Heavenly Bridegrooms (1918)/May 1916
HEAVENLY BRIDEGROOMS[1]
By Theodore Schroeder
and Ida C.
The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose.
Genesis 6:2.
"The demons, then, hearing these prophetic words [Genesis 49: 10, 11,] asserted that Bacchus was born the son of Jupiter; they ascribed to him also the invention of the vine, and in the celebration of his mysteries led an ass in procession, and taught that Bacchus was torn in pieces and taken up into heaven." Justin Martyr's Apology, I. 71.
Justin also draws a comparison between some of these gods and Christ, to show that Christianity claims no more for its god than did the heathen for those whom they called "Sons of Jove". He says:
"When we affirm that the Word, which is the first-begotten of God, was born without carnal knowledge, even Jesus Christ our Master, and that he was crucified, and rose again and ascended into heaven, we advance no new thing different from what is maintained respecting those whom ye call sons of Jupiter. For ye well know how many sons your approved writers attribute to Jupiter: Mercury, the word of interpretation and teacher of all men; Esculapius, who was a physician, and yet was struck with lightning and taken up into heaven; Bacchus, who was torn in pieces; Hercules, who burned himself upon the pile to escape his torments; Castor and Pollux, the sons of Leda; Perseus the son of Danae; and Bellerophon, born of human race, and carried away upon the horse Pegasus * * * * * * Neither is it necessary that I should relate to you, who already know well, of what kind were the actions of each of those who were called the sons of Jupiter; I need only say, that the writings in which they are recorded, tend only to corrupt and pervert the minds of those who learn them; for all take a pride in being the imitators of the gods ****** g ut jf we say t kat he [Jesus] was begotten of God, in a manner far different from ordinary generation, being the Word of God, as we have before said, let this be considered a correspondence with your own tenets, when ye call Mercury the word who bears messages from God. And if any one objects to us that He was crucified; this too is a point of correspondence with those whom ye call the sons of Jupiter, and yet allow to have suffered ****** Again, if we affirm that he was born of a virgin; let this be considered a point in which he agrees with what you (fabulously) ascribe to Perseus. And whereas we say that he made those whole, who were lame, palsied and blind from their birth, and raised the dead; in this too we ascribe to him actions similar to those which are said to have been performed by Esculapius. Justin Martyr's Apology I, 28, 29, 30.
We thus see that the heathen gods and heroes whose father was Jupiter, the Christian Messiah whose father was the holy spirit and the traditional "giants" whose fathers were angels, were, in the eyes of at least one Church Father but different aspects of the same underlying principle the possibility of marital union between dwellers in the unseen world and dwellers upon the earth, for the purpose of begetting children. Today, however, we look upon the story of virgin born Perseus as fabulous.[2] But the ancient heathen opponents of Justin seem to have accorded a scant respect to the story of the virgin-born Jesus as we do to the story of virgin-born Perseus. Now to laugh to scorn the birth of Perseus from the occult union of God with one virgin, and then to accept without question the birth of Jesus from the occult union of God with another virgin, is somewhat inconsistent. On strictly logical grounds, if one story be false, so may the other be false; if one be true, so may the other be true. But Perseus is only one of many virgin-born heroes or gods. We find thesechildren of a visible earthly mother and an invisible, celestial mysterious father, the world over, in all ages.
There was Buddha, the child of Maya and a celestial being god who, in the form of a white elephant, entered her side, or according to De Gingnes (See Higgins Anacalypsis I, 157) his mother conceived by a ray of light without defilement.
The Hindu Chrishna was born of a chaste matron, who, though a wife and a mother, is always spoken of as the Virgin Devaki. Chrishna, by the way, has many attributes in common with Kama, the East Indian god of love, corresponding to the Latin Cupid. He is represented as black a symbolism to which I will return later on.
The Egyptian God Ra was born from the side of his mother, "but was not engendered."
The Mayas of Yucatan had a virgin-born god, named Zama.
Among the Algonquin Indians we find the tradition of a great teacher, by name Michabou, who was born of a celestial Manitou and an earthly mother.
"Upon the altars of the Chinese temples were placed behind a screen, an image of Shin-moo, or the 'Holy Mother,' sitting with a child in her arms, in an alcove, with rays of glory around her head, and tapers constantly burning before her."
Rev. Joseph B. Gross, Heathen Religion, 60, quoted in Bible Myths, p. 327.
In ancient Mexico,
"The Virgin Chimalman, also called Sochiquetzal or Suchiquecal, was the mother of Quecalcoatle, [evidently the same as Quetalcoatl, who was crucified as a Saviour for the Mexicans, as Jesus was for the Christian world.] In one representation he is shown hanging by the neck holding a cross in his hands. His complexion is quite black. Sochiquetzal means the lifting up of roses. [This is really our Sukey, and the Greek 4>uxe, Psyche, which means the soul, and which was appropriately applied to the bride of the spiritlover, Cupid.] Eve is called Ysnextli, and it is said she sinned by plucking roses. But in another place these roses are called Fruta del Arbor, [arbol?] ******"
"The Mexican Eve is called Suchiquecal. A messenger from heaven announced to her that she should bear a son, who should bruise the serpent's head. He presents her with a rose. This was the commencement of an Age, which was called the Age of Roses.
[Is this the age when angels became the husbands of pure-minded women—an age fitly symboled by the rose, the flower of perfect love? Note, also, the resemblance between this tradition and the Christian tradition, concerning the angel's offering Mary a lily-branch at the Annunciation. Evidently, these are two different aspects of the same symbolism.]
Higgins, continuing, says:
"All this history the Monkish writer is perfectly certain is the invention of the Devil," and Justin Martyr strove to account for the analogy between the story of Christ and the story of Bacchus by supposing that demons had imitated the Christian Scriptures in advance, so totally unaware was he that both stories had the same esoteric meaning to the initiate. "Torquemada's Indian history was mutilated at Madrid before it was published. Suchiquecal is called the Queen of Heaven. She conceived a son, without connection with man, who is the God of Air * * * *
"The Mohammedans have a tradition that Christ was conceived by the smelling of a rose." Anacalypsis II. 32, 33.
In the Finnish epic of the Kalevala there is a heroine by the name of Mariatta (from Marja, "berry") who becomes pregnant through unwittingly eating a berry—the berry here playing a similar part to the rose referred to above in the Mohammedan tradition. She goes from one to another person, vainly seeking a place in which to bring forth her child. At last she is referred by one household to the stable of "the flaming horse of Hisi;" and she then appeals to the horse of Hisi in the following words:
"Breathe, O sympathizing fire-horse,
Breathe on me, the virgin-mother!
Let thy heated breath give moisture,
Let thy pleasant warmth surround me,
Like the vapor of the morning;
Let this pure and helpless maiden
Find a refuge in thy manger!"
Observe that, although the mother of an illegitimate child, she, like all the mothers of such children when their father is divine or mysterious, is "pure," the "virgin-mother," etc.
These virgin-mothers are not copies of the Christian Mary Most, if not all of them, were known long before the days of Christianity.
The mother of the Siamese 'Somona Cadom' was impregnated by sun-beams, another form of Danae's golden shower. She was called Maha Maria or Maya Maria, i. e., "the Great Mary." And this brings out some curious coincidences in name among virgin-mothers. Thus:
Marietta of the Kalevala has already been referred to above.
The mother of Hermes or Mercury was Myrrha or Maia.
Maya, the mother of Buddha, is identical in name with the Hindu goddess Maya, who is represented as walking upon the waters, with her peplum teeming with animals, to show her fecundity. Maya is also a well-known Hindu term for 'illusion."
The month of May (so nearly like the name of Maia) was sacred to some of the virgin-goddesses of ancient times, as it is now to Mary, the Mother of Jesus. The Christian Virgin Mary was also called Myrrha; and she is still called Santa Maria in Southern Europe and in Mexico. The title bestowed on her of "Star of the Sea" a title given to the Egyptian Virgin-mother, Isis, perhaps two thousand years earlier shows how close a resemblance tradition and folklore have traced between both of these virgin-mothers and the ancient genitrix of the waters. Also, the Latin "mare" and the French "mer" for "the sea," and the French "mere" for 'mother" bear a striking resemblance to the name Mary in sound. And Venus was born from the foam of sea presiding divinity of love between the sexes. She is credited with having been "indulgent Venus" to a mortal man Anchises, to whom she bore the hero of Virgil's Aeneid, a Borderland espousal, this though here it is the wife and not the husband who comes from the invisible world.
The Apocryphal Gospels speak of the Virgin Mary's being brought up as an orphan, in the temple, and they refer to her as an obedient and pure-minded maiden, accustomed to holding daily converse with angels. That she should have been called by the same root-name as these ancient virgin-mothers, is, therefore, the less remarkable, if we consider the possibility of her having been trained in the temple by the priests as an initiate in the sacred mysteries, and of her having passed the various ordeals so successfully as to entitle her to be called by the name sacred to the type of womanhood accounted worthy to sustain marital relations on the Borderland.
In some cases it would appear that ambitious princes or other designing politicians of ancient days did not scruple to avail themselves of the current belief in the possibility of divine paternity, when it would serve their purpose. It was an open secret among the Greeks that Alexander the Great had not hesitated to do this, on the occasion of his march into Egypt and Suria. When the oracle at the temple of Jupiter Ammon (doubtless for a bribe) declared Alexander to be the son of Jupiter, saying that this god, in the form of a serpent, had manifested to Alexander's mother.
The serpent is, in ancient sex worship, a well-known symbol of the phallus, and therefore, of the creative fatherhood. It appears in several stories of divinely begotten children.
Scipio Africanus was another politician who availed himself of the popular belief in these matters, it would seem. "There is no doubt," remarks Higgins in his Anacalypsis, I, 212, 213, "that he aimed at the sovereignty of Rome, but the people were too sharp-sighted for him." A. Gelline says, 'The wife of Publius Scipio was barren for so many years as to create a despair of issue, until one night, when her husband was absent, she discovered a large serpent in his place, and was informed by soothsayers that she would bear a child. In a few days she perceived signs of conception, and after ten months gave birth to the conqueror of Carthage."[3]
The Emperor Augustus was said to have been the result of a mysterious connection of his mother with a serpent in the temple of Apollo.
Ovid in his Fasti records a story that Servius Tulliuswas a mysterious shape, claiming to be a vulcan, which appeared to the mother, Ocrisia, among the ashes of the altar, when she was assisting her mistress (Ocrisia was a captive) in the sacred rite of pouring a libation of wine upon the altar.
Pythagoras, who lived more than five hundred years before Christ, was said to be the offspring of Apollo. He was born on a journey, his father (or rather, his mother's earthly husband) having traveled up to Sidon on business. Pythais, the mother, had been beloved by a ghostly personage who claimed to be the god Apollo Afterwards this same apparition showed itself to the husband, informing him of the parentage of the coming child, and bidding him to have no connection with his wife until after its birth.
A similar event is said to have transpired in the case of Plato, Apollo his father also. His mother was Perictione, a virgin, who was betrothed to one Ariston at the time. In this case, also, Apollo appeared to inform the earthly lover of the child's paternity. Higgins, relating this tradition, adds:
"On this ground, the really very learned Origen defends the immaculate conception [Higgins evidently refers not to the Roman Catholic Doctrine of Mary's stainlessness by that term signified, but to the conception of Jesus] assigning, also, in confirmation of the fact, the example of Vultures (Vautours) who propagate without the male." (!!)
The Vulture was an accompaniment of Hathas, the Egyptian Venus; and it would therefore seem as though Origen had unwittingly stumbled on a bit of folklore. Graves, in his Sixteen Crucified Saviours, remarks (I know not on what authority, but give his remark rather for its suggestiveness than as a vouched for historical fact):
"Many are the cases noted in history of young maidens claiming a paternity for their male offspring by a God. In Greece it became so common that the reigning King issued an edict, decreeing the death of all young virgins who should offer such an insult to deity as to lay to him the charge of begetting their children."
"The vestal virgin Rhea Sylvin, who bore Romulus and Remus to the god Mars, is well known. It is a curious coHeavenly Bridegrooms
incidence that the name Rhea, which was one of the names of the Mother of all the gods, is applied by one writer to the Virgin Mary who likewise became the 'Mother of God'."
The Mongolian conqueror, Genghis Khan, and his two twin brothers were said to be the result of an occult union of the earthly mother with a mysterious intelligence.
"His mother having been left a widow, lived a retired life; but some time after the death of her husband, * * * * she was suspected to be pregnant. The deceased husband's relations forced her to appear before the chief judge of the tribe, for this crime. She boldly defended herself, by declaring that no man had known her; but that one day, lying negligently on her bed, a light appeared in her room, the brightness of which blinded her, and that it penetrated three times into her body, and that if she brought not three sons into the world, she would submit to the most cruel torments. The three sons were born, and the princess was esteemed a saint. The Moguls believe Genghis Khan to be the product of this miracle, that God might punish mankind for the injustice they had committed." Anacalypsis II. 353.
Of the conqueror, Tamerlane, who claimed direct descent from Genghis Khan on the mother side, it is related that he was the result of a connection of his mother with the God of day.
Dean Milman says, in his History of Christianity (Bible Myths, p. 119.)
"Fo-hi of China according to tradition was born of a virgin, and the first Jesuit missionaries who went to China were appalled at finding, in the mythology of that country, a counterpart of the story of the Virgin of Judea."
But, had those same Jesuit missionaries apprehended the idea which lies back of both stories the substantiality of the unseen world beyond the grave and the possibility of marital relations on the borderland of that world and this, they would not have been thus "appalled." Mother of Confucius, says one tradition, when walking in a solitary place, was impregnated by the vivifying influence of the heavens.
The Chinese philosopher, Lao-Tse, born 604 B. C., the founder of the Religion of the Supreme Reason, was said tohave been born of a virgin of a black complexion a forerunner this, by hundreds of years, of the Black Madonnas in the Italian Churches.
Do those black Madonnas typify, mystically, the darkness of the unknown world beyond the grave whence the Heavenly Spouse emerges?
The Earls of Cleave were said to descend from a union between the heiress of Cleave and a being from the upper air, "who came to Cleave in a miraculous ship, drawn by a swan, and after begetting divers children, 'went away at Noon-day, in the sight of a World of People, in his Airy Ship.' '
The famous Robert le Diable, according to one tradition, was the child of an incubus.
The enchanter Merlin "son of an incubus and of a holy woman, became the center and the master of all nature," says Peyrat ****** ( T he Magic of the Middle Ages, Rydberg, 204,) the number of those adventurers during the Middle Ages who asserted themselves or others to be the bastards of devils and human beings. But if they had led a blameless life, evincing a firm belief in the dogmas of the Church, the danger of such a pedigree was not greater than the honor. The son of a fallen angel did not need to bend his head before a man of noble birth.
"But," it will be objected, "these stories are myths of ancient, or at most, mediaeval times. You don't find virgin-born children nowadays."
Stay:
In the establishment of Schweinfurth, that individual in Rockford, Illinois, who today claims to be the Christ, a woman a few years since bore a child, and steadfastly declared her belief that it was immaculately conceived. Trial it is said, before a jury of the women of Schweinfurth's establishment did not succeed in shaking the faith of these women in the possibility of such a thing.
In the Truthseeker of New York occurs this paragraph:
"Mrs. Helen Fields, of Wichita, Kansas, has given birth to a child whose father she avers is the Holy Ghost."
Moncure D. Conway, in his Demonology and Devil-Lore, I. 231, says:"When in Chicago in 1875, I read in one of the morning papers a very particular account of how a white dove flew into the chamber window of a young unmarried woman in a neighboring village, she having brought forth a child, and solemnly declaring that she had never lost her virginity."
It is, of course, easy to dismiss all these stories, ancient, mediaeval and modern, with contempt, as so many falsehoods, or, at best, self-delusions. I have already said that, despite the immense number of traditions and miraculous births, I doubt if such ever occur upon the borderland of the two worlds, owing to certain occult principles to which I shall briefly refer further on. Nevertheless this mass of folklore belief is too overwhelming in quantity and too widely diffused to be dismissed lightly. Back of it all there must be some objective realities and some fire for all this smoke. And we must not forget that there is one miraculous birth which is accepted throughout Christendom the birth of Jesus from a Divine Father and an earthly Virgin-Mother. Nevertheless by the cultured heathen opponents of Justin, the story of the divine paternity of Jesus seems to have been regarded with a scorn similar to that with which we regard the above tales today, and that Church Father showed his wisdom when he placed heathen and Christian stories upon the same logical basis.
Am I not right in saying that to impugn the possibility of marital relations between earthly women and heavenly bridegrooms is to strike at the very foundations of Christianity?
In folklore customs and fairy tales, fantastic though these may be, we find numerous indications of the world-wide belief in bridegrooms and brides from the unseen world of spiritual beings, or, as they were termed in the middle ages, incubi and succubae. (Latin, incubo, "to lie upon;" succubo, "to lie under."
We may set out with that description among the islanders of the Antilles, where they are the ghosts of the dead, vanishing when clutched; in New Zealand, where ancestral deities 'form attachments with females, and pay them repeated visits;' while in the Samoan Islands, such intercourse of mischievous inferior gods caused 'many supernatural conceptions;' and in Lapland, where details of this last extreme class have alsobeen placed on record. From these lower grades of culture the idea may be followed onward. Formal rites are specified in the Hindu Tantra which enable a man to obtain a companion nymph by worshiping her and repeating her name by night in a cemetery.[4]
Among the Metamba negroes, a woman is bound hand and foot by the priest, who flings her into the water several times over with the intention of drowning her husband, a ghost, who may be supposed to be clinging to his unfeeling spouse. T. F. Thiselton Dyers, The Ghost World, p. 182.
In China, it is not considered respectable for widows to re-marry, for the express reason that their husbands are expected to return to them from the world beyond the grave and resume marital relations with them upon the Borderland.
In the case of widows it would appear to be but a resumption of a relation previously established between the two upon earth. And there are indications that the same stress is not laid upon passing preliminary ordeals as is the case with the virgin, who "has never known man." May it not be because of the virgin's greater ignorance, physiologically speaking, so that she has to enter upon a more extended course of training than does the widow, who already has experience?
The myths and fairy tales which speak of maidens with mysterious lovers from the realm of the unseen are certain to contain, so far as I have observed, reference to some rule or pledge which the woman must strictly observe. If she fails to do this, her lover vanishes, and she can find him again only after passing long and toilsome ordeals. Such was the case with Psyche, who broke the command of her heavenly lover, Cupid, not to look upon him while he slept. He had come to her night after night in the darkness, unseen, as is the wont with so many of these heavenly bridegrooms; and she naturally desired to see his face. But, in her eagerness to know him more intimately, she let fall a drop of hot oil from the lamp upon him, which awoke him, and he vanished. This myth is an evident euphemism for a broken law of marital self-control. In other words, she wanted to enter upon the second step in the occult training which she was receiving from her husband, before she had fully mastered the first step. What those steps were—first, second and third—(for there is a third) through which the earthly wife of a heavenly bridegroom must pass, will appear further on in this book.
To be Continued.
- ↑ Continued from February 1916.
- ↑ His mother Danae was said to have been imprisoned, while yet a virgin, in a high tower, that she might have no children. Jupiter, however, visited her manifestly as a shower of gold, and Perseus was the result of the union.
- ↑ Ten lunar months, 28 days presumably, meant here.
- ↑ Tylor, "Prim. Culture," 3rd Ed. 1891, II, 189, 190. (Ward, "Hindoos," Vol. II, p. 151. See also Borri, "Cochin China" in Pinkerton, Vol. IX, p. 823.)