CHAPTER XIX

THE PHOENIX LIVES AGAIN

So spirit "dies" in matter, but dies to live again. After the brief "death" of latency it germinates and lives anew. It "dies" in the effort to involve its energies in a material organism, and must await the growth of the organism to deploy those energies again in full scope. In order to become creator of new life it must entwine its forces with the powers native in matter. In the new growth thus generated the hidden "meaning" of the involutionary process comes to light and realizes the entelechy. That which entered the ground or field of matter as potential energy emerges to view as structure of organic complexity, revealing pattern.

It is passing strange that the essence of this formulation has never been abstracted from John's pellucid representation of it in his verse: "Unless a kernel of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit." Life endlessly enriches and multiplies itself in its creatures, but it does so by endlessly dying. For its "deaths" are followed by "resurrections," and each revival results in multiplication of the original seed that died. That which wishes to be reborn must first "die."

Life swings eternally back and forth between the two ends of the gamut, actual organic development at the top of the cycle and amorphous latency at the bottom. It dies and is reborn and dies and lives again. It ever lives to die and ever dies to live. "He that loseth his life shall gain it." Paul dies daily unto one part of his being that he may live more fully in another. Thales wrote the intensely pertinent truth that "air lives the death of fire, water lives the death of air," and so on. Body's death is soul's more abounding life. Soul's "death" is body's more abundant existence.

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"He must increase and I must decrease." Socrates caught the idea that we are "the dead" of the philosophical texts of old. The most majestic line in all Egyptian wisdom runs--the soul of man speaking: "I die and I am born again and I renew myself and I grow young each day." Says Job in the Old Testament: "I shall die in my nest and I shall renew my youth like the eagle," the fabled phoenix. A majestic verse is that in the third chapter of Revelation, which runs: "I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive again for evermore." For life can not die in any absolute meaning of the term. It lives forever, yet it ceaselessly alternates back and forth between the two stages of latency or sleep and full waking activity, which are in human parlance denominated death and life. The complementary unity of the two has been ruinously broken by the dearth of true philosophy in the modern world. "Death" is always relative to "life," and "life" equally relative to "death."

"And life is ever Lord of death,

And love can never lose its own."

On the basis of the allegory of the soul's descent into matter, like the sun's setting in the west, the "dead" in Egypt, meaning the incarnated, were called "the Westerners." They had "gone West" to start a new career in a free country. The soul of Osiris was said to die on the western side of heaven and be reborn on the eastern horizon.

Involution, then, is the "death" of a unit of consciousness as it descends the several steps through the scales of intensities of atomic organization of matter from "pure spirit" at the zenith to "deadest" matter at the nadir of the round. It makes its descent by converting its potencies back into sheer potentiality as it involves these in the seed. To grow again it must reverse the process. Going into matter from empyreans of vivid life is to step from active life into comparative death. Every power is lethalized by going into dormancy until it is awakened again.

Like evolution, involution is a word easily and glibly spoken, but

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its full significance is the greatest of life's mysteries. How life, or spirit, or at any rate a nucleus of conscious being involves itself in matter or body--how indeed an immaterial "principle" of will and intelligence can implant itself in or attach itself to a physical body, so that the latter becomes its dwelling, its agent, its servant, is the prime mystery confronting the reflective genius of mankind. Intelligence must seek an answer to the question: What does it mean when one says that spirit involves itself in matter or that a soul incarnates in a body? It almost calls for a new definition of "in." Commonly one thing is "in" another when it is enclosed more or less completely by it. This is the physical basis of its meaning. How can wisdom be "in" words, or beauty be "in" a picture or heroism "in" a deed? Simply that the things, words, picture, deed express these qualities to the mind. So the living organism shows evidences of the presence and work of mind, will, spirit.

Modern view hedges or revolts from the claim of ancient theology that the soul, an independent entity, descends from heaven and enters an infant body. This objection springs from the too literal and "wooden mechanical" conception of what the ancients postulated. The methodology may sound too crudely simple to be acceptable. What these ancient seers actually proclaimed behind a veil of outward simplicity was a recondite and complex spiritual process, that was communicated only in the arcana of the Mystery Brotherhoods. Modern scientific cast of mind clings tenaciously to the view that where function is developed in connection with a mechanism, it is the product of the mechanism, and can not be presupposed as an existent entity apart from the machine. This is all that human thought can make of it, if a knowledge of subtler forces in nature is not at hand to correct naïve conclusions. Such finer intelligence was at hand in the ancient day, but sedulously safeguarded from the corrupting forces of obscurantism and ignorance in the councils of the initiated.

The more competent understanding of the guardians of primeval

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knowledge predicated the existence of the soul in the body on a basis of recondite data purveyed in the Mysteries. Soul, they said, is not a product of the body and its energies. It is an independent entity; it can subsist, in and of itself, apart from the body. Out of body it would be a soul, yet not a human soul. In body it is a human soul. It is an independent entity, but to arrive at that form of manifestation of its energies in the body of a man which wins for it the designation of "human" it must be linked to the energic powers of a human body, by affinities that are confessedly obscure to us. Yet, independent entity that it is, it does not enter the human body in any crassly physical way, but by the subtle methods of synchronism of vibrations.

In the first place it is not an entity in a crude corporeal extensional sense. It is a nucleated focus of ethereal, spiritual forces of vibrational or supra-electrical dynamism. As an atom is not a physical something at all, in the common substantial and mechanical sense, but a swirl of forces in the substrate ether, so the soul is a whorl of vivific life-force, embodying will and intelligence. Apart from bodily connection it is, as it were, static. To become kinetic and actual it must be linked with the powers of the atom released in an organic body. How is it linked to the latter?

The answer of supreme import for understanding is available in the radio and in the farmer's heated barn in the summer. How does a sonata get "in" the radio? By the provision therein of an electric charge which is able to match the wave-length and frequencies of the "soul" of the sonata that is in the air and ethers all around it. This soul of the music can not be converted from static silence to kinetic manifestation until a mechanism is provided to give synchronous channel to those sublimated waves. The soul of the music, apart from the receptive mechanism, is surely in being, as it is thrilling through the air; yet it can not be said to be in existence. It is not a piece of music actually, but only the "soul" of music. It is in being potentially, but not actually. For actual existence it

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awaits the presence of a mechanism co-ordinated to its vibratory nature.

The soul must be envisioned in like fashion. It is a node of spiritual energy, in being, but not existent as a human soul until a physical brain and nervous organism have been provided of requisite sensitivity to give play to its sublimated emotions. When such mechanism has been developed by organic growth and it has reached a point at which the functional capabilities of the mechanism are synchronized with the soul's own rates of vibration, the affinity causes the two to leap together, as it were, into a reciprocity of action. The machine releases the soul's energies and they in turn energize the machine.

How does the fire, which is physically non-existent (yet in being) get "into" the farmer's barn in the heat of July? "Spontaneous combustion" is the phrase for it. Here the same law is at work. The chemical conditions generated in the heated moist hay rise to an affinity with the static electricity in the air and the birth of fire is the result. These two phenomena, the radio and the burned barn, twit modern science with its failure as yet to comprehend how the soul comes into the body. Its refractory denial of the independence--not to say the existence--of the human-divine soul is as crudely stupid as would be the claim that the sonata in the air emanating from a distant station has no independent existence, and that it is only the product of your radio when you tune in the physical rapport at so many points of frequency. Its existence, that is, its presence in your room is the product of your radio, a function of its mechanism. But your radio set did not generate it. It merely registered it. It was generated elsewhere. The soul, too, is not a product, but only a registry of your brain mechanism. It, too, was generated elsewhere. It "hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar." It came "from heaven," asserts every scripture of the aged past. "Heaven," then, is but a station whose generating and broadcasting frequencies are something higher than those commonly capable of registry by the human brain. But the soul mi-

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grates from that higher world and comes to earth expressly for the sake of finding registry in human consciousness.

It is not a question of whether life can be, independent of body. It is ever in being; it ever is. The question that ought to be asked is whether it is in corpore or in ovo. It passes back and forth eternally from one state to the other. It steps from sheer being out into existence and again retires. When it is in existence, for which it must build a material organism, it has the appearance of being generated by the mechanism and being an epiphenomenon of the machine, its product. In fact it is merely being liberated to the outer world by the machine.

This conjunction with a body, through a synchronous rapport with the energies of the physical, constitutes the soul's involution, or descent. And the consummation of the gradual linkage of its nature with that of the body is dramatized as its marriage with the psyche. The wedding is consecrated through the handicap of upper with lower affinities at the point where they meet on common ground.

Soul is therefore "in" matter and body because it has become one with the animating energy of body. It has become for the body its animating or life-giving principle. Thenceforth it is not only "in" the body; it becomes indeed the chief creator and molder of the body. For its formative life springs ever from within and presses outward. The body takes shape under the nature and over the pattern of the forces expanding outward from within. Soul builds and shapes the body.

In the end it must be seen that almost the exact reverse of the dictum of modern science is true,--that the body is the product of the soul, not the soul the product of the body. The real truth of course is always to be found on the "horizon" line midway between the two extreme views. The phenomenon of the visible presence of both soul and body is the resultant of the meeting and balanced interplay between the two energies of life, widely differentiated, but

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capable of merging. That is the great basic datum of knowledge lost since Plato's day.

It may be true to affirm that the germ of conscious life is "in" matter at all times and ab initio. Matter itself does contain from everlasting the seed potentiality of conscious mind. Each atom is an embryonic universe, with mind and matter already segregated in their eternal polarity. For an atom, as a unit of true being, must manifest the nature and structure of true being, which ever exhibits the polarity in interaction. But if the seed germ of soul is in matter from the start, it is there long in embryo or in latency. It must abide in dormancy until far along in evolution the sun of conscious mind beams upon it and wakens its unborn energies to conscious function.

Being in matter seminally, the egg of mind undergoes a gradual expansion of its hidden faculties into actual exercise through its response to the exigencies of its evolutionary experience. It gains a knowledge of its resources of intelligence by having to deploy them at the beck and call of the stresses and strains thrust upon it by the vicissitudes of the onward march. Evolution of mind and soul thus comes through the challenge of experience. This is involved in the "cycle of necessity" spoken of in the Greek philosophy. Enhanced capacity for conscious bliss is the soul's abundant reward for its long pilgrimages from its celestial homeland in dreary exile in far countries.

The great item of knowledge that throws into a frame of understanding the ancient systems of theology is the important fact that the consciousness which is innate in the atom, and comes gradually to more sensible awareness in the mineral, then to somewhat more vivid sense in the vegetable, and finally into fairly definite feeling of its existence in the animal, is not capable of developing beyond the stage of a vague unrealizing subconsciousness into full self-consciousness, through its own unaided powers. Its nature and status are exactly comparable to the life of seed or root in the soil in winter. In these the innate capabilities of growth are latent. Of themselves they can not move out of their dormancy. They have

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to await the rising of the sun of spring, under whose thrilling rays they bestir themselves to activity.

This situation is an exact analogue of the great subconscious powers of the psyche. The consciousness that has come to the point of dim subconsciousness in the animal can of itself go no farther. It can not of itself attain full self-consciousness. It must await there the coming of that sun of righteousness which will flash its beams down into the dim recesses of its being and awaken latent potentials to active expression. For those latent energies of psyche the coming of those benignant rays is the glorious appearance of their Prince Charming. For the animal it is the equally glorious advent of the lord of life who will raise its powers to those of the self-conscious human. For man, the human, it is the epiphany of the lord of divine selfhood, the Christ. In every case it is the Coming, the Advent of that power of consciousness which redeems the life fallen into matter by raising it again to the kingly estate of full creative self-consciousness. "Nature unaided fails" was one of the cardinal maxims of the great wisdom. Nature can go so far, but she can not pass the limits set to her domain. Earth can reach up to the top of the highest mountain in her kingdom, that of animal consciousness. But she can not leap from that peak into the heavens unless an arm of power reaches down from thence, catches hold of her by chains of synchronized affinities and transports her likewise into the empyrean. This is figure, but it is more. It is the precise description of the evolutionary drama being enacted perennially on the stage of mortal existence in the life of man.

The son of God has descended in the fullness of time to catch up and bear aloft on his capable wings the sleeping psyche of animal man. He comes down, like April sun, to set the captives free, to open the eyes of the blind, to release the prisoners from their dungeons, to lead them forth out of this darksome land of "Egypt" across the "Red Sea" of bodily blood through the wilderness and the desert into the Promised Land. As crude flesh and blood can not inherit that diviner estate, he must first transform them "into

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the likeness of his own glorious body" of ethereal sun-essence before they can become eligible for celestial glories. So they ascend with him into the mount of transfiguration and there they are changed, their faces shining like the sun and their vestures glowing white as the light.

A great release of meaning for intelligence here is that the woman, Mother Nature, left to herself, is the "barren woman." She, like Hannah, Sarah, Elizabeth and others, was childless until her old age. The Christ must come to fructify the as yet abortive creation. The fruitless unproductive wastage of the woman over twelve years was instantly stopped the moment "virtue" from the Christ had passed into her. She was then to become the mother of the Christ genius.

To achieve the awakening of dormant godhood in man the animal, life provides the means of transplanting the seed of the divine potency into the earthly body, which is ruled only by the subconscious habitudes of nature. The divine seed is transplanted to earth and buried in the inmost being of the creature. This is the outside agency that comes to nature's aid when on her own resources she can go no farther. It is the coming of the gods to help the sons of earth. As the Christmas hymn (Hark! The Herald Angels Sing) words it, they were

Born to raise the sons of earth,

Born to give them second birth.

Man, human, waits for the coming of the Lord Christ, who, as Paul says, shall change our vile body into the likeness of his glorious body and end by converting us into gods.

All this depicts the incarnation. The Egyptians, in faithful accord with their addiction to nature symbolism, portrayed it to the imagination under the term "incubation." Like any seed, the seed of divine self-consciousness that would convert animal-human into divine-human, was said to be incubated in the soil of the human

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garden. There it first "died," but again germinated and shot into the growth of a new cycle.

Involution, then, is the planting of the seed of Christ-mindedness in the physical body of man the first, so that as the seed germinates and the plant grows, man may be transformed into the nature of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, and enjoy the liberty of the sons of God.

It is time now to look for the analogy of the involutionary operation of planting the seed which is to fructify the barren womb of Mother Nature and generate in her body the fetus of the Christ-child. And where is it to be found in phallic symbolism? The revelation that floods in upon the mind through this channel is nothing less than prodigious. The parallelism is so obvious as to be stunning in the force of its pertinence, if it has never been contemplated before.

In physical or human procreation the consummation of the act is the implantation of the seed of the male for its incubation in the female. Hence the male member was in all ancient symbolism the physical emblem of the soul descending into its place of meeting with the germinal potency of the female--matter. It is the sensitive arm that is projected into the interior core of the potential mother body, and is therefore the agent for the production and implantation of the seed. The phallus could not be other than the symbol of the Father's power to generate and project the seed of new life. As such it was nobly and loftily conceived. Its connotations are therefore entirely on the spiritual side. It quite fully matches the functionism of the divine soul in being the extended arm of God's power reaching deep into the heart of matter to awaken the unfertilized egg of a new birth therein to be incubated.

From this exalted significance of the erect male member comes the symbolization of generative fatherhood in such upright structures as round towers, pillars, obelisks, stone monuments and shafts, later church spires, in all religious architecture. They stood as mute spokesman for the mighty procreative power of life, as typed by

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male virility. Spirit projects an arm of its living power into the waiting womb of matter and deposits its seed of future life therein. Of this great cosmic operation the phallus, erect for creative progenation, must perforce be the effective natural symbol. And such it is. It is the sower of the seed.

Creative imagination, instructed and guided by the correspondences, must strive to reach comprehensive truth from the features of the analogy under the eye. The very structure of the male organ yields further light. First is its equipment of nervous sensitivity. This is at once illuminative. It is in this regard the counterpart of the soul itself, and the soul is a fragment of God's own divine mind. God projects a seed fragment of himself into matter and that is the soul. Then the phallus is the symbol of that fragment, as being the portion that enters the female.

Physiologically these ideological parallels seem to be faithfully carried out. The exquisite capabilities of keen sensitivity bespeak the very innermost soul of life consciousness reaching out toward the polar opposite. It is as if the god in man projected an organic unit of his own sensitive soul exteriorly, so as to penetrate the negative node of life. Invidious as it may at first sight appear, it must be seen, then, that both the organ and the seminal essence it draws forth, typify the spiritual or divine creative forces.

There comes to hand on the very day this page of the manuscript was to be typed a passage from that astonishingly revealing work of Henry O'Brien, published over a hundred years ago, The Round Towers of Ireland (p. 101):

"The eastern votaries, suiting the action to the idea, and that their vivid imagination might be still more enlivened by the very form of the temple in which they addressed their vows, actually constructed its architecture after the model of the membrum virile, which, obscenity apart, is the divinely-formed and indispensable medium selected by God himself for human propagation and sexual prolificacy."

O'Brien is one of the few who have seen with full clarity that ancient sun-worship and ancient phallic worship were identical in

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significance. The sun was the embodied essence of God's own emanative and creative power at the cosmic level. In man the microcosm the phallus carried this representative power, as it was the agent for the act of procreation on the generative side. Therefore all the male phallic emblems exploited particularly in religious architecture stood as representatives of both God and his stellar embodiments, the suns. Another statement from O'Brien is directly to this effect (p. 111):

"But the Budhists, not content with this ordinary veneration, or with paying homage in secret to that symbol of production which all other classes of idolaters equally, though privately, worshipped--I mean the Lingam--thought they could never carry their zeal sufficiently far, unless they erected it into an idol of more than colossal magnitude-and those idols were the Round Towers. Hence the name Budhism, which I thus define, viz., the species of idolatry which worshipped Budh (i.e., the Lingam) as the emblem of Budh (i.e., the Sun)--Budh signifying, indiscriminately, Sun and Lingam."

It should be explained for the sake of clearness that O'Brien puts strongly the claim that what he spells Budhism was not named after an alleged human founder, Buddha, but was derived from the ancient Irish name for the sun, Budh. It is worth noting that he asserts the word means both the sun and the phallus. Scholars may rail at him for this, but there is much to support his view. It is almost certainly correct. For the sake of showing the purity of the motives activating phallic worship, another brief statement from O'Brien's remarkable work may profitably be inserted here (p. 112):

"Such was the whole substance of this philosophical creed, which was not--as may have been imagined--a ritual of sensuality, but a manual of devotion, as simple in its exercise as it was pious in its intent--a Sabian veneration and a symbolical gratitude."

Along with the male organ regarded and venerated as symbol of generative life the seminal fluid partook of the same representative value. As to this we find Reitzenstein saying (Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, p. 20):

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"Among the various forms with which a primitive people have represented the highest religious consecration, union with God, belongs necessarily that of the sexual union, in which man attributes to his semen the innermost nature and power of God. That which was in the first instance wholly a sensual act becomes in the most widely separated places, independently, a sacred act in which the god is represented by a human deputy or his symbol the Phallus."

Indeed analogical industry went so far as to make of the phallus an image and reflection of God himself. Correspondences are not wanting. God, so to say, lets the "life" or creative power go out of his body, go "dead," as it were, in his periods of inactivity or sleep. In turn he arises, fills his universe with the life-blood of his creative purpose and generates creative force, ejecting life-giving streams from his body. He lies down in sleep; he arises for new work. He veils and unveils his head with an outer screen of matter. He enters the world of matter, the mother. He plants his seed there. And there are further analogies which must be held for later exposition. Reitzenstein's allusion to the phallus as the "human deputy" of God is suggestive of much. The phallus performs in the human organism what the God power does for the cosmos as a whole. Its functions are analogous to those of the supreme Godhead. It is the operator in the small sphere of the same power that God wields in the large. It can be thought of in this sense as God's son, his own power in a secondary or transmitted form. Hence indeed it came to be denominated in some ancient symbological systems as "the boy." It was the Father's creative majesty in the little edition.