The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
This god calls for no further notice in our inquiry, than from the circumstance of his having been distinguished in the Pagan world by the evangelical title of the Logos, or the Word - "The Word that in the beginning was with God, and that also was a God."
Our Christian writers, from whose partial pens we are now obliged to gather all they will permit us to know of the ancient forms of piety, discover considerable apprehension, and a jealous caution in their language, where the resemblance between Paganism and Christianity might be apt to strike the mind too cogently. Where Horace gives us a very extraordinary account of Mercury's descent into hell, [A] and his causing; a cessation of the sufferings there, [B] our Christian mythologist checks our curiosity, by the sudden break off - "As this perhaps may be a mystical part of his character, we had better let it alone." - Bells Pantheon. vol. 2. p. 72. But the further back we trace the evidences of the Christian religion, the less concerned we find its advocates to maintain, or even to pretend that there was any difference at all between the essential doctrines of Christianity and Paganism.
[A] "He descended into hell." - Apostles' Creed. "That he went down into hell, and also did rise again." - Baptismal Service. "By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison." - 1 Pet. 3-19.]
[B] See the Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus.]
Ammonius Saccus, a learned Christian Father, towards the end of the second century, had taught with the highest applause in the Alexandrian school, that "all the Gentile religions, and even the Christian, were to be illustrated and explained by the principles of an universal philosophy; but that, in order to this, the fables of the priests were to be removed from Paganism, and the comments and interpretations of the disciples of Jesus from Christianity; [c] while Justin Martyr, the first and most distinguished apologist for the Christian religion, who wrote within fifty years of the time of the Evangelist St. John, boldly challenges the respect of the emperor Adrian and his son, as due to the Christian religion, just exactly on the score of its sameness and identity with the ancient Paganism.
[c] Mosheim's Eccl. Hist. vol. 1, p. 171.]
"For by declaring the Logos, the first begotten of God, our Master, Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin without any human mixture, to be crucified and dead, and to have risen again into heaven; we say no more in this, than what you say of those whom you style the sons of Jove, &c. As to the son of God, called Jesus, should we allow him to be nothing more than man, yet the title of the Son of God is very justifiable upon the account of his wisdom, considering that you have your Mercury in worship under the title of The Word, and Messenger of God." - Reeve's Apologies of the Fathers, vol. 1, London, 1716.
Justin might, if he had pleased, have been still more particular, and have shown, that "among the Gauls, more than a hundred years before the Christian era, in the district of Chartres, a festival was annually celebrated to the honour of the Virgo Paritura, the virgin that should bring forth." - Dupuis, tom. 3, p. 51, 4to edit.
Gonzales also writes, that among the Indians he found a temple Pariturae Virginis, of the virgin about to bring forth. The good Christian Father Epiphanias glories in the fact, that the prophecy, "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son" had been revealed to the Egyptians. - Celtic Druids, p. 163. This prophecy, however, should rather have been revealed to the Irish, as its literal accomplishment is so strikingly of a piece with the equally authentic miracles of their patron saint, who sailed across the ocean upon a mill-stone, and contrived to heat an oven red-hot with nothing but ice. - "Life of the glorious Bishop St. Patrick, by Fr. B. B., St. Omers, 1625, by licence of the Censors of Louvaine, of the Bishop of St. Omers, and of the Commissary and Definitor-general of the Seraphic Order."
The Word Jesus Christ.
The celebrated passage, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," &c. (John 1-1.) is a fragment of some Pagan treatise on the Platonic philosophy, and as such is quoted by Amelius, a Pagan philosopher, as strictly applicable to the Logos, or Mercury, the Word, as early as the year 263; and is quoted appropriately as an honourable testimony borne to the Pagan deity, by a barbarian.
With no intention further off than, that of recognizing the claims of any human being to that title, Amelius has the words, "And this plainly was the Word, by whom all things were made, he being himself eternal, as Heraclitus also would say; and by Jove, the same whom the barbarian affirms to have been in the place and dignity of a principal, and to be with God, and to be God, by whom all things were made, and in whom everything that was made, has its life and being; who, descending into body, and putting on flesh, took the appearance of a man, though even then he gave proof of the majesty of his nature; nay, and after his dissolution, he was deified again."
This is the language of one, of whom there is not the least pretence to show that he was a believer of the Gospel, or even if he had ever heard of it, that he did not reject it; it was the language of clear, undisguised, and unmingled Paganism. The Logos then, or Word, was a designation purely and exclusively appropriate to the Pagan mythology. The Valentinians, a sect of Christian heretics of the first century, approximated so closely to Paganism, as to respect and believe a regular theogony, holding, according to Cyril, that Depth produced Silence, and upon Silence begat the Logos. [LN., and we should not forget that the Egyptians in their creation myths call him the Word.
As Nun, mistress of darkness and solitude, pondered at length her barrenness;
her untainted, salt-less ocean, her deep and fathomless womb.
In which nothing stirred, But emptiness and longing,
Desire without fulfilment,
Like faint waves on a sea
Without shores to die upon.
Once again, she beseeched the Word, her God and betrothed; and he who was, and is, and will always be, remembered her, and the coming of the Word shattered the silence.
"No longer will you be called Nun, from this moment on you will be called,
'NUT',
for in you I have sown the force of physical creation and its wisdom.
And the Word that echoed through all time was,
ATUM,
and the sound it generated was called, ON,
See SV, by Lux Nova, under 'Egyptians' the lessons of Moses part 2.]
-o0o-
Next chapter 27. Bacchus Jesus Christ