THE FIRST SEAL OF THE COVENANT PATH:
PREMORTALITY AND REMORTALITY
THE BREAD OF LIFE
Jesus was crucified for two claims that would be as controversial today as they were two thousand years ago. First was the declaration that he and God were of the same species. “If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him” (John 14:7). Second was the affirmation that he and God were family: “Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee” (John 17:1).
Moreover, Christ seems to have made potential gods of the most unlikely and unremarkable people, by altering them to be the same species as God and by transforming his humble disciples into his sons and daughters: “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world…Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word…And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17: 16, 20, 22).
Ordinances of ascension that were formerly the sole birthright of the sovereigns were restored to all regardless of birth or station if they were willing to be called by his name, and “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father” (John 14:12). Like Prometheus, Jesus had crossed from the celestial world to the world of mortals and offered them the fire of the Gods. “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49).
It is clear from the scriptures that the mysterious purpose of religion in human life is to overcome otherwise inevitable death and to obtain eternal life as a new creature. The mystery is how this new creature is still human. Eternal life is eternal human life, and this is the kind of life that God lives. Some such beings are so high and holy that their glory confounds the imagination. Although perhaps counterintuitive, the life of Yeshua of Nazareth- the mortal but divine human life that the Father chose for the immortal Christ to live- profoundly exemplifies eternal life. The most significant acts of immortals are not produced in some invisible heavenly sphere of the spirit, as the Pythagoreans and fathers of the Christian church and others who “hated the Mother/Matter” proposed. Nor are their works imponderable wonders conjured for their own sake by beings of another genus. Rather, celestial ordinances are performed here on earth, that performance might transform into gnosis, for “this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).
From the outset, Christian discipleship had more than one variety. When Jesus of Nazareth reached into his bag of seeds, he pulled out several types of grain. One type of grain was ground into communion wafers. Other grains were ground into other breads, and each became a redeeming sacrament of his body. When the original apostles were killed, the adversary might have thought he had pulled the movement up from the root, but grains of all kinds were sprouting in many soils, assuring the nascent movement’s survival in the same way that genetic diversity assures the survival of every species on planet Earth. None of the covenant cultures awaiting the messiah could go straight to the meat of Christ’s teachings without assimilating them to what the people already knew. As told in a parable of Jesus, “No man putteth a piece of new cloth onto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish…” (Matthew 9: 16-17). The variety of grains were an intermediary meal before the feast on the meat of the kingdom that could come only from full, mature initiation.
Christ drew his doctrines from antique sources beyond Israel. Johannine Christian discipleship was a Judeo/Samaritan mystery that rings sympathetically, if not exactly, with the symbolism encoded in the cult of Isis, the cult of Serapis, and other pagan mysteries. Officially Rome viewed the Christian movement with disdain, but Mithraism, the most prolific spreader of the Johannine mystery, was universally popular amongst the military. Without official sanction from the government, Roman Mithraism reached every corner of the sprawling Roman Empire and was established with the uniformity and discipline characteristic of the army. Centuries before Roman Mithraism and the official Roman Catholic Church faced off in the fourth century, in 134 CE the Roman Emperor Hadrian expressed his contempt for the Christian movement this way:
“From Hadrian Augustus to Servianus the consul, greeting. The land of Egypt, the praises of which you have been recounting to me, my dear Servianus, I have found to be wholly light-minded, unstable, and blown about by every breath of rumor. There those who worship Serapis are, in fact, Christians, and those who call themselves bishops of Christ are, in fact, devotees of Serapis…
There is no chief of the Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, no Christian presbyter, who is not an astrologer, a soothsayer, or an anointer…
They are a folk most seditious, most deceitful, most given to injury; but their city [Alexandria] is prosperous, rich, and fruitful, and in it no one is idle. Some are blowers of glass, others makers of paper, all are at least weavers of linen or seem to belong to one craft or another; the lame have their occupations, the eunuchs have theirs, the blind have theirs, and not even those whose hands are crippled are idle” (Historia Augusta, Vol. III, bracketed word added).
Ancient esoteric knowledge was the yeast in John’s teachings that leavened the Christian movement beyond the tragically shortened mortal lives of the original apostles. Of the two most dominant varieties in the movement, Peter’s, which began in waysides of Galilee, ultimately angled toward the stabilizing, hierarchical, and upward-pointing innovation of the Trinity. Meanwhile John’s temple mystery which originated in the rich soils of the intellectual and spiritual commerce of Alexandria was hunted to ignominy and extermination. The mysteries, earthy, egalitarian, and old, had their basis in covenant astronomy and agriculture. They were the murdered body, slandered as vulgar, that the later church would climb upon to stand itself up.
Long before the establishment of the official Roman Christian church, covenant peoples had been given authority to manifest the ordinances of heaven in earthly temples. The human body is another earthly temple, and so the seven seals of the covenant path preserved in John were a fractal (to-scale reduction or enlargement) representation of the life cycle of the human soul. Furthermore, the life cycle of the human soul is a fractal representation of a great cycle of time: the time it takes for the Sun to minister in all twelve of the zodiacal ages, each represented by one of the twelve oxen upholding Solomon’s molten sea.
As Jesus Christ demonstrated, this world has been occupied by human souls manifesting at different seals of the covenant path’s ascent. When the seven seals of the covenant path of initiation were lost to time and doctrinal confusion, so was the plainness of the cycle of development of the immortal human soul across cycles of time measured in tens of thousands of years. Held in common since the greatest antiquity, the mysteries of godliness and the invitation to eternal progression were the grog fortifying the clay. These most precious teachings of the soul’s growing from grace to grace were supplanted by all-or-nothing doctrines that made this mortality a perilous and arbitrary high stakes gamble with eternal damnation on one hand and redemption on the other. By this, the imperative of continual agency on the part of the soul to ascend or descend the seals was snatched away by the terror of randomness, the bylaws ruling the mercurial institutions of men, and the circumstantial whims of fate.
THE FIRST AND SECOND ESTATES
The first stone of the covenant path, or the first seal of the life cycle of the human soul, is represented in the Apotheosis Scroll as the subject in blueprint form, representing the design and planning stage of each new world. It is day one, as described in the first two verses of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God.” It corresponds in the great cycle to the age of Aquarius. Aquarius is the first and the last. It is the idea of life and the state to which it returns as nutrients to be composted and recycled. It is the root and the base and the red chakra. It is occupied by eternal gods and their creation gathered as seeds unsown.
The second seal, or second day, is the first seeding stage. Whether as grains in fertile black earth or the semen fertilizing an egg of the womb, this seal represents the power of generation and regeneration and the birth of humankind in the natural world from amniotic water. It is the sacral sign of life rising like a water snake from the primordial sea and the first steps of this world’s parents out of Eden and into Capricorn. It represents the first estate of the living human soul, very much alive in the created world but before it has been fully equipped to covenant with its Creator. It begins the chronicles of time humankind spent in primordial development up to the end of the Pleistocene era, characterized by the winged serpent of increasing intellectual faculty ascending the human spine, soaring toward higher and higher intelligence. Fundamental in the catalog of cross-cultural and primeval symbols, this rising intelligence in humankind culminates in the regenerative agency of the winged seraph serpent periodically refusing its old skin in exchange for new.
The third seal, or third day, is the Holocene Age. It is the age of the covenant, and it is our archaeological world. The covenant seal is signified by the global humanity that arose out of the worldwide mythologies of the flood that irrigated the whole earth, soaking the seeds of the second planting to soften their husks and break them open in the ground, “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). The symbolic baptism of Earth was a type for the covenant in every land among every people. The living earth became an ancient planet born again, immersed in water fluxed with the blood of its inhabitants, signifying the literal, physical new birth offered through the mother to all the planet’s inhabitants: humankind’s second estate. This birth recognizes not only the primordial sea of the mother’s amniotic water (second day), but also the blood of her covenant (third day), pressed from her body. The floodwater of commingled water and blood exiting the womb in the sacred covenant ordinance of childbirth is a symbolic transubstantiation of water into wine.
No one knows whether another individual currently occupies his or her first or second estate and so the Christian baptism ritualizes the performance of one’s second birth into the second, or covenant, estate. By this, every human being is offered the opportunity to enter the covenant seal through the agency of choice, as though he or she were among the seeds buried in the flood-soaked ground. Having just received the baptism of John by water, symbolizing the second day, Jesus initially refrained from turning water into wine at his mother’s request because “his hour [had] not yet come.” Nevertheless, because it was “the third day” as described in John 2:1, Jesus turned the water into wine in Cana under the seal of his mother, who presided over this ordinance and the flood.
From time-to-time holier beings have ministered to this age, and their invitation has been to be like them; to follow the path of the seraph serpent they followed to greater holiness, symbolized by living in the presence of the Father in sabbath rest on the seventh day. Because the natural man cannot attain to this on his own, the ritualized offering of the Holy Ghost is the symbol of that soul’s quickening from one estate to the next without tasting of death. At the end of the great age when Aquarius comes back around, the seeds so long ago planted will be harvested by the one who planted them, and the souls who have chosen to follow the holy ones will be offered a new body, another estate, the ascension body that they will occupy in the world to come.
SERAPHIC AGENCY AND THE THREE DEGREES OF GLORY
At every seal of the ascending covenant path the agency of each individual human soul is held inviolate and informed by that individual soul’s gnosis.
“And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
To turn back and descend the stair.”
-T S Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
In a great cycle of time marked by sequential zodiacal ages, the spirit world, which is in Virgo, chronologically precedes the age of the flood in Cancer. In a manner consistent with this precessional system, the author of the apocryphal Book of Abraham conceived of several potential seals of glory awaiting each son and daughter of Adam and Eve upon their release from the spirit world of the dead after judgment. As determined by whether they exercised seraphic agency to take upon them mortality in the covenant age,
“They who keep their first estate shall be added upon; and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate; and they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever” (Abraham 3:26).
To abstain from taking on mortality in the covenant age meant an end to progression on the covenant path. Such souls (known in Egypt as the Ba) elected the spiritual resurrection typical of the angels of the spirit world. These ascended to a glory of resurrection associated with sound, such as the music of harps and choirs, the sounding of trumps, and the Word of God spoken and heard. The telestial dwelling place in Gemini is furthest of all the glories from the Father’s throne which occupies the zenith of the noonday sun. Seraphic agents who chose from this vantage point to actively work against the Father’s plan for humankind’s advancement up the seals of the covenant path became fallen angels called the Sons of Perdition, descending serpents cast out from God’s presence.
The second degree of glory was a physical resurrection, to live in a terrestrial world like the first estate but nearer to the throne of God, as the moon in the constellation Cancer is near to Leo. From this vantage point, the grandeur is greater than the telestial order, as seeing is a higher degree of revelation than is hearing. The creature is restored to an estate of unified spirit and matter, symbolized by the cleaving together of male and female in the covenant of marriage.
The third, or highest, of the three degrees of glory is celestial (the sun), “Which glory is that of the church of the Firstborn, even of God, the holiest of all…For after [the earth] hath filled the measure of its creation, it shall be crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father; That bodies who are of the celestial kingdom may possess it forever and ever; for, for this intent was it made and created, and for this intent are they sanctified” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:5, 19-20).
The Gods are human Gods and the advancement of souls from body to body is human advancement. “They who are of a celestial spirit shall receive the same body which was a natural body; even ye shall receive your bodies, and your glory shall be that glory by which your bodies are quickened” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:28). Animated by this serpentine quickening of a new skin, or body, they descend from the very presence of God, birthed into their second estate and on to the third estate, and so on. They follow the ministering example of Christ, the original winged serpent, “For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16). As Jesus elaborated to Nicodemus, “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:13-16).
KAMRON COLEMAN ART 