THE HISTORY OF RELIGIOUS ERROR by L. W. de Laurence

From: 1948 - De Laurence's Catalog of Books on Occultism - Magic - Mysticism - Religion - The Cabala - Yoga - Astrology and all related subjects - Occult Students' Equipment - Talismanic and Symbolic Jewelry

L. W. de Laurence

Mystic and Master Occultist, de Laurence is world-famous as an Adept of the Highest Rank. His lifelong study of religious thought and emotion have brought him recognition and renown while his humanistic and sympathetic insight have endeared his name to thousands. His works are everywhere and his name stands high on the roster of independent and intrepid thinkers of all time.

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     The history of religious error is the history of the mind wandering in its search after Truth. We meet among the gross idolatry of one nation, as in the purer religion of another nation, the same acknowledgment that man is not his own creator, and that he is dependent for his welfare upon the will of some being or beings more powerful than himself.

     The cultivated man, when studying the wonders of the creation around him, traces them back through numerous secondary causes to one great First Cause, and thus arrives at the belief in One Undivided God; and feels more sure of the truth of his reasoning in proportion to the simplicity to which it leads him. On the other hand, an observing but unphilosophical man, in the childhood of the world when he had noted the various secondary causes which produce all the effects which meet his senses, would perhaps look no further; and he thus arrived at the belief in a variety of gods. But this is not always the case. Some nations seem, like the modern Turks, to have arrived at a belief in one God, as if from indolence of mind, from blind fatalism, from mere want of observation of the numerous causes which are working around them.

     Thus many of the Arabic races in the neighborhood of Egypt, as well as the Israelites, traced the hand of one only God, or Great First Cause, in all they enjoyed and all they suffered. But the Egyptians, like the Greeks and Romans, seeing so many causes at work, and not perceiving that they might all be set in motion by One First Cause, thought that every blessing that they received, and every misfortune that befell them, was the work of a different god, They thus peopled the seen and the unseen world beyond with a variety of beings or powers. To these they returned tanks for the blessings that they enjoyed, or more often, as led by a melancholy and less grateful disposition, addressed entreaties that they would withhold their injuries and punishments. The sculptured monuments of the country teach us the figures and sometimes the characters of these imaginary beings, together with the cities and parts of the kingdom in which each was more particularly worshiped.

     

JESUS, THE NAZARENE REFORMER - PART FOUR by L. W. de Laurence

From: 1948 - De Laurence's Catalog of Books on Occultism - Magic - Mysticism - Religion - The Cabala - Yoga - Astrology and all related subjects - Occult Students' Equipment - Talismanic and Symbolic Jewelry

L. W. de Laurence

Mystic and Master Occultist, de Laurence is world-famous as an Adept of the Highest Rank. His lifelong study of religious thought and emotion have brought him recognition and renown while his humanistic and sympathetic insight have endeared his name to thousands. His works are everywhere and his name stands high on the roster of independent and intrepid thinkers of all time.

PART FOUR

     On closer inspection, he becomes the double-headed Anubis, having one head human, the other a jackal's, whilst his girdle assumes the form of a serpent rearing aloft its crested head. "This figure," adds the author of the Gnostics, ets., "had two meanings - one obvious for the vulgar; the other mystical, and recognizable by the initiated alone. It was perhaps the signet of some chief teacher or apostle. This affords a fresh proof that the Gnostics and early orthodox (?) Christians were not so wide apart in their secret doctrine. King deduces from a quotation from Epiphanius, that even as late as 400 A.D. it was considered an atrocious sin to attempt to represent the bodily appearance of Christ. Epiphanius brings it as an idolatrous charge against the Carpocratians that "they kept painted portraits, and even gold and silver images, and in other materials, which they pretended to be portraits of Jesus, and made by Pilate after the likeness of Christ... These they keep in secret, along the Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, and setting them all up together, they worship and offer sacrifices unto them after the Gentiles' fashion."

Epiphanius

     What would the pious Epiphanius say were he to resuscitate and step into St. Peter's Cathedral at Rome! Ambrosius seems also very desperate at the idea - that some persons fully credited that statement of Lampridius that Alexander Severus had in his private chapel an image of Christ among other great philosophers. "That the Pagans should have preserved the likeness of Christ," he exclaimed, "but the disciples have neglected to do so, is a notion the mind shudders to entertain, mush less to believe."

     All this points undeniably to the fact, that except a handful of self-styled Christians who subsequently won the day, all the civilized portion of the Pagans who knew of Jesus, Pythagoras and Apollonius. Whence such a veneration on their part for a man, were he simply, as represented by the Synoptics, a poor, unknown Jewish carpenter from Nazareth?

     As an incarnated God there is no single record of Jesus, on this earth, capable of withstanding the critical examination of science; as one of the greatest reformers, and inveterate enemy of every theological dogmatism, a persecutor of bigotry, a teacher of one of the most sublime codes of ethics, Jesus is one of the grandest and most clearly-defined figures on the panorama of human history. His age may, with every day, he receding farther and farther back into the gloomy and hazy mists of the past; and his theology - based on human fancy and supported by untenable dogmas - may, nay, must with every day lose more of it, unmerited prestige; alone the grand figure of the philosopher and moral reformer instead of growing paler will become with every century more pronounced and more clearly defined. It will reign supreme and universal only on that day when the whole of humanity recognizes but one father - the UNKNOWN ONE above - and one brother - the whole of mankind below.*

Publius Lentulus

In a pretended letter of Lentulus, a senator and a distinguished historian to the Roman senate, there is Jesus. The letter itself, written in horrid Latin is pronounced a bare-faced forgery; but I have found therein an expression which suggests many thoughts. Albeit a forgery it is evident that whosoever invented it has nevertheless tried to follow tradition as closely as possible. The hair of Jesus is represented in it as "wavy and curling... flowing down upon his shoulders." and as "having a parting in the middle of the head after the fashion of the Nazarenes." This last sentence shows: First. That there was such a tradition, based on the biblical description of John the Baptist, the Nazaria, and the custom of this sect. Second. Had Lentulus been the author of this letter, it is difficult to believe that Paul should never have heard of it; and had he known its contents, he would never have pronounced it a shame for men to wear their hair long,** thus shaming his Lord and Christ-God. Third. If Jesus did wear his hair long and parted in the middle of the forehead, after the fashion of the Nazarenes (as well as John, the only one of his apostles who followed it), then I have one good reason more to say that Jesus must have belonged to the sect of the Nazarenes, and been called Nasaria for this reason and not because he was an inhabitant of Nazareth; for they never wore their hair long. The Nazarite, who separated himself unto the Lord, allowed "no razor to come upon his head." "He shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair on his head grow," says Numbers (vi. 5). Samson was a Nazarite, i. e., vowed to the service of God, and in his hair was his strength. "No razor shall come upon his head; the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb" (Judges, xiii., 5). But the final and most reasonable conclusion to be inferred from this is that Jesus, who was so opposed to all the orthodox Jewish practices, would not have allowed his hair to grow had he not belonged to this sect, which in the days of John the Baptist had already become a heresy in the eyes of the Sanhedrim. The Talmud, speaking of the Nazaria, or the Nazarenes (who had abandoned the world like Hindu Yogis or Adepts) calls them a sect of physicians, of wandering exorcists; as also does Jervis. "They went about the country, living on alms and performing cures."*** Epiphanius says that the Nazarenes come next in heresy to the Corinthians whether having existed "before them or after them, nevertheless synchronous," and then adds that "all Christians at that time were equally called Nazarenes!"****
a description of the personal appearance of

   

     In the very first remark made by Jesus about John the Baptist, we find him stating that he is "Elias, which was for to come." This assertion, if it is not a later interpolation for the sake of having a prophecy fulfilled, means again that Jesus was a kabalist; unless indeed we have to adopt the doctrine of the French spiritists and suspect him of believing in reincarnation. Except the kabalistic sects of the Essenes, the Nazarenes, the disciples of Simeon Ben Iochai, and Hillel. Neither the orthodox Jews, nor the Galileans, believed or knew anything about the doctrine of permutation. And the Sadducees rejected even that of the resurrection.
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* Those who would know more of de Laurence's real opinion of Jesus should read his book, "The Immanence Of God," Order No. 22.
** 1 Cor. x i. 14.
*** See the "Israelite Indeed," vol. ii, p. 348; "Treatise Naeir."
**** "Epiph. ed Petar." vol. i, p. 117.

JESUS, THE NAZARENE REFORMER - PART ONE by L. W. de Laurence

From: 1948 - De Laurence's Catalog of Books on Occultism - Magic - Mysticism - Religion - The Cabala - Yoga - Astrology and all related subjects - Occult Students' Equipment - Talismanic and Symbolic Jewelry

L. W. de Laurence

Mystic and Master Occultist, de Laurence is world-famous as an Adept of the Highest Rank. His lifelong study of religious thought and emotion have brought him recognition and renown while his humanistic and sympathetic insight have endeared his name to thousands. His works are everywhere and his name stands high on the roster of independent and intrepid thinkers of all time.

Part One

"Give ye not that which is sacred to the dogs,

Neither cast ye your pearls before swine;

For the swine will tread them under their feet

And the dogs will turn and rend you."

(Extract from The Sermon on the Mount.)

FTER nineteen centuries of enforced eliminations from the canonical* books, of the Bible, of every sentence which might put the investigator on the true path, it has become very difficult to show, to the satisfaction of exact science, that the "Pagan" worshippers of Adonis, their neighbors, the Nazarenes and the Pythagorean Essenes, the healing Therapeutes, the Ebionites, and other sects were all, with very slight differences, followers of the ancient Theurgic Mysteries. And yet by analogy and a close study of the hidden sense of their rites and customs, we can trace their kinship.

     It was given to a contemporary of Jesus to become the means of pointing out to posterity, by his interpretation of the oldest literature of Israel, how deeply the kabalistic philosophy agreed in its esoterism with that of the profoundest Greek thinkers. This contemporary, and ardent disciple of Plato and Aristotle, was Philo Judaeus. While explaining the Mosaic books according to a purely kabalistic method, he is the famous Hebrew writer whom Kingsley calls the Father of New Platonism.

     It is evident that Philo Judaeus' Therpeutes are a branch of the Essenes.**

     Their name indicates it - Asaya, Physician. Hence, the contradictions, forgeries, and other desperate expedience to reconcile the prophecies of the Jewish canon with the Galilean nativity and godship.

     Luke, who was a physician, is designated in the Syriac texts as Asaia, the Essaian or Essene. Josephus and Philo Judaeus have sufficiently described this sect to leave no doubt in my mind that Jesus, the Nazarene Reformer, after having received his education in their dwellings in the desert, and been duly initiated in the Mysteries, preferred the free and independent life of a wandering Nazaria, and so separated or inazarenized himself from them, thus becoming a traveling Therapeute, a Nazaria, a healer. Every Therapeute, before quitting his community, had to do the same. Both Jesus and St. John the Baptist preached the end of the age;*** which proves their knowledge of the secret computation of the priests and kabalists, who with the chiefs of the Essene communities alone had the secret of the duration of the cycles. The latter were kabalists and theurgists; "they had their mystic books, and predicted future events."

Dunlap, whose personal researches seem to have been quite successful in that direction traces the Essenes, Nazarenes, Dositheans, and some other sects as having all existed before Christ: "They rejected pleasures, despised riches, loved one another, and more than other sects, neglected wedlock, deeming the conquest of the passions to be virtuous."

These are all virtues preached by Jesus; and if we are to take the gospels as a standard of truth, Christ was a metempsychosist, "or re-incarnationist" -again like these same asserts that the Samian philosopher spent a certain time at Carmel with them.****

     In his discourses and sermons, Jesus always spoke in parables and used metaphors with his audience. This habit was again that of the Essenians and the Nazarenes; the Galileans who dwelt in cities and villages were never known to use such allegorical language. Indeed, some of his disciples being Galileans as well as himself, felt even surprised to find him using with the people such a form of expression. "Why speakest thou unto them in parables?"***** they often inquired.

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*Canonical books or Scriptures, those writings or books of the Bible accepted by the Church as genuine and inspired. The Roman Catholic Church receives as canonical some of the books styled Apocryphal by other Churches.

**Es-sene. One of an ascetic party or sect of the Jews, formed about the 2nd Century before the Christian era, and existing till the fall of Jerusalem. They practiced voluntary poverty, had community of goods, sought higher degrees of holiness, and were mostly celibates. Josephus("Antiquities" xiii) speaks of the Essenes as a sect which had existed in the time of the Maccabees. K.Kohler in Jew. Encyc., Vol. V, p. 228 (F. W. Co. 1903).

***The real meaning of the division into ages is esoteric and Buddhistic. So little did the uninitiated Christians understand it that they accepted the words of Jesus literally and firmly believed that he meant the end of the world. There had been many prophecies about the forthcoming age. Virgil, in the fourth Eclogue, mentions the Metatron - a new offspring, with whom the iron age shall end and a golden one arise.

****"Vit. Pythag." Munk derives the name of the Iessaens or Essenes from the Syriac Asaya - the healers, or physicians, thus showing their identity with the Egyptian Therapeutae. "Palestine," p. 515.

*****Matthew xiii, 10.

END OF PART ONE