Forlong - Rivers of Life

Sun Worship.
trary rather avoided this, raising the prophet to what they conceived a most perfect
and divine level, and therefore to a god-man—one able to mediate between men and a
still more distant ideal god. This, says the author of “The Keys,” many early Christians
saw in “the light of the world,” passing through his various stages—born of a
virgin, underground, subject to many perils in infancy, to the malevolence of Typhon,
the Serpent or Evil Spirit, and eventually dying through his agency, but not until he
had saved creation from his wintry curse, and left it well stored and able to withstand
fresh assaults. 1 “This Sun of Righteousness,” they averred, descended into Hell
(Ades or the West), and rose to heaven, the arbiter of life and death, the conqueror of
the grave. The Nicene Creed is thought by some to formulate the idea that Christ
was an incarnation of the Sun, and this the author thinks was natural, seeing that “Constantine
was an ardent Sun-worshipper,” and wished Christianity to be engrafted on
Soar cult; whereas “Julian, more truthfully-minded, sought to re-establish Sun-worship
in connection with Christianity,” 2 engrafting on the Sun-incarnation-idea, together
with. many spiritual truths those Neo-Platonic views of the Logos or “word made
flesh,” which the Jewish Christians had learned. Solar worshippers, of course, had no
objections to make to the so-called “Christian rites” of baptism, eucharistic repasts,
and keeping holy the Sun’s day. Indeed Jews, and especially Solar Essenes, had long
practised such Mithraic rites. The doctrines which Jesus is held to have taught as to
poverty, chastity, &c., were all severely inculcated by mauy sects, but most markedly
by the Essenes, who, as I have already stated, fully understood the meaning of the
Sun’s relation to bread and wine, and all his functions in connection with each season.
Among ourselves we see that those ritualists, as they are styled, who take most
literally in our present “eucharistie repasts” to the doctrine of the “sacrifices of
blood,” the “eating of my body, which is flesh indeed, and drinking my blood,” are
also those who are most strict in turning and bowing in their holiest prayers and rites to
Sol’s window, and who most insist on the “eastern aspect” of their altar table. What
they love is “that flesh which is pierced by the soldier’s spear.” 3 They cry for “the
real body,” “the real presence,” “the word and bread made flesh.” Alas! that they
should use here our strange equivalent for Basar, and so take back our ideas to the
still older faith. 4 Thus the symbolism so long in use in the worship of the god of fertility,
sexual though it was, became, with but half-reformed solar and spiritual
idealists, their own; and in the course of a century or two they also readily adopted
all the old tales of the good male and female deities, and of Typhon, the wicked Satan.
Thus, also, the ancient “Pagan” demigods and heroes, after slight modifications,
became the saints of the new faith. Mary—as mother, spouse, and virgin-daughter—
most suitably formed the new female triad; and Father, Son, and Spirit the great
male Triune. Satan, as Darkness, could have no companion, as there is nothing
tangible or visible in darkness, so there was no distribution in the functions, nor
1 See a Review of The Key of Creeds, by a
writer in Thos. Scott’s Series, 1875.
2 The Keys of the Creeds.
413
3
Priest’s Prayer-Book for the Church of England,
4th ed.
4
See note to p. 173, ante, also p. 197.