The scarcity of subjects induced the priests to be less scrupulous in their choice; divinatory science became corrupt and fell into disuse. Its final disappearance was universally considered, according to Plutarch, as a great misfortune. All Greeks believed in spirit intervention in human affairs.
Socrates possessed a daimon or familiar genius. When at Marathon and at Salamis, the Greek legions triumphed over the overwhelming Persian invasion, their strength was multiplied by the conviction that they were being seconded by invisible legions. At Marathon, the Athenians were convinced of the presence of two shining warriors who were fighting in their ranks. Ten years later, an inspired Pythoness, from the eminence of her tripod, foretold the means by which Greece might be saved.
Indeed, were Xerxes victorious, a barbaric Asia would overflow Hellas, stifling her genius and retarding by twenty centuries the fruition of thought to its ideal perfection. The Greeks, who were but a handful, defeated the huge Asiatic army, and, conscious of the unseen power that had come to their aid, they rendered homage to Pallas-Athena, a titular divinity, symbolical of spiritual power.
This solemn event took place upon the headland of the Acropolis, which is silhouetted between the blue and dazzling sea and the majestic outlines of Pentelicus and Hymettus. Such a popular participation in the mysteries would naturally contribute to the dissemination of occultism. It developed among the initiated a consciousness of the invisible forces, which spread, in a modified degree, to the people. Universally, in Greece, in Egypt and in India, the mysteries hinged upon the same important fact: the knowledge of the secret of death, the revelation of successive lives, and communication with the unseen world.
The effect of these examples and exhortations was such as to strongly influence the people, imparting to them an incomparable peace, serenity and moral force. This doctrine taught men to curb their passions, and to cultivate will and intuition.
Socrates, and after him Plato, in Attica pursued the task undertaken by Pythagoras. Socrates, who wished to remain free to teach the truths that his reason discovered, would never consent to be initiated.
After the death of Socrates, Plato departed for Egypt and was there admitted to participate in the mysteries. He returned to Greece, entered into some understanding with the Pythagoreans, and founded his academy; but being an initiate he could not speak freely. Behold, here are the destinies that life offers.
Choose freely, but remember that the choice is irrevocable, wherefore, if it be ill, accuse not God. Ovid speaks of them in his Metamorphosis chap. All the great Latin authors assure us that all men of talent are assisted and inspired by their familiar genii. To recapitulate, we cannot too often repeat that the secret doctrine, mother of all religions and philosophies, assumes different aspects with the different ages, but that its foundation is ever the same.
Born of India and of Egypt, it has thence journeyed westward, following the flood of migration. We shall find it in all lands which the Celts have occupied. In Greece, concealed within the mysteries, it stands revealed in the teaching of such masters as Pythagoras and Plato, clothed in poetic and pleasing guises. The pagan myths are like golden gauze that drapes in shimmering folds the pure lines of Delphic wisdom.
The scriptures were already illuminated by the esoteric science of another branch of initiates, the Essenes — as a dark vault is lighted by a dazzling gleam of sunshine. Into this source Christ dipped, as into a live and inexhaustible spring, borrowing of its vivid imagery and lofty flights.
Greece 31 base of all great religious and philosophical conceptions, and is universally identical. The sages, philosophers and prophets of all times and all lands have drawn from it the energy and inspiration which makes all things possible, which transforms both individuals and social organizations by forwarding them upon the path of progressive evolution. There would seem to be some mighty spiritual current which mysteriously flows through the deep places of history.
It appears to issue from that unseen realm that governs and surrounds us, where dwell and act those transcendental spirits who have ever guided this human race, with which they still commune. There it lived and thrived in a powerful and hitherto inexperienced form, and from it consequences were deduced such as were elsewhere unknown.
No other people of Europe possessed to the same degree the conviction of immortality, justice and liberty. Reverentially should we study the Gaelic philosophical tendencies, for is not Gaul the great ancestor in whom we shall discover, in strong relief, all the qualities of our race? There is nothing more worthy of our respect and inquiry than the doctrine of the Druids, who distinctly were not the barbarians that for so many centuries they were deemed.
For a long while all that we knew of the Celts was what the Catholic and Latin writers chose to tell: of these we have some right to be suspicious, for was it not to their interest to belittle our ancestors and misconstrue their beliefs? Philo and Suetonius both testify to the fact that this work is manifestly full of misrepresentations and voluntary errors.
The progress of Celtic research,28 the publication of the Triades and of the Songs of the Bards,29 allow us to gather from a clearer source a truer appreciation of the beliefs of our forefathers. Druidical philosophy, as we must now broadly view it, conforms alike with the secret doctrines of the Orient and with modern spiritualistic thought in agreement with which it asserts the progressive lives of the spirit in its progress up the ladder of worlds.
This virile doctrine imbued the Celts with such indomitable courage and self-assurance that they went forth to death as to a merry-making. Where the soldiers of Rome sheathed themselves in steel and iron, the hardy Celts stripped off their clothes and fought bare breasted. They gloried in their wounds and deemed the artifices of warfare to be no better than cowardice, whence their many defeats and final downfall.
Their belief in a future existence30 was so great that they often made loans redeemable in a future life. They confided messages to the dying, to be delivered to the dead.
The Celts had no notion of hell. Death is but the midway of a long life. They are happy, these men that know not the supreme fear of the grave. Hence their heroism in bloody battle and their scorn of death.
In Druidical institutions, we find the highest expression of Celtic genius. VI, chap. XIV: "The druids initially wanted to persuade us that the souls do not die, but rather, that after death, they pass into other human bodies" non interire animas, sed ab aliis post mortem transire ad alios.
Great was the political influence of the Druids, whose chief ambitions lay in the unification of Gaul. In the land of the Carnutes they instituted an annual assembly at which the deputies of the Gaelic republics would meet to discuss the important interests of the country.
The Druids were chosen by election; twenty years of study were required as a preliminary to initiation. Their worship was held under the green canopy of the woods, and its symbols were all borrowed from nature.
The moaning wind and shivering leaves filled this great green temple with a volume of mysterious sound that inclined the subdued soul to reverie. The oak, the most sacred of trees, was the emblem of divine might; the evergreen mistletoe represented immortality.
No object wrought by hand of man was allowed to defile their sanctuaries, for the Celts had a horror of idols, and of the puerile forms of the Roman faith. That their principles should not be tainted nor materialized by symbolism the Druids went as far as to forbid all plastic art, even to written precepts. They solely entrusted the tenets of their doctrine to their bards and initiates, which accounts for the scarcity of documents relating to this epoch. The human sacrifices, for which the Celts have been so harshly condemned, were, in the main, but legal executions.
The Druids, who were both magistrates and chief executioners, made, of condemned criminals, a holocaust to the Supreme Power. An interval of five years elapsed between sentence and execution. Eager to rejoin their dear departed in happier spheres, eager to ascend the circle of felicity, the Celts gaily mounted the sacrificial stone, and death come to them in the midst of a song of joy. Teutates, Esus and Gwyon were nothing in the Celtic Pantheon than the personification of force, light and mind.
Above these reigned the infinite Power, whom they worshipped by the consecrated stones, in the majestic silence of the forests. The Druids taught the Oneness of God. I have frolicked in the night, I have slept in the dawn. I have been a viper in the lake, an eagle upon the mountain tops, a wolf in the woods. Then did Gwyon the sacred spirit , the sage of sages, stamp me with his seal and I acquired immortality.
A long, long time ago I was a shepherd. Long did I wander over the Earth, ere I became learned in science. At last I shone amongst the high chiefs. Robed in sacred robes, I have held the sacrificial bowl. I have dwelt in a hundred worlds; I have moved through a hundred circles. Often, in each circle, is the soul incarnated. Far from bordering upon pantheism, like most of the Eastern faiths, Druidism was quite oppositely inclined, as well because of its exalted ideal of the Divinity as by its high conception of life.
He himself moulds and shapes his own destiny. His objective does not lie in the pursuit of temporary gratification, but in that elevation which is attained through self-sacrifice and duty accomplished.
Life is a battlefield whereon the brave are promoted. Such a doctrine placed a premium upon courage and was conducive to purity. It was as remote from puerile mysticism as from the deceitful platitudes of skepticism; it seems, however, to have erroneously maintained that32 the culpable soul which persists in wrong-doing may lose the fruit of its labours and retrograde to the lower degrees; that it may even be reduced to that germ level whence it sprang and thence from the very start be obliged once more to undertake its tedious and painful ascent.
Still, as the Triads add, loss of memory will at least enable it to take up the struggle without the clogging fetters of past remorse or hatred. The cosmologic knowledge of the Druids was extensive. They were aware of the fact that our planet whirls through space, describing a wide circle around the sun. I will ask them what it is that upholds the Earth in such manner that, the prop removed, still the Earth falls not. But, what could thus uphold it?
A mighty traveler is the earth! Whilst ever ceaselessly advancing, still she is constant to her course; how admirably contrived this course must be that the earth should not leave it! They taught that the universe, although eternal and immutable as a whole, undergoes a constant transformation in its parts: that life, thanks to an endless circulation, fills and animates it in every region.
Lacking the means of observation that modern science possesses, one wonders how the ancient Celts could formulate such theories.
There is ample testimony that the Druids communicated with the unseen world. From within stone enclosures, they evoked the dead. Druidesses and female bards rendered oracles. Before rousing Gaul against Caesar he betook himself to the Isle of Sein, the venerated dwelling of the Druidesses. There, in clash of thunder and a blaze of lightning,34 a spirit appeared that predicted his defeat and martyrdom. The commemoration of the dead is of Gaelic origin.
On the first of November the feast of the spirits was celebrated: not in cemeteries — for the Celts did not honour dead bodies — but in every house the bards and the seers evoked the spirits of the dead.
Our forefathers peopled wood and plain with wandering spirits: the Duz and the Korrigan were but so many souls in search of reincarnation. The teaching of the Druids was moulded, politically and socially speaking, into institutions befitting their standards of justice. Confessing one ruling principle and conscious subjects of one universal destiny, the Celts possessed both liberty and equality.
In all Gaelic republics the chiefs were elected by the assembled people. The over ambitious and the would be usurpers were punished, according to Celtic law, by fire.
The women were seers and prophetesses; they were admitted to the councils and held sacerdotal offices. They were subservient to themselves alone, and chose their husbands. Property was collective, all the land belonging to the republic; with them hereditary rights did not exist, and everything was elective.
But one memorable day of the old Gaelic blood surged in the veins of the people, and the Revolution swept away in tits turmoil those two foreign importations: the theocracy that Rome had given and the monarchy engrafted by the Franks!
Ancient Gaul lived anew in the France of One important thing, however, was lacking: the notion of solidarity. Druidism certainly inculcated the conceptions of right and liberty, but if the men of Gaul were aware of their equality, they lacked the sentiment of fraternity: hence the want of unity that determined its downfall. After being bowed beneath the weight of twenty centuries of oppression, purified by misfortune, enlightened by fresh knowledge, the nation has at last become unified and undivided.
Already, in the first centuries of our era, the bard Myrdwin, or Merlin had prophesied the coming of Joan of Arc. With the assistance of a young girl, a child of eighteen, the unseen powers reanimated a demoralized people, rekindled an extinct patriotism, quickened a petrified nation into active resistance and saved France from dissolution.
For one moment only, when in her dungeon at Rouen, did these voices seem to desert her. Then it was that, exhausted by suffering, she consented to recant. As soon as the spirits left her she became a mere woman, weakened and submissive. Then the voices spoke again; immediately she regained courage and replied to her judges: The voices told me that it was treason to recant. The truth is this: God has sent me and what I have done was well done.
Sanctified by her dolorous passion, Joan has given humanity a sublime example of self-sacrifice, a subject for deep meditation, and universal admiration. Considerable was the part played by the people of Israel, whose history was like a hyphen placed between the East and the West, between the secret science of the temple and democratized religion. Such was the ideal, unseen of the multitude, which the Son of Mary was to touch and transform into a vision of ineffable splendour. His disciples disseminated it amongst the pagans, and the dispersion of the Jews contributed to its diffusion.
Ever serenely progressing amid crumbling civilizations and the havoc wrought by the time, it will remain indelibly engraved in the hearts of men. A little while before the dawn of our era, when the power of Rome was most prevalent and predominant, the secret doctrine began to retrograde and its authority to pale.
True initiates had grown scarce, thought was becoming materialized, and high ideals corrupted. The oracles became dumb, superstition and idolatry invaded the temples, Roman debauchery overswept the world, a mammoth tidal wave of saturnalia, bestial lust and intoxication! From the apex of the Capitol the sated she-wolf rules both rulers and nations: in a bloody apotheosis Caesar, Emperor and God, holds sway.
Still, upon the distant shores of the Dead Sea, there are some who yet hold to the tradition of the prophets and to the secrets of the pure doctrine. These, a handful, are the Essenes, a group of initiates whose colonies extend to the banks of the Nile. They openly professed the practice of healing, but their secret object was other and higher: in pursuance with this, to a select few, they revealed the higher laws governing life and the universe. Their doctrine was almost identical with that of Pythagoras.
Their initiation, like that of the priests of Memphis, was gradual and required several years of preparation. Their morals were beyond complain, their lives were spent in contemplation, far from political strife and from the plotting of a grasping and envious priesthood.
All tends, however, to substantiate this surmise: the identity of His views with those of the Essenes, the aid they lent Him at sundry times, the free hospitality extended to Him as an adept, and the final fusion of their order with the first Christians, a fusion from which esoteric Christianity emerged. If Christ had not the superior initiation, His soul, which overflowed with light and love, was great enough to supply all the elements that His mission required.
Never did greater spirit pass through the world. A divine serenity radiated from His countenance; in Him all the perfections blended to form and ideal beauty and an ineffable loveliness. His heart throbbed with a boundless pity for the poor and lowly; in it reverberated the sorrows, woes and sufferings of all humanity.
Christianity 37 willing sacrifice to the elevation of mankind. Through Him, was the hidden teaching rendered accessible to all, even to the lowliest; when the mind was incapable of receiving it, its appeal was sent straight to the heart. This teaching He presented to them in a fashion that the world knew not as yet, with a passionate love, a winning sweetness, a communicative faith that thawed the frosts of skepticism, and, conquering his Hearers, made of them His devoted followers.
Intellectual treasures which the too frugal adepts had meted out but with prudence, Christ scattered broadcast amongst the great human family; amongst those million slaves who, bowed beneath their heavy earthly yoke, who knew nothing of their eventual destiny, could but dumbly await in doubt and suffering these glad new tidings which brought them warmth and cheer. His toil and teaching He gave forth ungrudgingly; they were moreover consecrated by His passion and death.
The Sermon on the Mount condenses and contains the whole teaching of Jesus. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are they which hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even publicans the same? This is set forth in the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Lost Lamb.
If Christ be sometimes severe and speaks wrathfully, it is to those Pharisees that are assiduous at their devotions but neglect the moral law. To Him a schismatic Samaritan is more deserving than the Levite who scorned the wounded. His faith was the inner faith, the only one worthy of a lofty spirit. God is a spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.
In addition to these teachings, intended by Jesus for the lowly, there are others in which the hidden doctrine of the Essenes is sketched in flashes of light.
In spite of these alterations it is easy to reconstruct the original if one but discards a superstitions clinging to the letter, setting mind and reason in its place.
This is especially evident in the Gospel according to John. I go to prepare a place for you. I will come again to receive you unto Myself, that where I am, ye may be also. These are the innumerable stations of our road, stations in which we shall rest if we follow the precepts of Jesus.
Jesus Himself will come to us and by His and by example and courage our endeavour to attain these worlds with so far transcend our own. Marvel not that I say unto you, ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and though hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whiter it goeth: so is every one that is born of the spirit. IV, notes 4, 5, 6, etc.
Christianity 39 return? I have yet many things to say to you, but yet cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you unto all truth… 43 At time he would depict the eternal truths, with dazzling colors and flame-like words.
His apostles could not always follow Him, but he relied upon time and events to ripen these seeds and the spirit of man. In order to receive the wisdom of the temples of Egypt and Greece, it was necessary to undergo the degrees of a long and painful initiation; whereas through charity all men may become good Christians and brothers in Jesus. Gradually, the supreme truths became obscured. Those who possessed them were supplanted by those who only thought they did and thus material dogma dethroned the pure doctrine.
Christianity, in expanding, lost in weight what it gained in surface. To the profound science of Jesus was superadded the fluidic power of the superior initiate, of the soul free from all lust, whose will dominates matter and commands the subtle forces of nature. Christ was gifted with the second sight: his gaze went to the bottom of minds and conscious; he healed with a word, with a gesture, with the laying on of hands, and even by His mere presence.
Beneficent effluvia arose from his person, and evil spirits fled at his command. He freely communed with the spiritual powers from whom in his hours of trial he derived the moral strength that sustained him on his dolorous awake.
At Tabor his frightened disciples saw him holding converse with Moses and Elias. The apparitions of Jesus after His death may not be doubted, for they alone account for the persistence of the Christians faith. After the martyrdom of the Master and the dispersal of His disciples, Christianity was morally dead.
The apparitions and discourses of Jesus could alone restore faith and energy to His apostles. Thus has a faint wave of opinion been started, the tendency of which is to reduce the origins of Christianity to the status of legend. These words are interpreted by the Church as predicting the coming of the Holy Spirit, some months later, to the apostles; but if mankind to whom this prophecy was made was not able to apprehend the truth, why should it be better fitted to receive it only fifty days later?
Paul enumerates the apparitions of Jesus, after His death. Several events which it chronicles are to be found in the history of other ancient peoples: some of the acts attributed to the Christ likewise figure in the lives of Krishna and Horus.
On the other hand there are many historical proofs of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, which proofs are the more peremptory that they originate from the very adversaries of Christianity.
All Jewish Rabbis recognize the fact of His existence. Moreover, how would it be possible to admit that the belief in a mere myth could have inspired the early Christians with such enthusiasm, courage and steadfastness in the face of martyrdom?
How indeed could this have enabled them to overthrow paganism, to conquer the Roman Empire and, gradually, the entire civilized world? A religion which endures twenty centuries and revolutionizes the half of a world can certainly not be founded upon a fiction. If we trace the cause that has produced a mighty result, we shall invariably find an eminent personality at the root of every great idea.
As to the theories which makes of Jesus one of the three Persons of the Trinity, or else a purely fluidic being, these seem to be equally baseless. Like ourselves, Jesus has suffered and has sorrowed, and this human suffering brings Him closer to us; and in becoming more akin to us His virtue and His supreme example are rendered still more wonderful. The coming of Christianity has brought about admirable results. It has endowed the world with a humanitarian ideal, of which antiquity had but a very faint glimmering.
This ideal, vitalized in the person of Jesus, has gradually expanded, and today is manifest throughout the western hemisphere, with the social consequences that follows from it.
To this conception we must add those others of moral law and eternal life which hitherto had been the exclusive property of sages and scholars. Therein lies an illimitable possibility of development: small wonder that two thousand years of incubation and obscure travail have hardly yet begun to show any modification in the social order! Christianity contains, in latent state, all the elements of true progress, but since the first centuries it has deviated, and its true principles, ignored even by its official representatives, have passed on into the spirit of the people, even into those who, no longer claiming nor believing themselves to be Christians, nevertheless unconsciously possess something of that ideal for which Christ died.
Neither to the churches nor to the so-called institutions of divine right — which implies the rule of might — shall we find the heritage of Christ transmitted; for these are but pagan, or barbarous, institutions! The spirit of Christ dwells in the soul of the people.
In its strivings after a higher life, in its constant reaching towards some social condition more consonant with the notions of justice and solidarity, this great humanitarian stream reveals itself; a stream whose source is upon the heights of Calvary and whose current is sweeping us towards a future in which the infamy of pauperism, ignorance and war, whether intestine or foreign, will be unknown.
Catholicism has vitiated the pure and beautiful doctrines of the Gospel by its conceptions of redemption through grace, of original sin, of hell, of atonement. In each century numerous councils have promulgated fresh dogmas, each of these being further removed from the teachings of Christ. Luxury and simony have overrun the pure faith.
Christianity 41 and caused oceans of blood to flow. Vainly has science, in its onward march, pointed out the contradictions extant between Catholic teaching and the real nature of things; the Church has replied by anathematizing science as an invention of the evil one.
A great gulf divides the Romish doctrines from the ancient wisdom of the initiates, which was the real fount of Christianity.
In this chaos materialism alone has prospered, everywhere spreading its insidious tentacles. Religious sentiment, on the contrary, has perceptibly weakened. Dogma no longer exercises the slightest influence upon society.
The human mind, grown weary of the restrictions to which it had been subjected, has made a dash for light; it has burst asunder its flimsy but galling bonds, so as to be free to seek counsel of those great spirits who belong to no one race or sect, but whose thought quickens and enlightens all humanity.
Enfranchised from sacerdotal tutelage it asserts its right henceforth to think, act and live, by itself. We desire to use all moderation in dealing with Catholicism.
We cannot forget that it was the faith of our forefathers, that it has cradled innumerable generations. Moderation, however, must not exclude criticism. When we look closely into it, we are forced to the following conclusions: The infallible Church has erred both in its physical conception of the universe and in its moral conception of human life. The Earth is no more the most important centre of the universe than this life is the only stage of our progress and struggles.
Work is not a punishment, but rather a means of regeneration whereby man may be strengthen and elevated. Men, who were born to happiness, succumb, wholesale, to the temptations of the evil one, and go forthwith to hell. And is this the Father of whom Jesus spoke when He bade us forget, in His name, the wrongs that we have suffered, when He enjoining us to render good for evil, and to practise mercy, love and forgiveness? Thus would a good and compassionate man be superior to God! We forget, it is true, that in order to save the world, God has sacrificed His own Son, one of the Trinity, part and parcel of Himself.
Thanks to it man has grown unused to thinking; it has taught him to stifle his doubts, destroy his reason and its best faculties, to shun those who freely and sincerely seek the truth, to esteem those who hear the same yoke as himself. Still, it remains true that the Church has done good work. It has had its days of greatness; it has raised dams before the advancing flood of barbarism; it has endowed the world with many useful institutions.
But now, as though petrified within it shell of dogma, it alone remains stationary, while all else moves and progresses. From day to day science is expanding and the mind is unfolding its wings. Nothing escapes the law of progress, not even religious beliefs. Thus is it with Catholicism. Having bequeathed to history all that it had to give, and being now powerless to fecundate the human mind, that mind deserts it, pursuing its tireless advance towards greater and nobler conceptions.
The Christian idea will not die out, however; it will be transformed to appear again in a newer and purer form. The day will dawn when Catholicism, with its dogmas and rituals, will be but a vague recollection, as indistinct as the Roman and Scandinavian paganism are to us; but the mighty figure of the Crucified One will forever tower over the centuries.
Of His teachings three things will abide, because these three are the expression of the everlasting truth; the unity of God, the immortality of the soul, and the brotherhood of man. One can follow its traces throughout the Middle Ages. At a very remote time, some Jewish initiates had already consecrated two celebrated works to it — the Zohar and the Seper-Jesirah — the combination of which forms the Cabala, one of the chief works of esoteric science.
The Christians likewise evoked the souls of the departed, with whom they were in communication. Numerous indications of this appear in the Acts of the Apostles. Almost all the Alexandrian philosophers, Philo, Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Porphyry, Arnobius, professed to be inspired by superior genii.
Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus received from St. John the symbols of the faith of the Spirit. The school of Alexandria then shone with its brightest lustre; all the great currents of human thought there seemed to meet and to commingle. From this celebrated school sprang a galaxy of brilliant minds, whose endeavour it was to combine the philosophy of Pythagoras and of Plato with the traditions of the Jewish Cabala and with the tenets of Christianity. They thus hoped to form a final doctrine of broad and far- reaching tendencies, a religion both universal and imperishable.
Like Socrates, this great thinker was counseled and inspired by a familiar spirit, through the intermediacy of whom he even 46 Consult Ad. VIII, chap. Christianity 43 wrote when sleeping. Of all the champions of esoteric Christianity, Origen is the best known. This man of genius, saint as well as great philosopher, establishes in his writings 54 that the inequality of men is caused by their unequal merits. Amongst the Fathers of the Church, many shared his views, 55resting upon the revelations of the spirits to prophets and mediums.
As to the plurality of lives, which Origen asserts and which Augustine sometimes seemed to deny, does he not also assert it in this passage? They lamented that the simple teachings of the Gospel should be so obscured by fabricated dogmas, which were imposed upon human credulity despite the protest of reason. They indignantly protested against the already scandalous luxury of the bishops. From them the heretics derived 52 Philon, « De Migrat. Abraham, » p. And hist. Dei, » livre X, chap. IX et XI.
III, chap. VIII, ed. What with reincarnation, with the redemption of sin through work and suffering, with the succession of lives, death had ceased to be a fearful thing, and every man was free to liberate himself from the earthly purgatory by his own individual efforts and progress; all of which went to make the priest superfluous. The Church, finding it no longer in its power to open at will the gates of heaven or hell, foresaw that it might and prestige alike would vanish.
It therefore thought it wise to impose silence upon all partisans of the secret doctrine; to renounce spiritualistic communications and to denounce their teachings as inspired by the evil one. It is from this time that Satan acquired an ever-growing importance in the Christian religion. All that embarrassed the latter was attributed to him. Origen and the Gnostics were condemned by the council of Constantinople ; the secret doctrine disappeared with the prophets, and the Church was left free to accomplish at leisure her task of absolutism and immobilization.
Then it was that the priests of Rome became blind to the light that Jesus had shown the world, and relapsed into darkness. This important book covers an area about which most people have very little knowledge but which is at the same time, of vital interest to all human beings. It outlines what happens to the human soul from the moment of death until the arrival of the Day of Judgement. Translator's Foreword: Questions abound about what happens after death.
In Western societies, in particular, there is a great deal of speculation on these matters. Muslims, however, have answers to these questions. Islam tells us what we can expect when we have finally make our exit from this world ; we are also given ample guidance as to how we may best prepare ourselves and earn the rewards of Paradise in the Hereafter. In this book, Husayn al-Awayishah outlines the Islamic teaching on death and the grave.
Akhirah is the word Muslims use to refer to life after death. Belief in an afterlife encourages Muslims to take responsibility for their actions. They know God will hold them accountable and reward or punish them accordingly. Importantly, though, Muslims believe that Allah will not test them beyond their limits. After death, most Muslims believe that the soul will enter Barzakh, a state of waiting, until the Day of Judgement.
Muslims believe they get to Paradise by living religiously, asking Allah for forgiveness and showing good actions in their life. Life Here and Hereafter. Get Books. Life Here and Life Hereafter.
Fearless Living. A sampling of Swami Rama's anecdotes on fearlessness, miracles of healing and the astonishing ability of the one-pointed mind. Philosophy of Life and Death.
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