The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
Including, John the Baptist and St Thomas.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
The Baptae, or Baptists, were an effeminate and debauched order of priests, belonging to the goddess Cotyttia, the unchaste Venus, in opposition and contradistinction to the celestial deity of that name, who was ever attended with the Graces, and whose worship tended to elevate and exalt the moral character, and to sanctify the commerce of generation with all that is delicate in sentiment and tender in affection. No worshipper of Venus could endure the thought of impurity. Neglect of the holiness which her rites enjoined was ever punished with degradation of mind and loss of beauty and health. [a] The Baptists are satirized by Juvenal. They take their name from their stated dipping's and washings, by way of purification, though it seems they were dipped in warm water, and were to be made clean and pure, that they might wallow and defile themselves the more, as their nocturnal rites consisted chiefly of lascivious dances and other abominations. The Baptists, or Anabaptists, as they are called, continue as an order of religionists among Christians, under precisely the same name. The licentious character of the order of religionists from whom they are descended, has received its correction from the improved intelligence, and, consequently, improved morality of the times. But the most unquestionable evidence confirms the fact, that the Christian Baptists of Germany, in the fourteenth century, and sometime before and after, came short of no impurities that could have characterized the Antinomian priests of Cotyttia. [LN., Cotyttia was actually the name of the religious festivals held for the goddess Kotys who was a Thracian goddess of sexual desire, or more lust, her followers went through elaborate washing ceremonies to purify themselves although her nocturnal festivities were basically drunken orgies, held in honour or, remembrance? Of the rape of Persephone, her followers were called Baptes=bathers. It is likely that these followers behaved in much the same way as the followers of Dionysus or Bacchus]
[note [a] The man after God's own heart exhibits, himself as an awful instance of the vengeance of Venus on one who turned the grace of God (for Venus was addressed, "Be thou God," or Goddess) into lasciviousness: "My wounds stink and are corrupt, through my lasciviousness; neither is there any rest in my bones, by reason of my sin." - Psalm 38.]
Astrological Character of John the Baptist.
The character of John the Baptist, like all the other personages of the Gospel story, presents precisely the same analogy to the system of astronomy which we trace in every personification of the ancient heathenism. Like all the other genii or saints, he presides over his particular day, or, rather, in mythological language, is that day; and, as if no room for doubt as to his identity should be left, the calendars attached to our church of England prayer-book have fixed that day as the 24th of June, the season peculiarly adapted to baptisms or bathing's, precisely the day on which the sun has exhibited one degree of descent from his highest elevation, and which stands directly over and
looks down upon the 25th of December, the day fixed for the birth of Christ, when he first appears to have gained one degree of ascent from his lowest declension. In exact accordance with which astronomical positions, we find the genius of the 24th of June (St. John) looking down upon the genius of the 25th of December (the new born Jesus), and saying, "He must increase, but I must decrease," (John 3-30), as the days begin to lengthen from the 25th of December, and to decrease or shorten from the 24th of June downwards, till they reach the shortest, of which the genius or saint is the unbelieving Thomas.
The learned and ingenious historian of the Celtic Druids, of whose labours I have greatly availed myself, maintains that "the Essenes were descended from the prophet Elijah, and the Carmelite monks from the Essenes, whose monasteries were established before the Christian era; that these monks, finding that from time immemorial, a certain day had been held sacred to the god Sol, the Sun, as his birth-day, and that this god was distinguished by the epithet The Lord, persuaded themselves that this Lord could be no other than their Lord God: whereupon they adopted the religious rites of this Lord, and his supposed birth-day, December the 25th, became a Christian festival, Paganism being thus spliced and amalgamated into Christianity." I only take the liberty of differing from this good Christian writer so far as to deny that there could be any splicing or amalgamation, where it was all one piece. The great sophism of Christianity consists in the pretence of a distinction where there was no difference.
St. Thomas
Stands on the 21st of December, in all the darkness of unbelief, and doubting whether his divine master, the sun, will ever rise again. In accordance with which astronomical sense, and in no other sense that divines can agree upon, we find Jesus, the genius of the Sun, in the 25th of Dec. telling the Pharisees, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad." (John 8-56.) It was the evident object of the writers of the sacred allegory, as it was of the mystagogues and contrivers of the Pagan system, to give an appearance of real personages, and of actual adventures and discourses, to the prosopopeia, under which they emblemized physical and moral truths. So that it is only incidentally, and when they are somewhat off their guard, that they let fall expressions entirely out of keeping with their general tenor; and furnish to a wary observance, the key to the occult and real sense which eludes and was intended to elude the tractable simplicity of the faithful. At the same time, nothing is more obvious, than that the failure of invention, or fissures in the weaving of the allegory, would be from time to time patched up with pieces of real circumstances, actual adventures, and indistinct reminiscences of conversations that had indeed occurred; till the fabricators themselves had become unable to distinguish what they had remembered from what they had invented. But who, but one who held it a virtue to be stupid, could drop the clue to the allegory put into his hand by such passages as (Eph. 4-9), "Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?
He that descended is the same also that ascended?" This descent into the lower parts of the earth, will apply to no sense of the actual burial of a man upon a level with the earth's surface, or not ten feet below it, but is strictly applicable to the sun's descent below the horizon, by an equable division of day and night, "to give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the valley of the shadow of death."
The Pagan philosophers pretended that their theology, and the genealogy of their gods, did originally, in an allegorical sense, mean the several parts of nature and the universe. Cicero gives a large account of this, and tells us, that even the impious fables relating to the deities include in them a good physical meaning. Thus, when Saturn was said to have devoured his children, it was to be understood of Time, which is properly said to devour all things. "We know," says this great heathen, "that the shapes of all the gods, their age, habits, and ornaments, nay, their very genealogy, marriages, and everything relating to them, has been delivered in the exact resemblance to human weakness. It is," he adds, "the height of folly to believe such absurd and extravagant things." [LN., Cicero, Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 to 43BC, was a Roman politician and lawyer.]
Did any of them ever believe anything more absurd? Did the annals of human folly or madness ever record anything more extravagant, than that new born children should be considered to have offended God, or that a full-grown fool should be believed to please him, by washing his dirty hide, and suffering a gawky idiot to talk nonsense over the ceremony?
As an allegorical sense was the apology offered for the manifest absurdities of Paganism, and an allegorical sense is challenged for the contents of the New Testament, not only by the early Fathers, but by and in the text of that New Testament itself, [a] can it be denied that both alike are allegorical? And both being confessedly allegorical, the innumerable instances of perfect resemblance between them are a competent proof that the one is but a modification or improved edition of the other, and that there never was any real or essential difference between them.
[note. [a] Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament, "not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter kills, but the spirit giveth life." - 2 Cor. 3-6.]
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next Chapter 32. The Eleusinian Mysteries; or, Sacrament of the Lord's Supper