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Let us now compare Kattragam and the Logos.
"The Logos is the son of God the Father," says Philo (De
Profugis). Kattragam is also the Son of God, the God whose followers
started all the subtleties about the Logos.
"The Logos is superior to all the Angels" (De Profugis) .
Kattragam as the god of war commands all the Devas.
"The Logos is the Physician that heals all evil."
Kattragam in Ceylon is the chief healer as well as the chief fighter,
practically identical functions when healing means battling with evil
spirits. Hence the importance of Kattragam's gold sword, and the big
shield of Abrasax.
Says Philo:—"The just man when he dies is translated to
another state by the Logos, by whom the world was created; for God by
his said Logos, by which he made all things, will raise the perfect
man from the dregs of this world, and exalt him near himself."
(De Sacrificüs).
Abrasax has a whip, which makes him the Lord of Hell and supreme
judge. The Christos of the Gnostics had the same function. Also he
brought not peace but a sword, and could summon more than twelve
legions of angels.
All this sheds a flood of light upon the Gnosticism of Alexandria.
It was Buddhism filtered through the Kappooism of Ceylon. Samana Deva
Rajah and his Nâgas is reproduced in Ialdibaoth, a serpent God with
his seven serpent-headed sons. Then the Goddess Pattinee is equally
prominent. It was the aim of Philo, one of the Gnostics, ever to be
the "Servant of Sophia," the inspirer of all that is good.
The most holy book of the Alexandrine version of the scriptures is
called "The Book of Wisdom." (Sophia), in the same way that
the tractates of the higher mysticism of the Buddhists are called Prajńâ
Pâramitâ, the "Wisdom of the other Bank."
But Pattinee is also the Gorgon, a popular Gnostic gem. She is the
Serpentine Durgâ.
Another plagiarism is noteworthy. Sekkraia, the god, half stone,
half man, sits on his stone in one of Mr. Upham's drawings, and has in
his hand a cup of wine. Now the chief god of Alexandria was Serapis,
and his conventional head (Pl. 24, Fig. 4) is
crowned with a wine cup and tree markings, the wine of the Tavateinza
Tree. His hair is a coiled serpent.
This gives a meaning to one of the most popular of Gnostica mulets.
Here is Sekkraia, the god, half man, half stone. In the mysticism of
the Kabbala the "Cup of Libation" designates the fourth or
highest grade in the progress of the mystic. Some trace a version of
this idea in the legend of the Sangreal. Another gem (, Fig. 3) shows
the god half man, half stone, still more clearly. He figures as a King
and also a Yogi. King's "Gnostics" gives several specimens
of this design. Each has the long hair of the Yogi and the Nazarite.
Each has a beard; each also has his arms crossed. Mr. King dates the
rise of Serapis from the building of Alexandria. The earliest
statue—that at Sinope—had Proserpine (Durgâ) for his wife.
Serapis has two faces like S’iva in India, and Janus at Rome. He was
called Soter (the Saviour), as Tertullian *
tells us, for he healed body and soul. But Mr. King says that in his
earliest form he was the Lord of Hell, and Judge of the dead; these
conflicting functions have been worked into Christianity. Tertullian
talks of the "three natures" of Soter. The gems throw a
light on this. Fig. 6 gives plainly the Trinity of S’iva-Buddhism
One—the Yogi with a beard (Tertullian's "Unmanifested
Supreme"). Two—the wife, the Buddhist Dharma, the Gnostic
Sophia; and the third emblem is the Elephant with the Rod of Hermes,
two Symbols of the Spiritual life. Fig. 5 makes this still more plain.
Here we see the Elephant, like Buddha, coming from Nirvritti to the
manifested Pleroma.
Herodotus, who speaks in a very circumstantial manner of the
deities, and of the religion of the Egyptians, makes no mention of
Serapis, His worship was not introduced to Rome until 146 A.D. Serapis
is described as a sort of Jupiter-Ćsculapius. In the second century
his temples in Egypt, called Serapes, numbered forty-three, at which
great cures were effected. His symbol was the Serpent, and he was
pronounced one of the infernal gods; and Jacobi in the "Dictionnaire
Mythologique" says that his statue, which Ptolemy replaced with
that of Sinope, was a block of granite rough and formless.
And the reader will perhaps remember Gibbon's account of the
Serapion at Alexandria whose pompous colonnades, upraised on a vast
artificial mound one hundred steps above the city, glittered with
golden statues like the Mahâdewayo Vihara in Ceylon; and possessed
"arches, vaults, and subterranean apartments," *
presided over by the goddess Anaitis, the special patroness of the
Brides of the God. †
At Sinope, an early statue of Serapis with three heads marked the
rise of the Nile, and also, like Trailinga Is’wara, the Past, the
Present and the Future.
Mr. Moncure Conway, commenting on the exceptional concealments of
the body of Serapis, likens them to similar veilings when the body of
the Bambino of Aracśli is exhibited. But the mythology of Ceylon
sufficiently explains the matter. If a portion of the body of a god is
sometimes of flesh and sometimes of stone it would not do to show too
much of him. *
The ideas which we call Messianic, which were in existence just
before the epoch of Christianity, were derived from many sources. From
the prophet Micah, the Jews had been taught to expect an earthly
conqueror, who was to destroy all the enemies of Israel and to set up
the Chosen Race upon the "Mountain of the Lord" resplendent
with the "gains" (Micah iv. 13) of his conquests. This
Messiah was certainly a man, for according to Daniel he was to be cut
off. Then came the influence of a very old Persian book, the Bundahesh.
In it Soshios or Soshyans comes with his angels to effect a general
resurrection, and to send the wicked to eternal suffering with Ahriman
in hell. †
A work, the "Apocryphal Book of Enoch" seems a version of
this work Judaised, with Jehovah for Ormuzd and Satan for Ahriman. A
similar resurrection and a judgment is there described, but Soshios is
an angel, and the leader of the heavenly host in the "Book of
Enoch" is Jehovah in one part of the book, and
"Messiah," the "Son of Man" in another. This work
is quoted by St. Jude, and it was viewed as part of Scripture by
Tertullian. ‡
A fifth influence must be mentioned, overlooked for a long time,
but now held by scholars to have had great influence with the Gnostic
societies at that time abundant.
"Five hundred years Ânanda," said Buddha, in the
Culavagga, "will the doctrine of the Truth abide." *
It is urged that this prophecy must have excited the Gnostics, for
Buddha's death is fixed at 477 B.C., and a new Buddha would be due
exactly at the time of the coming of Christ. Now it is a noteworthy
fact that each of these five descriptions is radically unlike the
"Coming of the Son of Man" as depicted in the three first
gospels. For his coming was to effect a complete destruction of the
earth, and the million billion star-systems of the Kosmos:—
"The sun shall be darkened and the moon shall no more give her
light, and the stars in heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in
heaven shall be shaken" (Mark xiii. 25).
Heaven and earth were to pass away, and a new heaven and a new
earth were to come down from heaven. Under such circumstances all the
descriptions of eternal punishment in a cave under the earth with
Ahriman or Satan must be more recent additions. If the Son of Man of
the Gospels were really to come as described, there would be no Cave
in the centre of the earth, no Satan, no wicked at all, and the verse
in Mark more than implies that the celestial cohorts would have come
to an end. It is true that these descriptions in modern pulpits are
made to refer to the taking of Jerusalem, on the strength of an interpolated
passage in Luke, but that is quite irrational. The epistles, which
were much earlier than the Gospels, announce that the heavens being on
fire shall be dissolved at the coming of the day of God (2 Peter iii.
12). That phenomenon was not observed at the taking of Jerusalem.
Now if we turn to the Buddhism of Ceylon we may find a possible
explanation:—
It was believed that S’iva at stated periods effected the
complete destruction of the Kosmos, and annihilated both men and gods.
Then he created a new Kosmos. This idea had come on to S’iva-Buddhism.
In the Mahâwanso "Kappos" (Kalpas, Sansk.) are
constantly mentioned, periodical destructions that come like a thief
in the night. Their arrival, says Mr. Turner, can be no more
calculated upon than a man can guess how many mustard seeds there are
in a mountain one yogana in height made up entirely of mustard seeds. *
"It," says Mr. Upham, writing of Ceylon Buddhism,
"is philosophically described as a circle. The universe arises in
beauty and excellence, and enjoys a golden age of excellence and
peace. It deteriorates as it passes through a determinate series of
changes from its brightness and glory; the stature of its inhabitants
diminishes; and the perfection of its fruits and every other natural
quality become proportionately lessened and impoverished by stated
degrees, until the arrival of the period of their destruction, for
which three agents are periodically assigned, namely fire, water and
wind. Each of these causes has its exact limits. The last is the final
and grand cataclysm, which sweeps the whole system into general
destruction." †
Matter believes that the chief battle in the early stages of
Christianity was between the Old Testament dualism derived by the Jews
from Persia, and Gnosticism. It was said of Basilides that he made the
devil a divinity. Readers of this work will see the falsehood of this:
indeed, Matter refutes it from the Gnostic's own writings. But much of
the Christianity of the priest, which was totally different to the
Christianity of Christ, seems to be a compromise between these two
antagonistic forces. The fate of the wicked, as I have shown, to be
confined for ever and ever with Ahriman in the flames of hell, would
be an impossibility to Basilides, who believed that the Supreme God
burnt up the systems from time to time. On the other hand the idea of
two omnipotent gods, different and yet the same, one-half much
concerned for, and the other entirely callous to, the fate of mankind
their offspring, which is the basis of the Logos and also the Trinity
idea, would be pronounced utterly irrational except in regions where
the philosophy of the followers of S’iva prevailed.
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