when it was on
the wane — the female being the reproducer as bringer-forth. So peas
and beans were sown in the wane of the moon to rise again like the
moon renewed. Corns ought to be cut during the wane of the moon
if you would have them disappear quickly. In very simple ways the
primitive observers had tried to set their life in time with the life
going on around them, and thus get what light they could from
Nature for their own guidance, and also make her language their own.
Butler asks (in Hudibras) : —

" "Why on a sign no painter draws
The full moon ever but the half?"

Now, that is very good sign language, especially as the " half-moon"
is a public-house symbol. It was an invitation to eat and drink to

6

the full, or come to the full as the half-moon does; it may be, to
" get fu'," in the Scottish sense. A moon already full would not have
answered the purpose.

An eclipse projected the shadow of coming calamity. The renewed
light of the old moon was like a promise of eternal life and everlasting
youth. When personified this was the healer, the saviour, an image
of very life. The first-born from the dead, the first-fruits of them
that slept in the graveyard of sunken suns, and cemetery of old dead
moons, was reproduced visibly in external phenomena, as the new
moon which was personated by the male moon-god Taht, called the
eighth, and lord of the eighth region, as the place of rising again from
the dead in the orb of the moon. There was a lunar mythology extant
long before it was known that the lunar orb was a reflector of the
solar light. There was a time also when it was not known, and could
not be divined, that the moon which dwindled and died down visibly
was the same moon that rose again from the dead. Hence there were
two different messages conveyed from heaven to men on earth, by the
hare as messenger for the moon in the lunar myths of the Hottentots
and other primitive races. In one of these versions the moon declared
that, as it died and did not rise again from its grave, even so was it
with man, who went down to the earth and came back no more. But,
when it had made out that the same moon returned as the old orb
renewed, the nature of its revelation was reversed. Its message now
contained a doctrine of the resurrection from the dead for man as well
as moon. The re-arising and transforming orb at la.st proclaimed that
even as it did not die out altogether, but was renewed from some
hidden spring or source of light, so was it with the human race, who
were likewise renewed to re-live on hereafter like the moon. In a
myth of the Caroline Islanders it is said that at first men only quitted
this life on the last day of the dying moon, to be revivified when the
new moon appeared. But there was a dark spirit that inflicted a death
from which there was no revival. This dark spirit, with its fatal
message, was primary in fact, and the true assurance of survival, like
the moon, depended on its being identified as the same moon which
rose again. It is in this way that we can re-think the primitive
thought, by getting it re-thinged in the physical realities of natural
phenomena. In the Ute Mythos the task of making a moon was
assigned to Whip-Poor- Will, a god of the night. The frog offered
himself as a willing sacrifice for this purpose, and he was transformed
by magical incantations into the New Moon. The symbolism is
identical, whether derived from Egypt or not. So is it when the
Buddha offers his body as a sacrifice, and transforms himself into the
lunar hare.

The Maories have a tradition of the first children of earth, in which
they relate that the earliest subject of human thought was the difference
between light and darkness; they were always thinking what might be
the difference betwixt light and darkness. Naturally, the primary con-
ditions of existence observed by primitive men were those that were

most observable, and, foremost amongst these, were the phenomena of
the day and the dark, which followed each other in ceaseless change.
Mythology begins with this vague and merely elemental phase of exter-
nal phenomena, alternating in night and day. In a secondary stage, it
was observed that the battle field of this never ending warfare of day
and dark was focussed and brought to a definite point in the orb of
the moon, where the struggle betwixt the two personified powers of
light and darkness went on and on for ever, each power having its
triumph over the other in its turn, — these being depicted in one repre-
sentation as the solar light and the serpent of darkness, in another by
the lion and the unicorn. These phenomena of light and darkness
were at first set forth by means of animals, reptiles, birds, and other
primitive types of the elemental powers ; and lastly the human type
was adopted, and the cunning of the crocodile, or the jackal of dark-
ness, is represented by the Egyptian Sut, the Norse Loki, the Greek
HermeB, or the Jewish Jacob, the dark deceiver ; and to-day, we find
the Christian Evidence Society engaged in defending such characters
as that of Jacob, in the full and perfect belief that Jacob was a human
being, and one of God's chosen race. Whereas, he was no more a
person than was Sut-Anup in Egypt, or Reynard the fox in Europe J
The human form, like that of the earlier animal type, was only repre-
sentative of some power manifested in natural phenomena. This
mode of representation was known when these sacred stories were
first told of mythical characters ; it was afterwards continued and
taught in the so-called " mysteries " by means of the Gnosis. When
the art or Gnosis was lost to the world outside, the ancient histories
were ignorantly supposed to be human in their origin; mythology
was euhemerized (that is, the ideal was mistaken for the real), and
Egyptian mythology was converted into Hebrew miracles and Christian
history.

Thus when the Iroquois Indians claim that the first ancestor of
the red man was a hare, we do not know what that saying means
until we learn the representative value of the symbol ! So is it all
sign-writino- through.

When Herodotus went to Egypt, he recognised the originals
of the gods that were adored, amplified, embellished, or laughed at in
Greece. At present, however, the Miillerites dare not mention Egypt,
but look askance at those who do. Here is a crucial instance of
survival, evidenced by philology, — the name of Mars as Ares will serve
to prove how Egyptian underlies the Greek ! The planet Mars is
called Har-Tesh in Egyptian, which signifies the red lord, or the lord
of gore. Cedrenus writes the name of Ares as Hartosi, and Vettius
Valens as Hartes, whence Artis, and finally Ares. Again, the name
of Hera denotes the heaven, over, in Egyptian ; which certainly
describes the nature of the Greek goddess of that name.

When we are told by the Roman Catholic Egyptologist, Renouf , that
" Neither Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from
Egypt," we can only think of such a dictum as an intentional blind,

8

or as a result of putting up the glass to an eye that cannot see. It is
simply impossible for the non-evolutionist, the bigotted Bibliolator,
or the Miillerite, to interpret or to understand the mythology of Egypt.
Its roots go too deep, and its branches spread too far, for their range of
thought. And now, let me offer a remarkable example of the modes
in which the Egyptians expressed or thinged their thoughts, by means
of external phenomena. The sun-god Ra is represented as possessing
fourteen spirits or kaus, the living likenesses and glorified images of
himself. These are portrayed as fourteen personages at Edfu and
Denderah. In- one text it is said, — "Hail to thee and thy fourteen
spirits fourteen times." These are also mentioned in the tablet of
Ipsambul, as the fourteen kaus of Ha, which " Taht has added to all
his ways." Taht is the moon-god, and this gives us a clue to the
fourteen spirits, which, I think, no Egyptologist has yet suspected.
But Taht is the god of the first fourteen days of the moon's lunation,
and fourteen nights of the new moon reproduced the likeness of the
solar god in light fourteen times over ; these were designated his
fourteen kaus, the visible images of his hidden self — in short, his
apparition seen nightly in the moon ! Indeed, the moon in its dark
half was treated as the niummy or un-illiiminated body of the sun-
god, who is described as coming to visit, to comfort it, to beget upon
it, in the under-world. This lunar body of the solar soul is repre-
sented by the ass-headed god Aai (upon which the sun-god rode), who
is found mummified on the tomb of Rameses 6th. Thus, the dark orb
or body of the moon was the mummy of the sun, and its fourteen days
of growing light were thought of as fourteen manifestations of the
solar-god in spiritual apparition, visible b}' night in the moon ; hence
the fourteen spirits assigned to the sun-god Ra. From such an origin
it will be seen how natural it was that the lunar orb should be looked
up to as the home of spirits, as when the Egyptian prays that his soul
may ascend to heaven in the disk of the moon ! Another fable of the
dark half of the lunation has been preserved by Plutarch, who relates
that when Typhon, the evil power, was hunting by moonlight, he by
chance came upon the dead body or mummy of Osiris prepared for
burial, and, knowing it again, he tore it into fourteen parts, and
scattered them all about. These fourteen parts typify the fourteen
days of the lessening light, during which the devil of darkness had the
upper hand. The twenty-eight days made one lunar month according
to Egyptian reckoning.

The earlier and simpler representation of the lunar light and dark
is portrayed in the myth of the Two Brothers, who always contend
for .supremacy over each other. The most ancient and primitive
myths are found to be the most universal ; and this of the twin
brothers is extant all over the world. It is the myth of Sut-Horus in
Egypt ; the Asvins or Krishna and Balarama in Inilia ; the Crow and
the Eagle of the Australian blacks ; Tsuni-Goam and Gaunab among
the Hottentots; Jack and Jill, and twenty other forms that I have
compared in my " Natural Genesis." It is that struggle of two brothers

9

in the beginning which is represented in the Hebrew book of Genesis
as the murderous conflict of Cain and Abel. Cain as the victor is the
same character as the Egyptian Khunsu, Khun or Khen, meaning to
chase, hunt, beat, be the victor , and therefore I take it that the name
of Cain is probably one with the Egyptian Khun. Abel is the dark
little one that fades and falls and passes away, the one who becomes
a sacrificial type, because of the nature of the phenomena. The
conqueror is portrayed as the killer. The Gnostic Cainites, however,
maintained truly that Cain derived his being from the power above,
and not from the evil power below. They knew the Mythos. The
contention of Jacob and Esau for birth and for the birth-right is
another form of the same myth. Esau, the red and hairy, is really
the lord of light in the new moon, Jacob is the child of darkness,
hence the deceiver by nature and by name. A Jewish tradition relates
that Esau, when born, had the likeness of a serpent marked upon his
heel. This shows he was a personification of the hero who bruised
the serpent's head, and that Jacob, who laid hold of Esau's heel, was a
co-type in phenomena with the serpent of darkness. There is nothing
moral or immoral in mere physical phenomena themselves. No
fratricide is actually committed by the conquering Cain, nor fraud by
the dark and wily Jacob. But when these same phenomena are
dramatised, and the characters are made human, or inhuman, as the
case may be, the un-moral becomes immoral, and the human image is
disfigured by the most wilful flaw, or wanton brand of degradation.
Cain is made the murderer of his own brother, in the beginning, and
that red stain is supposed to run through all human history, as a first
result of Adam's fall, and to burn on the brow of man until it is
washed out at last in the blood of a redeeming Saviour — who is
equally mythical.

This lunar representation has several shapes in Egyptian mythology,
where the Twin Brothers are Sut and Osiris, Sut and Horus, the two
Horuses, Taht and Aan, or Khunsu and Typhon.

In his Hibbert lectures Mr. Renouf says curtly, the Egyptian god
" Khunsu is the moon." But such Egyptology has not yet blazed the
veriest surface of the mythology. Such statements teach nothing
truly, because they do not put in the bottom facts. They do not
help us to think in those phenomena which have been entified or
divinised in and as mythology. It may be said quite as bluntly that
Khunsu is not the moon. He only represents one phase of the lunar
phenomena, which are triadic. Khunsu is the child of the sun and
moon. His name denotes the young hero. When this deity was
evolved it had been discovered that the moon derived her light from
the sun. In the planisphere of Denderah the youthful God Khunsu is
portrayed in the disk of the full moon of Easter, where he represents
the light and force of the sun that is reborn monthly and annually of
the lunar orb considered to be his mother, who thus reproduces the
child of light in the disk of the moon. The same myth is likewise
Osirian, as we learn from one of the hymns, where it is said, " Hail to

10

thee, Osiris, Lord of Eternity ! When thou art in heaven thou
appearest as the sun, and thou renewest thyself as the moon." But
this renewal of light in the moon was portrayed as the re-birth of
the god in the person of his own child ; hence the child Horus is also
depicted like the child Khunsu in the disk of the full moon, as both
may be seen in the same planisphere of Denderah. Khunsu is the
Egyptian Jack the giant-killer. In the Ritual he is called the slayer
of rebels and piercer of the proud. His natural genesis was in the
tiny light of the new moon, which rose up with its sharp horns to
pierce the powers of night, and drive them out of the darkened orb.
The giants of the primitive mind ivere the powers of darkness, which
forever rose up in revolt against the light, kept all life cowering in
their shadow by night, took possession of the moon in the latter half
of the lunation, or covered its face with the blood and dust of battle
during the terrible time of an eclipse. Then the little hero, the child
of light, arose and made war on the giants, and overcame them as he
grew in glory and waxed greatly in the plenitude of his Hidden
father's power and might. The name of Khunsu's father is Amen, the
Hidden God, the child Khunsu being his visible representative re-born
in the new moon.

Mythology is the ground-work of all our theology and Christology,
and it is only by mastering the plan that we can learn how the super-
structure has been built. This character of Khunsu is that of the
mythical Messiah, or manifester in external nature, as a representative
of the Eternal in the phenomena of time. In Egypt, Seb-Kronus, or
Time, was designated the true Repa, or Heir-Apparent of the Gods,
Later, the Repa was Heir-Apparent to the father, Osiris or A.men-
Ra, and the re-birth in time, might be monthly or annually, every
nineteen or twenty-five, 500 or 2155, years, according to the particular
period. In the mystical or spiritual phase this representative of
divinity was the Christ within, the Son of God incarnate in matter ;
the Christ of the Gnostics who was not a man ; their Jesus, who could
not be a Jew ; their Redeemer, who was but the immortal principle in
man, a Deliverer from the degradation ; a Saviour solely from the
dissolution of matter, which the Greek poet Linus calls the " Giver of
all shameful things."

But to return to the Moon Mythos. The legend of Samson can
now be read for the first time as the Hebrew version of the Egyptian
myth of Khunsu, the luni-solar hero who slays the giants — or Philis-
tines— and overcomes the powers of darkness. It was impossible to
read the riddle by supposing, with Steinthal, that Samson was simply
the sun-god himself ; because if he were, in killing the lion he would
be only slaying the reflection of himself — the lion being a solar type.
The name of Shimshon denotes the luminous or shining one, as an
emanation of the solar fire. Samson, like Khunsu, is the typical hero.
Khunsu is the Egyptian Heracles. Samson, like Heracles, slays the
lion, as his first great labour, or feat of strength. This deed is repre-
sented allegorically, and is put forth as his riddle. Out of the eater

11

came forth meat, and out of the mighty came forth sweetness. The
mighty one who devours is the lion, and the honey was found in its
dead carcase. The Mithraic and Egyptian monuments will enable us
to read the riddle. In the Persian we see the lion depicted with a bee
in its mouth. The lion, or rather the lioness, vjas an Egyptian figure
of fire — the lioness in heat. She was represented, by the goddess of
the solar fire and alcoholic spirit, as Sekhet, who carries the sun's disk
on the head of a lioness. The name of this she-lion, Sekhet, is also the
name for the bee, which is the royal symbol of Lower Egypt ; and the
bee denotes the sweetness in the lion. Now, the fiercest solar heat was
coincident with the waters of the Inundation, two-thirds of which
(according to Hor-Apollo) poured down into Egypt whilst the
sun was in the sign of the lion. Sekhet was also the goddess of
sweetness or pleasure — we may say literally, goddess of the honey-
moon. Hence the association of the Hon and the bee, or the honey in
the lion. The triumph over the lion may be understood in this way.
Sekhet, the she-lion, impersonated the force of the sun, which was
often fatal, hence she was made the punisher of the wicked with hell-
fire ; and this lunar hero, as Heracles, Khunsu, or Samson, was the
conqueror in the cool of the night, which followed the fiery fervour of
the sun by day. Further, at the time the sun was in the lion-sign, the
full moon rose vis-a-vis in the sign of the Waterman, or Waterwoman,
in the Hermean Zodiac ; and we cannot read one part of the celestial
imager}'' independently of the other. In this full moon, which brought
the sweet, fresh waters to Egypt, the hero attained the height of his
glory, as conqueror of the farnace-heat which culminated then and
there with the sun in the sign of the lioness, as reflector of the fiercest
solar fire. As the moon was the bringer of the waters, and the breath
of life in the coolness and the dews of night, the lunar hero was not
only credited with drawing the sting of Sekhet, but with extracting
honey from the dead lion.

When the young hero as son of the sun-god, reborn of the new
moon, has once more conquered in conflict with his eternal enemy, and
he breaks out in triumph, free from the throttling folds of the dragon,
of the Sami, or the Philistines, as he ascends aloft he is seen bearing
the dark orb of the old moon as a palpable proof of his power. He
had burst through the barriers of the underworld, the gates of death
and darkness ; and so it would be fabled that he carried the barriers
away with him, and bore them visibly on high to the summit of the
lunar ascent ! It is so represented when Samson not only breaks out of
Gaza, but tears up the city gates, and carries them away by night with
their posts, bolts, and bars, to the top of the hill, or mountain of the
moon, as the lunar height was called ! The soli-lunar nature of the hero
is shown by the number 30 (the thirty days to the month in the soli-
lunar reckoning.) Samson has thirty companions. He smote thirty men
at Ascalou, and spoiled them of thirty changes of raiment. The num-
ber 7 is also an all-important factor in the lunar mythos, with its
twenty-eight days to the month. In the cuneiform legend of Ishtar

12

the goddess descends and ascends through seven gates, each way in
her passage to and from the netherworld, as female representative of
the moon. So when Sut-Typhon, the dark one of the lunar twins,
was beaten by Horus, he is described by Plutarch as fleeing from the
battle during seven days on the back of an ass ! In each case the
number 7 signifies one quarter of a moon. The number 7, answering
to one lunar quarter, is prominent in the legend of Samson. In one
phase he tells Delilah that if he is bound with seven new bow-strings
his strength will depart, and he will become weak, and be as another
man. But when these are applied to him they are snapped like a
string of fire-singed tow ! We may suppose this phase to represent
the first seven days of the groiving crescent moon ; hence the seven
new bow-strings, which are in keeping with the seven strings of the
lunar harp. In the second phase the hero is bound with new ropes,
which he freed himself from as if they had been thread. Fourteen
days bring us to the moon at full, and to the culmination of Samson's
glory. Then he confesses to his charmer that if the seven locks of his
head are shaven ofl[' his strength will assuredly depart. Now, hair is
an especial, primitive type of virility, potency, and power. In the
Egyptian Ritual the Osirified, as Horus, ascends the heaven with his
long hair reaching down to his shoulders as a type of his growing
glory. Moreover, Samson's hair, the emblem of his strength, is in
seven locks. These answer to the seven nights of the quarter in which-
the lunar splendour comes to the full, and the opposing powers of
darkness, called the Philistines, are very literally " cleared out."
When this period is past, and the hero is shorn of his hair, the Philis-
tines are upon him once more. This time the drama is to come to an
end. But not without an intimation of its being continued or re-
peated in the next new moon, for the narrative confesses conscientiously
that Samson's hair began to grow again after he was shaven. But for
the present the powers of darkness prevail ; and having shorn the hero
of his glory during seven nights, and brought him low, they put out
his sight and bind him with fetters of brass, eyeless in Gaza, pitiful
and forlorn as " blind Orion hunsrering for the morn."

The eye of the blinded Horus being put out by Sut, who was at the
head of the Typhonian powers,, called the Sami, or conspirators, is identi-
cal in the Egyptian my thos with the putting out of Samson's eyes in the
Hebrew version ! In the Osirian myth, however, it is the eye of Horus
that is wounded ; the eye that is swallowed by Sut ; the eye that is re-
stored at dawn of day, and this one-eyed form of the my thos survives in
the account of Samson's blindness when he prays for strength enough to
avenge the loss of one of his tivo eyes, as we have it in the margin !
The lunar light was the eye of the sun, but this becomes the two eyes
of the hero when he is rendered according to the complete human
likeness, which shows us how the mythos was rationalised as history.
It is Delilah who causes the ruin of Samson, just as Ishtar, called
goddess 15, as the moon at full, is the ruin of her lovers, in the legend
of Ishtar and Izdubar, where she is charged with being an enchantress.

13

a pcisoner, a destroyer of male potency. Izdubar, the sun god, re-
proaches her with witchcraft, her murderous lust, her merciless cruelty,
and declines to become her lover himself ! According to the myth the
luni -solar male divinity was represented in the wane of the light as
suffering from the evil influence of the female moon. It is very evi-
dent that the myths were made by men ; as in case of a fall or catas-
trophe it was always she who did it. She tempted the poor man, or
overcame the god. It was she who had reduced his strength, and
brought him so low ; she who had shorn him of his glory ; she who
had given him poison to drink, and betrayed him to the p'')wers of
darkness ; she who is the cause of his impotential mood, his waning,
languishing, and drooping down. And the true meaning of Delilah's
name, I take it, expresses the weakened, worn-out, impotent condi-
tion of the lunar hero thus brought low — the name being derivable
from a root signifying to totter, droop, and hang inertly down —
Delilah being the personified cause of this emasculated condition of the
reduced and wretched, bound and blinded lunar god, the mighty hero
in his fallen state. The Danes have a lunar Delilah or lady of the
moon, who is described as being very beautiful when seen in front,
but she is hollow behind : she plays upon a harp of seven strings,, and
with this she lures young men to her on purpose to destroy them.
The Hebrews have a Talmudic tradition that Samson was lame in
both his feet. And this was the status or condition of the child-
Horus, who was said to be maimed and halt in his lower mem-
bers; the cripple deity, as he is called by Plutarch. Other scat-
tered fragments of the true myth are to be found ; for instance,
in the lunar triad of the mother and the twin brothers, one of
them accompanies the female moon during the first half of the total
lunation, the other during the latter half ; and this appears to be
reflected by the Hebrew mythos when Samson's wife is " given to his
companion whom he had used as a friend." Again, the jackal was an
Egyptian type of the dark one that devoured by night, and of Sut, the
thief of light in the moon, he who swallowed the Eye of Horus.
Jackal and fox are co-types, and they have one name, that of Shugal,
the howler, in Hebrew. This enables us to understand the story of
the 300 foxes or jackals in the Jewish form of the myth. Samson
being the representative of the sun-god who drives the darkness out of
or away from the lunar orb, and does all the damage he can to the
Typhonian powers, or Philistines, the story-teller multiplies the jackal
to enhance the triumph of his hero ; and instead of the struggle between
Horus and the jackal-headed Sut-Anup, we have the more difficult feat
of catching 300 jackals and setting fire to their tails, so that they might
consume the crops of the Philistines, or, in other words, burn out the
darkness from the orb of the moon.

It is probable that Mithra, son of Ahura Mazda, and natural oppon-
ent of the dark Power, is the same representative of the God of Light,
reflected in the moon as the witness by night for the absent sun. It
may be noted that Matra in Egyptian means che Witness, or more full^.

14

the Witness for Ra. The scene portrayed on the Persian monuments
is nocturnal, and the time of year is that of the sun's entrance into
the sign of Scorpio, where it is deprived of its virility. At this time
the moon rises at full in the sign of the Bull, the first of the superior
signs. The Lord of Light in the moon is now the dominating power
during six months. Thus Mithras slaying the Bull is equivalent to
Samson killing the Lion, or overcoming the fierceness of the Solar fire ;
and also of Osiris doing battle with Sut-Typhon and conquering his
terrors in external phenomena. Osiris dies on the 17th of the month
Athor, which was at the time of the Autumn Equinox, or rather he
enters the six lower signs at that time. An ark was made in the
shape of a crescent moon, and on the 19 th of the same month the
priests proclaimed that Osiris was found, his resurrection on the
third day being in the moon. Thus it was in the new moon that the
Dead Osiris first returned to life in the form of his own son.

Our modern solarite interpreters can talk of little else but the
sun, the dawn, and the dark. Mr. Renouf, in his Hibbert lectures,
identifies Sut-Anubis with the twilight, or as the dusk. Hence, when
it is said in the texts that he " swallowed his father Osiris," this on the
face of it looks like the darkness of night swallowing the disappearing
sun. But Egyptian mythology is by no means so simple as that. It
is not to be fathomed on the face of it, nor can it be interpreted with-
out such a knowledge of the total typology, as the Aryan School all
put together do not possess. There is nothing simply solar in it any-
where ! It is true that Sut represents the presence and the power of
darkness. It is true that the nocturnal sun in the under world was
called Osiris, or Atum, or Amen-Ra. Also, the setting orbs of light
were represented as being swallowed down by the crocodile or some
other type of the devourer. But the continual conflict and alternate
victory of light and darkness were seen to have their most obvious,
most visible, most interesting field of battle in the moon ! It was
there the watchers observed the never-ceasing struggle for the birth-
right of the twin brothers, who personated the opposing powers. The
dark one was first born from the mother moon at full ; but the light
one was acknowledged to be the genuine heir-apparent ! There is a
myth of the blind Horus in which he is described as sitting solitary in
his darkness. Sut is said to have swallowed his eye, or to have
wounded it, and put out the sight. In one text Horus says, " Behold,
my eye is as though Sut (Anup) had pierced it." In another he cries,
" I am Horus. I come to search for mine eyes." Sut, who swallows
the eye, is made to restore it again ! In one account the eye is said to
be restored at the dawn of day ; that is in the vague stage of the con-
flict between the darkness and the light.

At one time, says Plutarch, Sut smote Orus in the Eye ; this repre-
sented the diminution of the moon. At another he plucked the eye
out and swallowed it, afterwards giving it back to the sun. This
blinding denoted the Eclipse.

In the lunar phase of the mythos the Eye of light, or of the sun, is

15

the moon. The moon at full was the mirror of light, hence i^: was the
mother of Horus as the child of light ! But the eye was the primitive
mirror. So the moon was called the Eye of the sun, -vheL\ it was
known as a reflector of the solar light. Thus the lunar orb was the
consort of the sun ; his Y^yQ by night, as the reproducer of his light
when he was in the under-world ; and in reproducing the light she
was as the mother bringing forth his child ! For instance, the cow
was a type of the moon as Hathor, or as Aahti, and when the cow is
portrayed with the solar disk between her horns, the imagery
denotes the mother-moon as bearer of the sun, that is, as reproducer
of the solar light in the lunar orb, or, as it was also said, in the Eye.
For this reason the mother of Horus, child of light, is also de-
scribed as being the eye of Horus, the moon-mirror in which the
father Osiris made babies in the eye, as the poets say, or was reflected
as Horus, the child of light, re-born monthly of the moon as his
mother. The lunar god Taht is sometimes portrayed with the eye
of Horus, or the new moon in his hand. And the goddess Meri = Mary
bears the eye upon her head, as typical reproducer of the child. Now
this is the eye that was swallowed by Sut. When the power of dark-
ness had put out the lunar light, the eye was not only pierced but
swallowed, as the phenomena were rendered in the mythos. More-
over, as Osiris had become the father of all, he was also the acknow-
ledged father of Sut ; and as it was the father who was reflected by
the mother-moon, or the eye, Sut may be said to have swallowed his
own father when he obscured the lunar light, or swallowed it with the
darkness during an eclipse. This was the symbolic eye that was full
on the 14th of the month in the lunar, or on the 15th in the soli-
lunar reckoning, or on the 30th Epiphi, when the eye of the year was
full, according to the Egyptian Ritual. The swallowing of Osiris by
Sut belongs to the soli-lunar phenomena ! Plutarch tells us that some
of the Egyptians held the shadow of the earth, which caused an
eclipse of the moon, to be Sut Typhon. By aid of which we can
ideniify the original dragon of the eclipse ! The mythical and
celestial dragon, as I have elsewhere demonstrated, was founded on
the crocodile as the natural type of the swallowing darkness. The
crocodile is the swallower of the lights as they go down in the west,
and the tail of the crocodile reads kam, i.e., black, darkness. Typhon
(both male and female) is represented by the crocodile, the dragon of
the waters and of darkness. Now the most thrilling and fearsome
act of the lunar drama was during the period of eclipse. There is
something very weird, uncanny, and unked, in the projection of the
earth's shadow across the luminous face of the moon. To the primi-
tive mind it was the crocodile above, or the dragon, swallowing the
orb of light, or Sut swallowing his father Osiris. An eclipse was the
meal-time of the monster. An eclipse was the scene of the great
battle between Horus and Sut, or Horus and the Dragon, and the great
battle was identical with that of our Georore and the Dragon. The
same struggle between the powers of light and darkness is portrayed

16

in the Book of I-evelation when the woman clothed with the sun, and
the moon under, her feet, is about to bring forth her man child, and
the great dr? j;on of eclipse stands before her ready to devour the
Child as soon as it is born ! In the oldest astronomy the years were
reckoned by the eclipses, as it was in Egypt, China, and India. And
the most ancient type of time or Kronus, as Egyptian, is Sevekh, the
crocodile-headed god, that is, the dragon of eclipse who annually
swallowed the moon containing the Lord of Light or his infant
Image.

According to the mythical mode of representing the natural fact,
three days and three nights were reckoned for the absence of the
lunar light, between old and new moon, and the Lord of Light in
the lunar orb was said to be swallowed by a Dragon or a monster fish
and to remain for that length of time in its belly. The legend is
Egyptian. The great fish is the crocodile, the dragon of the deep.
This is called the fish of Horus in the Ritual. The Crocodile first
denoted the earth as the swallower of the Lights before it became the
Water-Dragon, and so the Manifestor, as Horus, Jonah, Tangaroa, or
the Christ, could be three days in the earth or the great fish previ-
ously to his resurrection. Types and stories might be manifold ; the
fact signified was always the same. Hence the Jonah of the Hebrew
version is identical with the Christ, not as type of him, where all is
typical ; and in the Roman Catacombs the Jonah of one version is the
Christ of the other. Jonah issues from the great fish in the form of
the Child-Christ. Thus the origin of the "three days and three
nights in the heart of the earth," or in the Crocodile, is to be found in
lunar phenomena.

In a later form of the Osirian legend the Twins are the double
Horus, instead of the Sut-Horus of the Typhonian myth. In this we
see the little dark child eyeless, soulless, maimed in his lower members,
going into Tattu to meet his soul, his other self, his glorified body, the
double, like that of Buddha, which was called his diamond body. This
other self is designated the soul of the sun, and it is this which revivi-
fies, regenerates, and transforms the child of the mother-moon into the
virile Horus, the new moon horned and pubescent. There is a tradi-
tion preserved by Plutarch that the child Horus, the cripple deity,
begotten in the dark, was the result of Osiris having accompanied with
Isis after her decease, or with Nephthys her sister, below the horizon.
Even this representation is perfectly correct according to the natural
phenomena. Isis personates the moon, which dies to be again renewed.
The renewal occurs in the under- world, and is out of sight or all in the
dark. Osiris, as the sun below the horizon is the renovator of the old,
dead orb of the moon, which he causes to re-live with his light ; hence
the fable of his accompanying with Isis after her demise is in accord-
ance with the mythical mode of representing the phenomena of external
nature in human imagery.

In one of its phases the moon was portrayed in the character of a
thief, which was personated by the jackal, ape, or wolf, who represented

17

the dark half of the lunation. The Germans have a saying that the wolf
is eating the candle when there is what is still called a thief in it. So
the primitiv^e observers saw the dark encroaching on the light, and
they said the wolf, jackal, rat, or other sly animal was eating the moon
as the thief of its light. This is why Hermes was represented as the
thief. Ill two different forms of the lunar mythos the jackal and the
dog-headed ape were two types of this thief of the light. And in the
zodiac of Denderah,just where Horus is on the cross, or at the crossing
of the vernal equinox, these two thieves, Sut-Anup and Aan, are
depicted one on either side of the luni-solar god. These two mythical
originals have, I think, been continued and humanised as the two
thieves in the Gospel version of the crucifixion.

The character of the thief still clings to the man in the moon. In a
North Frisian folk-tale the man in the moon is fabled to have stolen
branches of willow, or the sallow-palms, which he has to carry in his
hands forever. Here we can identify the palm-branch of the man in
the moon as Egyptian. The palm-branch was a type of time and
periodicity, Hor- Apollo tells us it was adopted as the symbol of a
month, because it alone produces one additional branch at each renova-
tion of the moon, so that in reckoning the year is completed in twelve
branches. A form of this appears as the Tree of Life in the book of
Revelation. The palm-branch is carried by Taht, the man in the
moon, and scribe of the gods, who reckoned time by means of the
lunations, and this evidently survives in the Frisian legend. He who
once reckoned time by means of the shoots on the palm-branch became
the picker-up or stealer of willow-wands or sticks, according to the
later folk-lore. Also, when the moon-god was superseded by the sun
as the truer reckoner of time, the character of the lunar deity suffered
degradation ! We find the same contention going on as there was
between the number thirteen and twelve. When the year was
reckoned by thirteen moons of twenty-eight days each, thirteen was then
the lucky number (a charm of primroses or a sitting of eggs was
thirteen), but when this was changed for the twelve months of solar
time, then the number thirteen became unlucky or accursed. The day
of rest being changed from Saturday, the old lunar god was charged
with being a Sabbath-breaker. He stole sticks, or he streived brambles
and thorn-bushes on the paths of people who went to church on Sun-
day (the day of the Sun). He did not keep the day of rest, but would
go on working, or reckoning time with his palm-branch, Sundays as
well as week-days, and so he was doomed to stand in the moon for all
eternity as a warning to wicked Sabbath-breakers. Taht (or Khunsu)
is the Egyptian man in the moon, who in the dark half of the period
was represented by the dog-headed ape ; and from these came our man
in the moon with his dog. The Creek Indians have the same myth.
They say the inhabitants of the moon consist of a man and his dog.

The ass was another Typhonian type of the moon. In an Egyptian
representation, it is by the aid of the ass-headed god Aai that the
solar divinity ascends from the under-world where the dark powers

18

have their time of triumph over him by night. The ass is portrayed
in the act of liauling up the sun-god with a rope from the region
below. That is one mode of expressing the fact that the moon here
represented by the ass was the helper of the sun by night, in his battle
against the powers of darkness — gave him a lift up, or, it may be, a
ride. Again, in the Persian form of the lunar myth, it is the ass that
stands on three legs in the midst of the waters, who is the assistant of
Sothis, the dogstar, in keeping time. The three legs of the ass are a
figure of the moon in its three phases of ten days each, like the three
legs of the frog in the Chinese myth. Also, the head of the ass is an
Egyptian hieroglyphic sign which has the numeral value of thirty, or
a soli-lunar month. Thus we find the ass fighting on the side of the
sun by night in the Egyptian mythos, and against the waters of the
deluge, as a timekeeper in the Persian legend. In the Hebrew version
the jaw-bone of the ass, a type of great strength, becomes the weapon of
power with which Samson slays the Philistines, or fights the sun-god's
battle by night against his enemies that lurk in darkness. The ass, as
a lunar type, was also represented as the bearer of the solar Messiah,
just as the cow carries the sun between her horns as reproducer of his
light in the moon. The moon at full was the genetrix under either
type. The lessening, waning moon was her colt — the foal of an ass.
The new moon, as the young lord of light, came riding in his triumph
on the ass, as the new moon on the dark orb of the old mother-moon !
Now, in the apocryphal gospel of James, called the Protevangelium,
the virgin Mary is described as riding on the ass when Joseph sees her
laughing on one side of her face, and crying or being sad on the other !
which corresponds to the light and dark halves of the moon. She is
lifted from the ass to give birth to the child of light in the Cave. In
the Greek myth Hephaistos ascends from the under-world riding on
the ass, the wine-god having made him drunk before leading him up
to heaven. In the Hebrew version the Shiloh is to come, binding his
ass to the vine, his eyes red with wine, his garments drenched in the
blood of the grape, and he is as obviously drunk as Hephaistos. This
imagery was set in the planisphere, ages before our era, as the fore-
figure and prophecy of that which was to be fulfilled in the Christian
history, according to the canonical gospels ! Now it can be seen how
the Messiah may be said to come riding on an ass, and upon a colt, the
foal of an ass, although it is pitiful enough to give one the heartache,
to expose the miserable pretences under which this mythical Messiah
has been masked in human form, and made to put on the cast-oft
clothing of the pagan gods, and play their parts once more ; this time
to prove the real presence of a god in the world.

It was as the mother-moon that Ishtar of Akkad was designated
" Goddess Fifteen," — she being named from the full moon in a month
of thirty days. The same fact is signified in the Egyptian Ritual
(ch. 80), when the Woman of the moon at full orb exclaims, — " I have
made the eye of Horus (the mirror of light), when it was not coming
on the festival of the 15th day." She is the Egyptian form of the

19

Goddess 15. Ishtar is described as ascending and descending the steps
of the moon, so many days up and so many days down — of these days
there would be fifteen altogether, in accordance with her name of
Goddess 15. And here the Christian Mary can be identified in this
lunar character by means of the Apocryphal Gospels, that contain
legends of the infancy which are of primary importance, hence they
have been denounced as spurious, excommunicated as heretical, and
kept out of sight by Papal commands. In pseudo Matthew (ch. iv.),
we learn that when the Virgin was an infant, just weaned, she ran up
the fifteen steps of the temple at full speed, without once looking
back. At this age she was regarded as an adult of about thirty years !
The story of the fifteen steps is repeated in the Gospel of Mary's
nativity (ch. vi.), where the fifteen steps are associated with the fifteen
Psalms of degrees. Further, it was on the 15th day of the moon that
the dark one of the twins was re-born, as the lessening, waning one
of the two ; and in the history of Joseph the carpenter, Jesus says
that Mary gave him birth in the fifteenth year of her age, by a
mystery that no creature can understand except the Trinity. The
Trinity being lunar, the subject matter is identical according to the
Gnosis of numbers, and Mary is also a form of the Goddess 15, — Meri,
or Hathor-Meri, in the Egyptian Mythos.

It is only in lunar phenomena that we can see how the child could
be born from the side of its mother, as Sut Horus was, as well as the
Buddha, or the Christ. Also, the divine child, as Baddha, was said
to be visible whilst in the mother's womb. The womb of the mother
being the lunar orb in which the child in embryo can be seen in course
of growth, it was represented as being transparent with the child on
view. The child Jesus is so portrayed in the Christian pictures of the
enciente Virgin Mary, as may be seen in Didron's Iconography !

The birth of the dark one of the mother-moon's two children,
depends upon that part of the lunar orb which is turned away from
the sun, being dimly seen through the light reflected from our earth.
As the light began to lessen, and the orb became opaque, there was an
obvious birth of the dark part of the moon ! That was the birth of
the little, dark one, of the lunar twins. So fine a point of departure
from the light half to the dark, and from the dark half to the light,
may be likened to a single hair — as it was in the Hindu mythos,
which represents Krishna as being born from a single black hair
and Balarama from a single white hair of Vishnu. This is, pro-
bably, the mythical meaning of a saying attributed to the Christ
in the gospel of the Hebrews, — "And straightway," said Jesus, " the
holy spirit (my mother) took me and bore me by one of the hairs
of my head, to the great mountain called Thabor." The exact colour
of the dark orb is slate-black, and this has been preserved in India as
the complexion of the dark child, Hari or Krishna. These types of
the light and dark twins were certainly continued as the tv/o-fold
Christ in Rome, one form of whom is the little black Bambino of Italy,
the Christ who was black for the same reason that Sut was black in

20

Egypt, and Krishna was blue-black in India. He was black, because
mythical, and not because the Word was humanly incarnated as a
nigger ! He was black because he was the child of the virgin-mother
as the moon !

One type of the huins found in the lunar phenomena has been
humanised in the story of Jesus and John ; these can be traced back
to Horus and Sut, who is Aan or Anup, the Egyptian John. These two
appear in the Ritual as the "Precursor," and the one who is preferred
to him who was first in coming. Speaking in the twin character, the
Osirified deceased says, " I am Anup in the day of judgment. I am
Horus, the Preferred, on the day of rising." Anup presided over the
judgment; so John the Precursor proclaims the judgment; and calls
the world to repentance. Jesus comes as the " preferred one" on the
day of his rising up out of the waters, when John the Precursor says
of Jesus, " After me cometh a man which is become before me !"
John's was the voice of one crying in the wilderness, " Make ye ready
the way of the Lord." " I make way," says Horus, " by what Anup
(the Precursor) has done for me," The twin lunar characters of John
and Jesus can be identified in the gospel where John says of Jesus
" He must increase, but I must decrease," So the title of the Akka-
dian moon-god, Sin, as the increaser of light, is Enu-zu-na, the Lord
of waxing. In the Mithraic mysteries the light one of the twins was
designated the bridegroom, and in one passage we meet with the
bridegroom and the bride, that is the lunar mother of the Twins and
Christ as the bridegroom. John personates the dark one; like Sut-
Anup, he is not the light itself, and only bears witness to the light.
The Christ or Horus was consort to the mother-moon, and the repro-
ducer of himself. John says of him, " He that hath the bride is the
bridegroom ; but the friend of the bridegroom which standeth and
heareth him rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom's voice."
These three, the bride, bridegroom, and John, are a perfect replica of
the lunar Ti-inity.

John represent^ the dark half of the moon, the child of the mother
only, and he is unmistakably identified by Jesus in or as this mythical
character when he says of his fore-runner, "Among them that are
born of woman there is none greater than John, yet, he that is but
little in the kingdom of God is greater than he ;" that is, among those
who are re-horn in the likeness of the father, as Horus was when the
solar god re-begot him in his own image as the reflection of his hidden
glory reproduced by the new moon — the least of these is greater
than he who was born of the mother alone.

As we have seen, the fox and jackal were both of them Typhonian
types of the dark power, the thief of light in the moon, and co-types,
therefore, with the dragon that swallowed the moon during an eclipse.
Now, the name of Herod in Syriac denotes a red dragon ; and the red
dragon in Revelation, which stands ready to devour the young child
that is about to be born, is the mythical form of the Herod who has
been made historical in our gospels. Here the legendary devourer,

21

the swallower of the moon, is impersonated as a Jewish ruler who
commands all the innocent little ones to be murdered in order that he
may include the child- Christ reborn for the overthrow of him who
can only rule in the kingdom of darkness. Now, if we bear in mind
that fox, jackal, wolf, and dragon are equally Typhonian types of the
evil one, the destroyer, we may possibly interpret a particular epithet
applied to Herod, the destroyer, by the Christ in the gospel according
to Luke, When Jesus is told that Herod would fain kill him, " he
said unto them, Go and say to that fox, behold I cast out devils and
perform cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I am per-
fected." The scene is obviously in the underworld, where the moon-
god descended during the three dark nights before he rose again or was
perfected on the third day. It was here that the god as Khunsu, the
caster-out of demons, or Horus, performed cures and exorcised the
evil spirits that infested the departed in their underground passage
where the dragon Herod, or the Typhonian reptile Herrut, lurked, and
sought to kill the healer of the diseased and deliverer of the dead.

Having identified Herod, the mythical monster, with the dragon,
and as the fox, we may carry the parallel a little farther, and perhaps
identify him as the traditional murderer of John !

As already shown, in the Christian continuation of the legend,
John takes the place of Taht-Aan, the dark one of the lunar twins.
Je^hn and Jesus are equivalent to Aan and Horus. In the Apocryphal
or Legendary Lore, John is often identified with and identified as the
primary Messiah ! He is so in the Apocryphal Gospel of James. In
this, Herod is seeking the life of the Divine child, and he sends his
servants to kill John. We read that " Herod sought after John, and
sent his servant to Zachariah saying, ' Where hast thou hidden thy
son?' and Herod said 'his son is going to be the King of Israel.'" Here
it is John who is to be the infant Messiah whose life is sought by the
destroyer Herod, and the fact, according to the true mythos, is that
John represents the first and that one of the lunar twins whom Herod,
or the Typhonian devourer, does put an end to, because he personates
the dark half of the lunation, the waning, lessening moon, that darkens
down and dies. In the Zodiac of Denderah we see the figure of
Aniip portrayed with his head cut off; and I doubt not that the de-
capitated Aan or Anup is the prototype of the Gospel John who was
beheaded by Herod. In the planisphere Anup stands headless just
above the river of the Waterman, the Greek Eridanus, Egyptian
larutana, the Hebrew Jordan ; and we are told that the Mandaites,
who were amongst the followers of John, had a tradition that the
river Jordan ran red with the blood which flowed from the headless
body of John.

As I have previously pointed out, the Christ of the Gospel according
to Luke has several features in common with the moon-god Khunsu,
the healer of lunatics and persons possessed, who was likewise lord
over the pig, a type of Typhon, the evil power. Khunsu followed
Taht, as child of the sun and moon, after Taht had been, so to say,

22

divinized into invisibility. Taht-Khunsu is the visible representa-
tive, who registers the decrees of the hidden Deity,. Amen-Ra, the
god who seeth in secret. He is particularly the god of health and long
life. It is said that he gives years to those whom he chooses, solicits
the superior powers for an extension of the lease of life, or " asks
years " for whomsoever he likes, and increases life in fulness and in
length for those who do his will ! " Life comes from him, health is in
him, Khunsu-Taht, the reckoner of time." This is because he person-
ated that renewal of light and time which was monthly in the moon.
Khunsu is the supreme healer amongst the Egyptian gods, more
especially as the caster-out of demons and exorciser of evil spirits.
He is called the driver-away of obsessing influences, the great god,
chaser of possessors, and is literally the lunar deity who cures what
are now termed lunatics.

And it is in this character that the Christ of Luke is particularly
pourtrayed. Chief of the suffering and afflicted who came to be
healed by the Christ were the (rik-qvia^oixivoi., or those who were
lunatic. Curiously enough they came to him on the mountain, where
the swine were feeding — that is, where the moon-god, Khunsu, holds
the typical pig in his hand, denoting the casting out of Typhon, the
Egyptian devil. For it is on the mount of the moon, or in the moon at
full, that Khunsu is depicted as the driver-out of demons and expeller
of the powers of darkness, the enemy of Sut-Typhon, the Egyptian
Satan, whose presence is represented by the pig.

In the Ute mythology, the Hero, as divine teacher of men, sits
on the summit of a mountain to think. He says repeatedly, — " I sat
on the top of a mountain, and did think." In the Egyptian Mythos,
preserved by the Gnostics, Hermes is the divine teacher, who not only
thinks, but preaches the Sermon on the Mount. The transfiguration
of Osiris in the mount of the moon occurred upon the 6th day of the
new moon. This ascent of the lunar moon after six days is repeated
in our gospels, and can be paralleled in a myth of Buddha's trans-
figuration on the mount. Here, the six glories of the Buddha's head
shone out with a radiance that blinded the sight of mortals and opened
the spirit-vision, so that men could see spirits and spirits could see
men. It was on the mount of the moon that Satan shewed Jesus all
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and at that height
it may not have been necessary for him to have shewn them, as was
explained by a German critic, " in a map." In Buddha's first tempta-
tion the dark Mara causes the earth to turn round, like the potter's
wheel, for him to see all the kingdoms of the world, and he promises
him that he shall rule the whole four quarters! The quarters are
lunar. By comparing the various myths with the Gospel versions, we
find that

Sut and Horus = Satan and Jesus.

Anup and Horus = John and Jesus.

The Double Horus = Two-fold Christ.

Khunsu - - = Christ.

23

The French retain a tradition that the man in the moon is Judas
Iscariot, who was transported there for his treason to the Light of the
World. But that story is pre-Christian, and was told at least some
6,000 years ago of Osiris and the Egyptian Judas, Sut, who was born
twin with him of one mother, and who betrayed him, at the Last
Supper, into the hands of the 72 Sami, or conspirators, who put him to
death. Although the Mythos became solar, it was originally lunar,
Osiris and Sut having been twin brothers in the moon.

The Man in the moon is often charged with bad conduct towards
his mother, sister, mother-in-law, or some other near female relation, on
account of the natural origin in lunar phenomena. In these the moon
was one as the moon, which was two-fold in sex, and three-fold in char-
acter, as mother, child, and adult male. Thus the child of the moon
became the consort of his own mother ! It could not be helped if
there was to be any reproduction. He was compelled to be his own
father ! These relationships were repudiated by later sociology, and
the primitive man in the moon got tabooed. Yet, in its latest, most
inexplicable phase, this has become the central doctrine of the grossest
superstition the world has seen, for these lunar phenomena and their
humanly represented relationships, the incestuous included, are the
very foundations of the Christian Trinity in Unity. Through igno-
rance of the symbolism, the simple representation of early time has
become the most profound religious mystery in modern Luniolatry.
The Roman Church, without being in any wise ashamed of the proof,
portrays the Virgin Mary arrayed with the sun, and the horned moon
at her feet, holding the lunar infant in her arms — as child and consort
of the mother moon ! The mother, child, and adult male, are funda-
mental ; and, as Didron shows, God the Father hardly obtains a place in
the Christian Iconography for nearly 1200 years.

In this way it can be proved that our Christology is mummified
mythology, and legendary lore, which have been palmed off upon us in
the Old Testament and the New, as divine revelation uttered by the
very voice of God. We have the same conversion of myth into history
in the New Testament that there is in the Old — the one being effected
in a supposed fulfilment of the other ! Mythos and history have
changed places once, and have to change them again before we can
understand their right relationship, or real significance. In the various
aspects of the divine child, born of the Virgin Mother, — the child of
prophecy that Herod sought to slay, — the Christ in conflict with Satan
as his natural enemy ; the Christ who transforms in the waters, and
is transfigured on the Mount; the Christ who is the caster-out of
demons ; the Christ who sends the devils into the herd of swine ; the
Christ who descends into Hades, or the earth, for three days, to come
forth, like Jonah, or as Jonah, from the belly of Hades, or the great
fish, the dragon of the waters ; who breaks his way through the
under-world, as the conqueror of darkness and disease, death and
devil ; as the saviour of souls, and leader into light ; in all these, and
other mythical phases, the Christ is none other than the soli-lunar

24

hero, identical with Khunsu, with Samson, with Horus, with Heracles,
with Krishna, with Jonah, or with our own familiar Jack the giant-
killer. It is just as easy to prove that an historic Christ never existed
as it is to demonstrate that the mermaid, or the moon-calf, the sphinx,
or the centaur, never lived. That is, by showing how they were
composed as chimeras, and what they were intended for as ideographic
types that never did, and never could, have a place, in natural history.
For example, Pliny in his natural history describes the moon-calf as
a monster that is engendered by a woman only. This chimera of
superstition was originally the amorphous child of the mother-moon,
when represented by the cow that gave birth to the moon-calf. This
moon-calf had the same origin and birth in phenomena as any other
child of the Virgin Mother ; and the mythical Christ is equally the
monster, or chimera, that is engendered of the woman only. This is
acknowledged when certain of the Christian Fathers accounted for the
virgin motherhood of the historical Jesus, by asserting that certain
females, like the vulture, could conceive without the male. For the
vulture was the Egyptian type of the virgin-mother, Neith, who boasts
in the inscription at Sais, that she dixl bring forth without the male !
Hor-Apollo explains that the Egyptians delineated a vulture to signify
the mother, because there is no male in this kind of creature, the female
being impregnated by the wind — the wind that becomes the Holy
Ghost, or gust, when Mary was overshadowed and insufflated.

In his Apology, Justin Martyr tells the Romans that by " declaring
the Logos, the first-begotten of God, our Master Jesus Christ, to be born
of a virgin mother, without any human mixture, and to be crucified and
dead, and to have risen again and ascended into heaven, we say no
more than what you say of those whom you style the sons of Jove."
That was true. So far as the mythos tvent the Christians followed
and repeated it after the Pagans; but being uninitiated A-Gnostics they
continued the mythos as a human history, which made all the
diff'erence. The relative positions of those who knew and those who
did not know may be illustrated by the man in the moon. That
popular figure of speech did not originate wi any human reality, but
in telling the story without the Gnostic clue the mythos would become
a human history; and Justin is in the position of a simpleton who
would persuade the learned men of Rome that the man in the moon
is a human being, and that the celestial virgin had brought forth Time
in person, as the child of the Eternal in a cave by the road-side near
Bethlehem, by which means the non-existent had become humanly ex-
tant. Naturally, the knowers assumed the mental attitude of the
right forefinger laid beside the nose !

Such are the mythical bases upon which historic Christianity has
reared its superstructure and built its Babel, with the view of reaching
heaven by means of this, the loftiest monument of human folly ever
raised on earth. Instead of mythology being a disease of language,
it may be truly said that our theology is a disease of mythology.
For myself, somehow or other, I have been deeply bitten with the

25

desire to know and get at the very truth itself in these matters, even
though it unveiled a face that looked sternly and destroyingly on
some of my own dearest dreams. The other side of this desire for
truth is a passionate hostility to those who are engaged in imposing
this system of false teaching and swindle of salvation upon the igno-
rant and innocent at the national expense. As Celsus said of the
Christian legends, made false to fact by an ignorant literalisation of
the Gnosis, — " What nurse would not be ashamed to tell such fables
to a child ? " We also say with him to those who teach these old
wives' fables as the Word of God, — " If you do not understand these
things, be silent and conceal your ignorance." Any way, we must let
go these gods of external phenomena, whether elemental, zootypological,
or anthromorphic, if we would discover the divinity within, the mys-
tical Christ of the Gnostics. And we can be none the poorer for
losing that which never was a real possession, but only the shadow
which deluded us with its seeming substance. To find the true we
must first let go the false, and, to adapt a saying of Goethe's, — until
we let the half gods go, the whole gods cannot come.

26

APPENDIX.

GREEK MYTHOLOGY

AND THE

GOD APOLLO.

If the author oi Juvenilis Mundi could but turn to Egypt, and make a first-hand
acquaintanceship with its Symbolism, I think it would enhghten him more than
any amount of listening round to those deluding Aryanists, respecting the origin,
derivation and meaning of the Greek Mythology.

For example, let us take the case of the god Apollo, who is related to the sun,
and yet is not the sun itself. The Solarites can shed no hght upon the darkness oif
Mr. Gladstone's difiSculty. Writers who talk about mythology being a " disease of
language," and know nothing of the gods as Celestial Intelligencers and time-
keepers for men — chief of which was the sun, when the solar year had been made
out; still earUer, the moon in its various phases — can lend us no aid in penetrating
the secrets of this ancient science. " Solar- worship" is good enough for them, but
it will not explain mythology to us, or to itself. The child of the sun, re-born as
Lord of Light in the moon, has never come within the range of their vision. Yet
it is the simple fact in natural phenomena, which was represented mythically as
the mode of making it known, of teaching it by means of the Gnosis or science of
knowledge, as one of the mysteries, so soon as the discovery had once been made ;
and this is one of the most important of all the factors in mythology.

I would suggest to Mr. Gladstone that the Greek Apollo is the same soli-lunar
personification as is Thoth (Taht or Tehuti), and Khunsu (or the soli-lunar Horus),
that is, the child of the supreme divinity in Egypt, the solar Ba, as his light by
night — whilst he himself is the god who is hidden from sight in the under-world —
his vice-dieu of the dark. Apollo is designated Lukegenes, or light-born. He is
the image of brightness, as shown by his title of Phoibus. So the moon-god is the
image of the solar deity, the reflection of his glory in the lunar disk.

Every phase of character in which Apollo appears, especially as represented by
Homer, can be identified as pertaining to the male moon-god in Egypt, and the
common basis of all may be found in those natural phenomena which are indicated
in previous pages. In these natural phenomena, there is a common source, or
foundation, to which the functions and attributes of Apollo and Taht (or the lunar
Horus) can be referred, and by which the characters may be satisfactorily
explained. The relationships of Apollo to Zeus, are exactly like those of Taht to
Osiris, the supreme being. It is Taht who gives the Ma-Kheru, or Word of Truth,
to the sun-god himself. As representative of Ra, his lunar logos, his light in the
darkness, he is the Word whose promise is fulfilled and made truth by the Supremo
Being, the sun that vivifies and verifies for ever. By his Word, he drives tho
enemies from the solar horizon, the insurgent powers of darkness which are fight-
ing eternally against Ra. This is the character of Apollo as the defender of heaven
against every assault. These powers of darkness, continually in revolt, ever

27

warring with the suu, were called the giants which Taht-Khunsu, the giant-killer,
slays by night, or during the lunar eclipse. Apollo also figures as the destroyer of
the giants who were at war with heaven. It is said in the Egyptian texts that Ra
created this god, Taht, as " a beautiful Ught to show the name of his evil enemy,"
i.e., Sut-Typhon, the eternal enemy of the sun. He held up the lamp by night
that made the darkness visible ; showed the name, the face, the personal presence,
of his lurking foe. This also is a character of Apollo, as a representative and a
kind of deputy providence for Zeus.

Apollo is god of the bow I Taht carries the bow of the crescent moon upon his
Lead ! Now the hero in the folk-tales who is always successful in drawing the
great bow in the trial where all his competitors fail, is this god of the new moon,
who alone can bend the bow, or bring the orb to the full circle of Ught once more.
He can be identified in the Hindu form of the Mythos as Krishna " with the Bow
of Hari." The crescent on the head of Taht is the bow prepared and ready to be
drawn to the full against the power of night, and every form of evil that dwells in
the darkness. Thus the lunar representative of Ea, with the bow of the young
moon on his head, who prepares it month after month, and draws it to the full
circle night after night, may be called the preparer of bows ; and in Egyptian the
name Apuru signifies a preparer of bows ; it also means the Guide and Herald.
As the u in Egyptian stands for o, and r for 1, we have Apuru=Apollo ; the preparer
of bows=the god of the bow as male divinity of the moon, who was the ofi'spring
of the sun and moon, the bowman of the solar god. Mr. Gladstone doubts whether
the root of Apollo is Greek, and says he would not be surprised to find it Eastern.
All the evidence tends to prove it Egyptian by nature and by name. Apollo is the
god of knowledge, past, present, and to come ; Taht is the deity of knowledge, past,
present, and future — the founder of science, lord of the divine words, and secretary
of the gods. Apollo is the god of poetry and music. So was Taht. He is the
psalmist and singer ; he is fabled to have torn out the sinews of Sut-Typhon to
form the lyre — the lyre or harp with seven strings being an image of the new moon,
like the bow.

Apollo was the god of heaUng. Taht is the supreme physician and healer;
" He who is the good Saviour," as it is written on a statue in the Leyden Museum.
Apollo was the bringer of death in a form that was serene and beautiful, as became
the lunar Lord of hght, and enlarger of the lunar light to the full, — the character
and function being afterwards applied to the light of life that suffered the passing
ecUpse of death. One name of Taht is Tekh, which signifies to be full !

Of com'se the Greeks did not simply take over the Egyptian mythology intact,
nor did they preserve the descent quite pure on any single line. In re-applying
the legendary lore, derived from Egypt, to the same phenomena in nature, there
would be considerable mixture, amalgamation, change of name, and consequent
confusion. The blind Horus of Egypt reappears as the blind Orion in the Greek
mythos. This is as certain as that the constellation of Orion, the star of Horus,
was named Orion after Horus ! His lunar relationship is shown by the recovery
of his sight on exposing his eyeballs to the rays of the rising sun, — ^just as the eye
of Horus was restored to him through the return of hghfc at dawn. Horus in his
lunar character is one with Taht and Khunsu in the other cults ; that is, the lunar
child may be Horus as son of Osiris, or Taht as the offspring of Ea, or Khunsu as
the child of Amen ; the myth being one in different religions. It foUows that so
far as Orion is identical with Horus he is also, or once was, identical in character
with the lunar Apollo, and therefore like him of twin-bhth with Artemis. Links
of this lunar relationsLdp remain. He lives and hunts along with Artemis when
his sight has been recovered. He was beloved by Artemis and slain bj* her be-
cause he made an attempt upon her chastity — which is a common charge brought
against the man in the moon by mythology !

The bringing on of the lunar mythos upon two different lines of descent, Apollo
being a continuation of Taht-Khunsu, and Orion of Horus, would account for the
later mixture in the relationship of the various personations — the fact iu nature
being represented under different names for the same character in mythology, as it
had been previously in Egypt.

1.

THE HISTORICAL (JEWISH) JESUS

AND THE

MYTHICAL (EGYPTIAN) CHRIST.

PAUL AS A GNOSTIC OPPONENT,

NOT THE

APOSTLE OF HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY.
3.

THE LOGIA OF THE LORD;

OR, THE

Pre-Cliristian Sayings ascribed to fesus the Christ.

THE DEVIL OF DARKNESS;

OR,

EVIL IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION.

5.

MAN IN SEARCH OF HIS SOUL,

DURING FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS,

AND HOW HE FOUND IT.

e.

THE SEVEN SOULS OF MAN,

AND THEIR

CULMINATION IN CHRIST.

GNOSTIC AND HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY.

8_

LUNIOLATRY;
ANCIENT AND MODERN.