THE SECOND SEAL OF THE COVENANT PATH:
THE LESSER MYSTERIES/THE FIRST ESTATE
The mysteries taught that the life cycle of the human soul mirrored the eternal round of the zodiacal cycle, planting and replanting a crop, natural childbirth by an earthly mother, and the connection between heaven and earth. John’s teachings about Christ were dually oriented to sky and clay because of their basis in covenant astronomy and agriculture. They point to the movements of the constellations and the planets, and to the monthly ministrations of the sun and moon. The same symbols formed a fractal diagram over the clay of the human body, which, like the soil of the furrowed field, cycled through periods of fertilization and harvest.
Our ancestral covenant keepers thought, based on astronomical indicators, that the gates to the afterlife met the earth at certain times throughout the year. Sacred teachings correlated astronomy to agricultural routines and prepared the soul to successfully transition from the states of planting and maturation to the states of harvesting and milling. Thus, the soul could pass through the gates to become the bread of life, and then return as a new seed suitable for replanting. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). The viability of the seeds and the mysteries all depended on the practitioners’ holiness and the successful transfer of knowledge and memory. The forms would have to adapt to cultural shifts and changing times while preserving the fundamental code from generation to generation. The inevitable diversity of mystery systems was grounded in immutable astronomical architecture and undeviating demonstration of high moral conduct.
Two hundred years after Jesus of Nazareth’s Galilean ministry, the early Christian church’s most prominent leaders and apologists were Neoplatonic scholars, merchants, and civic leaders already in positions of high social standing. As Christianity cut away from its roots in the toils of work and the ordinance of childbirth and death, and moved into abstract intellectualism, a cleft in the Christian discipleship movement was deepening. The Neoplatonist administrative current of the day had no need of the pageant of covenant astronomy. Disconnection from the mysteries slowly unmoored baptism, rebirth, and the gift of the Holy Ghost from performances signifying the uninterrupted transmigration of the human soul from life to life. Due to human weakness and deliberate suppression over time, the greatest treasures of knowledge were lost.
As head of the church, Peter’s focus is on the fractal of the covenant path of essential ordinances that are condensed on behalf of the worthy candidate in the immediacy of this life. John’s model is a to-scale enlargement of the covenant path mapped over the multi-staged advancement of the human soul across tens of thousands of years. When Peter and John clashed, whether the righteous human soul was intended to stay in a heavenly world of spiritual ideals after death or to be born again was at stake. While their doctrines are not mutually exclusive, Peter’s emphasizes the necessity of an earthly representative of God to shepherd spiritual newborns who have entered the covenant seal by the waters of baptism. The disciple in John’s model has already received the gift of the Holy Ghost- the empowering seraphic agency of the very ancient individual human soul, and his or her baptism is a symbolic reflection of having been born of the Spirit through an earthly mother who is a proxy for the Heavenly Mother. A third model, and the rarest, was for the disciple to be quickened through the seals of the covenant path by the direct ministration of Christ. This quickening of the soul of the disciple was foreshadowed when John the Baptist said, “I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost” (Mark 1:8).
In what came to be Peter’s model after centuries of copying errors, the saved soul was destined for a spiritual immortality of worshipping God on His throne, similar to the way that subjugation to the mercy and justice of the sovereign kept his subjects subservient and contented. The soul would be liberated from death and hell but, unindividuated with nothing much to do, the soul is stalled in its expansion and remains a servant wholly unlike the Sovereign (salvation).
According to John’s mystery, death is a continuance of the soul’s cycling processes into a new, potentially harrowing life, with a new name. Suffering and poverty would be welcome tutors, helping the soul along the path of humiliation and patience that leads to divinity. Passing through the fire of refinement after refinement, the soul is ever ascending in one eternal round until the disciple becomes a son or daughter begotten of God, with whom they have everything in common (exaltation). The separation between God and humanity, heaven and earth, was not a gulf, but a process. In the second century Clement of Alexandria was still able to say, “God became man so that we in our turn may become God.” As described in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, whether one was rich or poor, king or servant, whole or maimed, of all the forms the bare seed in its simplicity is the most suitable for planting and replanting. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). As the church grew, it was almost inevitable that the fortification of the church’s administrations to save the sheep and exalt the shepherds would supplant the mystery of transmigration embedded in the Sermon on the Mount.
A human life abides in heaven some of the time and in earth at other times. The human soul migrates between these states as expectedly as a grain of wheat is sometimes a seed and sometimes bread. Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (369 BC-286 BC) offered a Taoist parable on this point about a man who dreamt he was a butterfly, “I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
Of supreme importance to the life cycle of the human soul taught in John’s covenant astronomy are the symbolic gates to the two births: first of water, then of the Spirit. Paul described the two births at length in his letter to the Corinthians. His succinct description, already well established in the mysteries, can be reduced to, “The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual” (I Corinthians 15:46, NIV). “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit…the first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven” (I Corinthians 15:45, 47, KJV).
But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickend except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance wheat, or some other grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:35-42).
Mithraism was the most prolific of the covenant mysteries born as a result of the new astronomical age. It emerged about the time of Christ’s mortal ministry and was in accord with Paul’s teachings. Like Paul’s doctrine, it was almost certainly informed by the cult of Serapis in Alexandria and the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece. After months of preparation and instruction and a week-long journey through the seals of initiation, the Eleusinian mysteries finished with a communal fast and night-long vigil held in the Telesterion. Breaking and partaking of the bread of life and the sacrament of drinking from a communal cup ended the fast. The Eleusinian mysteries culminated with a shared vision of the apparitions of Persephone and her newborn son in a marvelous, life-altering display that forever impressed upon the initiates the grandeur of the eternal life cycle of the human soul and its journey of divine apotheosis. The babe in Persephone’s arms embodied the potential of Asclepius the healer and Malachi’s “Sun of righteousness [rising] with healing in his wings” (Malachi 4:2). The crowning ordinances of Mithraism likewise centered on the breaking of bread and drinking from the cup. Mithraism’s ordinances expanded further to borrow from Persia’s Zoroastrian cosmology and its Orion-based hero Perses was a Persian stereotype. At the turning of the age from Aries to Pisces, Mithraism adapted its parent mysteries to move from anticipation of the solar messiah to recognizing his arrival. It was practiced almost universally by the Roman military and adapted accordingly to the all-male company. As such, the initiate sought only the glory of the Son/Sun through communion with the resurrected Lamb of God.
“The background of Mithraic eschatology was provided by that theory of the relation of the soul to the universe…. The soul was thought to have descended at birth from the eternal home of light through the gate of Cancer, passing down through the seven planetary spheres to earth. At each stage it became more heavily weighted by accumulated impurity. During its time of trial upon earth came the opportunity to acquire purity through moral struggle, that is to say, by the conquest of passions and appetites and the practice of courage, endurance, fortitude, and truth” (William Reginald Halliday, The Pagan Background of Early Christianity, pp. 294-295).
The sign of Capricorn marks the emergence of the soul birthed from the water and the sign of Cancer marks the emergence of the rebirthed soul from the spirit world. Knowledge of the first and second births through the two gates was widely understood. This ancient knowledge was elaborated in the Eleusinian Mysteries which precede Christianity by 1600 years and thrived alongside Christianity for its first four hundred years. In accord with all of these, “The solstices, from a Mithraist’s perspective, are the most important points in the universe. For in Mithraic thinking they are the points at which the soul-journey…starts and finishes. The Mithraists were not alone in this belief. We find it also in Neoplatonic speculation, where Proclus attributes it to Numenius explicating Plato’s ‘Myth of Er’:
By ‘heaven’ he means the sphere of the fixed stars, and he says there are two chasms in this, Capricorn and Cancer, the latter a path down into genesis, the former a path of ascent.
(Beck, Roger, “If So, How? Representing ‘Coming Back to Life’ in the Mysteries of Mithras”, University of Toronto, 2017.)
When hegemonic ambitions took Rome to war with Persia in the fourth century, Mithraism, the most prolific religious discipline in the Roman world aside from the state-sponsored Catholic church, had to be blotted out, and all the mysteries with it. Jerome maligned Mithraism this way in his 107th letter addressed to Laetas in 403 AD:
And to pass over such old stories which to unbelievers may well seem incredible, did not your own kinsman Gracchus whose name betokens his patrician origin, when a few years back he held the prefecture of the city, overthrow, break in pieces, and shake to pieces the grotto of Mithras and all the dreadful images therein? Those I mean by which the worshippers were initiated as Raven, Bridegroom, Soldier, Lion, Perseus, Sun, Crab, and Father? Did he not, I repeat, destroy these and then, sending them before him as hostages, obtain for himself Christian baptism?
So thorough was the deliberate suppression of literacy in covenant astronomy and the eradication and over-writing of this rival cult that its embeddedness in the very foundations of Christianity is painstaking to show. Deciphering Mithraism’s ruins demonstrates that both John’s Gospel and Revelation are perfectly analogous to it. It has been reasonable for some scholars to speculate that John’s accounts report on his Mithraic initiation. Perhaps it is no coincidence that every account of the Roman soldiers in the Gospels paints them more favorably even than the children of the Abrahamic covenant, such as the case of the centurion whose servant was suffering a terrible affliction:
And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him, and saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented…When Jesus heard it, he marveled, and said unto them that followed, Verily, I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, that many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:5-6, 10-12).
Although it has been vigorously disputed, Ernest Renan may have been correct when, in 1882, he said “if the growth of Christianity had been arrested by some mortal malady, the world would have been Mithraic” (Marc-Auréle et la fin du monde antique, Paris).
KAMRON COLEMAN ART 