Children of the Most High

Part One Part Two

1st series (Judaic Strand from Homo Serpiens): Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four

Audio at the end. Old Homo Serpiens text in bold.

Myths, Tragedies, and Parables

“I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist. . . he who leads a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself . . . not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in the cell, but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the world is a song. . . . The very basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the artist—an intense and flamelike imagination. He realized in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. . . . Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, he was the first individualist in history. . . . But wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ.” —Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

[Wilde is writing more about Lucifer here, though in the symbol of the Morning Star, there may be a mysterious “Gnostic” overlap.]

In The Sun Mystery & the Mystery of Death and Resurrection (pg. 35), Rudolph Steiner writes about how “for the Greeks, a strong sense of self was a natural development, but it made everything around them appear dead, so that they saw only the corpse of the natural world.”

Steiner describes the experience as “exhausting and consuming.” The Greeks “realized that life consumed people, and they experienced perceiving only the dead aspects of nature as mental and physical illness of sorts.” Since the Greeks “experienced quite vividly that daily life made them ill . . . they needed something to make them healthy again. That something was tragedy.”

According to Steiner, the Greek plays “presented the spiritual forces at work behind the ‘dead’ world of nature [so that] the feelings stirred up by the tragedies—fear, sympathy for the hero, and so on—worked like a medicine.” The enactment of tragedy “provoked a crisis [and] overcoming the crisis then led back to health.”

Over time, however, “the drama that had been held so sacred in ancient Greece and experienced as healing medicine for humankind came down from its pedestal, so to speak, and was transformed into mere entertainment.” As a result, the tragedy depicted on Greek stages “had to take place once as a historic fact for all of humankind to see and feel” (p. 35). This was the Mystery of Golgotha:

And when the first Christians modeled their lives on the embodiment of the Christ in the person of Jesus and contemplated the contents of the Gospels . . . they experienced a similar inner tragedy and healing. This is why the Christ was and still is called the Savior, the physician, the great healer of the world. The Greeks of antiquity sensed this healing in their tragedies, and humankind must now gradually learn to feel the healing in the historically enacted Mystery—or great tragedy—of Golgotha. . . . Here in the physical world, human beings are born and die. This is not true of the divine spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies. They are not born and do not die; they are simply transformed. The Christ, who lived with the other divine spiritual beings until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, decided to experience death, to descend to Earth and become human in order to undergo death in a human constitution and to regain consciousness after death through resurrection. For a god to undergo death for this purpose was a very significant event in the divine spiritual world (p. 34-35, 26-27).

If we look at some of our modern myths, found in cinema and comic books, consumed mostly by children, we will see that they consist every bit as much of tragic elements as ancient myths ever did. For example, the hero is rarely if ever permitted to enjoy his superiority, and often views it as a burden, possibly even a curse. Rarely, if ever, is he permitted to use his powers for personal gain; in order to avoid being corrupted, the hero must be a model of altruism, nobility and selflessness. “With great power comes great responsibility” (Peter Parker, in first ever Spiderman story).

The trouble with heroic figures is that superiority, or a belief in such, at once demands an inferior model be established (or invented), and so the idea of an “elect” becomes a form of oppression. In Mark (4:3-9), Jeshua offers the following parable:

Hearken: Behold, there went out a sower to sow; And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way side, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth; But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away. And some fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on the good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred. And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

If we are all cast from the hand of the sower—God, Elohim, Extraterrestrials or Cosmic Chance—scattered like seeds upon the Earth, this implies that, on leaving the sower’s hands, we are all equal. Some fall on “stony ground,” however, others amongst the thorns, and only a few ever take root. Of these, even less come to full bloom and bear fruit. “Evolution depends upon right variation.” [I took out the italics and added quotes.]

The location factor in the parable relates to environment, not so much outer but inner, namely, to awareness. According to modern physics [oh really?], it is this quality of in-formation (the forming within) that determines the nature of a given particle (seed) and establishes its energy quotient. Hence, though the seed of rebirth obtains in all, the requisite climate needs to be maintained—the awareness of the individual being rightly focused—for this seed to bloom.1

The duty of Jeshua, as a fully active “seed” and fruit-bearer, was to spread the word—the necessary information—by which other seeds might also bear fruit. The function of all myth-makers, poets, bards, story-tellers and artists is the same: to render—in code—the awareness necessary for myths to be realized on a physical plane, in the hearts, minds, and acts of human beings. Hence we have a myth about a myth, for Man himself is a myth unfinished. [Sounds anthroposophical?]

Double-Blinds

There are, however, also myths that are deliberate blinds, manipulations, disinformation that serves only to hinder and delay humanity’s collective apotheosis awakening. These are the bogus signs that lead the naive New-Ager [or Christian] to the gates of Armageddon, yet are an integral part of the myth-story. What the ancient Egyptians taught [says who?] was that only in diversity can unity be found [proto-wokism?]. Hence the Monotheism of the Jews—lacking diversity—soon gave way to dualism (the adversary), which has led inexorably (via the collision of opposites) to nihilism. [Tidy formula but historically asinine.]

There is only one formula to abolish all the -isms and bring about a synthesis of archetypes—allowing humanity’s individuation—and that is a return to Pantheism. This is the old-time religion which the Judaic formula of the One God outlawed, reducing it in time (via Christianity) to “animism,” and finally to “paganism.” [Oops]

The human psyche is not one, or even two, but many. In fact, it is Legion. As such, it must approach the multiplicity of gods and acknowledge them individually in order to make peace with them. This is the return to All, known as Pan: “the only god for the masses, forever.” (D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.) It might even be said that the Monotheist perspective of Moses was a premature leap towards God—made without taking the necessary intermediary steps—and that this leap caused the “door” (Christ) to slam in humanity’s face, forcing it to take an unwilling step backward—into the primary (or primordial) state of consciousness associated with “the beast.”2

[This formula is less tidy and hence more intriguing. But is it anywhere near accurate? I suggest the reader not try too hard to decide. It is more Aeolian guesswork. OTOH, premature awakening of consciousness to “God,” and to opposites, is there at the beginning, mythically speaking; so it stands to reason it might be there throughout the evolutionary development of consciousness, even unto the end. The view I tend to hold today, that Christianity can never work (i.e., be truly Christ-ian) as a group-identity/social movement, might be consistent with pantheism being inherent to any kind of societal system of collective worship.]

This would account for humanity’s preoccupation with the devil archetype, as the inevitable consequence of the rash and presumptuous exhortation: “There is no God but Man.” (Attributed to the Masons, this boast contains the built-in “fall” mechanism of the Serpent’s promise. [Actually it was Crowley, Liber Oz, and a web search only brings up this attribution. But the point still applies.]

Once conscious, “the will to power” became contaminated by “lust for result.” [The first phrase is Nietzsche, of course, the second from Crowley’s Book of the Law.] By seeking after immortality, Man fell from it. Yet the Serpent’s words remain the foremost magikal truth to be spoken in 6000 years of religion, philosophy, art, science, and politics. They are the key to humanity’s salvation, and the ultimate meaning of “apotheosis of species.”

Urmmm… Well, no comment, perhaps, except to say that Jesus is also attributed (John 10:34) with quoting Psalm 82, when he says, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” This is said in response to the accusation that Jesus, a man, was making himself God. So what did he (or the author of John) mean when he said it? Here is the full Psalm:

God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods. How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah. Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked. They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course. I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.

Recall now Steiner’s words, quoted above, about how gods “are not born and do not die,” but that Christ, “who lived with the other divine spiritual beings . . . decided to experience death. . . . For a god to undergo death for this purpose was a very significant event in the divine spiritual world.”

Christ, in other words, was a god who died like a man, so that men could realize they are gods.

(All-new material on Gnostic reading of Pauline epistles behind Paywall)