Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries

form part of the Lesser Mysteries, being integral portions of

His place. In the mythic tales the resurrection of the hero and his glorification invariably formed the conclusion of his death-story; and in the Mysteries, the body of the candidate was always thrown into a death-like trance, during which he, as a liberat

ines of the human constitution, and understand the natural and spiritual b

and speak indifferently of "soul and body" or "spirit and body," meaning that man is composed of two constituents, one of which perishes at death, while the other s

l, and Body. This division is sound, though needing further subdivision for more profound study, and it has been used by S. Paul in his

own Body. The Soul is dual, and comprises the mind and the emotional nature, with its appropriate garments. And the Body is the material instrument of Spirit and Soul. In one Christian view of man he is a twelve-fold being, six modifications forming the spiritual man, and six the natural man; according to another, h

the need for intelligence on the part of all who desired to become Gnostics. After all, those who find them troublesome can leave them on one side, without gr

uch forms. The form may be of rarest, subtlest, materials, may be so diaphanous that we are only conscious of the indwelling life; still it is there, and it is composed of Matter. It may be so dense, that it hides the indwelling life, and we are conscious only of the form; still the life is there, and it is composed of the opposite of Matter-Spirit. The student must study and re-study this fundamental fact-the dua

never completely separated from each other until death, though a partial separation may be caused by an?sthetics, or by disease. These two may be classed together as t

eaves the physical body, and carries on his conscious activities in this, which functions in the invisible world closest to our visible earth. It

functions in this. It is his vehicle of consciousness in the second of the super-physical worlds, which is also the second

the dual physical body, the desire body, and the ment

of man formed part of the teachings in the Lesser Mysteries; the simple division into Spirit, Soul, and Body was exoteric, the first rough and ready division given as a foundation. The subdivision as regards the "Body" was

rding to the kind of matter he wants to travel in. The analogy is rough and inadequate, but it is not misleading. When a man is busy in the physical world, his vehicle is the physical body, and his consciousness works in and through that body. When he passes into the world beyond the physical, in sleep and at death, his vehicle is the desire body, and he may learn to use this consci

"caught up to the third heaven," and of there hearing "unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter."[243] These different regions of the invisible supernal worlds are known to Initiates, and they

cessive lives on earth, ere the germinal soul of the savage can become the perfected soul of the Christ, and then, becoming perfect as the Father in Heaven,[244] can realise the union of the Son with the Father.[245] It is a body that lasts from life to life, an

, "the Resurrection Body." It is not a body which is "made with hands," by the working of consciousness in the the lower vehicles; it is not formed by experience, not builded out of the materials gathered by man in his long pilgrimage. It is a body w

l by all, and is thus the expression of the fundamental unity. In the day when the Son Himself shall "be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be a

in "mortal sin." The great mass of humanity pass into a purifying region, wherein a man remains for a period varying in length according to the sins he has committed, only passing out of it into the heavenly world when he has become pure. The various communities that are called Protestant vary in their teachings as to details, and mostly repudiate the idea of post mortem purification; but they agree broadly that there is an intermediate state, sometimes spoken of as "Paradise," or as a "waiting period." The heavenly world is almost universally, in modern Christendom, regarded as a final state, with no very definite or general idea as to its natur

anding of the Resurrection and Ascension, we must see how

ysical surroundings, both people and things, we can steadily purify it, by choosing its materials well, and thus make it an ever purer vehicle through which to act, receptive of subtler vibrations, responsive to purer desires, to nobler and m

ody grows subtle and becomes very sensitive to the higher influences. In proportion as a man dominates his lower nature, and becomes unselfish in his wishes, feelings, and emotions, as he makes his love for those around him less selfish and grasping, he is purifying this higher vehicle of consciousn

ing built now by aspirations, by imagination, reason, judgment, artistic faculties, by the use of all the mental powers. Such as the man makes i

heaven while remaining on earth, coming into conscious possession and use of this heavenly body. And inasmuch as heaven is not far away from us, but surrounds us on every side, and we are only shut out from it by our incapacity to feel its vibrations, not by their absence; inasmuch as those vibrations are playing upon us at every moment of our lives; all that is needed to be in Heaven is to become conscious of those vibrati

o rise into the second heaven. After the Second Birth, the birth of the Christ in man, begins the building of the Bliss Body "in the heavens." This is the body of the Christ, developing during

trance, the death of the crucified. The body was placed in a sarcophagus of stone, and there left, carefully guarded. Meanwhile the man himself was treading first the strange obscure regions called "the heart of the earth," and thereafter the heavenly mount, where he put on the perfected bliss body, now fully organised as a vehicle of consciousness. In that he returned to the body of flesh, to re-animate it. The cross bearing that body, or the entranced and rigid body, if no cross had been used, was lifted out of the sarcophagus and

f the triumphant Christ: "I am He that liveth and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death."[251] All the powers of the lower worlds have been ta

on of the Son with the Father, of man with God, when the Spirit re-entered the glory it had "before the world was."[253] Then the triple Spirit bec

with the Father, and God is all in all. That is the goal, prefigured in the triumph of the Initiate, but reached only when the human

d righteousness men were to be saved from divine wrath. There was current in the Church the glorious and inspiring teaching that He was but the first fruits of humanity, the model that every man should reproduce in himself, the life that all should share. The Initiates have ever been regarded as these first fruits, the promise of a race made perfect. To the early Christian, Christ was the living symbol of his own divinity,

beside that grandiose ideal of esoteric Christianity, the e