18. And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly (Chap. 19).
This is the earth in its postsolar convulsions, that cosmic bomb we spoke of earlier. This follows naturally from the “burning bush” stage, which is the sun. In both, the creative power is violent and this is the awful God of Sinai; the terrestrial God of Canaan, earth, is this same power in its subsequent tranquillity.
17. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount.
This “nether part of the mount” is identical with the “backside” of God, namely the Evolutionary part. As we have said, mythologists have no respect for time, place or sequence, and so we have both Involution and Evolution here.1
16. And the glory of the Lord abode upon mount Sinai (the planetary entity), and the cloud covered it six days (Involution): and the seventh day (of Creation) he called unto Moses (the Life force) out of the midst of the cloud.
17. And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel (Chap. 24).
We have heard much about “the glory of the Lord” and many of us hope to bask in it somewhere beyond the grave. Here we see what it consists of—the glory of the sun, so violent it would destroy us were we any nearer. Out of its involutionary “cloud” this violent power now speaks to Moses, saying “Come up and see me sometime.” And Moses went up taking with him the same number Jacob brought down, namely, seventy. And Moses was in the mount “forty days and forty nights”—those of Involution now in reverse. Here he is given moral laws, and here we come to one of the greatest pieces of spiritual deception in all literature.
The laws of Sinai are not the moral laws nor are those of the tablets, the Ten Commandments. The laws of Sinai are the law of nature, antedating the commandments by billions of years. The stone on which they were written is that stone called earth, and to carry it further, the two human stones on which are written the laws of heredity. As we have said, the laws of God are not in Torah but in terra. We also said there were no such things as laws but only actions. This is the energy aspect; the consciousness part is not even action but ideation, biologic and hereditary. The moral laws were the priests’ creation and to give them divine authority they declared them handed down by God at Sinai.
The moral laws are laws of moral man, the epigenetic; the laws of God are the laws of the genetic, and considering its nonmoral nature, moral man could draw up ten times ten commandments for it: Thou shalt not destroy the work of man’s hands with earthquakes, hurricanes and tornados; thou shalt not make floods in one part of the country and droughts in another; thou shalt not make polio germs to cripple little children or cancer to kill their parents; thou shalt not drive mankind to war, adultery, prostitution and overproduction. These are all products of this ruthless power and instead of striving to control it, we waste our time worshiping it. We are not here to worship God but to make intelligent use of what He (it) has created.
From chapter 20 to the end of Deuteronomy is no part of the Exodus myth, but an insertion by priests a thousand years after the alleged time of Moses. This murderous one would never have said, “Thou shalt not kill,” nor would his murderous God. This is the law of a long subsequent and more civilized era. It was the priests of this era who compiled the laws, including a few for themselves: “And ye shall give unto us tithes,” and food and tabernacles, and we’ll be “a kingdom of priests,” as God commanded. To these priests their God was the Creator of the entire universe; would such a being concern himself with tribal rites and rituals, arks and tabernacles, even the number of loops on the curtain? Our Preface said that only priests would write volumes about such things.
The laws of Sinai are the laws of Involution, written by El Shaddai; they must be broken that Evolution might be, and now we find they are, not once but twice because of different myths. The first was by the plagues, and now by Moses personally. On descending the mount with horns on his head, and probably with hoofs and tail also, he “cast the tables out of his hands and brake them beneath the mount” (32:19). Rather within the mount. The reason for this was his anger on finding his people worshiping a “golden calf,” a symbol of the golden sun and therefore something in the past. This, as with Adam, they must not return to and “live forever.” Breaking the law here is identical with that of Eden, and as with Adam it greatly angered the God of Israel. He was so angry, in fact, He threatened to kill His “chosen.” But Moses, much wiser than He, persuaded Him that this was wrong, and so, “the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (32:14). But as Moses and the Lord are one, it also angered Moses and so he ground their brazen symbol to dust, as he had ground their other symbol, Egypt, then forced his people to consume it. Life had looked back and so, like Lot’s wife, it had to be punished. Moses, the law of planetary progression, therefore commanded the Levites to slay their brothers with the sword, “and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men” (32:28). And this is the man who later is called “meek”—not by wise mythologists but by tampering priests.
It was for breaking this first law that Moses was denied the “Promised Land,” and not, as some suppose, for his anger or his killing of the Egyptian. Indeed the more Egyptians he killed, the more respect his God had for him, but breaking the law of Involution and thus precipitating the tragedy of Evolution put him in a class with Adam and Satan. And so he has two sins to atone for; his own and his people’s.
On returning to the mount to receive the second law he finds his God exceedingly angry, and to appease Him he offers his own life as a sacrifice for his people. And how the preachers praise him for this act! Only the sacrifice on Calvary, they say, excels it. And yet how factual is it? We are told (33:11) that “the Lord spoke unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.” And a few verses later it says, “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (33:20). If then Moses saw God and no man can see God, then Moses was not a man. What then of his willing sacrifice? It is like Isaac’s, mythological.
The reason “no man hath seen God” is not because he is an invisible spirit or too awful to look upon, but because “he” is consciousness, and no man hath seen consciousness at any time, or energy either. It is time the credulous race realized that theophanies such as this occur only in mythology. We say such as this because there is a theophany, three of them, in fact. The word means a visible appearance of God, and the three are, first, a sun, second a world, and finally, its forms. We ourselves are a theophany, but theophanies such as we should not look for theophanies other than this. God is in what he creates.
The account of Sinai is a wonderful story, brilliantly and compellingly told, but is that any reason why we should believe it literally? Elsewhere we said that knowledge of other races’ literature helps us understand the Bible. So is it with Sinai, Moses and the law. According to the Assyrians, Mises also wrote his laws on two slabs of stone. Dionysius, the Greek lawgiver, was portrayed as holding up two tables of stone on which the law was engraved. Minos, King of Crete, received the laws of his land from God on Mount Dicta. The Persians say their laws came to them in the same way. As Zoroaster prayed on a high mountain God appeared in thunder and lightning and delivered to him the Zend Avesta, or “Book of the Law.” What then is so unique about the Hebrew account?
At a time contemporary with the literal Abraham, Hammurabi of Babylon delivered to his people a code of laws, that according to tradition, was given him by Shamash, the great sun god and maker of human laws. This code is entitled “Laws of righteousness that Hammurabi, the mighty and just king, has established for the benefit of the weak and oppressed, the widows and orphans.” Historically, not mythologically, this code antedates the Mosaic code by more than a thousand years, yet it is just as enlightened, and in some cases less severe, than the Mosaic code. In the latter, the law governing slaves reads thus (Exod. 21:2): “. . . six years he shall serve; and in the seventh he shall go out free.” In the Hammurabi code it reads: “. . . for three years they shall work ... in the fourth year they shall be free.” Commenting on the similarity of these codes, I. Elliott Binns remarks: “The variety of cases provided for is much greater than in the Mosaic codes, but where they deal with the same matters there is an extraordinary similarity in their ordinances, especially in phraseology.” Thus this older code could well be the source of the Mosaic code, not Jehovah. At any rate the moral laws are no part of the laws of the mythological Moses. There is nothing miraculous about them; they are but the codified morality of the age and race that wrote them. Instead of “the word of God” someone dubbed them “Ten ways of keeping out of jail.”
Those who go no further than the Bible for their knowledge of man’s moral development, see its origin and flowering in the Jews, surrounded by ignorant, Godless heathen, yet thousands of years before the Jews were ever heard of the Egyptians, whom they painted as morally inferior, had a well-developed sense of morality. The evidence for this lies in the Egyptian
“Oath of Clearance,” which in toto contains six of the ten commandments. It reads in part as follows:
I have not committed fraud and evil against men.
I have not diverted justice in the judgment hall.
I have not caused a man to do more than his day’s work.
I have not caused a slave to be ill-treated.
I have not taken milk from the mouths of children.
I have not stolen cattle.
I have not been weak.
I have not been wretched.
I have not been impious or impure . . .2
Any race that could even devise such a code is not without a high moral sense. What is more, it reveals a more enlightened kind of morality than that of the Mosaic law—“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” “If an ox gore a person and he die, the ox shall be stoned, and his owner put to death.” Holding an ox guilty of homicide implies belief in the animal’s moral responsibility, and killing its owner, ignorance of moral justice. The Mosaic law recognizes a man’s right to sell his daughter into slavery and makes rules to govern it. There is nothing that low in the Egyptian and Babylonian codes. It is not only our opinion but that of able scholars that morality flowed to not from the Hebrews. Here we quote from one of them—James H. Breasted. “We are all aware that Egyptian-Babylonian culture set European civilization going; but few modern people have observed the fact, so important in the history of morals and religion, that Egypto-Babylonian culture also set Hebrew civilization going.”
How presumptuous then for this semibarbarous tribe, still in the nomadic state, to sit in judgment upon a race whose culture even then was twelve thousand years old. According to Herodotus the Egyptian gods were “in existence twenty thousand years ago.” If we take literally the “piromis stones,” we must admit such antiquity, though they too may be somewhat mythological. There were 340 of these, representing the generations down to Sethon, 720 B.C., and after Sethon twenty more, making in all 360. Now an Egyptian generation was 36 years. Thus 360 times 36 equals 12,960 years. Our false concept of the ancient Egyptians is due in part to our own ignorance, but the evil we attribute to them is due entirely to the libelous nature of Hebrew mythology.
I think we have proved the mythological nature of Moses, but what about Aaron? Elsewhere we said that this ancient priest was genetic consciousness; in other words, the generative principle. The word itself implies this fact. It comes from barab, which means “to conceive.” Ginzberg translates it “woe unto this pregnancy”—the mythological woe resulting from the earth’s pregnancy, biologic existence. This was the woe Eve brought upon herself, not just painful childbirth. It is stated that only Aaron and his two sons could perform the rites for women during and after delivery. This puzzled another of our “great Bible students,” Bishop Colenzo, who figured the time on the basis of six or seven hundred thousand women. He concluded it would take the three of them fourteen hours a day without rest or interruption. But like all his cloth, Bishop Colenzo did not understand his Bible. If he had he would have known that since Aaron means to conceive, Aaron himself did the conceiving, and also the rites and ceremonies. He is the planetary genetic, but once in organic forms he becomes sex and its organs. This is the key to the occult balderdash that follows here, and has been so religiously observed ever since. The “sacred” garments with which Aaron clothed himself are but the physical flesh the genetic puts on in biologic forms, male and female. We said the priest had a strange name for these also and here they are—ephod for the male, and breastplate for the female. These were to be cunningly made and elaborately adorned, but not by human hands: these are the Creator’s work. The ephod is the tumescent phallus, its genetic nature implied in the Greek epbebe, pubescent youth.
32. And there shall be an hole in the top of it, in the midst thereof: it shall have a binding of woven work round about the hole of it. . . (Chap. 28).
If this be the prepuce, what about literal circumcision? The miter worn by priests is a well-known phallic symbol; but there is more to the vestment than just the phallus.
9. And thou shalt take two onyx stones (rather, Onan stones) and grave on them the names of the children of Israel (Chap. 28).
Three or four million names could not be engraved on two onyx stones, but their heredity could be on two Onan stones.
11. . . . thou shalt make them to be set in pouches of gold (rather, pouches of skin).
On these two stones, testes, are engraved the genetic law and hereditary characteristics of all forms of life. But one telling was not enough; a little later the ground is gone over again and this time they are pomegranates. The word, from pomum and granatus, means a fruit of many seeds. Among the ancients it was a symbol of generation and fecundity. The goddess Nana conceived by putting a pomegranate in her bosom. Mythologists, it seems, are no respecters of places either.
And now, perhaps, we can learn the nature of the “holy oil” with which Aaron anointed everything; it is the seminal fluid.
31. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, This shall be an holy anointing oil unto me throughout your generations (creations, as with Noah).
32. Upon man’s flesh shall it not be poured, neither shall ye make any other like it, after the composition of it: and it shall be holy unto you.
33. Whosoever compoundeth any like it, or whosoever putteth any of it upon a stranger, shall even be cut off from his people (as Onan was) (Chap. 30).
To some, such an intrepretation of this “holy oil” will be offensive, but if so, it is only because they do not know the Bible and the cunning of its creators. The Hebrew name for this holy oil was shetnen, and when the sh is written with a dot over the left side thus b, as it is in this case, the sh is pronounced as s. Thus it is simply semen. This is the only “holy” that nature recognizes, and likewise the Bible.
The equally ornate breastplate is the female part, and this and the ephod are to be joined together, occasionally. Genetic Aaron must carry these whenever he goes into the “holy place”; and now we can see what the scriptural “holy place” is also—the womb of generation.
This, we repeat, is the “sacred” and the “holy” of the Bible, and religion is replete with its symbolism. The church with its steeple is a symbol of the two sex organs. The “seed of Abraham” is the seed of the Creator. The word testament itself comes from the Latin testes, the genetic receptacle. Here again our priestly cover-ups tell us it comes from an ancient custom— swearing by the testes—as did Abraham and Abimilech. This is indeed a strange name-source for “the word of God.” As with the Bible itself, there is nothing that inconsequent about it. The real meaning is the Bible’s meaning—genetic Creation. This earth is a cosmic testis, whose genes created everything upon it, and as we proceed we will find that this “holy Bible” is but the testament or record of this work. Indeed the Bible and our own work could well share our subtitle, A Genetic Cosmoconception. We have not said that the Bible teaches our theory, “worlds from world seeds,” yet its emphasis on seeds, its name and its nature come as close to it as the cunning hand of Jacob comes to anything.
Life was originally male-female, and when not clearly divided appears even now as the third sex. And this, when religiously inclined, takes upon itself the guardianship of sexual purity, particularly in women, a task not difficult for the indifferent. But the Bible does not deal with sexual purity but sex purity: this is the meaning of the Urim and Thummim, light and perfection. It is not human light and perfection, however, or even chastity, for nature cares nothing about that; this is a social problem. The sex purity of scripture is genetic purity; it must not be contaminated or in any way affected extraneously. It is set apart in the body as a specialty, and this is the meaning of the Levites, set apart from the rest of Israel. Elsewhere we said that the genetic would have naught to do with the epigenetic, also that the genetic partakes not of man’s heaven, and now we find the Levites have no inheritance in the “Promised Land.” Not even their chief symbols, Moses and Aaron, are allowed to enter it. Thus does the Bible confirm our statement that God cannot enter our heaven, man’s epigenetic world.
The numerous Levites who succeeded Aaron represent the divisions of the androgenous Life Principle, the many forms it took, and the genetic nature of it. Thus the scriptural Levites are no basis for a sex-condemning religion, for they are sex, and their paraphernalia, sex symbolism. The priesthood today in all its regalia is but an ignorant literalization of this.
Only by recognizing this sex symbolism can we understand the scriptural ark, the tabernacle, the temple, and other structures of wondrous beauty and fabulous wealth produced in the wilderness by a band of refugees so destitute they had to be fed from heaven. Where did they get their silver and gold, their precious stones and fine linen? These they had in abundance, and even after the work was completed, each tribe had wagon-loads to offer as sacrifices.
Were these the treasures the fleeing Israelites stole from the Egyptians? Yes, esoterically, for this tabernacle of the Lord is the biologic form, and the materials with which it is built are the treasures of symbolic Egypt, namely, earth. This is another “temple not made with hands,” another “house of God.” In Involution we “live and move and have our being” in God, but in Evolution, God lives and moves and has his being in us.
Later, we read that this holy tabernacle became a regular slaughterhouse, in which innumerable fowl and beasts were burnt as sacrifices, yet soon these people are again starving in the wilderness and must be fed from heaven—the Joshua myth. At the dedication of Solomon’s temple, they sacrificed twenty thousand oxen and one hundred and twenty thousand sheep. And every sacrificed animal had to be without blemish. Taken literally, this would end in the complete destruction of their stock. It doesn’t make sense, literally or racially; it does, however, symbolically. This vast and ruthless sacrifice of life represents nature’s sacrifice thereof.
No doubt these ancient God addicts had some place of worship, and the details of the ark, temple, and other buildings could refer to it, but these are not in the narrative historically but only as the moral laws and the priestly rituals are—to make them seem of divine origin. There is nothing uniquely Hebrew about them. Every ancient race had its ark, and the sacred things put in it were symbols of the genetic principle. “The ark represents the holy of holies, the consecrated receptacle of life and was one of the most important symbols in the religious ceremonies of the ancients.” “The ark of the Egyptians held the symbols of the Creative forces of life.” “The Jewish ark of the covenant bears a close resemblance to the sacred ark of the Egyptians.” E. E. Goldsmith. These arks are all of historic times, and symbols only, whereas the ark of mythology is the body, and that is the meaning of the statement that the Israelites carried it about with them.
And now having conquered Egypt, the “Promised Land” lies before them. But before they can enter it, they must first invade and utterly destroy the six great nations that occupy this “land of milk and honey.” These had “cities great and fenced up to heaven” (Deut. 9:1). Is this fact or just some more mythologized cosmology? In our Premise we said that after the earth was formed some physical elements disintegrated and formed, or would eventually, an aura of six metaphysical elements, likewise “great and fenced up to heaven.” These are the energy substantives of biologic forms, and part of the organism’s work is to absorb, qualify and thus isomerize them. They are thus our servants, and so we find Joshua making them “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Josh. 9:27). Now we are not asserting that this planetary aura was what the Hebrew authors had in mind when writing their account, no more than we had theirs in mind when writing ours—this was perceived later—we point it out only because the parallel is so obvious. At any rate, we hope the barbaric treatment of these unoffending nations was not human.
16. But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
17. But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord God hath commanded thee (that the Godites may have their land) (Deut. 20).
And this, that “meek” man Moses, who said “thou shalt not kill,” did with a vengeance.
32. Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to fight at Jahaz.
33. And the Lord our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people.
34. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain:
35. Only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves, and the spoil of the cities, which we took (Deut. 2).
If their Judeo-Christian God is as opposed to war as we are told, why did He not stop it here in the beginning? Because God never stopped any war; on the contrary He starts them. It isn’t a pleasant picture as presented here, but we make a great mistake in explaining it as primitive man’s crude God-concept. The authors of the Bible were not primitives intellectually; they were men of great intellect who, unfortunately, wrote in a manner beyond our comprehension. They were mighty men and dealt with mighty things. Out of stuff that dreams are made of they fashioned men and women and breathed into their forms the breath of life and they became living souls—to us. Such were their prophets, patriarchs, heroes, kings, and likewise their gods and saviors. We, absorbed in our commercialism, cannot comprehend their cosmolingua, their myths and symbols. Myths are little stories containing great truths, but little souls cannot see great truths, great anything, in fact. And so we took their story literally—a personal God, a human Adam, his “fall,” his “sin,” and hence “salvation.” Rise ever so little on the mental plane and you see them for what they are—mythic formulae, and applicable only to the world.
So let us interpret this divinely inspired conquest and destruction as we did the plagues—the dissolution and transubstantiation of planetary elements. Thus does a little knowledge absolve even God. In an early chapter we said our theory did just that, and also removed Him from the horns of the religious dilemma. But it does even more than that; it removes Him, period—an event greatly to be desired for it will mean the intellectual emancipation of both Jew and Gentile.
Moses had wandered in the wilderness forty years, and now he is old and ready to die. This mighty man is Man, the Life Principle, and the wilderness it had to wander through is the four lower evolutionary planes, a wilderness indeed, or should it be jungle? The wanderings are life’s blind groping towards its “Promised Land,” the spiritual planes above. In the last chapter of Deuteronomy we read of this great one’s death: “. . . his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.” Why should it be since Moses is this natural force, very much alive even yet. He was buried on Mount Nebo, “. . . and no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.” This should read, no man lacking metaphysical enlightenment knoweth, which means Piscean humanity. The word Nebo means fire and the fiery Mount Nebo is fiery Mount Sinai, namely, earth. This is Moses’ sepulchre and most of the slumbering giant is still within it. And here Michael is still contending with Satan for it, and not even an archangel dares bring a railing accusation against this alibi foi God’s diabolism.
Such knowledge of Moses should end for all time the argument about the authorship of the Pentateuch. For ages it was believed that the man Moses wrote it, yet strange to say it records his own death. Modern critics make much of this self-obituary, yet it is all vain argument. Moses as the creative force did what the Pentateuch records, namely, a phase of Creation, so he provided the material no matter who wrote it. Then there is the Ezra faction, which claims this later prophet wrote the wondrous five books. The date of Ezra is more in keeping with the priestly part, but the account savors too much of tradition to be anything else. According to this, Ezra, after fire destroyed the originals, sat down and from memory dictated, in the usual forty days, ninety-four books to five scribes: twenty-four of the Old Testament and seventy Apocryphal.
As Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are but elaborations of the mythical Moses, we will leave them and this key to the reader himself. Thus as far as we are concerned, the story of Moses is finished. We are not done with mythology, however, for this is but the end of one myth and the beginning of another, namely, that of Joshua, son of Nun—which could as well be None. According to the Arabs, Joshua was the son of Miriam, and Miriam is matter. But in Egypt Nun means water, cosmic, in mythology, and so Joshua, son of the water, is but a revolution of Moses taken from the water.
1 In fact, fiery Sinai represents a period prior to life’s exodus from Involution.
2 From G. G. Atkins, Procession of the Gods, p. 59.