AULA LUCIS
fiat · lux

We are all sinners, or so the Bible tells us. Or rather, so Christian theologians interpret the Bible as telling us, which is not the same thing at all as we shall see. According to Christian doctrine, every single human being who emerges into this world is cursed by the stigma of original sin by virtue of their descent from Adam and Eve.

the dogma of original sin

¶ The basis for this doctrine is found in the account of the expulsion of our supposed parents from the Garden of Eden, recounted in Genesis, chapter three. Two further scriptural sources are often cited in support of this doctrine: Psalms 51:5 and Romans 5-12-21. The former is rather unconvincing in my view. Here is the verse: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Superficially it can be said (and was fiercely argued by one dogmatic cleric whom I knew well when I was still a practising clergyman) that these words can be traced to the curse pronounced upon Eve by the ‘Lord’ God in Genesis 3:16. “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” But if we consider Psalms 51:5 in context (which is rarely done) a different picture emerges. The verse concerns King David’s anguished repentance for committing adultery with a married woman. Read in this light, it is simply one verse among 18 others describing how sorry David was for sleeping with the beautiful Bathsheba and fathering a child by her. The child later died, supposedly in Divine retribution for David’s many sins. Frankly, the only ‘iniquity’ and ‘sin’ here is sexual desire. Without it I wouldn’t be here to write these words and you wouldn’t be here to read them! What of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans? Verse 19 seems unequivocable: “For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.” The former ‘one’ is clearly Adam and the latter Jesus. So this source supports the account in Genesis, or does it?

¶ There are two important considerations that weigh against this. Firstly, Paul’s misogyny. In 1 Timothy 2:11-13 Paul writes: “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve.” The Apostle’s antipathy towards Mary Magdalene is well attested in the Pistis Sophia. “My Lord, we will not endure this woman, for she taketh the opportunity from us and hath let none of us speak, but she discourseth many times.” Secondly, there is considerable evidence that Paul’s letters were ‘touched up’ by generations of meddling clerics to support the Church’s dogmas, of which the doctrine of original sin is one of the most fundamental. If it can be proved that the doctrine antedates Genesis and that ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ were copies of previous ‘sinners’, the whole shaky house of cards which constitutes dogmatic Christianity falls to the ground. Gerald Massey did prove this in his masterwork, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World, wherein we may read:

¶ So wrote Massey 117 years ago. Merodach, whose name means ‘calf of the Sun’, was a very ancient deity who became the chief god of Babylon under the name Marduk. Massey does not explain who the god Sar was, nor is he mentioned in any of the lists of Babylonian deities. However, he may have stood for the guardian who was later transmogrified into the ‘flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life’ mentioned in Genesis 3:21. We must not lose sight of the fact that a large number of Jews spent nearly 70 years in captivity in Babylon after their defeat by Nebuchadnezzar II in the 7th century B.C.

¶ They were so well-treated during their exile that many of them became quite wealthy through farming and commerce. Hence, their religious leaders had both the opportunity and the leisure to learn the religious beliefs and mythology of their captors. But, as Massey shows, the Babylonian prototype of the Semitic fall did not originate with them. It had been prefigured ages earlier in ancient Egypt. Various vignettes in the Papyrus of Ani show him and his wife Tutu in the Egyptian paradise of Aaru, eating the fruit from the Tree of Life with no suggestion that it was forbidden or ‘sinful’ to do so. That part of the myth is purely Semitic, itself founded, as we have seen, on the Babylonian model.

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And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

¶ Massey remarks that: “As there is no mention of the woman [Eve] in this expulsion, the man must have gone alone upon his ‘solitary way’, unless the woman is included in Adam-homo as in the first creation.” This proves that Genesis, and indeed most of the Bible is an allegory, as I have attempted to show throughout this book. Seen in this light, the supposed original ‘sin’ of our mythical parents takes on a very different meaning, which explains what the ‘fall’ of man really was and means, as we shall see in the next part of my analysis.

the fall that wasn't

¶ Once again, I turn to that brave illuminator of the Semitic distortion of the Egyptian Wisdom—Gerald Massey—for an elucidation of the mythical fall of man. In volume two of Ancient Egypt Massey writes:

¶ Whenever Massey uses the word ‘Ritual’ he means the sacred texts preserved upon the monuments and in the papyri of ancient Egypt. From the quotation just mentioned it is clear that by ‘food’ experience is meant. Knowing good and evil is thus a synonym, in the Bible, as well as in the Egyptian teachings, for the fruit of experience, whether garnered on Earth or in ‘Amenta’, the Egyptian term for the higher or lower regions or planes of the Astral World.

¶ In the distorted Hebrew version of the Egyptian original we read:

¶ The Biblical serpent is a direct copy of the Egyptian goddess Renenet who was depicted either as a woman, a cobra, or a woman with the head of a cobra. Renenet was the giver of food in the fruits of the earth or in the Tree of Life. For once the account in Genesis is quite correct when it tells us that the serpent “was more subtil than any beast of the field.” Of course it was, for as we shall see in a moment, it is a representation of Divine Wisdom which can only be acquired through the knowledge of good and evil born from our personal experience of the material world. It is this knowledge which determines whether we shall rise or fall in our evolution; whether we will devolve into devils, gnashing our metaphorical teeth with rage in the stygian darkness of the lower realms so graphically depicted by Dante in his Inferno, or evolve into angels, fit to join the ranks of the Blessed who dwell in Paradise.

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The Egyptians were infinitely older than the Semites, but had never heard of the world being lost by Adam’s fall, or its need for an historic saviour who should take the place and act the part of the Jewish scapegoat.

¶ Gerald Massey continues: “The Babylonian handling of the Egyptian Wisdom was begun by falsifying it on behalf of an infinitely later system of theology, which was continued in the Hebrew line of descent in the book of Genesis.” The Egyptians were infinitely older than the Semites, but had never heard of the world being lost by Adam’s fall, or its need for an historic saviour who should take the place and act the part of the Jewish scapegoat. The later doctrine of vicarious atonement has been added. This, as Massey proved, is Semitic, not Egyptian. The real ‘fall’—the only fall of man (and woman)—was the descent of spirit into matter, or the Higher Self entering a material body to gain experience it was impossible to acquire on High, in the Biblical garden of Eden, itself a poor copy of the Egyptian heaven. Adam was never unceremoniously booted out of Paradise: he left in obedience to the law of Evolution. None of this is new. Neither is it heretical. It may surprise some readers to learn that the true, esoteric meaning of Genesis was known to many of the early Fathers of the Church. Why they chose to suppress this knowledge is a question outside the scope of this investigation. They may have done so from fear it would undermine the power of the Church, or because they were incapable of anything other than a purely literal interpretation of the events described in Genesis.

¶ What we do know is that the beliefs of Gnostic sects such as the Ophites, which flourished during the second century of our era, were well-known to Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Hippolytus of Rome, to name just four Christian theologians who lived between 170 and 260 A.D. The Ophites derived their name from their doctrine that the Serpent which tempted Eve was no devil, but the impersonation of Divine Wisdom, the great Teacher and Civiliser of the human race, the parent and author of all knowledge and science. This, as we have seen, is in complete accordance with the Egyptian Wisdom teachings. They, along with many other Gnostics, also believed that the Creator of the material world was a being subordinate and even antagonistic to the Supreme God—a limited and limiting deity, proud, revengeful and jealous—in fact, the Jehovah of the Jewish race, whose character expresses itself in the Old Testament which proceeded from him.

¶ It was to this inferior deity that the Ophites gave the name of the Demiurge, or World–Former. In the Gnostic text known as the Pistis Sophia he is called Ialdabaoth, or Son of Darkness, and Adamas, the Great Tyrant. The Ophites asserted that the Demiurge ruled the starry world, and that the stars represented the cosmical principle, which seeks to hold the spirit of man in bondage and servitude, and to environ it with all manner of delusions. This brings to mind the astrological adage that “the wise man rules his stars; the fool obeys them.” That is to say, the Higher Self of man is free of all stellar influences unless it allows itself to be dominated by the foolishness of the lower self. The Ophites further asserted that at the beginning of all things is Sabaoth, or Victory; at the end, the ‘Old Serpent’ (Ophis). Between these are the Seraphim (Intelligences) and Cherubim (Benevolences), and their representatives. Ialdabaoth and the angels begotten by him are the Spirits of the Seven Planets. In order to keep his six angels in subjection to himself and prevent their looking higher and discovering the wonderful realm of spiritual light above them, Ialdabaoth endeavoured to fix their attention elsewhere, and to this end called upon them to create man in their own image, and so prove their independent creative power. They did so, but could not give a soul to the form they produced, so brought it to Ialdabaoth to animate.

¶ The Demiurge breathed a living spirit into the lifeless shape his angels had made, but as he did so, all unperceived by himself, the spiritual seed passed from his own being into the nature of man, and he was deprived of this higher principle of life. He saw with amazement and wrath that a creature created by himself, within his own kingdom, was rising above both himself and his kingdom. His aim was now to prevent man gaining consciousness of his higher nature, and so he issued the command to the first man that he should not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

¶ But Divine Wisdom had all this time been watching and at this point employed the Serpent as an instrument (or, even according to some leaders of these sects, Itself assumed the Serpent’s form), to defeat the cruel purpose of Ialdabaoth, by tempting the first man to disobedience. Here we have a coherent and satisfying explanation for the so-called ‘original sin’ of Adam and Eve that led to their equally suppositious ‘fall’. Each one of us is free to accept this explanation or to cling to the irresponsible and implausible fairy-tale foisted upon us by the Christian Church.

Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve (1504) — Engraving

¶ We find further confirmation of these beliefs of the Ophites in the Zohar, or ‘Book of Splendour’, the primary text of the Qabbalah. I should add that the Qabbalah, meaning “esoteric doctrines received by tradition,” also written ‘Kabbalah’, ‘Cabala’, etc., is a system of Jewish mystical theosophy, not a trendy new spiritual movement for jaded Hollywood celebrities! Nor, I might add is it a means of summoning so-called ‘spirits’ and ‘demons’ by would-be magicians. The Zohar is on an altogether higher plane of mystical thought than such pedestrian, dare I say, ‘grubby’ distortions of the Qabbalah. The Zohar teaches that the Soul and the Form (Higher Self and astral body in our terminology) when descending on Earth “put on an earthly garment,” meaning the material, physical body. This fits in with the occult teaching that the astral body is made of finer matter than the physical body. The book further teaches that:

¶ From this, it is clear that Adam and Eve were not driven out of ‘Paradise’ because they had ‘sinned’ but because it was necessary for their evolution to leave Paradise, meaning the highest realms of the Spiritual World, and enter into incarnation on Earth. For it is on Earth, and not in Heaven that we find no shortage of opportunities to ‘sin’ in the way Adam and Eve are supposed to have ‘sinned’. I gave you an example of this much earlier when I related what happened to my youngest daughter when she succumbed to the ‘sin’ of gluttony. I’m sure some of my naughtier readers can think of far worse ‘sins’ if they put their mind to it! The quotation from the Zohar also explains the dual nature of man, partly blessed by the Higher Self, the ‘Heavenly Adam’ as the book calls it, and partly cursed by the lower self (the ‘Earthly Adam’). Hence there aretwo ‘Adams’ to be considered, not one as the Bible tells us. Regarded in this light, Genesis takes on a very different meaning from the literal interpretation accepted and taught by the Church. But not all the Church interpreted Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden in this way, at least not in the early centuries of our era. In the 2nd century Origen wrote: “What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in Paradise like a common gardener? I believe that every man must hold these things for images, under which the hidden sense lies concealed.” All this goes to show how the ancient and divine Truths have been distorted by the ignorant. Which brings us back to the statement made earlier that the only ‘sin’ Occult Science recognises is that of ignorance, all else being the result of wrong thinking and action of some kind. We may further reduce this to the simple statement that sin is ignorance personified.

— john temple

john temple is the pen-name of a writer who has studied and practised the occult sciences for more than 60 years. He graduated from Cambridge University with a first in Theology and Religious Studies and was ordained as a Minister in the Anglican Church in 1957. He left the Church in 1972 and has since lectured to students around the world on a wide variety of occult, religious and mystical subjects.

¶ John retired in 2002 and now lives quietly in London with his wife, two Yorkshire terriers and a talkative African Grey Parrot called John (no relation).

¶ His forthcoming book, The Search for Truth – An investigation of the occult secrets in the Bible, its Mystery Language, and their origin in the Wisdom Teachings of ancient Egypt is currently available for pre-orders (see below).

Related Books:

The Fall that Wasn’t

21st July, 2024

¶ Massey includes an illustration from the Papyrus of Nefer-uben-f (reproduced below) depicting the Egyptian original of the Biblical copy. What do we  find above the crown of the Egyptian Tree in this drawing? An image of the Sun—the prototype of the ‘flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.’ But in the Egyptian original of the irresponsible Semitic fairy-tale its role is wholly beneficial and protective. This also shows where the concept of the vengeful, jealous ‘god’ of the Old Testament is ‘coming from’ as the modern expression has it. Needless to add, not a good place! Massey continues: “The pair of beings in the Semitic version are supposed to have fallen from the garden [of Eden] through eating the forbidden fruit.” Or, as we may read in Genesis: