17

The Metamorphosis of the Soul

Just as the philosopher Zeno famously illustrated the two doors of Truth and Falsehood to his pupils, so Plato used the symbol of two paths in the conclusion to his Republic when he wrote about a return-of-the-soul story of a soldier named Er, who journeys to a place of judgment, a kind of paradise, while the less virtuous travel along a path to the left and downward to meet their fate. The moral of the story is that those who’ve followed a life of awareness and self-examination will be able to turn their fate to their advantage, they will have a finer degree of control over their future, even the choice of reincarnation. Only this ardent pursuit of wisdom can combat the stupefaction to which all humans are subject. This symbolic imagery of the wisdom-loving soul ascending to higher levels of existence became a central tenet of Platonic, Stoic, and Neo-Pythagorean Mysteries schools.

Plato reminds us that the point of undergoing initiation into the Mysteries is to restore the soul to that state of perfection in which it entered the world, but from whose aim it becomes deflected while in the physical body. Suitably enabled, a person may conduct him- or herself with greater certainty while living. The Orphic schools point out an additional benefit for initiates when they finally reach the moment of physical death. Faced with a forking of the roads to either beatitude or to torment and wearisome rebirth, as it leaves the body the initiated soul already knows which direction to follow; it has an advantage over those who have slumbered through life unaware that they can better navigate the impenetrable darkness of the underworld before reaching the Otherworld and its paradisiacal vistas.¹ Homer himself reiterated the point when he wrote Hymn to Demeter: “Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these Mysteries. But he who is uninitiated and who has no part in them, never has possession of such good things once he is dead.” These relatively recent views substantiate the lengths to which ancient Egyptians went to spell out all the minutiae outlining the situations and obstacles to be met in the Amdwat, as exemplified by the copious descriptions throughout the chamber of Pharaoh Unas.

To journey into the Otherworld is to discover the self.

Secluded niche illustrating the concept of the Two Doors. Machu Picchu.

The metamorphosis of the soul is allegorically celebrated in the stories of Cupid, the god of love, and his eventual marriage to the goddess of the soul, Psyche. It is essentially the retelling of the path pursued by both Buddha and Osiris. Such characters appear to fall to Earth by the impulse of curiosity for the mortal world; they undergo toils and tribulations but eventually recover their forfeited bliss by reconnecting with the Otherworld while alive and discovering the wisdom inherent in the pursuit of the divine feminine.

The Gnostic gospels describe with blatant obviousness the benefit behind this pursuit. There are two antagonistic forces at work in the physical world: the God of Light, right-action, and love; and the God of Darkness, whose primary aim is to frustrate the attainment of such positive forces by making people “drink of the waters of forgetfulness . . . in order that they might not know from whence they came.”² Every social system of organized thuggery founded on deception has always promoted the anesthetizing of intelligence and the pursuit of “mind blindness,”³ to which the Gnostic gospels reply, “Ignorance is the mother of all evil. Ignorance is a slave. Knowledge is freedom.”⁴ The purpose shared by all esoteric sects was to liberate humans from this ensnarement by initiating them into the cult of knowledge from whence they might know themselves, and the technique was a shamanic journey of living resurrection into the Otherworld. Like Adam and Eve, a little knowledge goes a long way in helping one make decisions between good and evil whose cause and effect echo both in life and in eternity.

The ritual of raising the dead reverberates into our time, recognized as it is in Easter, a religious event marking the pivotal time of death and rebirth of the spiritualized god-man, now characterized in Christianity by a resurrected Jesus. Yet the etymological roots of Easter lie with Isis/ Ast/Asterte, who in her Saxon incarnation was Ostara—the Morning Star—and finally the Germanic Eostre. As such she equates with the Egyptian ideal of the reborn soul following the culmination of the ritual of resurrection at dawn.

In his eighth-century work the Venerable Bede laments that during the month dedicated to Eostre, feasts were held in honor of this fertility goddess but by his time the event had been usurped by the church’s new agenda. Even so the Egyptian connections remained. The prelude to Easter is Palm Sunday, marking Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey, an event loaded with ritual symbolism, being as it is the representation of a man who’s overcome his animal nature—which Jesus/Isa achieves by undergoing a figurative death. His followers marked this deeply symbolic rite of passage by waving palm leaves, a gesture harking back to the resurrection ritual of Osiris, for the symbol used to mark the occasion was the palm tree.

Osiris is depicted with a bluish-green skin; he is the oldest surviving expression of the cult of the Green Man, the tutelary deity of fertility who every year at the spring equinox revitalizes the land and raises it from the dead. Although Jesus is never depicted with green skin, the attentive eye glancing up at the stained glass throughout Chartres Cathedral—a site with long links to Mysteries schools—will notice how, in the southeast window, Jesus has been placed on an uncharacteristic green throne.

What countless initiates discovered during their immersion in the sanctity of the bridal chamber remains the biggest mystery of all, and yet the surviving accounts make one benefit very clear: the reconciliation of opposites and the experience of unity within the individual. This is the key that unlocks the limitless psychic energy within, which in turn amplifies the awareness of the self and one’s ability to function consciously as an autonomous being. The Gnostics and the later Hermeticists discovered all too well this potential to reach into a spiritual world beyond form that lies within each person’s grasp—the paradise long stymied by orthodox religion.

 

 

Cupid and Psyche. The legend is recounted in The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius, in which the hero is put through a series of adventures whereby he overcomes his animal urge, discovers the nature of his soul, and is indoctrinated into the Mysteries of Isis.

The path to understanding this latent potential was through initiation where the candidate underwent a figurative death and crossed over momentarily into a new threshold. Today, such an event is termed a near-death experience, and latter-day studies of such incidents reveal patients describing the same landscapes, euphoria, meetings, and blissful visions once seen long ago by initiates in their sarcophagi or caves. But more to the point, these people, through an involuntary experience, not only gained mystical revelations, they also discovered something about their purpose in this life, and upon returning to the body proceeded to lead charmed lives, with improved health, greater empathy for others, even greater sensitivity to light and sound. They also consider themselves to be more spiritual after the experience, but not necessarily aligned to organized religion.⁵

Although the journey of this book has dealt with things of ages long gone, its appeal is timely. More and more people are shunning major world religions because their core has been revealed to be hollow or their message hijacked by extremists. At the very least, people are rejecting communal prayer for personal introspection, ironically imitating the very essence of the initiate’s solitary search for self-discovery. As humans, we long for spiritual rejuvenation and direct experience of purpose.

The aim of the Knowledge was to assist people transcend their perceived helplessness by taking an active role in their personal conscious manifestation process. Because all forms are interconnected, both in the material and the ethereal, a person armed with an understanding of cosmic processes can actively influence the outcome of forces taking place in both spheres; they can become masters of their own reality rather than being victims of it. By becoming aware of their place in the order of life, a man or woman can instigate changes in the world around them, they can influence circumstance, and far from being passive observers, they can make reality respond to their will.

The successful journey into the Otherworld and the discovery of the self represents the triumph of psychospiritual energy above blind religious dogma. Ultimately the goal and gift of living resurrection is freedom of conscience, precisely as the Gospel of Thomas reminds us: “Whoever finds himself is superior to the world.”⁶