THE ORIGIN ^ EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
BT THE SAME AUTHOR
ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF PRIMITIVE MAN _
ARCANA OF FREEMASONRY (u/ and 2nd Editions)
SIGNS AND SYMBOLS OF PRI- MORDIAL MAN {ist, 2nd and ^rd Editions)
ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF FREEMASONRY connected with the Origin and Evolution of the Human Race (ij/ and ind Editions)
ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE
LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN UNWIN LTD.
THE ORIGIN AND E V O L U T I O OF RELIGIO
ALBERT CHURCHWARD
M.D., M.R.C.P., Etc.
LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. x
Firsi m ig24
[A a rights reserved)
. ■ Printed ^ Grmi Britaia
UNWIN BROTHERS, -XIMITED, LONDON AND /WOKiNS
3- DeDfcate
THIS WORK TO ALL HUMANITY WHO WISH TO LEARN AND KNOW
THE TRUTH
CONTENTS
PAGE
List of Figures, in the Text . . ... . .. L . xi
List of Plates . , ' . • . . ... » xEi
CHAPTER I
DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION. THE DAWN OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS; „
.1. Propitiation of Elemental Powers.
' 2. Propitiation of Ancestral Spirits.
3. Propitiation of a Great Spirit. :
All of wMcli. first originated amongst Primitive Man~Tiie Pygmies : the first humans evolved in Africa — The reason for Ancestral Worship, Propitiation, and Sacrifices — All Pretotemic, arising in these three primary forms.
CHAPTER II
THE, RELIGIOUS CULT OF THE TOTEMIC PEOPLE . . . . • I4
Totemic Sociology and Ceremonies, reasons for, first brought into being by the Miotic Negroes — Totem, its origin, derivation, and signification explained— The Primitive Eucharist—Origin of the Mystery of the Resurrection and Doctrine of .Soul-making — Origin . of the ICa Statue,, a type of eternal duration— Origin of the .Mystery of passing thi'ough the Underworld — Beliefs in Ancestral Spirits, the reason and proofs of same.
CHAPTER III
MAGIC AND FETISHISM. . . ■» . , . » * 36
■ Magic .and Fe,tisM.sm defined and explained: — Tote.inic Ceremonies ., performed for increase of food,, and. those of religious nature:
., Tree- Worship,. Sun-Worship, Phallic ' Worship, Serpent- WorsMp , ^defined and explained.
CHAPTEE-IV
HERO CULT AND MYTHOLOGY , A ' ■ . . . . . , 47
The Mythology — The Sacred Signs which were, evolved by the Nilotic Negroes — The commencement, of Hero, Cu.it,; Set, Homs and Shu, as the three Primary Heroes, found, ,.in\ many countries — Set the first Primary God-- of the Southern Hemisphere ; various t^j-pes of Set; ceremonies still- in '.existence connected with the primary Myths — Shu type of \ the God of , the 'Equinox.
. . ' ' vil- .■
CONTENTS
viii
CHAPTER V
, ' 'PAGE
SACEEB: SYMBOLS . . . . ■ . • ' .. , 67
Primary forms of the Dual God — Set as Primary God and Ms Cult widespread — Signs and Symbols associated with Set and Horus — The great Serpent of Evil traced to Hero-Cult Nilotic Negroes — List of zootype types — ^The custom of burning incense and making libations, and their meaning.
CHAPTER VI
THE STELLAR CULT . . . , . . . * . 86
Its origin and world-wide distribution — Horus God of the North, the Primary God — Horus as the great Fish — The Assyrian- American and Christian types — Various depictions of the Great Mother.
CHAPTER vn
THE STELLAR CULT [contintied) . . . . , , . .117
Depiction of Spirit landing at the Stellar Mount of Glory — Portrayal of Great Mother in various countries and forms — The birthplace at the Pole — Children born of the Great l^vlother — Uranographic representations — “ Brothers of Horns found in many countries under various types — The Deluge Myths.
CHAPTER VIII
iHE STELLAR CULT {continued) 135
Heference to the Crucified Horus on the North and South Poles In " Arcana of Freemasonry,’ ' p. 41 — ^Various portrayals of Horns and.
Set in different countries.
CHAPTER IX
THE GREAT FYRAMIB OF GHI2EH . . . . . . . ,143
Its Origin and Builders — Its description and Symbolical nuxin- ing — The difference between Stellar Cult and Solar Cult Temples —
The Temples of Jerusalem.
CHAPTER X
BIFFEREXT PHASES OF THE STELLAR CULT . . . . . . I73
DistinguisMng characteristics of Stellar Cult Tentples-- Temples of the Axe and their decipherment and orientation-- Horns of the Double Horizon or Dual Power — ^Mexican and Indian portrayals of Horus— -The Winged ^Disk and its meaning — Horns Beliutet and the Cult of Atem — The Serpent type of Horus as Tem— The Tower of Babel and its explanation— Signs, Symbols and Ideographs
.1
CONTENTS
IX
used during the Stellar Gult^ and' ■' their explanation — Proofs of Stellar Cult having been carried^' to - most' parts .of „ the ^ world— The ,, origiiial, .division of Eg3^t into -Nomes'-and proof of its . type , being carried to the Pacific Isles.
CHAPTEK XI
THE LUNAR CULT . , . . . , . ... . , . .
The change of t'ypes a.nd time, as .reckoned b}’ the Lu.n.ar Orb and descriptiG.n of the same — The proofs of 'the Lunar Cult having been carried to many lands — The Moon God Aali-Tehiiti and the Great Mother Hathor amongst the Papyrus reeds. '
CHAPTER Xir
THE SOLA.R CULT . . . . . . ......
The reason .for changing the Cult and ■ the reckoning of, time— The different ima.gery arising from bringing on part of the Stellar and Lunar Cults into t.lie Solar — Tern and Turn brought on i.n the e.arly ' Solar .as A.tu 111- III and. Atum.-Ra — Mexican portrayals — The Father- hood first recognized — Tlie foundation of Monotheism — Professor Maspero's opinion— The Spiiinx : its origin, its Symbolical meaning, and Mexica.,n portraya.1- — ^Tlie doctrine of the iiicarnatioii and resurrection — ^The dilferent imagery of the Double .Horns or Horus of the Double Power, ' explanation of the M^^'stery — Horus as the All-one a..n.d Mexican portrayal of the same— Horns as the tivo Lions — The Chaldean, Bab3donian. and Assyrian, and Mexican portrayal of Horus.
CHAPTER XIH
THE SOLAR CULT {conirnued) . ... . . ■ ..
The My^stery of Har-Makhu — E.xplanatio.n of the different imagery — llie Cult of Ptali — The Cult of . Amen — The making of Amenta and explanation of same — lu-em-Hetep and Dr. Wallis Budgets opinion — The l^Iexican portray^al of the same, also l\Iexican portrayal of the making of Amenta — Depiction of Shu^ — Mexican Gutemala and Peruvian — Osiris as the God in Mummy form in Amenta — -How tMs Cult was brought on into the Cliristian- — The difieience between the Pyramid portrayal and the Amenta — ^Proof of the Totemic My'^steries survived as Eschatological— The Egyptian depiction of the passage of the Spirit and .Soul to the Paradise as the North Celestial Pole — Ptah-Seker- Ansar, the Triune God of the Resurrec-’ tion — The Ritual of Ancient Egypt commonly called the Book of the Dead — The Nesi-Khonsu ' Book . of the Dead- — Amsu -Horus— The ten great Mysteries^ — The reason for the Mummy type.
.FACE
194
213
238
CONTENTS
FAGl
. CHAFTEE XI¥ .
.THE .JEWS .AND ISRAELITES ^ . 29I
Manetho’s statement with regard to Bfoses — The people of Ysiraal and the Exodus — The Books of Genesis, Exodus, and Josliua~Tlie .Laws of ' Moses--“CIem^^ of Alexandria's statement — ^Tlie Penta- teuch, its origin' — The Creation, the fiction and truth — Traditions among the nations of Antiquity — The Semetic derived from the Egyptian originally — The Elohim are the Ari — ^Tiie Garden of Eden Tlie passage of the Red Sea and the Exodus.
CHAPTER XV
BABYLONIAN ' CULT ■ d .... . ' . • . ,...^3.28
. CHAPTER XVI
BUDDHISM , ... . . . ' . . . . 330
The ' ' first Buddlia—The system of Buddhism in Thibet — T.Iie Hindu Golden City of the Gods — Buddha in CMna — Explanation of Buddhism and ■ Hindu Beliefs — Khonds of Orissa — The Buddhist and Brahmins — The Cult of Tern carried to India.
CHAPTER XVII
THE DRUIDS .. ... . . . ■ 346
Remarks on the Religion of the Druids.
'^CHAPTER XVIII
MOHAMMEDISM . ■ . ■. . . v ' « . . . 355
Remarks on Mohammed and liis Religion.
CHAPTER XIX .■
CULT OF CHRISTIANITY .......... 362
First establisliment of the Religion of the Cross — The name of the Bible — Historical opinions — The sacred books of the .Hebrew and Egyptian-gnostic writings — The early Christian Fathers and their writings — The wnritings of Paul — The dogmas of Ciiristiaiiity introduced — Pisiis Sophia : the Ritual of Ancient Egypt and Christian doctrines compared — The Resurrection — Revelation and its origin — John and Taht Aan — The question of an Historical Jesus and the Devil on the Mount in the wilderness,
CHAPTER XX
CONCLUSION GLOSSARY INDEX .
. 404 . 4II
. 413
LIST OF FIGURES IN THE TEXT
FIG. ' FAGS
I., A EA; IMAGE FOUND AT EASTER ISLAND. . , .. . . . ^ 30
■ 2,. THE ""dual god"' OF BABYLON — MEXICAN AND EASTER ISLAND 49 ' 3., .BIRD REPRESENTING ‘"GREAT 'MOTHER"" 'WITH EGG, FOUND AT
EASTER. ISLAND 59
, 4, , BIRD REPRESENTING "" GREAT xMOTHE'R "" WITH GOLDEN .EGG, 'FOUND
AMONGST .MAYA , RUINS . . . . . . . 6 1
5. ,S.EB,A.ND NUT SLEEPING IN EACH OTHER"s ARMS . . . . 62
6. STARRY HEAVENS OF NIGHT UPRAISED BY SHU , ■ . . . 63
7. ■ HORUS OF THE INUNDATION, STELLAR PORTRAYAL . . . . 64
8. PRIMARY DEPICTION OF ANUBIS, AS JACKAL ..... 74
9. EGYPTIAN PRIEST BURNING INCENSE AND POURING LIBATIONS . 80'
10. MEX'ICAN DEPICTION OF GREAT MOTHER IN D'UAL FORM, . , 99
11. MEXICAN DEPICTION OF HORUS CONTENDING WITH SET FO'R WATER I06
12. 'MEXICAN DEPICTION OF APAP HAVING SWALLOWED ALL THE WATER
AND HORUS TRYING TO MAKE HIM DISGORGE IT . . , . I07.
13. APT THE GREAT MOTHER GIVING BIRT'H TO HE.R SON HORUS . .IIO
I3A. MEXICAN DEPICTION OF HORUS AS GOD OF AM-KHEMEN . . 1X2
14. RANN'UT, THE SERPENT GODDESS 'MOTHER, SUCKLING HORUS . .II3
15. A SOUL, .ASCENDING THE LADDER TO THE MOUNT OF GLORY . II7
16. ' THE .GREAT MOTHER APT .AND HAUNCH . . . . . , I18
17. CONSTE'LLATION OF THE HIPPOPOTAMUS AND THIGH . . . 122
18. SCO.TTISH SYMBOL OF HORUS OF THE DOUBLE HORIZON .. . 1 24
19. SCOTTISH SYMBOLS OF THE UREAT MOTHER APT GIVING BIRTH TO
. HER SON HORUS . . , . . : I,25.
20. VARIOUS FOR.MS ,OF SWASTIKA FOUND. IN ASIA BY DR, DRUMMOND
.'...OF CEYLON . ■ . . .' 'v . . ■ . ■ . ■ ■ .126
21. SYMBOLS FOUND IN aiEX,ICO . „ . . . . . . . 1 27
22. THREE DEER HEADS , . , ■ . ' 12/
23. SYMBOLS OF THE DIVINE ' CIRCLES -.., '' A ■ . . . . • * 03
24. THE GODDESS SESHETA . .. ■' 'A . '. , . . I40
25. HETEP, SUMMIT OF GREAT PYRAMID 1 55
26. HORUS AS THE NATZAR AND DOUBLE , HORIZON . . . . I76
27. CHALDEAN WINGED DISKS . iSo
28. ""WINGED disks"" AND .NATZAR, FRO-M. SCOTLAND .... 182
29. FOUR JACKALS, TYPES OF .'FOUR- GREAT, SPIRITS .... 183
si'. .
FIGURES IN THE TEXT
FIG. pac;f
30. THE IBIS OR HEBI WITH THE- GODDESS ,MA AT . ., , ,, . 202
31. : THE DOG-HEADED APE . . ... . ' . .■ . 203
32. CHANGES IN. THE EQUINOXES . . . . . . . . iig
.33.., .DIAGRAMATIC PORTRAYAL . . . . . . . , . , 220
34. ' EGYPTIAN SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC. .. . . . ' > .. . 221
35. ...THE EATER OF THE ASS ■ . ' . ' . . . ... . . . 222
36/ MEXICAN PORTRAYAL OF PTAH PIERCING APAP . . . .. .225
37., HAR-URAS AN IMPUBESCENT CHILD . . . . . . . 2 29
■38. , MAYA PORTRAYAL OF ATUM-IU . • , • ■ - * . . . 234
39. BES-HORUS WITH EGYPTIAN HARP . . . . . .236
40. ■ BES-HORUS - .. .. . ' . . . , , . , . ' 246
41. MAYA DEPICTION OF KHNUM FORMING MAN FROM CLAY . . .. 248
42. THE TWO TATX PILLARS .249
43. RAISING OF THE TATX CROSS IN AMENTA . . . . , -251
44. MEXICAN DEPICTION OF PTAH FORMING AMENTA . . . * -257
45. MEXICAN DEPICTION OF PTAH OPENING AND CLOSING AMENTA . . 259
46. . MEXICAN PORTRAYAL OF INSTRUMENTS FOR THE ' OPENING . ..A NIT
CLOSING OF AMENTA 26O
47. SHU, THE KNEELER 2fll
48. SHU, FROM PERU 2fp4
49. MEXICAN DEPICTION OF AMSU-HORUS iS6
50. HINDU GODDESS MAYA 34!
51. MAKARAS ..... 344
52. THE MAKARAS OF VARUNA . . . ■ > . ... .„ 345
53v ■ THE GREAT. CAT . . > . .. , 39O
LIST OF PLATES
W.A.TB memo PA-:;s
I. SHU UPRAISING THE HEAVENS, I. E. NUT THE SKY FROM SEE,,.
l.E. THE EARTH . . ■ . . . . . %
,11. SET AN0 HORUS POURING OUT LIFE OVER SETI I.. , .. ' JZ
III. , MEXICAN DEPICTION OF THE SUBMERGENCE • OF SET IN THE ,
SOUTH -AND ELEVATION OF HORUS IN THE NORTH AS ** GOD OF THE NORTH AND SOUTH''' . . 73
IV. THE GOD SET REPRESENTED AS FIGHTING . . . . , . 80
V. HORUS-BEHUTET, OR THE ELDER HORUS . , . . 8 1
VI.' , A typp: of keru-ur . . ■ . , . ■ . ' . . . 88
VII. SOLAR TYPE OF HORUS ISSUING FROM THE WATER . ■ . 96
VI n. SEBEK-HORUS AS THE GREAT FISH . . . . ' . ■ 97
' IXv HORUS HAVING BOUND THE BLACK BOAR OF SET IS SPEARING
. , HIM . . . . 104
X. PORTRAYALS OF ZOOTYPES OF GREAT MOTHER FROM . SOUTH
AFRICA , . ' . . ' ■ ' . . . , ' . . ' . 105
.XI. PORTRAYALS OF ZOOTYPES FROM ..GUATEMALA, . ' . , , . I08
XII. SEKHET-BAST AS THE GREAT .MOTHE.R . . . ' . I09
XIIL MERSEKERT: AS THE GREAT MOTHER’ SUCKLING HORUS . , II2
XIV. ISIS AS TPIE great’ MOTHER SUCKLING , HORUS IN THE PAPY- RUS SWAMP ■ 113
XV. NUT, THE MOTHER. OF THE GODS ' . ■ . 120
xvr. BIRTHPLACE. OF HORUS .IN SOTHIS. . ■ . , . . . ■ 121
XVII. SYMBOLS 0.F THE D,I¥ISION OF HEAVEN . . ..128
XVIII. THE FOUR GREAT SPIRITS . . . ' , , . ' . . I29
XIX. SYMBOLIC PLATE . . .. ■ I.60
XX. THE THIRTY-SIXTH PAGE OF THE DRESDEN MAYA CODEX . 161
XXI, PHOTOGRAPH OF A TEMPLE IN INDIA 1 76
XXII. DOOR OF THE TEMPLE 1 77
XXIII. INDIAN REPRESENTATION OF HORUS AS SAVIOUR BY FOOD
AND WATER ......... I78
XXIV, HORUS AS NAPRIT 1 78
XXV. CHALDEAN DEPICTION OF HORUS . . ' . . . . I79
XXVI. MEXICAN DEPICTION OF HORUS . . . . . ,184
XXVXI. ASSYRIAN WINGED DISK . • ^^5
: iriil
XIV
LIST OF PLATES
plate facing page
■ ■ 'XXVIII., EGYPTIAF WINGED DISK ' . . . . 185
XXIX. THE UR^US SERPENT OF : EGYPT ' . f \ . I96
XXX. THE GODDESS HATHOR WITH HORUS (EOOTYPE) . . . I §6
XXXI. THE GODDESS HATHOR IN HUMAN FORM , . ' . . 1 96
XXXII. HATHOR AMONGST THE PAPYRUS REEDS ... . . 196
XXXIII. THE GODDESS MEH-URIT . . . • - '* * :• 197
XXXIV. STATUE FOUND IN THE TEMPLE OF .KHONSU AT KARK.AK , . 397
XXXV. THE DUAL GOD KENSU STANDING UPON TWO CROCODIL.ES
(lunar depiction) . . . , . . ... 200
■ XXXVI, . HERU-SMA-TAURI . . ' ■. . . ^ . 200
XXXVII. AAH-TEHUTI . , . . .. . , . . . . 200
XXXVIII. AAH-TEHUTI IN LUNAR ARK . .. . .. , . . 201
XXXIX. TEHUTI OR THOTH . . . . ' . 208
XL. THE GODDESS MAAT ' . . . . 2o8
XLI. THE GODDESS SATI IN HUMAN FORM . . . . , . 2o8
XLII, SEB, THE ERPA OF THE GODS ' , ■ . . . . . ■ . 209
XLIII. THE GOD TEMU IN HUMAN FORM . . . . . . 2l6
XLIV. THE GOD TEM SEATED IN HIS BOAT . . . . , 23 7
, ^ ,XLV. HORUS STAN.D3NG ON TWO CROCO.DILES, S0.LA:R TYPE , , 2,24 ■
XLVI. HERU-PA-KHART . . . .. . . , , . , , . . , 2.:25
XLVII. THE GREAT SPHINX OF EGYPT . . . . , > ' . '2J2
XLVIII. THE GREAT SPHINX OF THE MAYA (MEXICAN) ' . , , . . , 232
XLIX. INDIAN PORTRAYAL OF HORUS WITH LUTE . ■ . , , 233
L. HORUS AS THE GOD OF GAMES AND M.USIC (M.EXICAX IYPOLOGY) 233 LI. PTAH FASHIONING THE EGG OF THE WORLD . ; • , 240' .
LII. KHNUM FASHIONING MAN FROM EARTH ^ . , . 24 1
Lin. PTAH-TANEN . . . . ' ■ ' . ■ . ' , . 248
LIV. PILLAR OF PTAH . . , ' . ' , ' : . 249
LV. THE CREATION OF HEAVEN — BY SHU ” ■ . ; , ' . . . 264
LVI. SHU ” UPLIFTING THE HEAVENS ' . ■ . ' . . . . 264
LVn. '' SHU '' FROM GUATEMALA . ■ . . 264
LVin. MEXICAN DEPICTION -OF.. SHU ■ DIVIDING THE NORTH FROM THE SOUTH, GIVING THE .NORTH TO HORUS AND THE SOUTH TO SET . . . . , . ' . - . . 265
. LIX.' MEXICAN DEPICTION OF FIGHT BETWEEN HORUS AND SET . 264
; ..'LX.: ANUBIS, ' ANUP OR AP-UAT 268
LXI. I. MEXICAN DEPICTION OF SET ATTACKING HORUS IN THE
PAPYRUS SWAMP , . .272
II. EGYPTIAN PORTRAYAL 272
III. MEXICAN DEPICTION OF FIGHT BETWEEN HORUS AND SET 272 LXII. MEXICAN DEPICTION OF HORUS AS ** CLEAVER OF THE WAY'* — GOD OF THE AXE
273
HIEROGLYPHICS IN THE TEXT
Pages 9, 15, 39, 65, 70, 86, 93. 95. 106, 118, 121, 128, 133, 156, 158, 177, 179, 201, 202, 207, 245, 252, 254, 258, 267, 303, 332, 342, 348, 353, 354. 363. 366.
ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
CHAPTER I
DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION. THE DAWN OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS
The first Thought and Question is : What is Rehgion ?
There are many definitions as well as different phases, and it would be as well to begin with a few examples :
1. "A belief binding the spiritual nature of man to a Superhuman Being on Whom he is conscious that he is dependent ; also the practice that springs out of the recognition of such relation, including the personal life and experience, the doctrine, the duties, and the rites founded on ii/’~Standard Dictionary.
2. “ Religion is man’s belief in a Being mightier than himself and inaccessible to his senses, but not indifferent to his sentiments and actions with the feelings and practice which flow from such a belief.”— Standard Dictionary.
Writers hitherto have given the different phases, or forms, under a classification which omits the true interpre- tation of the origin and evolution of religion.
They commence with the Anthropological as : (i) Anim- ism, or Polydffimonism. {2) Polytheism embracing Therianthropism. (3) Nomistic religions, as Brahminism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism. (4) Individualistic religions, as Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity.
They also class them Philosophically : (i) Antitheistic, embracing Atheism, Agnosticism, Pantheism, Nature re- ligions and Animism.
2
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
(2) Theistic, embracing Polytheism and Monotheism, or Theism proper, including Theism, Mohammedanism, Juda- ism, and Christianity, etc. It is my task to try and show that all these various forms, and the different phases of religion, originated from three sources, and that as man advanced in evolution so his religious ideas became more and more developed upon a higher plane ; ail was at first depicted in Sign Language because primitive man had not the words to express his ideas otherwise.
Nothing short of the remotest beginnings could sufficiently instruct us concerning the origin of religious rites, dogmas, and doctrines that still dominate the minds of men without being understood.
One has to go back and study the menial evolution that has taken place in the human race pari passu with the physical, and show that the mode in which primi- tive man attained expression, in terms of external phenomena, by a process as purely scientific as the origin, was simply nature governed by the Periodic Laws ; then we can understand why mankind should come to worship a divine being alleged to divide ail things into three as- a mode of representing its own triune nature.
The earliest forms of religion can only be found when we study the Anthropological Ethnology of earliest man.
The Offering Propitiation to the elemental pow’ers was the first origin of religion — by the Pygmies, first of the human race, born in Africa.
The earliest mode of worship recognizable w^as of three kinds : (i) Propitiation of the Superhuman Powers. The power was of necessity elemental, a power that was objectified by means of the living type ; and of necessity the object of propitiation, invocation, and solicitation was the power itself, and not the types by which it was imaged in the language of Signs. If w'e use the term " worship,” it was the propitiation of the power in the thunder or storm, not the thunder or storm itself. Primitive man had observed the various powers and attributes of the forces of nature — water flowing, trees growing, darkness, light, thunder, storms, etc. — and from
OF RELIGION 3
these powers of nature man would imbibe his Spiritual ideas, and so lay the primary foundation of the later myths. Each at first was given, and recognized by, a Sign and Symbol ; afterwards a name would be attached to or connected with each power or attribute — one greater than all would become “ The One " Great Power or Spirit, and others would become attached as attributes or powers of The One.
(2) The propitiation of the Spirits of the Ancestors, which has been called Ancestral worship.
This was the dawn of true religion, because :
Religion proper commences with and must include the idea or desire for another life. The belief in another life is founded on the Resurrection of the Spirit. The belief in the resurrection of the Spirit was founded upon the faculties of abnormal seership, which led to Ancestor Worship in all lands at one time. It was a worship, or propitiation, of the Ancestor Spirits, not the body Corpus which died and disintegrated, but the human soul emerging alive, in the likeness of the man, out of the body of dead matter. The Corpus could not, and never did, come back, or make its appearance again in any form but the “ Spiritual body ” of pure Corpuscles which arose out of the dead body, and was visible to seers. It was for this reason that man was so sure of an after life, and upon this religion was founded. If man had not seen any ghosts, there never would have been any religion. Unfortunately, the present “ wise men ” have made a great mistake, which primitive man did not. The later homo has mixed up the “ elemental powers ” with the “ human Ancestors.” The former never had been men or women, the latter had j and this is where the Hindu, Christian, and others have gone wrong in their doctrines, not knowing the true gnosis or origin of these religious doctrines. There could be no transmigration of Souls from elemental powers which were not nor ever had been httinan.
The " Anima ” signifies one of the seven elemental souls, but does not comprehend the group.
4 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
^ powers were t5?pified : the
Ancestral spirits are personalized.
The elemental powers are commonly a group of sevea but spiritualism has no experience or knowledge of seven human spirits that visit earth together, or traverse the planetary chain of seven worlds.
In Animism, mediums could not interview the serpent, bull, or turtle of eternity in spirit form ; on the contrary, the Animistic powers have had to be objectified and made apparent by means of these totemic types.
Thus in Animism there are no spirits — that is, no spirits which appear as the doubles of the dead or phan- tasms of the living.
Thus when the Zulus say : “ There are Amatonga or Ancestral spirits who are snakes and who come back to visit the living in the guise of reptiles,” they are speaking in sign language. Both the monkey and the snake had been totemic types, not only of the human brotherhood, but also of the elemental powers or souls. Thus there was an elemental soul of the snake totem and the Ancestral spirits of that same totem, and the snake remained a representative of both, to the confounding of the Animistic soul with the Ancestral spirit at a later stage.
But those who kept fast hold of the true doctrine, always and everywhere insisted that their Ancestral spirits did not return to earth in the guise of monkeys, snakes, lions, crocodiles, or any other of the totemic Zootypes, but in the human likeness.
They did not mistake the “ souls ” of one category for “ spirits ” in the other, because they knew the difference. The Egyptians always made it clear betwixt the super- human powers, and the Manes, or the “ Gods ” and the " Glorified ” — and that can be followed all over the world. Thus the human soul never was " conceived as a bird,” but may be imaged as a bird, according to the primitive system of representation. The Golden Hawk, for instance, was a bird which typified the sun that soared aloft as Horus in the heavens, and the same bird in the eschatology was then applied to the human soul in its resurrection
OF RELIGION
5
from the body. Hence the hawk is a confirmed image, not the portrait of a human soul. The feathered Angel was never yet seen by clairvoyant vision, and is not a result of revelation.
We know how they originated, why they were so represented, and how they came into the Syrian and Mohammedan Doctrines and Christian eschatology. They are the human-headed birds that were compounded and portrayed for souls in Egypt, and carried out thence into Babylonia, Judea, Greece, Rome, and other lands.
Thus in the Koran (Sura XXXV) it is said that God maketh the angels His messengers and that they are furnished with two, or three, or four pairs of wings, according to their rank and importance ; the archangel Gabriel is said to have been seen by Mohammed the ■Prophet wth six hundred pairs of wings. The duties of the angels, according to the Mohammedans, were of various kinds. Thus nineteen angels are appointed to take charge of hell fire (Sura LXXIV) ; eight are set apart to support God’s Throne on the Day of Judgment (Sura LXIX) ; several tear the souls of the wicked from their bodies with violence, and several take the souls of the righteous from their bodies with gentleness and kindness (Sura LXXIX) ; two angels are ordered to accompany every man on earth, the one to write down his good actions and the other his evil deeds, and they will appear with him at the Day of Judgment, the one to lead him before the Judge, and the other to bear witness either for or against him (Sura L). Mohammedan Theolo- gists declare that the angels are created of a simple sub- stance of light, and that they are endowed with life and speech and reason ; they are incapable of sin, they have no carnal desire, they do not propagate their species, and they are not moved by the passion of wrath and anger ; their obedience is absolute. Some are said to have the form of animals. Four are Archangels, viz. Michael, Gabriel, Azrael, and Israfel ; they possess special powers, and special duties are assigned to them.
If we turn to the older Syrian system of angels, we
6
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
find them divided into nine classes and three orders— upper, middle, and lower. The upper order is composed of Cherubin, Seraphim, and Thrones ; the middle order of Lords, Powers, and Rulers; and the lower order of Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. The Archangels in this system are described as “ a swft operative action,” which has dominion over every living thing except man, and the Angels are a motion which has spiritual knowledge of everything that is on earth and in heaven.
With the Hebrews, they were grouped into ten classes, i.e. the Erelim, the Jshim, the Bene Elohim, the Malachim, the Hashmalim, the TarsMshim, the Shishanim, the Cherubim, the Ophannim, and the Seraphim. Amongst these were divided all the duties connected with the ordering of the heavens and the earth, and they, according to their position and importance, become the interpreters of the Will of the Deity.
As I shall endeavour to show, these were the elemental powers divinized by the Egyptians, and the true gnosis was perverted, after the esoteric meaning had been lost.
(3) The third was propitiation, invocation, and worship of a Great Spirit whom they could not define.
Thus we find that the origin of spirits and religion is threefold.
First, elemental powers were propitiated ; secondly, Ancestors were invoked and propitiated, and, thirdly, propitiation, invocation, and worship were made to the Great Spirit.
The Gods and Goddesses of the oldest races were developed from the superhuman nature powers which originated with and from the earth, as the universal Great Mother, and not from the Ancestral human Spirits. The one is always and universally differentiated from the other.
The supposed transmigration of human souls, of turtles, or of other Zootypes was impossible when as yet there was no human soul descreted. Those who believe that primitive man fancied he had a separate soul wMch
OF RELIGION
7
he could hide for safety in a tree, a stone, or an egg are but speculative theorists who have never mastered the language of the primitive signs. The soul which trans- migrates was pre-human, elemental, and totemic ; a soul that was divisible according to its parts and elemental powers, but common to life in general in all its forms, in earth and water, air and tree, to man and reptile, fish, bird, and beast.
Primitive man has been portrayed in modern times as if he were a philosophic Theorist. He has been charged with imagining all sorts of things which never existed ; as if that were the origin of his Spirit and his Gods ; whereas the beginning was with the elemental powers. These were external to himself. There was no need to imagine them. They were, and with this cognition his Theology began. However primitive, they neither had not pretended to have the power of taking the human soul out of the body when in peril, and depositing it for safety in a tree or stone, nor any other Totemic type. Such a delusion belongs to the second childhood of the human race rather than to the first.
Now we cannot get back further in the origin of religion, its meanings, and true interpretation than the Pygmies, for the Pygmy was the first human in evolution from the Anthropoid Ape. Here then we find the origin and dawn of all religion and religious ideas.
With the Pygmy the elements of life themselves are the objects of recognition, and the elemental powers were and are propitiated. This was the beginning which preceded the Zootype, and which was expressed in Sign Language ; it preceded Mythology and Totemism. The Pygmies are pre-totemic, and there are no legends or folk-lore tales connected with them ; they possess no magic, but they do possess religious ideas.
These Pygmies are upon the lowest step in the ascent of man. They were the first humans, and, although still found in many parts of the world, their Motherland on earth is Africa. In no other country do we find even any trace of the connecting links (Bushman and Masaba
8 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
Negro) with the Nilotic Negro who developed religious ideas in the next stage of evolution.
So closely w^ere the facts of nature observed and registered by the Egyptians that the earliest divine men in their Mythology are portrayed as Pygmies, and the earliest form of the Human Mother was depicted with the characterfstic of the Pj^gmy woman.
The Great Mother was not depicted as a u'oman until the later part of the Lunar Cult, and then only as “ part of a woman.” ^
The Divine man was not portrayed as a man until the Solar Cult. All Gods and Goddesses and the Powers of Nature before the late Lunar and early Solar Cults were imaged by Zootypes in one form or another.
Thus we see how erroneous are the terras ; Animism, Polydffimonism, Polytheism, Therianthropism, and all that these terms imply, when used to express the true conceptions of primitive man, because from the first the Pygmy recognizes :
1. The One Great Spirit Whom he cannot define or see, but to Whom he erects a primitive altar and makes offerings, supplications, and invocations, and invents a Sign or Symbol to depict or image Him objectively.
2. He propitiates the Spirits of the departed by erecting little houses wherein he places food, because he can see them and knows that they exist ; not that he believes his former friends will eat the actual material food, but that the Spirit of the food will be consumed by them and will satisfy their wants, and thus they will leave him in peace.
3. He propitiates the Elemental Powers or Spirits, but he does not believe that these are human, or ever had been human, neither does he believe that they are demons in the present-day acceptation of the term. He recognizes them as a force or power — either for good or ill — and during the pre-totemic period of human evolution he had not as yet imaged them by one or other of the Zootype
I I have dealt with this point at greater length in my “ Origin and Evolution of the Human Race,”
9
OF RELIGION
forms. These forms the later Nilotic Negro brought into existence to establish the distinction one from the other. He had no words to do so at that time, nor any other means to visualize and distinguish these elemental powers but by Sign Language, which would best convey to his mind the force or meaning.
The Pygmies imaged by a Sign or Symbol “ The One Great Spirit" whom they cannot define by name, not
having seen Him ; it is portrayed thus ^ and is their most sacred Sign or Symbol — ^just three sticks crossed.
This primary Sign or Symbol, fashioned in the begin- ning by the African Pygmies to represent " The One Great Spirit,” has been carried on by the various cults during human evolution, down to the present-day Cross of the Christian Doctrines ; it always represented the One Great One. Sometimes it was varied in form or shape by the pre-totemic people who left Africa, e.g. by a spear, or, as among the Veddas, by an arrow ; but never- theless it was the Pygmies’ Sacred Symbol from the beginning.
The Spirits of the elements of air, fire, water, earth, trees, etc., were in a sense Ancestral, though not Ancestral Spirits. The one was pre-human, the others are originally Human.
The most essential part of religion assuredly originated in the worship of Ancestral Spirits. These must have been the Spirits of human origin discriminated from the Animistic Spirit or elemental powers, as the raison d’itre of the worship. The first fear and dread of the destroying powers was followed at a later stage of development by the natural affection for the Mothers and children, who were universally propitiated as the Ancestral Spirits, the Spirits of the departed who demonstrate the continuity of existence hereafter by reappearing to the living in phenomenal apparition ; but they never appeared in Totemic or Zootype forms.
All Ancestor worshippers have been Spiritualists in the modern sense ; they have had evidence by practical demonstration that the so-called dead are still the living,
10
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
in a rarer but not less real form. Their belief in a personal continuity has ever been firmly based on phenomenal facts, not merely ideas or dreams.
Herbert Spencer could find no origin for the idea of an after-life, save the conclusion which the savage draws from the notion suggested by dreams (Spencer, “Facts and Comments,” p. 210). But whatsoever dreams the savage had, they would become familiar in the course of time. He would learn that dreams had no power to externalize themselves in apparitions, had there been no ghosts or visible Spirits of the dead. He would also learn readily enough, and the lesson would be perpetually repeated, that however great his success, when hunting in his dreams of the night, there was no game caught when he awoke in the morning. Clearly no reliance could be placed on dreams for establishing the ghost, any more than on the result of other dreams. Moreover, the same savage that is assumed to have relied on dreams for a false belief also reports that he sees the Spirits of the dead by abnormal vision, and has the means of com- municating with them. But all the credulity of all the savages that ever existed cannot compete or be compared with the credulity involved in this belief or assumption that the ghost itself, together with the customs, the ceremonies, the religions, rites of invocation, and propitia- tion, the priceless offerings, the countless testimonies to the veiitability of abnormal vision, the universal practices for inducing that vision for the purpose of communicating with Spiritual intelligences, had no other than a subjective basis and a false belief that the dream-shadow was the sole reality. Can one conceive anything more fatal to the mode or belief of evolution as a mode of nature’s teaching than this assumption, that man has universally been the victim of an illusion derived from a baseless delusion ? If primitive men were the victims of a delusion which has been continued for thousands of years in defiance of ail experience and observation, what guidance or trust could there be in evolution ; or how are we to distinguish_^between the false product and the true, if men
OF RELIGION
11
dreamed the ghost into being when there was no ghost, and founded the whole body of his religious beliefs and customs on that which never existed ? Primitive man was not a hundredth part so likely to be the victim of hallucination or diseased subjectivity as the modem. Eternal Nature is not hallucinative ; it is the scene of continuous education in primal or rudimentary and constantly recurring realities. His elemental spirits or forces were real and not the result of hallucination ; why not his Ancestral Spirits ? African Spiritualism, which might be voluminously illustrated, culminated in the Egyptian Mysteries. The Mystery teachers were so far advanced as phenomenal spiritualists, and record so Uttie about it in any direct manner, that it has taken one who owns to have a profound experience of the phenomena many years to attain the true Knowledge of the Spiritual Laws of the Universe and Spiritual World as set forth in the eschatology of the Ritual, and which is proved by the Periodic Laws of the Corpuscles.
The Christian Cult is the only one Religion in the world that was based upon the corpse instead of the Resurrection of the Spirit. In no other Religion is con- tinuity in Spirit made dependent on the Resurrection of the earthly body (Origen’s teachings).
The Christians mistook the risen Mummy in Amenta for the corpse that was buried on Earth, whereas all other religions were founded on the rising again in the Spirit from the corpse as it was imaged in the Resurrection of Amsu-Horus transforming from the Mummy Osiris, and by the human soul emerging alive from the body of dead matter. There is no instance recorded in all the experience of Spiritualists, ancient or modern, of the corpse coming back from the Tomb, The so-called worship of Ancestors depends entirely on the Ancestors being considered living, conscious, acting, and recipient Spirits, and not as the corpses mouldering in the earth. This furnishes the sole reason for all the sacrificial offerings, the life, the blood, the food, the choicest and costliest ofieiings that could be given to the dead. Those whom
12 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
WQ csll dead were the veritable living in superhuman form, possessing superhuman powers. Clairvoyance was “ the vision and the faculty divine," the “ beatific vision ” of all the early races, which a few possess at the present day. It was sought for and cultivated, prized and pro- tected, as the most precious of all human gifts.
Both the pre-totemic and Totemic people had learnt by experience how to communicate with their loved ones who had departed this earthly life ; yet they never mourned them nor wept for them, but rejoiced at the time of death because they knew that they lived again. Their " Under- world ” was founded upon the facts that they had ascer- tained from their departed, and the smallest details are left recorded as to what the Spiritual body of the departed had to undergo before entering the "Final Paradise.” Only those who had attained that Great End were per- mitted to return and visualize themselves to their friends. The Materialists of the present day can never obtain that gnosis, because they have never tried to learn, and therefore will ever remain in dark and dense ignorance of the subject which is most material to their future existence ; but it is none the less true, notwithstanding their unbelief or ignorance of the true gnosis. This is set forth in the Book of Everlasting Life, the oldest in the world.
In studying the beginnings, our first lesson is to learn something of the Symbolic Language of Animals, as primitive man did, and to understand what it is they say as Zootypes,
Primitive Language is still extant in divers forms. It is extant in the so-called dead language of the Hiero- glyphics, the Ideographs and Pictographs, in the figures of Tattu, in the portraiture of the Nature Powers, which came to be divinized at length in the human likeness of the Gods and Goddesses of Mythology ; and in that language of the folk-fables still made use of by the pre- totemic people in which the Jackal, the Dog, the Lion, the Crane, the White Vulture, and other beasts and birds kept on talking as they did in the beginning, and continue
OF RELIGION
18
more or l^s to say in human speech what they once said in the primkive Symbolism ; that is, they fulfil the same characters in the Marchen that were first founded in the Mythos.
Actuality was earlier than Typology, and the elements of life themselves, as the objects of recognition were earlier than the Zootypes, as, for instance. Earth, Air, Wind, Water, Rain, Vegetables, etc., which became Totems without being, as it were, first in types of Mythology.
Thus we find all fir e-totemic people:
1. Worshipped and made offerings to “ The One Great Spirit,” Whom they could not define but portrayed in Sign Language by a Symbol.
2. They believed in the Spirits of their Ancestors because they could see the Corpuscular body after it was dead ; and they propitiated and made offerings in order that the Spirit of their Ancestors should do no harm to the living humans.
3. They believed in the Elemental Powers, or Spirits, and propitiated them, not as demons, but as powers or forces of Nature. These are the three” primary forms of religion proving pre-totemic man’s religious beliefs, and the foundation and beginning of all Religion and Religious beliefs in the world.
CHAPTER II
RELIGIOUS CULT OF THE TOXEMIC PEOPLES
The next stage of Religion and Religious ideas was evolved by the Nilotic Negroes. We find as man advanced up the ladder in evolution, so his Religious ideas pro- gressed and advanced to a higher plane.
All humans in the pre-totemic stage were in the state of a gregarious horde with its general promiscuity.
The earliest form of human society was brought into existence by the Nilotic Negro under what may be termed Totemic Sociology, which in one phase distinguishes it from the pre-totemic people.
For reasons unnecessary to be dilated upon in this book, they first divided themselves into two halves, or tribes ; afterwards these divided again into four ; later a further subdivision took place into eight, and then further subdivisions, each tribe having its own dis- tinguishing Totem. It became necessary to distinguish the blood relationship of these various tribes — the one from the other, as the Father of a child was never known — because all Women, of, say, A tribe, were common to men of B tribe, and vice versa, only the Mother blood could be traced. To ascertain this and keep it true they introduced " Totems ” and performed Sacred Ceremoni^ called Totemic Ceremonies. Whilst some of the Nilotic Negroes carried out the primitive wisdom from the same central birthplace in Africa (at the head of the Nile and around the Great Lakes), to the islands of the Southern Seas and other parts of the world, and were fossilized during long ages of isolation, those that remained carried it down the Nile to take living root and grow, flourish and expand as their Mythology and Astro-Mythology,
ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 15
finally ending in the development by evolution in the Eschatology of Ancient Egypt.
Totemism has been variously described. Sir James Frazer calls it" both a religious and social system," a description with which I entirely agree.
The name Totem is not, however, in my judgment, derived from an OJibway (Chippeway) word, as he states
{" Totemism,” p. i), but from the Egyptian Tem-t.
The hieroglyphic is the figure of a total composed of two halves.
The Egyptian Tem or Tem-t has various applications in Eg5^tian.
It signifies Man, Mankind, Mortals, also to unite, to be entire, or perfect ; it is the name for those who are created persons, as in making young men and young women in Totemic Ceremonies. Also it is a Total and to be totalled. It is the figure of totalling a number into a whole which commences with a two-fold unity.
To understand this definition, take the case of two different classes of one clan or class ; the whole clan or tribe we will call A. This is subdivided into A and B. AU A can marry all B, or all B can marry all A, but A must not marry A nor B marry B. These again can be (and are in some cases) re-divided again as regards their children and come under either C or D, and these again into two other sub-classes. Yet all are totalled into the one tribe.
It is also a place name, as well as a personal name for the social unit or division of persons.
Among the Nilotic Negroes the Totem first represented two phases — primarily it was given to the girl when she was made a woman, as her badge or banner by which she, as the Mother, and all her children would be known ; and, secondly, it included that of food districts, and the special food of certain districts was represented by the Totem of the family or Tribe. The Totem was first eaten by members of the group as their own special food; later this was altered, and the Totemic food was only very
16
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
sparingly eaten by the Tribe with that Totem ; it became Tabu, or sacred, to them. The Tribe was appointed its preserver and cultivator and was named after it.
The Totem primarily, then, was given to a girl when she became pubescent, as her badge or banner, by which she and all her children were always known. Thus, if her Totem was a Lizard, ail her children would be Lizards, or, if a Crocodile, all her children would be young Croco- diles ; and when we read in books, as we do, of women bringing forth Snakes, Crocodiles, or any other Zootype, we know that the Totem of the Mother was a Snake or Crocodile, or some other Zootype which was the name of her Totem, and her children obviously were named accordingly. The Totem, then, represented the Maternal Ancestor, the Mother who gave herself up for food to the tribe, and was eaten absolutely alive after she had ceased to bear children, because she should never die, but always be alive. This was the primitive Eucharist, and was the foundation of all such rites. “The body and blood ” were veritably eaten whilst alive, and no morsel, however small, was allowed to remain uneaten. It was a sacred feast to be equally partaken of by each member of the tribe. This custom has now died out in most parts of the world, if not all, inhabited by the Nilotic Negroes, and her Totemic Zootype is eaten sacramentally once a year in place of the human Mother. It is very important to remember this as it is the origin of one of the principal doctrines of the Christian Cult, and it can be traced all through the different Cults in evolution to the present time in its various phases. She, the Mother of the Tribe, was afterwards represented as the Mythical Great Mother in Egypt, as the Goddess Hathor in the Tree, the Suckler as Rerit the Sow ; the Nurse as Rannut the Serpent, and the enceinte Mother as Apt, who was translated into fleshly form for eating as the Totemic Cow, i.e. when the elemental powers became divinized.
In Totemism, the Mother and Motherhood, the Sister and Sisterhood, the Brother and Brotherhood, the girl who transformed at puberty, the Mother who was eaten as
OF RELIGION
17
a sacrifice, the two women who were Ancestresses, were all of them human, all of them actual, in the domain of natural fact. But when the same characters have been continued in Mythology, they are superhuman. The Mother and Motherhoods, the Sister and Sisterhoods, the Brother and Brotherhoods, have been divinized. The realities of Totemism have supplied the types to Mythology as Goddesses and Gods who wear the heads and skins of beasts, to denote their character. The Mother, as human in Totemism, was known by her Totem as the Water-Cow, and this became the type of the Great Mother in Mythology. Bui it is the Type that was continued, not the Human Mother. The Mother as first person in the human family was the first person in Totemic Sociology. Hence came the Great Mother in Mythology who was fashioned in the Matriarchal mould, but with this difference ; it is the Human Mother underneath the mask in Totemism. It is not the Human Mother who was divinized as the Great Provider in Mythology. Thus the Mother was human in the mask of Totemism and is superhuman in the mask of Mythology. The human Mother might be represented by, or as, the Totemic Cow, Serpent, Frog, or Vulture, nevertheless they were not Human Mothers who were divinized in these same likenesses, as the Egyp- tian Goddesses Isis, Rannut, Hekat and Neith. But the Human Mother who was eaten alive at the sacramental meal did supply a type of the superhuman Mother in external nature, who also gave herself as a voluntary sacrifice for human food and sustenance ; the Mother of life in death who furnished the first eucharist which was eaten in the religious Mysteries, the Human Mother had been an actual victim, eaten as a sacrifice. The Superhuman Mother or Goddess was eaten typically or by proxy. Hence she, who was the giver of food and life to the world, came to be eaten sacramentally and vicariously ; that is, in some Totemic victim, by whose death her sacrifice was symbolically represented. There were different types of the sacrificial victim at different stages of the eucharist. At one stage it was the Red-Calf as the type of Horus,
18
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
the child; this same type was continued in the Hebrew Ritual ; it was carried on under various types in different Cults, and finally into the Christians’ Doctrines ; but the origin of the Rite was the actual eating of the Mother of the Tribe, as a sacred and solemn sacrificial rite so that the Mother should never die, in the Totemic Mysteries established first by the Nilotic Negroes.
The object of certain sacred ceremonies associated with the Totems is to secure the increase of the animal or plant which gives its name to the Totem.
Each Totemic Group has its own ceremony, and no two are absolutely alike ; but however they may differ in detail, they all have for their main object the purpose of increasing the supply of food ; not food in general, but the food represented by their Totem.
Other Sacred Totemic Ceremonies are associated with what may be called the second “ Creation ” ; that is, making the boy into a man and the girl into a woman, and may be termed religious ceremonies of the most premature form.
“ The Cutting and opening ” was the making of men and women ; hitherto all had been a promiscuous herd, now at the inception of these Totemic Ceremonies the boy was made into a man and the girl into a woman. And this is the origin and meaning of the second creation as recorded in the Hebrew Texts.
Thus the Creation of man was mystical in one sense, and in another Totemic ; i.e. pre-totemic and Totemic. — pre-human and Human.
The Totem afterwards, in its religious phase, was as much the sign of the Goddesses and Gods as it had been for the Motherhoods and Brotherhoods from whence it took its origin. The Zootype became and was the image of the superhuman power; for example, the Mother- Earth as a giver of water was imaged as a Water-Cow. Seb, the Father of Food, was imaged by the Goose that laid the eggs. The primary seven elemental powers were looked upon Mythically as children of the Great Earth- Mother, who were all bom Males ; they were begetters
OF RELIGION
18
as transformers. The two primary were twin-brothers. Set and Horns, representing as powers. Night and Day, or Darkness and Light, assigned as Set, God of the South, and Horns, God of the North. Shu was the Third, representing the breath of life, breathing force ; the winds, represented at the Equinox by the Lion; and these formed the primary Trinity, or the God in a triune form, or with three attributes. The cult of the primary Mythology was founded in invocation and propitiation of the Great Mother-Earth, the giver of life and birth, of food and water, as the primary power who brought forth the seven elemental powers, called her children. Many and various Zootypes have been used by the Nilotic Negroes all over the world as representative images, by the later Lunar and Stellar Cult people who came after. The powers of nature had been represented by pre-totemic people by sign language only.
It was the Hero Cult Nilotic Negro who first repre- sented these nature powers by means of Zootype forms. The Goddess, the old Earth-Mother and her seven children, were developed from the superhuman nature powers originating with, and from the earth, as the Universal Great Mother, and not from Ancestral Human Spirits, The one is universally differentiated from the other. These powers, which were called her children, were at a later stage :
In Egypt : The seven Ali.
In Phoenicea : They are the seven Elohim.
In Assyria : They are the seven forms of Lli.
In Israel : The seven Elohim, Kabirim, or Baalim.
It was these Nilotic Negroes who first used Zootypes to distinguish the human Motherhoods and Brotherhoods.
These Zootypes were re-applied to the elemental powers in their Mythology which the Hero Cult people developed and, aftenvards, repeated in the constellation figures as a mode of record in the heavens in the prehistoric past during the Astro-Mythology, which followed the M3dhology which can still be read by the aid of the Ancient Eg3q)tian wisdom, but not by means of Semitic legendary
90
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
lore. Thus we jfind that all the types of Sign Language of Mythology had first been founded in Totemism and brought on in evolution as man ascended the ladder to the present time.
It is only by studying primitive man, his thoughts and his Totemic Ceremonies, and all that these represented to his mind in Sign Language, following and tracing them through the evolution of the human race, that one can arrive at a definite and true knowledge of the origin and meaning of our present-day beliefs.
We must remember, to understand correctly, that Totemism originated in Sign Language rather than Soci- ology ; the Sign Language originating with the pre- totemic people, the Signs being now, at the Totemic Stage, applied for use in Sociology, Mythology, and Fetishism.
Ceremonial rites were established as the means of memorizing facts in Sign Language when there were no written records of the human past. In these the Knowledge was acted, the Ritual was exhibited and kept in ever- living memory by continual repetition. The Mysteries, Totemic or Religious, were founded on the basis of action.
Thus the Sign to the Eye and the Sound to the Ear were continued, pari passu, in the dual development of Sign Language that was visual and vocal at the same time. The brothers and sisters were identifying themselves, not with, or as, animals, but by means of them, and by making use of them as Zootypes for their Totems.
The secrets of the most primitive form of the Myths and S5nnboIs for thousands of years existed in human memory alone. In the absence of written records the oral method of communication was held all the more sacred, as was exemplified in the ancient Priesthood, whose ritual and gnosis depended on living memory for its truth, purity, and sanctity.
It was the mode of communicating from mouth to ear ; it continued in all the Mysteries, and is still carried on as from the original, in the present Masonic Mysteries. The earlier religions thus had their Mysteries interpreted.
We have ours mis-interpreted.
OF KELIGION
21
K these elemental Souls or Spirits, which have no sex, that have been mixed up with human souls by Hindu, Greek, Buddhist, and Pythagorean after losing the true gnosis of the Egyptian Mystery. Teaching had become lost and perverted, and mistaken for the human soul in course of transmigration through the series which were but representative of souls that were distinguished as non-human by those who understand Sign Language. No transmigration of souls is involved, and this
is where the translators of the Book of Enoch have erred - — “ The Sons of God who cohabited with the daughters of men.” The translator or writer of this book mixes the seven elemental powers, which were divinized, or the Mythical Gods, with the human women, not under- standing the Sign Language of the Ritual from whence this book originated. (See Genesis vi. also.)
The change of the human descent from the Mother- blood to the Father-blood is obviously commemorated in the Mysteries or ceremonial rites of the Arunta. In the operation of young-man making, two modes of cutting are performed upon the boy by which he becomes a man and a tribal Father, The first of these is commonly known as circumcision, or lartna, by the Arunta; the other ceremony of initiation, which comes later, is the rite of subincision called ariltha. The second cutting is necessary for the completion of the perfect man. With this trial test the youth becomes a man ; fathership is founded, and, as certain customs show, the Motherhood is in a measure cast off at the time, or typically superseded by the Fatherhood.
Nature led the way for the opening rite performed upon the female, and therefore we conclude that this preceded the operation performed upon the men, which was a custom established like the couvade, in the course of commemorating the change from the Matriarchate to the Father-right.
When we hear Nilotic Negroes say that ; “ The Lizard first developed the sexes ” (as stated by the Australians) and also that it was the author of marriage, we must
22
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
first know or ascertain what the Lizard signifies in Sign Language. We find that, like the Serpent or Frog, it denoted the female period, and we see how it distinguished or divided the sexes and in what sense it authorized, or was the author of, Totemic marriages, because of its being a sign or symbol of feminine pubescence. It is said of the Amazula : That when old women pass away they take the form of a kind of Lizard.
The Lizard in the primitive system of Sign Language was a Zootype, the Ideographic value of which informs you that it appeared at puberty, but disappeared at the turn of life, and with the old woman went the disappearing lizard.
The Frog, which transformed from the tadpole condi- tion, was another Ideograph of female pubescence — a type of transformation. Also it w'as a sign of “ Myriads,” and as Lunar, it would denote myriads of renewals.
The custom of ” the couvade ” found amongst the Iberians, Basques, Corsicans, Navarres, many African Tribes, Carabs, Tamanacs, Abipones, Dyaks of Borneo, Tupis of Brazil, West Yuman in China, Greenlanders, Indians of California, and many others, originated amongst the early inhabitants of the Stellar Cult people, or Hero- Cult in the Valley of the Nile. It is a custom typical of the transformation of the father into the chOd. This is demonstrated by the doctrine of Kheper who was the creator or transformer, and, although the doctrine of Kheper came into existence during the Solar Cult, in my view the custom originated during the earlier Stellar Cult in a primitive form at least, and the doctrine was carried all over the world by the later Hero Cult or earliest Stellar Cult people, which is the reason why we find it existing at the present day.
When the Arunta perform the rite of subincision, which follows that of the primary operation (circumcision) a slit is cut in the penis right down to the root. The natives have no idea of the origin of the practice,* but, as the practice proves, it is performed as an assertion * Spencer and Gillen : "Northern Tribes of Australia,” p. 263.
OF RELIGION
28
of manhood, and is a mode of “ making the boy into a man,” or " creating man.” Now, at this time it was customary to cast the Motherhood aside by some significant action ; that is, when the Fathership is established in the initiation ceremony. And in the Arunta rite of subin- cision, the operating Mura first of all cuts out an oval- shaped piece of skin from the male member which he flings away. The oval shape is an emblem of the female all the world over, and this is another mode of rejecting the Mother and of attributing begettal to the Father, as it was attributed in the creation by Atum-Ra, who was both male and female. (As the one ” All Parent.”)
From the "cutting” of the male member now attributed to Atum-Ra, we infer that the rite of circum- cision and of subincision was a mode of showing the derivation from the human Father in supersession of the Motherhood, and that in the Arunta double cutting the figure of the female was added to the member of the male ; nor is this without corroboration. In his ethno- logical studies (p. i8o) Dr. Roth explains that in the Pitta-Pitta and cognate Boulia dialects, the term Me-Ko Ma-ro denotes the man with a vulva, which shows that the oval slit was cut upon the penis as a figure of the female, and a mode of assuming the Fatherhood. In the Hebrew Book of Genesis this carving of the female on the person of the male, in the second creation, has been given the legendary form of cutting out the woman from the body of the male. Adam is thus imaged as a biune parent, Atum-Ra.
But when the custom of circumcision was transferred to the time of childhood, as it had been by the Jews and Arabs, to be performed on the infant of eight days old, then the natural (i.e. according to the Totemic religious condition) loses its sense and becomes cruel in its dotage.
The M5rstery of the resurrection, which was originally instituted by these Totemic Nilotic Negroes, may be seen still performed syrabohcally by the Arunta Tribes in the quabarra ingunringa inkinga, or corroborree of
24
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
the arisen bones, which bones image the dead body, whilst the performers represent the Ulthauna, or spirits of the dead. The bones were sacredly preserved by those who were yet unable to make the mummy as a type of permanence.
Every native has to pass through certain ceremonies before he is admitted to the secrets of the tribe. The first takes place at about the age of 12 years ; the final and most impressive one is probably not passed through until the native has reached the age of 30 years. These two initiations thus correspond to, or represent, the origin of those mysteries of the double Horus, or Jesus, at 12 years of age; the child Horus, or Jesus, makes his Transformation into the adult in his baptism or other kindred mysteries. Horus, or Christ, as the man of 30 years is initiated in the final mysteries of the resur- rection. The long lock of childhood was worn by him until he attained the age of 12 years, when he was changed into a man. With the Arunta Tribe, the hair of the boy is for the first time tied up at the commencement of the opening ceremony of the series by which he is made a man. His long hair is equivalent to the Horus Lock. The first act of initiation in these Mysteries is that of throwing the boy up into the air. This was a primitive mode of dedication to the Ancestral purity of the Totem or the tribe, whose voice is heard in the sound of the churinga or bull-roarers whirling around.
It is said by the natives “ that the voice of the Great Spirit was heard when the resounding bull-roarer spoke.” The Great Spirit was supposed to descend and enter the body of the boy and to make him a man, just as in the mystery of Tattu, the soul of Horus the adult, descends upon and unites with the soul of Horus the child, or the soul of Ra, the Holy Spirit, descends upon Osiris to quicken and transform and re-erect the Mummy, where risen Horus becomes bird-headed as the adult in Spirit ; the Arunta youth is given the appearance of flight to signify the change resulting from the descent of the Spirit, as the cause of transformation. When one
OF RELIGION
25
becomes a soul in the Mysteries of the Ritual by assuming the form or image of Ra, the initiate exclaims : “ Let me wheel round in whirls, let me revolve like the turning one ” (Ch. 83, Rit.). The " turning one ” is the sun God Kheper, whose name is identical with that of an Australian Tribe, Chepara (Kheper), as the soul of “ self-originating force,” which was imaged under one type by the Bennu, a bird that ascends the air and flies to a great height whilst circling round and round in spiral whorls (Ch. 85, Rit.).
The doctrine of soul-making at puberty originated amongst the Nilotic Negroes, as did many of the other Egyptian Mysteries. For example ; In the Egyptian Mythology, Horus is the Blind-man, or, rather, he is the child born blind, called Horus in the Dark. He is also described as the Blind Horus in the city of the Blind. In his blindness he is typical of the emasculated sun in winter and of the human soul in death. At the place of his resurrection or re-birth there stands a tree up which he climbs to enter Spirit life. In Australia, near to the Charlotte Waters, is the tree that rose to mark the spot where a blind man died. This tree is called the Apera Okilchya ; that is, the blind man’s tree. In another place where a tree stands was the camp of the blind, the city of the blind, the world of the dead, in which the tree of life or dawn was rooted. Should the tree be cut down, the men near where it grows will become blind. They would be like Horus in the Dark, this being the tree of light or the dawn of eternal day. In another of their Ceremonies the Arunta perform the Mysteries of the fight between Horus and the Sebau — in a primitive phase.
The Chepara tribe of Southern Queensland also perform the great Mystery of the Kurungal, in which may be identified the baptism and re-birth by fire. The same ceremony is described in the Ritual as an exceedingly great Mystery and a type of the hidden Things in the underworld (Ch. 137A, “ Ritual of Ancient Egypt ”).
The most sacred ceremonial object of the Arunta is
26 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
called the Kanana. This is erected at the close of the Engwum Mysteries. A young gum-tree, 20 feet in height, is cut down, stripped of its branches and its bark, and erected in the middle of the sacred ground. The decora- tion of the top was "just that of a human head." It was covered all over with human blood. The exact significance of the Kanana has been forgotten by the natives — they do not know now. They tell you it has some relation to a human being, and is regarded as common to the members of all the Totems. The Mystery is made known at the conclusion of the Engwura series of cere- monies, the last and final of the initiatory rites through which a native must pass before he becomes a fully developed member, then admitted to all the series and secrets of the tribe. This is the original of the Egyptian Ka statue which is a type of eteimal duration as an image of the highest soul. To make the Kanana, so to say, the pole is humanized. It is painted with human blood and ornamented like the human head. It has but one form, and is common to all the Totems. So it is with the Egyp- tian Ka, the eidolon of the enduring soul. The name of the Kanana answers to the long-drawn-out form of the word " Ka ” as Ka-a-a (Egyptian).
Another Ceremony performed is called the Bora, which typifies symbolically passing through the under- world. It is the primitive form of the Egyptian Amenta. " A valley of death ” is portrayed on the selected ground with the form of a dead man thereon depicted. Members of the Mysteries stand in two rows, one on each side ; these men are armed with spears and clubs, etc., and form an arch over the representative dead body. The initiate is conducted through this " valley of death " and has to undergo trials, etc. His conductor carries implements of power and might to ward off all dangers. As he arrives at each man, he is told, with threats of death, he cannot pass unless he gives the password. The word is given, and he is conducted through safely. It is the primitive, symbolic, and dramatic form of passing through the underworld. He is initiated into
OF RELIGION
17
the passage of the dead to the Spirit world. It is the Totemic form of the Abyss of later Cults and Purgatory of the Roman Church. I
The Nilotic Negroes also believed in their Ancestral Spirits and propitiation of the same. Livingstone tells us that the natives about Lake Moere make little idols of a deceased father or mother ; to them they present beer, flour, and bhang ; they light a fire for the Spirits to sit round and smoke in consort with their living relatives.
This was the origin of the Egyptian Ka or image of a Spiritual self.
The Ewe-speaking natives also have their Kra or Eidolon, which existed before the birth of a child, and is precisely identical with the Egyptian Ka (Ellis : A. B., “Ewe-speaking Peoples” p. 13).
Sir Harry Johnston, in his “The Uganda Protec- torate,” states: “It is a common practice with the Bantu tribes for the relatives of deceased persons to carve crude little images as likenesses of the dead and set them up for worship or propitiation.” Offerings are made to them in place of the later Ka of the Egyptians.
The earliest type of the departed was a body portrait, which may be found amongst these Nilotic Negroes, all over the world. Later it was the Mummy. The Ka was the Spirit likeness ; but both imply the same recognition of the Ancestral Spirit which lives on after death.
The Ka-chambers in the later Egyptian Tombs were evolved from these prototypes.
Erecting a little hut for the Spirit is a recognized mode of propitiation. Lionel Decle in his “ Three Years in Savage Africa ” (pp. 34-6) describes his Wanyam- wezi as making little huts of grass or green boughs, even when on the march, and offering them to the musimo or Spirits of their Ancestors.
All primitive races held, and still do hold, that in death the spirit rose again and lived on, and for this
* Photograph of this in “ Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man,” P- 455. 3rd ed.
28 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
reason the Ka statue was erected in the funerary chamber as it had been in the forest hut.
A black shadow of the body cast upon the ground could not demonstrate the existence of an eternal soul, neither could the hawk or serpent or any other symbol of force. But the Ka is the double of the dead. It is a figure of the ghost. The Ka was an image of the only soul of all the series that ever could be seen outside the human body. This was distinct from the soul of life in a tree, a plant, a bird, a beast or reptile, because it was an apparition of the human soul made visible in the human form. The doctrines of its propitiation are definitely stated in the rubrical directions to Chapter 144 of the Ritual. At this stage of his spiritual progress the deceased has reached the point where the mummy Osiris has transformed into the risen Horns, the divine one, who is the eighth at the head of the seven great spirits. T]\us, in the Mysteries of Amenta, human Horus dies to rise again as lord of the resurrection and to manifest as the double of the dead. He is divinized in the character of the ghost, and as such he becomes the spirit medium for his father, the holy spirit his “ Witness for Eternity,” who is called the only begotten and anointed son. In this character the deceased is Horus in spirit, ready for the boat of Ra. An effigy of the boat was to be made for the deceased. In the instructions given it is said ” a figure of the deceased is to be made ” in the presence of the gods. This figure is the Ka. Oblations of flesh and blood, bread and beer, unguents and incense are to be offered ; and it is stated that this is to be done to make the spirit of the deceased to live. It is also promised that the ceremony, if faithfully performed, will give the Osiris strength among the gods, and cause his strides to increase in Amenta, earth, and heaven. Thus the Ka image to which the offerings were made was representative of the deceased who lived on in the spirit, whether groping in the netherworld, walking the earth as the ghost, or voyaging the celestial water in the boat of Ra on his way to the heaven of eternity. Naturally
29
OF RELIGION
enough, the sustenance of life was offered to feed those who were held to be the living, not the dead.
The Ka image depicted in the Egyptian must be distinguished from the Mummy. The mummy was made on purpose to preserve the physical likeness of the mortal. The mummy was a primitive form of the effigy in which the body was preserved as its own portrait, whereas the Ka was intended for a likeness of the Spirit or immortal, the likeness in which the just spirit made perfect was to see ” The Father ” or ” God ” in his glory. Both the Mummy and the Ka were represented in the Egyptian tomb, each with a chamber to itself. In the Egyptian custom, described by both Herodotus and Plu- tarch, it was not the dead mummy that was brought to table as a type of immortality, but the image of the Ka, which denoted what the guests would be like after death, and was therefore a cause for rejoicing. This was brought on by the gnostics, and Christianized in Rome. One of the many titles of Osiris in all his forms and places is that of “ Osiris in the monstrance ” (Rit., Ch. 141, Naville). In the Roman ritual the monstrance is a trans- parent vessel in which the host or victim is exhibited. In the latest Egyptian Cult, Osiris was the victim. The elevation of the host signifies the resurrection of the crucified god, who rose again in spirit from the corpus of the victim now represented by the host.
I reproduce (Fig. i) a "Moai-Miro” or "Ka image,” found on Easter Island.
The ” Ka ” Image is a primitive type of "eternal duration,” representing the spirit of their ancestors. The fact that these are called “ Moai-Miro ” proves that they, the Easter Islanders, have retained the Egyptian belief of their forefathers, i.e. that in spirit form “the male was blended with the female ” to attain the ultimate and final type of " the Ka ” for eternity, because the words, or one double word, means “ male and female.”
Moai-Papa : Female.
Moai-Tangata : Male.
Moai-Miro : “ The Ka,” or blending of the two.
80 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
The Shennu Ring XI portrayed on the back is ako Egyptian and an emblem of eternity.
It is of little use to attempt to write the past history of religion and the human race if the Spiritualism proper, which is based on phenomenal and veritable facts in Nature, is left out. Hitherto this, the most important of all mental factors, has been omitted, derided, decried, or falsely explained away.
The Egyptians were profoundly well acquainted with
Moal-Mro or Ka image^ found at Easter Island with Egyptian Sheaau Ring depicted on the back — ^type of everlasting eternity*
Moai-Miro or Ba, image, found at Easter Island.
those abnormal phenomena which are just re-emerging within the ken of modern science, and with the hypnotic means of inducing the conditions of trance. Their “ rekhi," or wise men, the pure spirits in both worlds, were primarily those who could enter the life of trance or transform into the state of spirit, as is shown by the determinative of the name " rekhi,” which is the ” phoenix ” of spiritual transformation.
When the Zulu King, Cetewayo, was in London, he said to a friend : " We believe in ghosts or spirits
OF RELIGION
81
of the dead, because we see them, but we cannot see ‘the Great God or Great Spirit,’ ”
I know some people, now living, who possess the inestimable gift of seeing and being able to converse or communicate with their departed friends, who never leave them night or day.
But these good spirits cannot speak so that one can hear them, they cannot make noises, nor can you take photographs of them. All that kind of phenomena of which most present-day Spiritualists tell you, is chicanery and humbug. Spirits are composed of pure Corpuscles in the likeness and form of their previous earthly state as humans, only much more beautiful. They cannot leave Paradise without Divine permission. They cannot visualize Themselves to anyone without Divine permis- sion, When a person dies, his or her Spirit leaves the body matter at once. Some are permitted to enter Paradise immediately, after being judged by the Great God; others have to go through another state or trial, which the Ancient Egyptians imaged by an Ideograph, and termed Amenta, before being allowed to enter Paradise, and others never enter There, They are annihilated as Spirits, and their Corpuscular forms are returned to the ultimate Separate Corpuscles to be regrouped for some other purpose.
Some evil Spirits are allowed to remain on earth for a time, and they are always tr5dng to influence or work some evil on poor humanity, but their ultimate end is always the same — annihilation.
The belief that deceased persons make their re- appearance on the earth in human guise is universal amongst all the ancient races.
The Kareus say, that the La, or ghost, sometimes appears after death, and cannot be distinguished from the deceased person ; only has a lighter form.
The Eskimo states : the soul or spirit exhibits the same form and shape as the body it belonged to, but is of a more subtle and ethereal nature.
The Tonga Islanders say that the human soul is the
82
THE ORIGIN OF EVOLUTION
finer, more aeriform, part of the body, the essence that can pass out, as does the fragrance from a flower.
The Islanders of the Antilles found that the ghosts vanish when they tried to catch them, having no apparent material substance.
The Greenland seers describe the soul as pallid, soft, and intangible when they attempted to touch them.
Huxley says : ” That there are no savages without ghosts.”
So we see that amongst these early people it was recognized that the ghost or Spirit of their Ancestors could, and did return to manifest itself to their friends and in a purer Corpuscular form. Of course, they did not use that terminolog}’, because they could not comprehend what Corpuscles were ; but their objective evidence confirms the fact, or rather science confirms the fact of their objective evidence.
All the Nilotic Negroes believe in a Great Spirit whom they cannot see or define, but v^arious names are used by the different Totemic Tribes all over the world to express their ideas and beliefs.
Amongst certain tribes in Australia He is called Baiame or Daramulun, and they have different names for all his fingers, toes, limbs ; these represent the different attributes they attach to him.
Amongst some tribes the women and children are taught to believe that the sound of the bull-roarer is the voice of the Great Spirit, called amongst the Arunta tribe Twanyirika, and amongst the Katish tribes Atnatu, which is an Egyptian word, in one form of its interpreta- tion, meaning " the breath of life.”
The Bushmen’s Creator, or Great Spirit, whom they call Kagan,” is symbolized by a grasshopper.
Ideographs were adopted first to represent the super- human Powers or Spirits.
The living Ideographs or Zootypes were primary, and can be traced to their original habitat or home, Africa, and to nowhere else upon the surface of the earth.
The Cow of the waters, Female Hippopotamus, thus
OF RELIGION
88
represented the Earth-Mother as the great brihger forth of life, before she was divinized as Apt the Goddess in human guise with the head of a Hippopotamus ; so also all the talking animals, as the Hawk of Horus, the Kaf- Ape of Taht-an, the White Vulture of Neith, the Jackal of Anup, and many others were pre-extant as the talking Animals before they were delineated in a semi-human form as Gods and Goddesses or elemental powers, thus figured forth in the form of birds, beasts, reptiles, and fishes.
Animals that talk in the folk-lore tales of the Bushmen, or the Indians, or the Marchen of Europe, are still the living originals which became pictographic and ideo- graphic in the Zootypology of Egypt, where they represent divinities — i.e. nature powers at first and deities after- wards, then ideographic, and finally the phonetics of the Egyptian Alphabet. No race of man ever yet imagined that the animals talked in human language as they are made to do in the popular Marchen.
No man is so primitive as to think that anyone was swallowed by a great fish and remained three days and three nights in the monster’s belly, to be afterwards belched up on dry land alive.
They were not human beings of whom such stories were told, and therefore those who first made the Mythical representation were not capable of believing they were human.
Professor Max Muller asked how the total change of a human being or a heroine into a tree is to be explained. But Hathor in the green Sycamore, or Tefnut in the emerald sky of the Egyptian dawn, were never human beings.
The root of these things lies far beyond the Anthropo- morphic representation, where the Arynists have never travelled.
The Animals and Birds, etc., were ever superhuman, therefore were adopted as Zootypes and as primary representations of the superhuman Powers of the Elements.
They were adopted as primitive Ideographs, and they
4 ■
jutiJii UitAiiiiM UJb JKVUJLUTION
were adapted for use and consciously stamped for their representative value, not ignorantly worshipped.
The origins of mythology, symbolism, and numbers have all to be sought in the stage of gesture-language, which was the first mode of figuring an image. The most ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are those winch convey by direct representation or imitation. In a later phase these were still continued as ideograpliic determinatives, so that notwithstanding the development of the hiero- glyphic the links are complete from the gesture-signs down to the alphabet.
The beetle, in Egypt, during the Inundation, would have been washed out of life altogether but for its Arkite cunning in making ready for the waters by rolling up its little globe, with the seed inside, and burying it in the dry earth until the Inundation subsided. How primi- tive man must have watched the cle\'er creature at work ; no font of letter-type employed in radiating human thought could shed a clearer light of illustration on the idea of resurrection from the earth than this living likeness of the process of transformation into the winged world. How the primitive man observed the works and ways and on-goings of the intelligence thus manifested around him ; how he copied where he could, and gradually found a line of his own in the scheme of development ; how he honoured these early teachers and instructors, and made their forms the pictures of the primal thoughts which they had evoked from his mind, is at length recorded in the system of hieroglyphic symbols and mythology: and the illustrated proofs are extant to this day. As an example, both the Kaffirs and Zulus, as well as the Pygmies, say that the spirits of their dead ancestors appear to them in the shape of serpents, but they are speaking only in sign language ; the serpent was a type of the eternal by periodic renewal, an emblem, therefore, of immortality, and their belief that their ancestors survived in spirit was expressed by the serpent symbol. The truth can be recovered in Egypt, with whom survived the consciousness of Kam. The goddess Renen, the Gestator,
85
OF RELIGION
is said to receive in death the breaths (souls) of those belonging to her (Rit., Ch. i6o). The serpent was one of her symbols ; consequently these souls, or breaths, would enter the serpent- woman to be born again ; the serpent was a type of renewal before Renen was personified in Egypt, and so we hear these primitive people talking in the same figures of speech that were made visible by Egyptian art.
This Sign Language must be studied when considering the Paleoanthropic.
: O* . ■ xniij ujtti.(brj,py UJf- HiVUljUTlON
were adapted for use and consciously stamped for their representative value, not ignorantly worshipped.
The origins of mythology, symbolism, and numbers have ail to be sought in the stage of gesture-language, which was the first mode of figuring an image. The most ancient Egyptian liieroglyphics are those which convey by direct representation or imitation. In a later phase these were still continued as ideograpliic determinatives, so that notwithstanding the development of the hiero- glyphic the links are complete from the gesture-signs down to the alphabet.
The beetle, in Egypt, during the Inundation, would have been washed out of Hfe altogether but for its Arkite cunning in making ready for the waters by rolling up its little globe, with the seed inside, and burying it in the dry earth until the Inundation subsided. How primi- tive man must have watched the clever creature at work ■ no font of letter-type employed in radiating human tlioiiglit could shed a clearer light of iliiistration on the idea of resurrection from the earth than this living likeness of the procep of transformation into the winged world. How the primitive man observed the works and ways and on-goings of the intelligence tlius manifested around him ; how he copied where he could, and gradually found a line of his own in the scheme of develonmcnt • how he honoured these early teachers and instrurtot: and made their forms the pictures of the primal thoughts which they had evoked from his mind, is at length recorded in the system of hieroglyphic symbols and m}'thology ; and the illustrated proofs are extant to this day. As an example, both the Kaffirs and iSuIus, as well as the Pygmies, say that the spirits of their dead ancestors appear to them in the shape of serpents, but they are speaking only in sign language ; the serpent was a type of the eternal by periodic renewal, an emblem, therefore, of immortality, and their belief that their ancestors survived in spirit was expressed by the serpent symbol. The truth can be recovered in Egypt, with whom survived the consciousness of Kam. The goddess Renen, the Gestator,
85
OF RELIGION
is said to receive in death the breaths (souls) of those belonging to her (Rit., Ch. i6o). The serpent was one of her symbols ; consequently these souls, or breaths, would enter the serpent-woman to be born again ; the serpent was a type of renewal before Renen was personified in Egypt, and so we hear these primitive people talking in the same figures of speech that were made visible by Egyptian art.
This Sign Language must be studied when considering the Paleoanthropic.
CHAPTER in
MAGIC AND FETISHISM
Professor Sir James Frazer considers that all tribes have developed their religious ideas, Totems and Totemic ceremonies from their own surroundings, and that those that practise magic represent a lower intellectual status ; he thinks that magic preceded religion. I do not share this view. I believe that magic is very late in comparison with religious ideas, probably by many thousand years, and that we do not meet with this e\-oltition until the time of the Nilotic Negro ; even amongst the jjrimitive tribes of these it is questionable if it i.s practised by them ; certainly none of the pre-totemic race.s practise it, except when they have adopted it by intercourse with the Nilotic Negroes.
I know it has been stated that " The Veddas,’* who are a Pygmy race, practise Magic, but —
1. These have no Totems or Totemic Ceremonies ; they have the Pygmy dances, but no history of pre-human Ancestors.
2. They believe in a Great Spirit whom they call “ Kataragam ” ; make offerings and propitiate.
3. They believe in the Spirits of their Ancestors, whom they propitiate, under the name of “ Nac Yaku.”
Also they believe in the two Heroes of the Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes, Kan de Yaka and Belindi Yaka, corre- sponding to Horus and Set of the Ancient Egyptians, and they believe in the Great Earth Mother, under the name Gale Yaka or IndigoUac Kiriamma (Goddess of Earth or great provider of food). This shows that at some time these beliefs of the non-Hero Cult and Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes have been adopted by them, probably
ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 37
from association with the Tamils and Sanghalese. I do not agree that they practise Magic.
Magic is the power of influencing the Elemental Powers or Ancestral Spirits.
The phrases of great Magical efficiency in the Ritual are called: “The words that compel.”
They compel the favourable action of the superhuman power to which appeal is made.
To make magic was to act the appeal in a language of signs which, like the words, was also intended to compel, and to act thus magically was a mode of compelling, forcing, and binding the superhuman powers.
Magic was also a mode of covenanting with the power apprehended in the elements.
The theory and practice of Magic was fundamentally based on Spiritualism. The greatest magician or sorcerer, witch or wizard, was the spirit-medium. The magical appeal made in mimetic Sign Language was addressed to superhuman powers as the operative force. The Spirit might be elemental or Ancestral, but without the one or the other there was no such thing as Magic.
Magical words are words with which to conjure and compel. Magical processes were acted with the same intent, i.e. magical incantations which accompany the Gesture sign. The appeal is made to some superhuman force ; i.e. one of the elemental powers in Mythology, which become the Gods and Goddesses in the later Cults.
The beetle, Kheper, typified the self-reproducing power in nature which operates by transformation according to the Periodic Laws of evolution.
The Green Jade stones found buried with the dead was the Amulet, typifying that which was for ever green, fresh, and flourishing. In this. Sign Language tells us that an evergreen was, so to say, made permanent in stone, and buried with the dead as a type of eternal youth.
The deceased exclaims : " I am the column of green felspar ” (Rit., Ch. i6o), and he rejoices in the stone being so hard that it cannot be crushed or even
88
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
receive a scratch, saying : " If it is safe, I am safe ; if it is uninjured, I am uninjured.” The power of this Amulet was in its impenetrable hardness, v’hich represented eternal permanence for the soul which it imaged.
The Ritual of Ancient Egypt contains many references to magic as a mode of transformation. " My mouth makes the invocation of magical charms. I pray in magical formulas. My magical power gives vigour to my flesh.” The one great reason of these Nilotic Negroes for making fetish images and honouring them was that the so-called w'orship was a mode of laying hold upon the power which they represented. The images are a means of taking tangible possession of the powers themselves through their hostages. The devotees thus have them in their power and hold them, as it were, in captivity, to control, command, and even punish.
Wearing tlie fetish as a charm, a medicine, a visible symbol of jiower, is common with these Negro races ; the fetishes represent a helpful power. His fetishes represent power in various forms, whether drawm from the animal or human world, whether the tokens be a tooth, a claw, a skin, a bone, a stone, or any other thing. They represent a stored-up power to him and he has faith in them, and that acts as a potent mental influence. When it was known what the type or fetish signified as a representative figure, it could make no direct appeal to religious consciousness, nor evoke a feeling of reverence for itself, any more than the letters of the alphabet.
The Arunta have an emblem in their Churinga which is a very sacred fetish. This is associated with the Alcheringa spirits. When there is a battle, the churinga is supposed to endow its owner with courage. So firm is their belief in this, that if two men were fighting and one of them knew that the other carried a Churinga, whilst he did not, he would certainly lose heart, and without doubt be beaten (Spencer and Gillen).
. Magic and Fetishism takes up the tale of development in Sign Language following Toiemism, and this proves how erroneous is Sir James Frazer’s opinion.
OF RELIGION
89
Fetishism does not mean a " worship,” but a reverent regard for Amulets, Talismans, Mascots, Charms, and Luck tokens that were worn or otherwise employed as magical signs of protecting power.
The Amulets, Charms, and Tokens of magical power that were buried with the dead, afterwards became fetish on account of what they imagined symbolically, and Fetish Symbolism is Sign Language in one of its ideo- graphic phases.
The fetishes acquired their sacred character, not as objects of worship, but from what they had represented in Sign Language, and the meaning still continued to be acted when the language was no longer read.
The Serpent was a symbol, or type, of periodic renewal and self-renovation, and thus the slough or skin remains a fetish to the end, the Serpent being therefore an emblem of immortality.
The Ankh-cross signified the life to come ; that is the life everlasting.
The Shen-ring imaged continuity for ever in the circle of eternity .ioX .
The Egyptian word Sa, whence the meaning of the word Magic was means aid, protection, defence,
virtue, touch, soul, efficacy. In Egypt, Sa or Ka was the author or creator of the types which became fetishes (Rit., Ch. 17). Thus Fetishism was a mode of Sign Language which supplied a tangible means of laying hold of nature powers that were to some extent apprehended as superhuman without being compre- hended.
We see by the Zunis that one great reason for making fetish images and honouring them was that the so-called worship was a mode of laying hold upon the powers which they represented, and this is the universal belief. It is still extant in the Church of Rome, as witnessed by the Amulets and charms, the cross, the rosary, and other fetish figures that are yet worn for protection, and are touched in time of need to establish the physical
THE ORIGIN AND E’^'OLLTION
link with the invisible power with which it is desired to keep in touch.
Totemism, Magic, and Fetishism culminated in the Egyptian I\h’steries, ending finally in the Eschatology from which Christian religions in the world have arisen.
In totemism, then, we find sacred Mysierie.s performed in various modes of Sign Language, by wliich the Thought, the Wish, the Want is magically expressed in act instead of, or in addition to, words. Obviously tiie object of these most ancient mysteries of magic is the perennial increase of food, more expressly for the animal, or plant, that gives its name to the totem of those who perform the particular rites. Spencer and Gillen (X.T.) describe a mystery of transformation in relation to the Witchetty- Grub Tribe, tlie Grub being an article of diet amongst these natives. W'ith magical incantations they call upon the Grub to lay an abundance of eggs ; they invite the Animals to gather from all directions, and beg them to feed on this jiarticuiar feeding-ground of theirs. The men encase themselves in the structure intended to represent the chrysalis, from which the Grub emerges in re-birth, and out of this they crawl. To interpret the dumb-drama of all these Totemic Mysteries we must learn what is thought, and meant to be expressed, chiefly by what is done. Here we see the mystery of transformation is acted magically by the men of the Witchetty-Grub Totem for the production of food in the most primitive form of a prayer meeting or religious service. The Powers are solicited, the want made known by signs, especially by the sign of fasting during the performance. They shufiie forth one after another in imitation of animals newly born. Thus they enact the drama or mystery of transformation in character. It is only amongst these Totemic peoples that we can find the true origins of all our sacred Mysteries and beliefs.
The Spirit that moved upon the face of the Waters from the beginning was recognized as a force or power, not human, and this force or Spirit of the Air was divinized
41
OF RELIGION
in Shu, the God of breathing-force, whose Zootype was a panting or roaring lion.
What has been continually miscalled Phallic Worship originated in the idea and symbolism of Motherhood. The Earth itself as producer of food and drink, which was the primary want of primitive man, was looked upon as the Mother of life.
The Cave in the Earth was the womb of the Bringer- forth, the interim symbol of the Genetrix. The Mother in Mythology is the Abode. The Sign of the female signified the place of birth.
The Cave or the Cavern in the rock was an actual place of birth for man and beast, and therefore a figure of the uterus of the Mother-earth.
In the Mysteries the stone with a hole in it was made use of as the emblem of a second or Spiritual birth. In their magical ceremonies they represent a woman by the emblematic figure of a hole in the Earth (” Arunta Tribes,” by Spencer and Gillen, p. 550) ; also a figure of the Vulva as the Door of Life is imaged on certain of their Totems. The Esquimaux Great Mother Sinde is the earth itself as producer of life and provider of food, and is a figure of the Mother.
“ Phallic- worship ” began with the earth itself being represented as the Womb of Universal Life, with the female emblem for a figure of the Birthplace and Bringer- forth. Not that the emblem was necessarily human, for it might be the sign of the Hippopotamus or Sow ; anything but worshipful or human. The mythical ges- tator was not imaged primarily as a Woman, but as a pregnant Water-Cow, size being required to emphasize the Great ; i.e., enceinte Earth-Mother and her Chamber of birth.
The Cave as birthplace of the Earth-Mother was identi- fied with the uterine abode by the emblem scrawled upon the Rock from time immemorial. This figure, called the symbol of wickedness “in all the land ” by Zechariah (Chaps. 5-8), portrayed through all the world, has ever been most prominent in the primitive art of all aborigines
42
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
in Africa and other countries. Not as an object of worship, nor of degradation, but as a likeness of the human abode depicted in the birthplace of the Cavenimen.
The Superhuman type of the Motherhood is portrayed in Symbolism not only as the Cave, the Gap, or the Stone, but also as the Tree, the Sow, the Water-Cow, the Crocodile, the Lioness, and many other Zootypcs,
The God Seb is the Egyptian Priapus, who has some- times been called a Phallic deity. He is the Earth-God and Father of Food, the God of Fructification associated with plants, fruits, flowers, and foliage, which are seen issuing from his body. He is the “ Lord of Aliment,” in whom the reproduction powers of earth are icthy- phallically portrayed. But the potencj* represented by Seb was not human, although a human member is depicted as a type of the begetter or producer.
The Lion and phallus are elsewhere identical as Zootype and type of the Solar force, when it is said the luminous lion in its Course (the sun) is the phallus of Ra(Rit.,Ch. 17), as, therefore, this was solar force, it will be obvious why this image was made in so enormous a size when carried in the processions of the Phallus (Herodotus, B. 2, 48).
Spencer and Gillen mention the custom, still extant amongst the aborigines, for the widow of a deceased person of importance to wear the phallus of her dead husband suspended around her neck for some time, even for years after his death. This custom is dominated by a religious sentiment and is a symbolical action which Egypt explains. By wearing the phallus the widow was preserving it from decaying in the earth, and in wearing it she was preserving that type of resurrection which Isis in her character of the widow sought to preserve in a tj'pical image. In Egyptian Resurrection scenes the re-arising of the dead, or inert Osiris, is indicated by the male emblem; re-erection being one with resurrection.
It is thus the dead are raised or re-erected as Spirits, in Sign Language, and the power of rising again is imaged in the life-likeness as by the figure of Amsu-Horus.
Thus these poor natives wear the phallus of their
OF RELIGION
48
dead husbands as a token of his future resurrection, being the most primitive representation in living form of the prototype of the widow divinized as Isis, who consecrated the phallus of Osiris and wore it, made of wood to preserve in a typical image her belief in his resurrection.
The most exact and comprehensive title for the religion designated " phallic worship ” would be the Cult of the Great Mother, taking Hathor for the type, who was the womb of life as Mother Earth, the suckler as the Cow the giver of food, shelter, and water, as the tree, and who, in the course of time, became goddess of Love, of fecundity, and child-birth. The primitive simplicity of Hathor- worship was that of the infant at the Mother’s nipples when the source of plenty was portrayed as superhuman in the likeness of the Cow. But in the later phallic Cult the type had been changed from the Cow to the Human Mother. The Cow was superseded in the Temples by the woman as the more alluring type of the great goddess. It is pitiful to see how the sex became the human organ of the superhuman power, offering itself as Hathor in the Asherah-tree, or as the house of God, acting the goddess as the great harlot of the Cult in its debasement and deterioration. The Great Mother was the ideal in the minds of the devotees, she whose size had been imaged by the hippopotamus, whose sexual force had been represented by Sekhet as the Lioness in heat. The Great Mother when represented in human form becomes the harlot of promiscuous intercourse who brought much revenue to the religious Temples by her capacity for performing the rite on behalf of the Great Mother, in her tree-tent, or Rock Cave, or later sanctuary. It was as representatives of the Great Mother that the Temple prostitutes attained pre-eminence in various lands, and afterwards even highly honoured as servants of the goddess. The Great Mother in the Mount was represented by such goddesses as Astarte, whose Ephebae and Courtesans received her devotees in grottoes and caves that were hollowed out for the purpose in the Syrian
44
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
hillsides. The Temple of Hathor at Serabit-el-Khadem in the Peninsula of Sinai, was based originally on a cave in the rock which was the Great Mother’s earliest shrine.
The phallic festival was periodically celebrated in honour of the Great Mother, the supreme power in nature personalized as the goddess of fertility, the giver of food and drink, the celebration being in accordance with primitive usages and the promiscuous sexual intercourse of pre-totemic times.
The Asherah is a sacred simulacrum of the goddess whose desire was to be ever fecundated. And when the women of Israel set up the Asherah and wore the hangings for curtains of concealment {2 Kings xxiii. 7) they became the representatives of the Great Mother, who is denounced by the Biblical writers as the Great Harlot, but who was a most popular Mother in Israel, and was Sekhet in Egypt.
In the Biblical version, Israel is charged by Hosea with having become a prostitute by letting herself out for hire upon the Corn-floor. “ Thou hast gone a whoring from thy God : thou hast loved hire upon every Corn- floor ” (Ch. ix. i). In this case the Mother-Earth as the Corn-goddess was being fertilized by human proxy in the phallic festivities, which included the rite upon the Corn-floor, as well as on the hill, under the green tree, etc. The Great Mother was the object of propitiation and appeal, pregnant with plenty, as the bringer-forth to birth and the giver of food. This was the superhuman Mother in Mythology, and not the human parent as in Totemism. This was brought on in Rome, the first types being the “ Vestal Virgins,” and the last the White Nuns of the Roman Christian Religion.
It is as Amsu-Horus, rising in Icthyphallic form with the sign of virility erect, which only can account for the PhaUus found in the Roman Catacombs as a figure of the resurrection ; it is the typical member of Horus, whose word was thus manifested in Sign Language with pubescent power in the person of the risen Amsu.
The Totemic Ceremony, or festival of fructification,
II: I
j| Jai# ;
OF RELIGION
naturally had a phallic character, as it was sexual from the first.
It was not only performed at seed-sowing and harvest, on behalf of food. Thousands of years before corn was cultivated in the name of Isis of Demeter there was a general rejoicing at the time when the youth was made into a man and the girl into a woman. This Totemic ceremony was brought on into the early Christian Church as witnessed by the festival of the Agape, and the present- day Maypole dance is a remnant of this same ceremony carried down through the ages of time.
Amongst the early Christians, the Agape was celebrated in connection with the Eucharist and was held to be a Christian Sacrament. Paul, in speaking of the love feast at Corinth as a scene of drunken revelry (i Cor. i. 20-2), recognizes the celebration of two .suppers which he is desirous of having kept apart, one for the Church and one for the house. These two are the Eucharist and the Agape. But at the time of the advent of Christianity these two festivals had assumed a different phase. Ecclesiastical writers differ as to which of the two ought to be solemnized first. But Egypt tells us which stood first in order.
At the time of the Osirian doctrine the last supper was the last night of the old year, and the Mesiu on the first night of the New Year. This duality was maintained by the Agnostics and continued by the Christians.
With so-called Tree-Worship, the Tree is a type, but the type is not necessarily an object of Worship. The forest men were dwellers in the tree or bush ; the tree that gave them food and shelter grew to be an object of regard. It thus became a type of Mother-Earth as the birthplace and abode. Hence Hathor was the hut or house of Horus (Har) in the Tree.
Myth-making man did not create the Gods in his own image. Totemism was formulated by Myth-making man with types that were very opposite of human, and in the Mythology and the Anthropomorpliic representations was preceded by the whole world of Totemic Zootypes.
46 ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
If primitive man had projected the shadow of himself upon external nature to shape its elemental forces in his own image, then the primary representation of nature powers ought to have been Anthropomorphic ; whereas the primary powers and Divinities were first represented by Zootypes.
Thus Totemic People —
1. Worshipped and made offerings to the One Great Spirit whom they could not define, but portrayed as having many attributes which they depicted by Zootypes or other forms.
2. They believed in the Spirits of their Ancestors because they could see the Corpuscular body after they were dead, and they propitiated and made offerings to these to assist them in this earthly life.
3. They believed in the elementary powers or Spirits, and portrayed them as the Great Earth Mother and her seven children, in Zootype form, aU of which they propitiated.
4. They established Totems and Totemic Ceremonies with some religious beliefs and sentiment attached to them.
5. They were the first to practise Magic and, following this. Fetishism.
6. The later Totemic people were those who founded the Mythology and established Hero Cult Worship.
So far, we find that the types of man had gradually ascended in evolution, that religious ideas and beliefs had kept pace with Ms anatomical and physiological development, and that the Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes with their religious beliefs and Totemic Ceremonies, as they left Africa, spread over all the world. Remnants of the old exodus are yet found in isolated lands still pro- fessing, believing, and practising their religious beliefs of tMs preMstoric past, the primary foundation from wMch all others have been built.
;irf
CHAPTER IV
HERO CULT AND MYTHOLOGY
In Totemism the dual Motherhood is followed by the dual Brotherhood, represented in the primary Mythology as the Twin Brothers, Set and Horus, the first two Heroes, and followed by Shu, forming the three first Kamit Heroes — ^the primary Trinity.
The followers of the romantic school who hold Mythology to have been Magic, out of some general undefined feeling, or popular conviction, can only be taken as trying to read before learning the Alphabet ; their deductions can only be assumed as fabulous romances, because they have never learnt the Sign Language, or touched bottom of the subject-matter. There is assuredly nothing more unscientific and unhistorical than to deny a law of development in the religious idea as a whole. Mythology or mythological forms of rehgion are not represented quite as thoughts only, but are types used to express certain original powers that are inherent, physical as well as spiritual.
Therefore it would be true to regard all the representa- tions which were formed out of the original religious consciousness, by means, or by the observation of natural phenomena — simply a,n evolution in primary religion.
Propitiation of a superhuman nature power for food and drink was the most primitive form of the appeal that ultimately culminated in worship. The gods of Egypt, from the beginning, represented food and drink, not only as givers of sustenance — they were the sustenance in food and liquid. The Great Mother was the suckler, or wet-nurse. Hathor offered food in the sycamore-fig, and Isis in the persea-tree of life. Child Horus was the
*7
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
shoot, the branch, the calf, the lamb, or fish. Seb, god of earth, was the father of aliment. Plenty of food and water first made heaven palpable to primitive or archaic man on earth. Hence the primitive paradise was imaged as a field or garden of food. The deity Atum-Ra, who first attained the status of “ Holy Spirit ” in the eschatology, says of himself : “ I am the food which never perishes ” (Rit., Ch. 85). Horus of the inundation was constel- lated on his papyrus as the overcoming shoot (Plan of Denderah) ; he was also the giver of food as the fish, the calf, and the lamb that were made celestial types in the Astral-Mythology. The tree of life %vas planted in the midst of the celestial oasis. Upon this grew the fruit as food upon which the gods and glorified fed. A power of perennial renewal was perceived in nature, and this was manifested by successive births. Hence the child god of Egypt became a type of the eternal recurrence of the seasons and of the elements of life and light, which in the character of Horus was at first by food and then water. This was the eternal, ever-coming, ever-renewing spirit of youth.
Ta-Urt, the Great Mother Earth, was the first or original form of the later Isis, the first or earliest Mother in Mythology.
In the next phase of the development of the Mythology, Ta-Urt was divinized and called Apt, and depicted astro- nomically. She mythically brought forth seven children — ^two at first. Set and Horus, the twins, and then the third, Shu. These are the three Heroes of the Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes, and they play an important part in the folk-lore tales, under different types, throughout the world.
Apt is represented as male and female, both in one, and her seven children are all males, and are termed “ The Bulls of their Mother,” because at that time there was no fatherhood known. These Heroes were the first three Mythical Gods or divinized elemental powers.
Set, as the primary elemental power, represented Darkness ; Horus, bom twin with Set, represented Light.
OF RELIGION
In the Mythology they were given two Stars on high, the South and North Pole Stars. These first two elemental powers of darkness and light were the first two children bom of the Great Mother.
The eternal contest betwixt the powers of light and darkness is extant in the African folk-tales ; for example:
The Han (a Rabbit) Kalalu and the Dzimivi are two of the contending characters.
The Han, as in Egypt, is typical of the Good Power.
Two birds representing Honis and Set of the Egyptians from Easter Island.
The Mexican Ometecutle and Omecinatl. The Lords of duality.
The Babylonian dual God, or their represen- tation of the Egyptian Horns and Set,
The Dzimivi is the Evil Power, like Apap, the Giant Ogre, the Swallower of the water or the light (see Werner: " African Folk-Lore ” Contep. Rev.).
As a proof of my contention that this Cult was carried out of Egypt to many parts of the world, I here reproduce (Fig. 2), pictures of the “ Dual God,” or “ God with
60
the origin and evolution
two attributes,” tbe first phase of the Hero Cult, and afterwards carried on into the early Stellar Cult.*
No. I. The Babylonian “ dual God,” or their represen- tation of the Egyptian Horus and Set.
No. 3. The Mexican Ometecutle and Omecinatl, “ The Lords of duality,” their representation of Horus and Set of the Egyptians.
No. 3. The ” dual God ” of the Easter Islanders, which is their representation of the Egyptian Horus and Set.
I could reproduce many more from other countries, but the above is sufficient and critical proof of the statements I have made.
Shu, the next child of the Great Mother, represented breathing power or air, wind, etc., and was imaged by the Zootype of a roaring or panting lion, also later by a feather. These three represented the Heroes of the Hero Cult people and the Primary Trinity, and were carried throughout the world by the Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes.
In the preface of the Japanese Kojiki the beginning of the separation of Heaven and Earth is described by Yasumaro; Heaven and Earth first parted and the three Kami performed the commencement of creation. The passive and active essences then developed, and the two spirits became “ The Ancestors of all Things.” These are identified with Izanagi and Izanami in the Japanese system, and with the Yin and Yangi in the Chinese. The three Kami, called the Heaven-bom Kami, are one with the Egyptian Set, Horus, and Shu, whilst the twin brother and sister are identical with Shu and Tefnut, who repre- sented breathing power, or air and moisture, as the two halves of a soul of life. Shu of breathing force, and Tefnut of liquid life, the active and passive essences which blended and became the creative spirit moving on the face of the firmament. In Mythology that which has been called " Creation ” begins with duplicating, by dividing ; dark- ness was divided from light, dry land as breathing-place was divided from water. The North was divided from the
* I have given the Egyptian representation in " Signs and Symbols," p. 72, 2nd ed.
OF RELIGION
are equivalent to: “There was evening and there was morning one day.” It must be noted that the Hebrew word for evening ais is the name of the raven, the Zootype black bird of Set.
All the earth, heavens, and seas (two lakes) were con- sidered dual. It was South and North, the wet season and the dry, and although Horus was called God of the North, and Set God of the South, the two were one God depicted with two different attributes; the primary form was dual. A trinity was not conceived until the element of air, wind, or breathing force had been divinized and imaged as a panting Lion, under the name of Shu.
Then we had the first form of a Trinity or Great Spirit with three different attributes, which were first elemental.
As the Mythology first came into existence in the old land South of the Equator, so Set was recognized as the first or Primary God, and when in their migrations North they arrived at the Equatorial regions Set and Horus became equal or the “ bi-une God.”
It shows that the earliest Egyptians founded their Mythology on facts that they had observed in ever- recurring phenomena of external nature and then expressed in Sign Language.
In the beginning was the void, otherwise designated the Abyss. From our sun, this earth, and other planets forming our Solar System have been thrown off as super- heated vapour, gradually cooling down, ever revolving on their own axis around our Sun, in their allotted space
32
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
and time. Our sun was thrown off from another sun, around which it revolves, taking 25,827 years to perform its cycle of one year. “ The one Great Year of the Egyp- tians.” (They have left records of ten great cycles at least.)
As Hero Cult developed, the types of totemism attained a uranographic setting; they were not limited to the human group.
They were no longer merely of the earth, but also represented the Mother and big-brothers in the Sky, from whom descent was claimed by the totemic group. These were the bear that lived again in future food, the serpent that renewed itself, the panes bird that never died, the turtle of eternity, and other types of superhuman powers that were constellated in the heavens.
The first of these was the Great Mother and her three sons, as we have seen imaged variously. As examples, the Ainus say they descended from the region of the bears, which was at the summit of the very lofty mountains in the North, that is at the Pole. They claim to derive their origin from the bear as their Mother and the dog as their father, which can easily be read as Astronomical Hero Cult. The She-bear took the place of the female hippopotamus, the original Great Mother in the Egyptian whose Constellation as Apt was the Great-Bear. The dog is equivalent of the earlier jackal, one of the zootypes for Set, and Set was one of the “ bulls of his mother ” imaged in the Little Bear and these two Constellations ; the Great Bear as the Mother and the Little Bear as her children were the primary foundation of the Stellar Cult, which was a continuous development from the Hero Cult in evolution and was carried all over the world, and is extant at the present day.
Amongst the Iroquois they claim descent from the Bear and the Wolf. The primal pair here again were the Great Bear as Mother, and the Jackal, Wolf, or Prairie- dog as her son and consort.
The Navajio Indians derive their origin from the top of the divine mountain in the North, where the Pole is represented as a great reed which saved their progenitors
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
a**r1
■I
^SUii ■ M i''*
The New Guinea Hero Cult people have :
1. A Great Mother deity = Apt.
2. Harmuna, a good spirit = Horus.
3. A bad spirit = Set.
There is a unity of origin for all mythologj^ as is demonstrated by a world- wide comparison of the great primary types, and the origin of that unity, the common origin of the Mythical Genetrix and her “ children ” of seven elemental forces or powers lies in Egypt.
The Mythology which commenced with the Hero Cult and ended in the Astro-Mythology did not arise from a hundred different sources as frequently stated, but ;
It is one as a system of representation ;
One as a mould of thought ;
One as a mode of expression ; and all its great primordial types are universal.
Mythology commenced with those whom we might term savages, Nilotic Negroes, in Africa ; it was preserved and continued by the Egyptians. But although their Ancestors were savages, and they continued to repeat the Myths of their savage Ancestors, they did not continue to remain savages.
The Egyptian Mythology is the oldest in the world ; it did not begin as an explanation of natural phenomena, but as a representation by such primitive means as were available at the time.
The earliest form of a religious Cult was founded in avocation and propitiation of the Great Earth-Mother, who was divinized in their Astro-Mythology and urano- graphically represented in the Great Bear, Ursa Major, with her seven elemental powers constellated in Ursa Minor, the Giver of Life and Birth, of Food and Water, as the primary provider. She was represented in Zootype form as the Water-Cow, the fruit Tree of Hathor, the Sow of Rerit, the Serpent of Rennit, who was first besought in worship as the Great Goddess, the All Mother.
The Totemic Mother was and is a live woman. There are millions of ” Totemic Mothers ” to-day, her " goddess
55
representative,” or " representai Great Mother of Mythology v Mythical Mother was taken froi as a type.
In the later Semitic legend it
founded on the flood, as
of the abyss. ' — the earth stood upon the fixed centre, with the tree upon figure of food and water in vegetation abyss of the beginning was ' underground, where life was Great Mother from the womb of the Abyss this is described as the Tuat egress from the lower earth.
nobody can fathom, ’ -
and ‘ place
■ was said the earth was “ ■ s if it were afloat upon the water
But according to the primary expression, its own bottom in the water, at the summit as a u The mythical the'^ welling place of water i brought to birth by the >. In the Ritual, a place of entrance and It is a secret Deep that • i, which sends out light in the dark, its ofierings are eatable plants.” It is the birth- of water and vegetation, and therefore more
bottomless pit,” is a figure that was derived from this implumbed deep inside the earth itself. From this abyss the Mother Earth (as the womb of hfe) had brought forth her elementary progeny as the perennial renewers of food to eat, water to drink, and air to ^5®3,the.
The Tuat in the recesses of the South is identified in the hymns as the secret source of the river Nile, whic is thus traced to the Lake Tanganyika. Such was the birthplace of the beginning, the birthplace of water in the heRinning from which the papym pl“t rose as the primal food, so the fact is recorded in the Ritual. It is the habitat of the dragon, called ” The crocodile coming out of the abyss.” It is also the lair of the Apap-monster, of whom it is said by Shu : " If he who m ^he water opens his mouth, I wdl let the earth fall into the waters well ” being the South made North (Records, Vm. 4). ^ Dr. Elliot Smith, in his “ The Evolution of the Dragon, n. 104 states that ; “ In Egypt we do not find the character- istic dragon and dragon story.” Surely he is wrong ir this statement ; it was from old Egypt that the
56
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
Dragon and Dragon stories arose and were carried all over the world. 'E.e has mixed up the old evil Dragon with the dragon Crocodile Sebek, a Zootype of Horus ; also another type of Horus was Tem, the Great Serpent type. Horus was the Crocodile or Great Fish who brought the waters to Egypt annually to give life and food to the people, hence a Saviour. The great dragon, Apap, was the devour- ing monster who drank up all the water and blasted the country with hot, burning winds and air ; the fight was annual and continues.
"The Dragon Story” originated in the old dark land of Africa ; it was the oldest myth of Egypt, and is repre- sented in the earliest Stellar Astronomical Mythology, as the conflict of the two brothers, Set and Horus, as the two Dragons.
The primal mother in the Karaite representation was the bringer-forth of Set and Horus as her first two children, who were represented as having been born twins.
These, as the powers of darkness and light and drought and fertility, were a pair of combatants who fought for the supremacy until one brother overcame the other. In the different Cults they are depicted under various types and forms, one of the first being as two Dragons — Horus, the Crocodile Dragon of water, and Set, the Dragon of Drought— -both of which were represented in the Astro- nomical Mythology. " Hydra ” remains for all time as the “ hellish Apap,” who drank up all the water and swallowed all the light ; and “ Draconis ” as a figure of the good Dragon ; the " Horus-Crocodile,” figured also as " Sebek-Horus.”
When the two brothers were repeated in the Solar Mythos, as the two warring sons of Atum, or as two of the associated gods in the constituent parts and powers of Atum, or as the sons of Ptah and members of the Put Company of the Ali, the conflict was continued for the possession of the Arru-garden in Amenta. These various types have been carried all over the world from old Egypt, whence they originated ; each type representing at the
OF RELIGION
57
were originally men ” (pp. 30-1). But as we have seen, ” these Gods ” only represented types of elemental forces ; Osiris, in my view, represented the last, not the first, phase.
Osiris originated as a god in matter when the powers were elemental, hut in the later theology the supreme soul in nature was configurated in a human form. Matter as human was then considered higher than matter un- humanized, and the body as human mummy (Osiris) was superior to matter in external nature. Also the spirit in human form was something beyond an elemental spirit ; hence the God as Supreme Spirit was based upon the human ghost, with matter as the mummy.
Osiris as a mummy in Amenta is what might be called the dead body of matter invested with the limbs and features of the human form, as the type to which the elemental powers had attained, first as Ptah, then as Amen in the human-featured Horus, who succeeded the earlier representations depicted by means of Zootypes. Osiris is a figure of inanimate nature, personahzed as the mummy with a human form and face, whilst being also an image of matter as the physical body of the god. Resurrection in the Ritual is the coming forth to day
58
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
and put together by his son and by his mother in Amenta, when he rose again as Horus from the dead ; whatsoever had been postulated of Osiris the mummy in the ra5dhology was repeated on behalf of the Osiris in the eschatology. The process applied to the human body first in death was afterwards applied to the god in matter, in the elements, or in the inert condition at the time of the winter solstice represented as awaiting, corpse-like, for his trans- formation or transubstantiation into the young body of the sun, or spirit of vegetation in the spring. The Solar God, as the sun of evening or of autumn, was the suffering, dying sun, or the dead sun buried in the nether earth. To show this, it was made a mummy, bound up in linen vesture without seam, and thus imaged in the likeness of the dead who bore the mumm}" form on earth, the unknown being represented by the known. The sun god, when descending to Amenta, may be said to mummify or karas his own body in becoming earth, or, as it were, fleshed in the earth of Ptah. Hence the mummy type of Ptah, or Atum and Osiris, each of whom at diflerent stages was the solar god in mummied form when buried in Amenta. This was mythological and formed the types of the eschatology.
Professor Elliot Smith also states (p. 214) : “ But the Babylonians not only adopted the Egyptian conception of the power of evil as being seven demons, but they also seem iJo have fused these seven into one, or rather given the real dragon seven-fold attributes.” ^ This is entirely mis- leading. There are no seven serpents of death, no seven evil serpents in the Egyptian, nor yet any one serpent with seven-fold attributes.
The seven Uraei,*Ahough elemental, born of matter, and of earth earthly, like their mother Rannut, are not evil powers ; they are not in the same category with the Sehau of Apap or the semi-fiends of Set, which were not seven, but very numerous.
Again on p. 216, Osiris, Isis, and Set were not identified with the Pig. The many-teated Sow was an image or type
* Italics are mine,
OF RELIGION S9
of the Great Mother, as the suckler, called Rerit. The type was brought on from Totemic times and ceremonies. The later type or image was mythical, the primary Totemic was not. (The ceremonies and imagery are still practised at the present day amongst the natives of New Guinea.) The type was used as a zootype, but was not anthropo- morphic. The Black Boar was one of the types, or Symbolic imagery for Set, but never for Isis or Osiris. Osiris was imaged in tmimmy form only at first, and when he rises, it is as Amsu-Horus, who pierces the Black Boar Set with his spear wad puts chains upon and binds him.
Bird, with egg, found on Easter Island. Fig. 3.
On the first of the Tablets of Creation of the Chaldeans it is written :
" At a time when neither the heavens above nor the earth below existed, then was the watery abyss ; the first of seed, the mistress of the depths, the Mother of the universe. The waters clung together, no product had ever been gathered, nor was any sprout seen. Ay, the very gods had not yet come into being.” i.e. when it was still Totemic.
On the third Tablet it is related how the gods are preparing for a grand contest against a monster known as Tiamat, and how the God Bel-Marduk overthrows Tiamat.
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
In the Tableau over the door of the East fagade of the temple at Chichen, we see the same cosmogonic notions expressed, the same as in the first book of the Manava- Dharma-Sastra, in which the union of the great Mother Goddess, the God Mother of all Gods, with the son, " brings forth an egg, which becomes a form or type of the Supreme Being.” The inhabitants of the islands of the Pacific entertain similar notions regarding creation.
Ellis, in his " Polynesian Researches,” says : “ In the Sandwich Islands there is a tradition that in the beginning there was nothing but water, when a big bird descended from on high and laid an egg in the sea. That egg burst and Hawaii came forth.”
They believe that the bird is an emblem of deity : so it was. In one type it represented the great Mother of the old Egyptians, and the “ egg ” has been substituted for the ” fish ” as a type of Horus. In the Solar Cult " Ptah ” issues from an “ egg,” another imagery.
In the Mythology it was the bird of Earth, The Great Mother, that laid the Egg, but in the Eschatology, when the egg is hatched, it is the bird of Heaven that rises from it as the Golden Hawk, a type of Horus.
The Lake of the Goose or Duck is referred to in the Ritual, Chapter 109.
The Sun was imaged as a golden Egg laid by the Duck or Goose, or Seb, the Earth.^
The Hill or Island standing in the Lake is the Earth, considered as a Mount.
The explorers of Easter Island found this Symbolic Symbol there, but not understanding Sign Language or the Ritual of Ancient Egypt, remained ignorant of its meaning or from whence it was derived or originated.
The bird symbol of the principal female divinity is met with in Polynesia, Japan, China, Chaldea, Greece, America, and all originated from Egypt,
It was in the region of the two great lakes and in the land of the papyrus reed that souls in the germ first emanated as the soul of life from water, and the Goddess
^ The Zootype for Seb was a Goose. See also in ** Solar Colt.'*
OF RELIGION 61
Uati is the African Great Mother in the bed of reeds which the Egyptians rendered mythically by means of the reed plant, as a symbol of the primeval birthplace on earth, with Horns issuing from the waters on the reed which became the lap of life, the cradle and the ark of the eternal child. This is recorded in the Ritual, Chapter 172. It was in the birthplace of the reeds, in the region of the
Bird, with Golden Egg, found amongst the Maya ruins. (From Queen Moo.^')
Here the bird is represented as a Parrot.
In the Egyptian original it is a Duck or Goose,
The fauna would be diferent in dififerent countries, but typical.
FIG 4.
reeds, that light first broke out of darkness in the begin- ning, in the domain of Set, and where the children of darkness and of light were born. The Mother Earth was a womb of universal life, the producer of food of various kinds, and the food was represented as her offspring. Horus, on his papyrus, imaged food in the water plant as well as the branch of a tree or in general vegetation.
62
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
Thus the doctrine of life issuing in and from the papyrus reed was first Eg3?ptian, before it spread over other parts of the world. Naturally the earliest life thus emanating from the water was not human life ; but this later would be included in the mythical representation. The origin of a saviour in the guise of a little child is thus traced to Child-Honis, who brought new life to Egypt every year as the Messu of the inundation. This was Horus in his pre-human characters — of the fish, the shoot of the papyrus, or the branch of endless \’ears during the early Stellar Cult. In the Solar, the same image of
Seb and Nut sleehmg in each other's arms*
Fig. '5. „
Horus on the papyrus represented the young god or Solar cause of creation.
The above proves that the Egyptians possessed a very good idea of the origin of life at a very remote period, as well as “ evolution,” set forth later in this work.
Without doubt the contention of Set and Horus began with the conflict of darkness and light, drought and water, when these were elemental powers, and the birthplace of the twin brothers — one black and one light — was in the bed of reeds. The phase was continued in all the cults. In the Lunar, by the twins who struggled for supremacy in the dark and light halves of the moon, which yet imaged the light eye of Horus and the dark eye of Set. But the war extended to the whole of nature that was divided in halves betwixt the Set and Horus twins who
Shu upraising the Heavens, i.e. .Nut from Seb, i*e. the Earth
See also in Solar Cult.
Plate I.
OF RELIGION 68
were the firstborn of the ancient Mother in two of her several characters.
Shu, the third Hero and third child of the old Earth Mother, comes into being at the time when the Hero Cult ' people had arrived at the Equinox or equatorial regions, a place of no latitude, where the pole stars were to be seen upon the two horizons. The heavens signified in the old Kamite Mythology was the starry heaven of night upraised by Shu as he stood on the Mount of Earth. Nut or Nu, the Egyptian name for heaven, has the meaning and sign of "uplifting” (Plate I).
In Fig. 5 \¥e see Nut lying in the arms of Seb (God of the Earth) at night, being uplifted by Shu in the day. There was but one point at which the heavens could be
The starry heaven of night upraised by Shu.
Fig, 6,
said to rest upon the earth ; that was in the region of no latitude, where the two pole stars were to be seen on the two horizons. As the Hero Cult people travelled toward the North, the heaven of the pole which touched the earth as viewed in equatoria, naturally rose up from the mount, or as mythically rendered, it was raised by Shu, who now became the third hero, and the tripartite division took the place of the dual in the heavens and the earth, Shu becoming the arbitrator of the two brothers at the equinox, giving the northern division to Horus and the Southern to Set, in the phases both Celestial and Terrestrial.
Horus of the inundation was constellated on his
^ Hero Cult Nilotic Negi'oes first and Stellar Cult people after.
papyrus as me evercoming buuui, / \xian.
Denderah). He was also the giver of food as the fish, the calf, and the lamb which were made celestial types in the Astral-Mythology.
Thus came a saviour to the land of Egypt as Horus of the inundation, Horus the shoot or natzar.
The deity Atum-Ra, who first attained the status of Holy Spirit in the later eschatology, says of himself: " I am the food which never perishes ” (Rit., Ch. 85.)
The feminine t3rpe was first, because Motherhood was known before paternity could be identified under Totemic Sociology, and the Mythology was founded on this. The Tree was producer of fruit, so was the female.
Horus of the inundation.
Fig* ' 7.
The font of water was from the Mother-Earth.
The Serpent changed periodically, so did the female ; thus the Fatherhood could not be discovered in heaven until recognized on earth. Therefore in the first plerome of the Gods there is no Fatherhood. The Gods are a family of seven born of the genetrix of “ Gods and Man.” The whole seven were born from Mother Earth, afterwards divinized as Apt, the only Mother; hence the biune parent, a twin form of “ double primitive essence,” and the seven elemental forces found in Egypt, were carried thence into Akkad, India, Britain, New Zealand, and other lands, and became Kronotypes in the secondary aspect and Gods in the final psychotheistic phase — the seven souls of Ra in the Solar Mythology, and the seven
Of RELIGION
65
great Spirits in the Eschatology. Mythology exhibits a series of types as the representation of certain natural forces froni which the earliest Gods and Goddesses were evolved and were finally compounded into one Deity, who assumed all their attributes as His manifestations, and therefore was typical of the Supreme Being and the God of all.
Platonists are simply metaphysical speculators. All such interpretation is finally futile that is not founded on the primary physical phenomena which are still veri- table in the phenomena of nature.
Metaphysical explanations have been the curse of Mythology from the time of the Platonists up to the present. The non-evolutionist, who is likewise a meta- physician, would deal in vain with the problem of the religious origins. None but the evolutionists can go back far enough. Only the evolutionist can present the facts in their natural sequence and the true order of their development. An Egyptologist may know the monuments from first to last and yet be unacquainted with the origin and development of the Egyptian religion, because its roots must be traced back to pre-Totemic man in the vast ages of the hidden past. It is easy to assume that all the divine types are modes of manifestation of the one God, but we require to know what they signified in their pre-monumental phase, and what was their origin. It is not until we have followed through the series of Elemental, Stellar, Lunar and Solar Cults that we attain the highest phase of the various religious Cults. There is no origin of religion worth discussing apart from the primitive foundations and evolution of the same. The utterly misleading way in which the Egyptian physics were converted by Plato and his followers into Greek metaphysics makes Platonism only another name for imposture.
Thus we perceive how evolution continued as man advanced to a higher plane. First, the Pygmies believed in a Supreme or Great Spirit, whom they could not define or comprehend, but imaged or symbolized by which
6
became a representation of the Great Spirit in Sign Language
In the next phase, the Nilotic Negroes, who believed in the same Great Spirit, attributed two primal elemental powers or spirits to Him — Light and Darkness — thus representing, or believing Him to be a Dual form, or a Dual God, i.e. God of Light and God of Darkness, as well as God of the North and God of the South, and they imaged this by symbolizing the type as two Birds, one Black, the other White. Later they added the elemental force or spirit of “ Breath of Life, or Force of Wind,” and symbolized or imaged this by a panting or roaring Lion. Thus the Primary Trinity, or a Great Spirit with three attributes of the elemental powers, was first portrayed, imaged as God of Darkness, God of Light and God of the Breath of Life, as well as the God of the North, God of the South, and God of the Centre. In tliis figure of Horns of the Double Power, we find a still further advancement, that is, He is here represented as the God of the Eastern and Western Horizons and a God of the Double Force as well as the God of the North and South. He is also represented by symbolism as the young Child, representing the spirit of life in the young shoot, or the young Fish, or Bird, or Lamb, or other types of ” rebirth of Spirit life”; also as the adult man as typified by the head of Bes or Har-Ur as representing the full development of the Spirit of the Fish, or Shoot, or Tree, or Fruit, or other types. These attributes were the elemental Nature Powers or Spirits of Nature which were visible and cognisant to them, and they objectified the same by this imagery of Symbolism in Sign Language when they had not the terminology to express their ideas and beliefs otherwise.
SACRED SYMBOLS
The Sacred Signs and Symbols which were evolved by the Nilotic Negroes must be taken into consideration in our argument to show the origin and meaning of many which have been brought on in every Cult up to the present-day Christian Doctrines.
To comprehend why these were invented and used, we have to carry ourselves back into that early state of the evolution of the human race when man had no words to express all his ideas and beliefs. He had “ to think in things ” which were visible before any uhstydct ideas were evolved in the human brain. Man observed nature in all its phases, which was ever before him visually ; it was they 6 objectively / there could be no imagination in the visible facts of nature or nature’s Laws. Not possessing sufficient words, he objectified these powers by inventing signs and symbols which would best convey to his mind the powers of these elemental Spirits. Each sign or symbol typified the best image he was able to produce, objectively representing the qualities or proper- ties, of a Spirit, or power, in nature’s universe.
Naturally, the first two man would image would be Light and Darkness, Day and Night. Therefore the primary imagery of the first two Heroes representing the elementary powers of Light and Darkness, Night and Day, were represented by two birds — one white, one black— as two personal Totems representing Horus and Set. There are many other types of images for the tvs^o primary gods amongst the Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes in Africa, as well as all over the world. The next would be the force or power or Spirit of the wind and storms.
67
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
Shu, portrayed in Lion form, represented this elemental god. Then the whole seven elemental Powers were Sym- bolically depicted by a Sign or Sj’mbol for each. In tracing the evolution of the primary gods we find that during the various Cults, which have ever been brought on from the original, the same types have sometimes represented different attributes, and sometimes the one attribute has been represented by many and various Signs and Symbols. But the interpretations, w'hen cor- rectly rendered, are identical, the variations being caused either from the different fauna found in the country to which Nilotic Negroes migrated or owing to the passing from one Cult to another during evolution ; i.e. although the types have varied, the esoteric meaning attached to each has been the same. Furthermore, as man attained greater knowledge, more attributes would be added to his Great Spirit.
That Sut or Set was the primary God and chief Hero of these Nilotic Negro Hero Cult people is amply proved and borne out by the monuments as well as the Ritual.
He was the God of the South Pole or Southern Hemisphere.
How long the cult of Set lasted is impossible to say, but I should say fifty thousand years was the lowest estimate. On the oldest Monuments, although his name has been almost invariably chiselled out, we find names of Kings who have taken his name in the same manner as we afterwards find the Horus name ; and although the legend of the conflict betw^een Horus and Set is as old as the Ritual at least, it is, however, likewise a proof of Set’s position having once been very different. There can be no doubt that these Hero Cult people worked out their primary Mythology South of the Equator first. Set was the firstborn of the old Earth-Mother and was, whilst South of the Equator, the Primary God, because the Southern Pole Star, one of the Symbols by which he was imaged, was in the ascendant, i.e. it wms more prominently visible and higher in the heavens.
Set was called the Father of the Gods (Rit., Ch. 8)
The Totemic Zootype, in its religious pnase, was ab much the sign of the Goddess or the God as it had been of the Motherhood or Brotherhood. It was an image o the snperhuman power. ^
As regards the Slaughtering Block of the God Sep , mentioned in the Ritual, it is a question if this was made for human sacrifices or not (the Masai Group still otter sacrifices, but not human) ; at the sa,me time, from monu- mental evidence still extant, there is evidence that some of the captives of war were sometimes ottered as sacrifices in the earlier part of the Stellar Cult, and during the early part of Totemism; Homo was certainly Androphagi as regards his Tribal Mother. Although Juvenal in his SaUres declares that " the Egyptians ate human flesh,” there is not a particle of evidence in the Egyptian inscriptions to show that they ever did, and we have every reason to believe that the practice of Androphagi founded by the Non-Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes died out, that the human was supplanted by the Totemic Zootypes by the later Hero Cult people, and that the Zootype form of the primary eucharist was the only class of mortuary me^ eaten by the Egyptians. Neither do I consider that much reliance can be placed on what the Spanish priests recorded on this point in America, for they did not understand the Cult, and they would blacken the character of the old Stellar Cult priests as much as possible to leave them- selves whitewashed for all the horrors they committed in the name of Christianity.
The earliest Ta-Neter, or Holy Land of the Egyptians, was Puanta in the South, which was sacred on account of its being their primeval home — the earthly Paradise of the Hebrew legend. The field of reeds was the field of
70
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
Uat, the papyrus reed and the sources of the Nile. Hence the traditions found amongst all nations that the human race emanated from “ a watered Paradise.” Also Uati is a title of the Great Mother Isis, who brought forth child Horus on the lap of the papyrus flower. Uat, in Egyptian, is also the name of Lower Egypt. Uat is the oasis. Uat is the water and the wet fresh evergreen. Uat is the papyrus reed and the most ancient name in Eamite Mythology. When the Hero Cult people left their original Paradise in the South, they travelled North through desert sands and trouble until they came to Egypt ; here it was that Paradise was regained, and so they depicted it uranographically as the Mount of Heaven in the North with the Eye of Horus (North Pole Star) on the Mount, The Great God of All, a type of the Eternal.
Set, as primary Judge, was imaged in one phase by the Jackal, the Jackal being a Zoo type for the Judge amongst the Egyptians. Also the Eye on the Mount, or the dot O within the centre of the circle w^as a type of Anup. The earliest law of Heaven w'as given on the Mount, because the Mount was an image of the Pole, and Anup (the Jackal) administered the law as the Judge.
That the dual type was thus portrayed is proved by the planisphere of Denderah, where the two Poles are represented by two Jackals as weU as the two Eyes.
The Pole Star is an emblem of stabihty, a seat or throne of the Power which is the highest God, which was First, Set-Anup of the Southern Hemisphere, and Secondly, Horus in Egypt of the Northern Hemisphere. This was carried out of Egypt under the terminology of Bar-a-Pa-Bar by the Syrians,
Sydik in Phoenicia,
Anu in Babylonia,
Baal of the Hebrews,
Ueucteoll of the Mexicans,
Tai-yih of the Chinese,
Avather or Zivo in Mesopotamia, Ame-ro-Yoko-Tachi-Kami in Japan,
OF RELIGION 71
and various other names in other parts of the world during the Stellar Cult.
Two Pillars or Poles were used sometimes to depict the North and South divisions of heaven, and symbolized as the two supports.
The two poles still survive amongst the descendants of the original Nilotic Negroes, in many parts of the world, as for example amongst the Arunta of Central Australia. These people have no North Pole Star, or Northern division of Heaven, but they still continue to carry the two Symbolic Poles about with them, which they erect wherever they go, as a sign of locality or encampment. See my “ Origin and Evolution of Freemasonry.”
Another phase was when Horus pursued Set and Set went in a hole in the ground called the Devil’s hole, and Horus put a pole over him ; he thus became hidden. For further information on this Symbol, see ” Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man,” 2nd edition.
It is Set whose sign is changed for that of Osiris in the letters of the Father of the Great Rameses, and two other Kings of that dynasty ; it is the same God, with his ordinary monumental name, Nubi (in iVw&fizw), who is pouring out life and power over the King. In Plate II we see Horus and Set pouring out life over Seti.
Dr. Budge's “ Gods of the Egyptians ” (Vol. II, p. 248) shows the equal divinity of these two Gods at one time, as Set and Horus, as two brothers (Chief Heroes) reigning together. His hieroglyphic figure of a Giraffe, or Okepi, is the Nubian Primary God Set, and with Anup added the translation is “The Lord of the Southern Hemisphere,” as witnessed in the monuments of Karnak and Medinel Habu. The first figure to remark in Plate II is Horus (Amun-Khem) to whom the King is sacrificing and doing homage, while Horus is pouring out life and power upon him. The fact that we find Set here as one of the great Gods is a proof that he was considered and looked upon at the earliest period of their Mythology as, at least, a brother to Horus, and that now Horus was primary.
72 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
The myth had shifted or changed places. The domain of Paradise of the South with Set as God of the South, had shifted to the Paradise of the North, with Horus as God of the North. It is probable that the primary part of the Mythos was first evolved at the Lakes at the head of the Nile, South of the Equator, when the Southern Pole Star was most prominently visible, and that the primary Cult of Set continued pari passu with that of Horus for thousands of years.
How far they had worked out their Mythology in the Southern Hemisphere before they came North it is at present quite impossible to say; they had, however, made considerable advancement, which was afterwards absorbed and blended with the Horus Cult when he became the primary God of the Pole Star North, which he did as they left the Equator Lands behind t^iem. The different names of Set taken by Kings, which we find on the oldest monuments, prove this ; on some the Set name has been obliterated and the name of Horus, and later of Osiris, substituted.
That the Cult of Set was still practised by some of the Tribes is also shown from the “ Totems of the Nomes." We also find that during the earlier part of the Stellar Cult, Temples were built and dedicated to Set, not only in Egypt, but in many parts of the world, wherever the earlier exodus had settled. Set was the ElShadda of the Hebrews and Phoenicians.
The apparent internal connection which we find on the monuments and in the Ritual can be understood and explained critically in the manner above set forth : the points of resemblance in the oldest types and monu- ments indicate a general amalgamation of the attributes in the order which had been first worked out in the Southern Hemisphere and brought on to that of the Northern, in the type of Horus, Lord of the Northern Heavens.
The P5?ramid Text also shows the change from Set to Horus and the appropriating of all Set's previous attributes to Horus.
Drawn by K. Watidns.
Set and Horus pouring out life over Sett 1
[Ty face p. y:
spiction 01 the Submergence oi Set in t us God of the I\orth und South ’ froni
Plate III.
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73
In the Pyramid Text and in the Text of Unas, we meet the change as Heni-Sept, who is mentioned in con- nection with Ra-Tem, Thoth, Horns of Tat, and the Star, Nekhehk.
The Hero Cult gradually evolved into the Stellar Cult when all the elementary powers were divinized. Although the Cult of Horus commenced after the Nilotic Negroes had left the South of the Equator regions behind them on their way North, the Cult of Set continued for many thousands of years, as we find from monumental evidence. Many of the oldest Temples were dedicated to Set ; their orientation was South, and they were always built in a circular form, differing from the Horus Cult where the orientation was North. The Chinese have these two typical Temples at the present day, one of w'hich is consecrated to Heaven, built in a circular form, a Temple of Set (see " Origin and Evolution of the Human Race,” p. 368), the other is built in the form Of a square and consecrated to the Earth, and is a " Horus Temple.”
Set, in another phase, was God of the dead or abode of the dead. This was founded on the fact that, as the Nilotic Negroes began to travel the 3,700 miles to the North, they would gradually lose sight of the Southern Pole Star, and all the Uranographic images they had configurated with it in the nightly heavens. Their celestial primal Paradise was situated in the heavens at the South Pole ; the primal Paradise on Earth was situated in the reedlands around the Great Lake Tangan3n.ka.
Thus, in Astronomical Mythology, begun here by these Hero Cult people, do we find the origin of the ” fall and deluge.”
There would be a gradual sinking down in the waters of space, called a deluge — a lost Paradise — and the symbol of the God Set went down to the nether world and hence- forth would represent the Power or King of Darkness.
The Ritual describes the ways of darkness in the entrance of the Tuat as the tunnels of Set, which show that a way to the nether world was made by Set when his Star and the primal paradise went down with him in the
74
THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
abyss, whicli was from the beginning situated in the South where the Egyptians figuratively localized theTuat, or entrance to the underworld, which also was the place of egress for the life that came into the world by water from the recesses of the south. It is certain that in one phase they imaged Set as going down South to some sort of underworld, and thus he became the representative of the power of darkness.
In the Eschatology he is phased as Ap-Uat, or the Jackal, as the conductor of souls, the opener of ways, the seer in the dark. The t%vo forms of the Jackal, that of the South and North, now become “ The guide of the
Fig. 8.
Southern ways," or the “ nether- world,” and “ as the opener of the Northern ways to the summit of the Mount,” the North Pole or Paradise of the North, with Horus as God of that Paradise. The scene had now shifted from South to North, and all the attributes which had belonged to Set were transferred to Horus ; the tw'o Gods were really one ; the Ritual proves tliis when it mentions “ The two Horuses.” It was the one God who had changed his abode in the South and gone to the North. In other words, the Nilotic Negroes had transferred theii Paradise from South to North as represented by their Astro- Mythology. But it was the one God all theTime.
OF RELIGION
75
Different types were now given in which Set is depicted as ever warring against Homs — -one was Zootype form, and later another assumed the Anthropomorphic.
Darkness being the primordial condition, the earliest type in Mythical representation was Apap, the Serpent reptile, the devouring reptile, all mouth, the prototype of all evil in external nature, which rose up by night from the Abyss and coiled around the Mount of Earth as the Swallower of the Light, who in another phase drank up all the Water as the fiery dragon of drought. The voice of the Monster was the Thunder which shook the firmament (Rit., Ch. 29). Other powers born of the void were like- wise elemental with an aspect inimical to Man. In the Ritual these are called the Sami or demons of darkness, or the wicked Sebau, who for ever rose in revolt against the powers that wrought for good.
Set, as Typhon, was considered an evil power, a sort of Devil of Darkness, and the conflict between him and Horus was a struggle between light and darkness, taking place in the twihght of evening and morning or in the mid-winter season or at the Equinoxes. Plutarch tells us how the evil Set or Typhon was humiliated and insulted
by the Egyptians at certain festivals when they abused
red-haired men because Set was red haired (Ch. 3^)r To explain the Egyptian symbolism, Set, the treacherous opponent of Horus, was the Egyptian Judas. He betrayed his brother to his enemies, the Sebau. He was of red complexion, but the complexion and the red hair of Set were not derived from any human origin. Set was painted red or sandy as representing the desert ; he was the original devil in the wilderness, the cause of drought, darkness, and the creator of thirst. In the beginning was the void, otherwise designated the abyss, the dwelling- place of Set, and one of his imagery symbols was a stone. Maspero {“ Dawn of Civilisation,” p. 133) states ; “ Set was the Spirit of the Mountain stone and sand, the red and arid ground, as distinguished from the moist, black soil of the valley. He was cruel and treacherous, always ready to shrivel up the harvest with his burning breath,
m
M|»l
re THE ORIGIN ANjD EVOLUTION
and to smother Egypt beneath a shroud of shifting sand.” A bronze statuette of the Twentieth Dynasty, a drawing of which I give (Plate IV) shows Set as having the body of a man with an animal head, wearing the crown of the South and in a fighting attitude.
Maspero states ; “At the time of the Osirian Cult ("Dawn of Civilisation,” p. 200), which was very late. Set still possessed his half of Egypt, and his primitive brotherly relation to the Celestial Horus remained un- broken, either on account of their sharing one temple, as at Nubit, or because they worshipped as one in two neighbouring nomes, as, for example, at Oxyrrhjmchos and at Heracleopolis Magna.
“ Certain small districts persisted in this double W'orship down to the latest times. It was, after all, a mark of fidelity to the oldest traditions of the race.”
The Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt were at first portrayed as Superhuman Powers by means of Superhuman human types. Primitive man did not create the Gods in his own image, or at first of any sex.
The Three Primary Divinities, or Heroes, Set, Sebek (Horus), and Shu, were represented in the likeness of the Hippopotamus, or the Okapi, the Crocodile, and the Hawk, and the roaring Lion and Feather, whilst other later divinized elemental powers were Hapi imaged as an Ape, Anup as a Jackal, Ptah as a Beetle, Taht as an Ibis, later as the Kaf-Ape, Seb as a Goose. So it was with the Goddesses. They are likenesses of powers that were super- human, not human. Hence Apt was imaged as a Water- Cow. The Cow of Waters represented the Earth-Mother as the great bringer forth of life before she was divinized as Apt, the Goddess in human guise with the head of a Hippopotamus, Hekt as a Frog, Tufnut as a Lioness, Serk as a Scorpion, Rannut as a Serpent, Hathor as a Fruit Tree, Neith as a White Vulture, and a hundred others.
The Mother in Mythology, who gave birth to the Polemic annually, and who is confused at times with the human Mother, is Mother Earth, who in one type is
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represented by the Snake as the Renewal of vegetation, or the Goddess Rannut.
We have seen that the Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes first evolved two chief Heroes, later a third, from the old Earth-Mother, all of whom they divinized. That South of the Equator, Set was Primary Deity ; at the Equator, Set and Horus were equal ; but that as they came North, Horus became primary. The Art of smelting iron and other ores had been discovered by these people, and Horus was the chief deity of the clans ; therefore the Hammer or Axe was assigned as His Symbol, and he was styled “ God of the Hammer,” or ” Great Blacksmith and “ God of the Axe.” This is one of the Symbols that has continued to be used to typify the “Great God” through all the Cults up to the Christian.
These Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes came up from the South, drove out the Masaba and Non-Hero Cult inhabi- tants, and established themselves there in pre-dynastic times. At first there were three different Totemic Tribes who settled here in Egypt, and very soon four others came, making seven in all, each with a separate and distinct Totem of their Motherhood. They settled down according to their Totemic Law into seven different districts or Nomes ; and each Totemic Clan or Tribe was given a part. There is distinct evidence that one of the clans, and that the first one to settle here, brought on the Cult of Set with them from the South, and that the second were the followers of Horus Behutet, or the Great Blacksmith.
• These Nilotic Negroes had formed a secret and sacred Society, which still exists amongst Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes at the present day. They invented Signs and Passwords for their working members. Primitive Religious Ceremonies were established and performed with sacred Signs, Symbols, and Words amongst the Priesthood, only known to them- selves. There were some Signs and Passwords in common, but the Priesthood and religious sect was quite distinct and separate. These were the men who came North and founded the second Nome with Edfu as the Centre or
• ;
►
78 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
Capital, and were the “ Followers of Horus-Behutet,” called “ The Great Blacksmith/’ their deified God (Plate V).
The Priests all had to be initiated into their sacred Mysteries and Rites, and were a distinct class by them- selves. Those Nilotic Hero Cult Tribes at the present day possess most of the secret Mysteries of Horns of Edfu, also sometimes called Heru-ur or the Elder Horus, and in one phase or imagery symbolized by the Hawk. The Tradi- tion amongst the Masai still existing at the present day is “ that Horus came down from Heaven in the form of a man,” but was not a Htiman Man, but a Spirit.
All these people, Nilotic Hero Cult Negroes, were Paleolithic, the Fathers of the Stellar Cult people, who were Neolithic and were evolved from them. They were indigenous to these regions, and instead of coming from the East, some of them went there, following their pre- decessors, the Non-Hero Cult people. The Proto Semetics, as Dr. Wallis Budge calls them, were the early Stellar Cult people, who left Egypt after the Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes, and followed them to many lands.
During the whole of the Neolithic Period, Stellar Cult was practised ; Hero Cult was during the Paleolithic Age ; Lunar Cult followed Stellar, and Solar after Lunar.
Egypt was divided up by these early Stellar and Hero Cult Nilotic Negroes with a Totem or Badge for each Tribe, which originated with the original Mother of the Tribe as her Totem. These Totems were of Zootype form, but they were never worshipped. All the Totems of the Tribes, representing the Elemental Powers and a great many others, were brought on to represent the Gods and Goddesses in their Mythology and Astro- Mythology types. But there was no such thing as Serpent- Worship, Tree Worship or Animal Worship. In the Mythology which arose out of Totemism, the Mother and Child are represented in the Tree and Branch. The Tree being a type of the Abode, the Roof-Tree, the Mother of Food and Drink, the Giver of Life and Shelter, the Wet Nurse in the dew of rain, the producer of her Offspring
as the branch and promise of Periodic continuity. Was it the Tree then that was worshipped, or the Giver of Food and Shelter in the Tree ? Dr. Wallis Budge states, that they worshipped the “ Apis-Bull,” and designates this ” Apis-worship.” But the Apis carries the Solar Disc betwixt its Homs. This also is being saluted. Which, then, is the object of worship? There are two objects of religious regard, but neither is the object of adoration. That is the God in Spirit, who was represented as the Soul of life in the Sun and in the Tree, also by the fecundating Bull.
In Egypt the Totems of the tribal system had been continued in the towns and cities which bore the same name of the Zoological types.
The Hero Cult developed into the Stellar Cult, and that development took place along the valleys of the Nile, which I will term Old Egypt. The reason why we find these types all over the world is because they went out from Old Egypt and carried all their Religion, Arts, and Cults, which had been evolved up to date, with them.
Neither were there a large number of Gods worshipped. There was only ” one Great God,” from the first to the last, under whatever terminology or imagery He was depicted.
The different Iconographic or Zootype figures found portrayed on temples and stones in ruined cities in many lands were Zootypes, engraved or painted by these old Stellar Cult people to depict their so-caUed Gods and Goddesses, and were the imagery of the attributes of the one Great God, the divinized elemental powers. For they had no language at this time to express their mental ideas, nor could they portray the human form as a super- human power ; all they could do and did was to use this Sign Language.
Men who first employed signs had not attained the art which supplies an ideal representation of natural facts ; they directly represented their meaning in visible forms, but the Sign enters a second phase as the representa- tives of ideas when they become ideographic and meta- phorical, which they did during the Stellar Cult,"^
■ Drawn by E 'Watklai.
Egyptian Priest burning incense and pouring libations.
the portrayal of all the Religious Cults were identically the same, and could only have emanated from one centre.'
' For further illustrations of Old Signs and Symbols and their significant meaning, I must refer my readers to my former books, "Origin and Evolution of Freemasonry.” "Signs and Symbols of
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i cannot agree with the explanation of the custom of burning incense and making libations in religious cere- monies given by Professor Tory (“Introduction of the History of Religion/' p. 486). He states that “ when burnt before the deity/' it is “ to be regarded as food, though in course of time, when the recollection of the primitive character was lost, a conventional significance was attached to the act of burning. A more refined period demanded more refined food for the gods, such as ambrosia and nectar, but these were finally given up.”
Professor G. Elliott Smith, F.R.S. (on incense and hbations in the “Evolution of the Dragon,” p. 31) states : “ I do not think that anyone who conscientiously and without bias examines the evidence relating to incense- burning, the arbitrary details of the ritual and the peculiar circumstance under which it is practised in different countries, can refuse to admit that so artificial a custom must have been dispersed throughout the world from some one centre where it was devised,” and (on p. 33), “that the original object of the ofierings of libations was for the purpose of animating the statue of the deceased, and so enabhng him to continue the existence which had merely been interrupted by the incident of death.” “ In course of time, however, as definite gods gradually materialized and came to be represented by statues, they also had to be vitahzed by offerings of water from time to time. Thus the pouring out of hba- tions came to be an act of worship of the deity; the reduced use of water for anointing the corpse or the statue was merely a specific application of the general principles of biology which was then current.” Also (p. 36) “ the idea of divinity of the incense- tree was a result of, and not the reason for, the practice of incense- burning. As one of the means by which resurrection was attained, incense became a giver of divinity, and by a
Primordial Man,” “Arcana of Freemasoiuy," and "Origin and Evolu- tion of the Human Race,” wherein I have given many further illustrations and proofs not included in this work, but which prove critically my contention.
7
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THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
simple process of rationalization the tree which produced the divine substance became a god.” As I have already tried to prove, propitiation and offerings \\’ere first made by the little Pygmies, both to the elemental Powers and their Ancestral Spirits. What did they offer ? Naturally, whatever they had themselves, and something the}' valued. Their first idea would be that what was good food for them would naturally be appreciated by the spirit of their former chiefs and friends. To the elemental Powers they would offer something valuable, such as a Club, an Arrow, or stone Axe ; at that time there v’^ ere no statues. The Ka image was first (rudely) fashioned by the Nilotic Negroes, and they still do this in whatever part of the world found. It is an image made to portray, or represent, the Spiritueil body of Man, to which they offered food and drink, as a propitiation, in the first place, to do them no harm ; later it became a custom of love and affection and supplication to assist them in their daily lives and wants. The primitive practices of offering food and drink to the dead, more especially to the Soul of Life in Blood, were based upon the postulate that the so-called dead were living still in Spirit form. Obviously enough the sustenance of life was offered to feed the life of those who were held to be living because seen to be existing in the likeness that was represented by the human figure of the Spirit-Ka.
The Ka image is the double of the dead. It is a figure of the ghost. It was, and is, an image of the only soul or spirit that could be seen outside the human body.
The gods and goddesses representing the seven ele- mental powers, and imaged at first by Zootypes, never could appear as ghosts, although called ” The Glorious Ones ” and ” The Seven Great Spirits ” (in distinction to the Ancestral Spirits who were called the Glorified). They had never been humans and never could be. Thus the Ka-Spirit w'as, and is, entirely distinct from the soul or Spirit of Life in a tree, a plant, a bird, a beast, or a reptile, which may image either one or other of the seven Great Spirits. It was to the apparition of the human
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soul visible in human form that the offerings were made to the representation of the deceased, who lived on in Spirit form ; the food of life was offered to feed the life of those who were held to be the living, not the dead.
In the Ritual it is commanded that four measures of blood shall be offered to the Spirit or Ka image of the deceased.
The doctrine is identical with that of the races who gashed and gored their bodies to feed the spirits of the departed with their blood because the blood was the life and because it was the life they desiderated for their dead.
In the same rubrical directions it is ordered that incense shall be burned in the presence of the Ka image as an offering to the Spirit. In Sign Language incense represents the breath of life, and this was one that another element of life, besides the blood, should be offered to the deceased, “ to make the perfect spirit live.”
The Egyptian Ka is portrayed in their drawings as a spiritual likeness of the body, to identify it with the soul of which it is the “ so-called double,” the soul, that is, which has the power to duplicate itself in escaping death ” from the body of dead matter,” and to reappear in a rarer or Corpuscular form than that of the mortal, as the soul or spirit outside the body, to be seen in appari- tion or by the vision of seers.
The Ka was propitiated, that is, saluted with oblations, as a divine ideal. The Kamite equivalent for eternal life is the permanent personality which was imaged by or in the Ka, As a sacrifice of " blood,” the Tribal Mother was the “ first sacrificial victim ” ; the soul in the spirit of blood which should not die was the reason for her being eaten alive ; she was the primary eucharist, and was the original of all ” blood and body ” offerings, which have been carried down through all the Cults to the Christians.
Present-day Christians offer ” flowers and wreaths ” to the spirits of their dear ones as tokens of love and affection, but the practice fundamentally has been the same through all ages.
84 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
“ Tree Worship ” was the propitiation of a power ir nature that was represented by the tree and b3r the vegeta- tion that was given for food and although voti\’c offerings were hung upon its branches, the tree itself was not the object of the offerings but the power personified in Nut or Hathor, the Great Mother, as giver in the tree. This custom has been carried down to the Roman Church of to-day, where votive offerings are placed on the imaog of the Virgin Mother in their churdics.
The tree was never thought of as a “ God,” although the spirit of the giver in the tree was imaged hv a goddess, as a type of the Great Mother. Waitz tells the story of a Negro who was making an offering of food to a tree when ^ a bystander remarked that ” a tree did not eat food.” The Negro replies : " Oh, the tree is not fetish ■
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a symbol of prayer. It is the same language and the same sign when, the Australian Aborigines approach the camp of strangers with a green bough in their hands as a sign of amity equivalent to a prayer for peace and goodwill.
Acting Sign Language is a practical mode of praying and asking for what is wanted by portraying instead of saying. A green branch of a symbolic tree is dipped in water and sprinkled on the earth as a prayer for rain.
The Australian Diererie solicit the Good Spirit by bleeding two of their Mediums or divinely-inspired men, supposed to be persons of influence with the Moora-Moora, or Good Spirit, who will take heed of their suffering and send down rain. “ The Customs of the Native Tribes of South Australia” (p. 276, G. Gason), should be compared with I Kings xviii, when the Priests of Baal (Set) cut and slash their flesh with knives and lances and limp around the Altar with their bleeding wounds as a mode of invoking heaven for rain.
Such customs were universal from the tinie of the first primitive man ; he was praying and supplicating in the dumb drama of Sign Language for the water or the food that was fervently desired.
In these Totemic Ceremonies performed for food or water, we find the most primitive form of prayer-meeting or religious service j the powers, elemental, ancestral, and the Great Spirit, were solicited, and wants made known by Signs, emphasized by the sign of fasting during the performances.
CHAPTER VI STELLAR CULT
The Stellar Cult was not a new Cult, but a continuation and further development of the Hero Cult and the Mythology, which originated amongst the Nilotic Negro Hero Cult people. ^
The Great Spirit and Great God of the North was the same as the Great Spirit and God of the* South as stated in the Ritual, "the two were One." It was’ the primary form of representing a biune God, i.e. a great
God possessing two attributes, and with Shu added a tnune God. - , a.
As already stated, the followers of Horus-Behutet came up from the South and established themselves at Jidfu. They were the Mesinu or the Mesenti
— I [TTU founded the second
nome in Egypt. The first nome was established by the followers of Set. Many followers of the Cult of Set remained true to that name and Cult until quite late, and travelled to many countries, including Asia and South America, after having founded the first nome in old Egypt.
« I^ead,” stktes
that the Heru-seshii, or followefs of Homs '' are a class
+1 beings or divine-gods, who already in
le Pyramid Text are supposed to recite prayers on behalf of the deceased and to assist Horus and Set in
opening his mouth ” (or coming forth in Spirit form from the Mummy).
pr. Budge has here mixed up the seven divinized spirits, the primary elemental powers, brothers of Horus,
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ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 87
and Set in the Stellar Cult, also followers and his children in the Solar Cult, the astronomical Stellar Cult gods, or spirits, which were never human, with the true human “ followers of Horus,” the Mesinu or Mesenti, who came up from the South with their Hero Cult, and founded Ancient Egypt, with Horus-Behutet as their god; these were the human followers of Horus, and were not mytho- logical. The brothers, servants, or followers, as the Seshu of Horus were seven in number, and were never human, only mythical astronomical characters, which is proved by the Ritual, the book which contains the divine words that bring about the resurrection to the glory of eternal life. It is the book of the mysteries in which the revelation was dramatically enacted. In his form of the Divine Son on earth, Horus, as the Word, gives voice to the decrees which his Father has spoken in heaven. In his form of the divine son, Horus executes those decrees, and Aan is the recorder of the decrees for human use.
It is announced in the opening chapter of the Ritual that Ra, the holy spirit, “ issued the mandate which Taht- Aan, or Aan, hath executed (Ch. i, Renouf). This was the revelation made by the Father in Heaven as testifier to Horus, the son, who is the “ word made truth” in the Books of Aan.
The revelation of Taht-Aan in the Ritual begins with the resurrection, or coming forth in spirit form from the life on earth, and in the Solar Cult from the lower earth or Amenta.
It is the same opening in the Book of Revelation. ” Ra issued the command to Aan that he should effect the triumph of Horus against his adversaries, and the command is what Aan hath executed in writing the Ritual.”
The Revelation of John is termed “ The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him to show unto his servants ; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John, who bore witness of the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ of all things that he saw ” (Rev. i. i, 2).
88 THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION
Jesus is accompanied by the seven great spirits, whos place IS before the Throne of God. As Egyptian, thes were the seven servants, or followers, or "sesliu of Horus.'
Thus the Revelation of Jesus Christ was given ti John by God the Father “ to show unto his servants ’ the first of whom are "the seven spirits" which ar before the Throne." This is similar to the Revelation o Horus that was given him by Ra to be v’ritten dowi by Aan, or Taht-Aan, the scribe of the gods. Therefon John the divine seer in the isle of Patmos is the Christiar
form of Aan upon the Stellar Mount of Glory in the isle of flame.
Not only are the " seven seshu of Horus " gi^-en tc Jesus as his servants, or followers, in Revelation ; thev are also grouped around him in their various characters by name, (i) The seven spirits of God. (2) The se\'en as spirits of fire. (3) The seven as stars. (4) The seven as eyes. (5) The seven as golden lampstands. (6) The seven as seven ruling powers, as heads of the dragon (Apt). {7) The seven as the seven angels of the seven churches.
Thus we see that the "followers of Horus" were spiritual ’ and " human ” ; they were imaged into two continuatories, spiritual and human ; i.e the Human were the Mesinu or Mesenti Nilotic Negroes with "Hero Cult," who came up from the South having Horus- Behutet as their god or chief Hero. When the Stellar Cult was fully established, the seven elemental powers bom of the Old Mother Earth, Ta-Urt. were given stars on high and became reborn as divinized elemental powers, as children of Apt, who were the brothers or followers of Horus in the Astronomical Mythologv. which the old Egyptian Urshi formulated symbolically to teach the Eschatology. Dr. Wallis Budge has mixed up the
'■ ^as confounded the mythological with the human, or I might add more truthfully, he has not recognized "the human followers of Horus" at all but attributed them to an influx of some foreign element'
1, f Solar representation,
but the types and imagery were brought on from the
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Stellar and Lunar, which were pre-Solar. Taht-Aan of the Lunar was Aan of the Stellar, and the mythical followers, or brothers, of Horus, were originally Stellar Astronomical characters, or imagery, quite distinct from the “ human followers of Horus.”
Menetho states that the Hero Cult lasted in Egypt for 24,000 years before the Stellar Cult was evolved; but time must always be allowed for overlapping. The fight between Horus and Set and the Sebu, or evil elements, was continuous, periodic, and mythical, but there is distinct evidence on the monuments that the followers of Horus and those of the prior cult of Set fought many battles which were actual fights in the domain of fact, and therefore not mythical.
The mixing up of these, the one with the other, has confounded many translators who are unacquainted with Sign Language and the Mythology. Although we find remains of the Temples of the Cult of Set in Africa, Asia, and South America, it was only by, and through, the further evolution of the Horus Cult that religion was evolved to a higher plane, and it is through all the phases of the portrayal of Horus that we must study their thoughts and beliefs expressed in Sign Language ; this gives us the key to the knowledge of the development of religion in the Human race. It was the followers of Horus, now called the Mesinu, the descendants of the earlier Mesenti, who by imaging in Zootype forms and then uranographically representing, and thus for ever registering His different attributes, could express them- selves and keep the records of the past.
The whole of the human form was imaged during the Solar Cult, and replaced entirely the Zootypes which had hitherto been employed to represent the Gods and Goddesses and elemental powers ; but this was a gradually acquired art as is shown by the pictures and statues still extant, i.e. with Zootype head and human body. The Zootype head was used to distinguish which attribute, or deified elemental power, was assigned to the God, as is portrayed here in this picture of Heru-ur
00 THE OBIGIN AND EVOLUTION
or the Eider Horus (Plate VI) . The Eagle head is one of the imaged types of Horus. It is here superimposed upon the body to depict the properties attributed to that Zootype. It is the same symbolism as found in the Christian Cult, where St. John is imaged symbolically by the Eagle.
Before the Stellar Cult there was no record of time except night and day, the wet season and the dry.
They formulated time by continuous observation and registration of the changes that took place in the recession of the seven Pole Stars or Ursa Minor, “ The Stars which never set,” and b}^ observing Ursa Major and other constellations through ages of time.
How accurately they had w'orked out their Astro- nomical and Mathematical knowledge, and to what a high state they had attained (which has never been surpassed, if equalled), is proved by the records they have left written in stone, i.e. the Great Pyramid. The Sacred doctrines were first written during Stellar Cult, and in Sign Language ; emphasized in the old Hieroglyphics, and known only to the old Her-Seshta, or Urshi, or Watchers, or Mystery Teachers, of whom there were seven classes. The Urshi, or Watchers, were the first humans to reckon and register human time. All the Stellar Cult people wrote in Glyphs only. Alphabetical linear WTiting was not invented until the Solar Cult.
The Creation exoterically described in the Semitic legends of the beginning was not cosmogonical. It was Uranography, not Cosmography.
Uranography is Sign Language constellated in the Stars. That which has been called ” chaos ” in the legends of creation was a condition in which there was neither law nor order, time nor name, nor means of representing natural phenomena, because there had been no mode of expression. But things existed even when they had no name or record before Mythology, and the Mythical representation did depend upon the elements or nature force being already extant, to be named or to be constel- lated and to become pictoral for the purpose of the Mystery Teachers.
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The History of Horus is depicted in the heavens as upon the wall of some vast picture gallery. It was the subject of subjects in the Astronomical or Stellar Cult.
Har-Ur, or Horus the elder, was represented also as the child in the Mythos. His title of Repa will identify the child born to be King, as that signifies the Heir- Apparent, or the Prince, who was predestined to become the King.
The Elder Horus was the mother’s child who was born but not begotten.
In the Maori ^ tale of Ko-Ka-Ko the boy is called the bastard. Horus was called the bastard, also in the Jews’ legend Jesus is called the Mainzer or bastard.
Horus on his papyrus, a pedestal, Uat, as a Vulture, is an early form for Horus as the son of Neith (imaged by a bird). Horus as the Golden Hawk standing on the column with cestus was the child of Hathor in Lunar Cult, the Hathor who gave birth to the blue-eyed golden Horus as her child, her golden hawk or golden calf. Horus the child, or shoot on the papyrus, or on his mother’s lap, is representative of the resurrection and renewal of life for another year. Horus came to Egypt as a Saviour of the people from the dreaded drought. He came invested with “The Power of the Southern Lakes,’’ to drown the dragon in the inundation. In the Ritual, Chapter 64, it says of him, “ I am the inundation.” In one phase He is the Saviour as the bringer of water, in another He is the child of Light. He also treads the serpent of darkness under foot, as the renewer of light. In Ritual, Chapter 64, it says : “ I who know the Depths is my name I give to spiritual things. Millions and billions are the measure of things. I am the Inundation. Rising from the Great Water is my name. I am yesterday, the morning, the Light at its birth the second time. My transformations are made of Turn or Kheper. I have departed from the shrine” (Solar).
When Hoi'us came by water as Ichthus the fish, who gave himself for food, he swam the deluge of the inundation * The Maories were Nilotic Negro Hero Cult people.
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THE ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION^
when as yet there was no boat built, or ark; but when the Ark is built, Argo is constellated as the Ark of Horus. This is portrayed in the planisphere with the child on board and the devouring Apap coiling round it seeking to destroy the child, the infant Saviour of the World, who brings the food and water as the lord of life.
In the Stellar Cult, the constellation representing Hydra represented the Apap reptile. It is figured in the waters of the Southern Heavens, and is that fearsome monster which in various legends drank up all the water. In the Solar Cult, Apap, the enemy of Ra, is the blind, devouring darkness.
But as the adversary of the Elder Horus, he of the inundation, Apap or Hydra is the dragon of drought. Drought in the land of Egypt was " the curse,” and the evil dragon as its deadly image was the primitive type of physical, not moral, evil.
The first uranographic portrayal of Paradise w'as a Stellar enclosure round the pole of Set in the Southern Heavens, wliich w'as followed later, when the followers of Horus came North, by the configurating of the circum- polar Paradise in the Northern Heavens by the Astrono- mers when they reached the land of Egypt from the South.
The South was the scene of the so-called ” Creation,” or, as it signifies in Egyptian, " of the first time,” and it is stated in the inscription of Tahtmes on the stele of the Sphinx, "The first time goes back to the days and domain of Set.” Set, who is traditionally “the inventor of astronomy ” and who as such had created the pillars of the Pole vStar. The domain of Set was south of the Equator,
The first portrayal in their astronomical mythology was to depict their Paradise on Earth in the land of the Lakes, uranographically in the Southern Heavens.
Earth, as the mother of life and giver of water, was portrayed in the abyss as a great Fish emaning water from its mouth ; the primary water, or the w'et nurse of Mythology, was on earth, imaged as the Lake Tanganyika. She was now constellated in the Heavens as the Southern
OF RELIGION
Fish, as the producer of life and sustenance from water in the unfathomable abyss of the firmament.
This is figured in the Southern Fish. The star, Fomalhaut, at the mouth of the fish, denotes the point of emergence whence the stream is seen ascending from its source beneath the constellation of Aquarius.
In the Egyptian it states : “ In the beginning was the Nun. Thus saith the primordial word.”
This does not mean “ in the beginning ” of the Heavens and Earth — that is, the creation of the world— but “ in the beginning ” of the uranographic representation in their astronomical mythology. The Nun is a name in Egyptian for the firmament, when imaged as " a