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TENTH PHASE: THE RESURRECTION & THE ASCENSION
THE PROSERPINE MYTH
Anything that begins must end; but there are ends which are made points of emergence into larger cycles, and there are "deaths" which channel the harvest of individual selfhood into the patterns of more-than-individual living. To him who has experienced the Transfiguration; to him who has assimilated the Neptunian "gift-waves" of the spirit, death can become if he passes successfully through the tests of Pluto and the "descent to hell" a reorganization of the dynamic and ideo-spiritual elements of his illumined personality. The bio-structural framework which the racial ancestry had built and filled with compulsive instincts and collective idols collapses; the warp and woof of the ego-ruled psyche vanish, and the many colored shapes of personal existence are dispersed, as a neat jig-saw puzzle being shaken loose violently. But, from the very substance of Space itself, from nowhere and everywhere, a condensation of power and purpose is felt, and the scattered elements are reintegrated into an "organism of 'light". Space itself is now the warp and woof a new kind of space, an expression of the purpose and power of the spirit. The tapestry of self is woven by the Star into a "Robe of Glory", a "Risen Body" of spirit-substance.
The Hindu philosopher speaks of the svarupa, the concrete and operative form of selfhood (sva, meaning "self"); the Buddhist, of the nirmanakaya body, a protean organism which is beyond or with-out (nir) the principle of ego-individualization (manas). The Gospels record the mysterious appearance of Christ after the Crucifixion in what, in every respect, was a physical body, able to take food, susceptible of being touched by Thomas' doubting hands, holding converse with pilgrims on the road in a most normal way yet, also capable of materializing in the midst of a room, passing through walls and closed doors as if these were open lanes of space.
The devotee bows in stunned worship as before a unique never-to-be- repeated miracle, and finds it convenient and far easier not to think further. The intellectual believer, who has need of Christ as a teacher of ethics or psychological wisdom, seeks to dismiss what he cannot explain with his ego-structured mind compelled to think in terms of absolutely separate bodies and discrete concepts. It is all symbolism, he claims; and he too fails to meet the challenge implied in a potential fact, around which he might have to reorganize his data of insecure knowledge. How could one understand Christ's Resurrection, who is not ready to reintegrate his consciousness around the potentiality of his own eventual resurrection? How could one conceive of the "Body of Glory" who has not realized the substantiality of the spirit and the possibility that space itself might have an entirely new meaning and character in terms of the activity of the spirit?
That the spirit might be said to have substance should not disconcert the modern mind now accustomed to behold the transformation of matter into energy. But while all that modern man can do is to decompose and disintegrate, the essential nature of the activity of the spirit is to harmonize and to integrate, to bring forth new concrete manifestation in terms of a divine purpose thus, to create. This activity of the spirit occurs in answer to the needs of all separate entities, of humanity as a whole as well as of all relatively isolated egos striving through lives of discord and want. It is a harmonic response to every disharmony, a compensatory (thus healing, whole-making) activity welling up from the absolute Harmony which we call God, and whose manifestation men witness as the heavens.
For most modern intellectuals these heavens still constitute the immensities of a space which extends infinitely in all dimensions, as the limitless container of celestial bodies; yet the Einsteinian concept of space already negates such an image, as space is made to curve and to become bent or modified by the presence of material aggregates, of planets and suns. The synthesis of the concepts of space and substance can be carried much further, at two different levels. Space considered as a framework of emptiness inside of which separate objects move and extend the one next to the other is space conditioned by matter; it is "discrete" space, space as extension. Space can be conceived also as a manifestation of the being and power of God; emerging as a result of the activity of the spirit, each act of spirit generating as it were its own space. Space, so understood, is "concrete" (which means etymologically "growing together"); it is space as intention, not as "extension".
If spirit is "intent" upon being active in any particular field where there is need of its activity, spirit is there. The intention creates the space. It is not for the spiritual act a matter of going from one place to another in a space which extends between things. The space covered by the act of spirit can only be conceived in terms of the intention and purpose of the act; not in terms of material distance. This space is an expression or attribute of the purposeful activity of the spirit and fundamentally of God's intent. Thus, in Biblical symbolism, God says: "Let there be light!" And there is light. Modern science now recognizes that light is both energy and substance. But, more than this, light is, in essence, an expression of spiritual space; or we might say the link between the space of spirit-activity and the space of "extension" of the world men perceive through this very light.
The main characteristic of spiritual space, as we understand it, is that it is ''ideo-plastic''. If the disharmony of an illness is present in a person, and if the healing action of the spirit seeks to reestablish the disturbed harmony, the spirit's intent condenses, as it were, spiritual space at the point where the disharmony exists. The spirit "is there," in that space; it is there precisely, concretely, as a healing image of harmony, compensating for and harmonizing the diseased condition. This healing image is not a mere phantasm. It is substantial in a spiritual sense. It is a manifestation of the "concrete" space in which all acts of the spirit occur. Moreover, as this healing image is intended as a compensation and cure for the disharmonic material condition, it bears a definite relationship to that condition. It is, in a general sense, the positive and radiant counterpart of the negative and darkened organism is being healed. It is as soul is to ego, as the Risen Body of Christ (and of all true Sons of God) is to the material organism of Adamic man in bondage to the disharmonic condition of earth-nature.
Indeed the Risen Body of Christ was, and is, a healing answer to the need of humanity. It is an effective and infinitely potent act of the spirit intent upon revealing to the men of a new era the purpose of God for them and the era. It is an act of spirit expressed ideo-plastically; that is, in the form of the divine idea and purpose of the act. It manifests in spiritual space, in a space that is concrete and substantial in as much as it can condense in substantial objectivity, at whatever point of our material space the healing and revealing act of the spirit is intent upon reaching. The intent of the act, the condensing ideo-plastic image, and the spatial substantiality of it, are all indissolubly related factors in the spirit's act itself; and the expected result of the event is a healing or stirring effect upon the human beings confronted with the Christ-Body, or with any similar manifestations and revelations of the harmonizing power of the spirit.
The appearance of Christ in his Risen Body was made necessary by the poignant need of his disciples and of the civilization to which they were to convey the Glad News of the individualization and incorporation of God in a perfected individual of the Adamic race. What this News conveyed was the birth of a vast cycle of human evolution in which the power of divine Sonship was to be released in such a manner that every person in whom the God-seed had reached sufficient development as an organism of individualized spirit could assume this power and become transfigured by it. Every Risen Body every Adept or Master is an answer to a need, the need of humanity as a whole, or of a section of it to which the resurrected individual is specifically linked by his ancient karma overcome by the power of perfect love and sublime compassion. This Body, for the man who overcame the Plutonian confrontation with the accumulated collective failure of all mankind, is the vehicle of his personal immortality; but it is also a super-personal answer to this collective failure (the state of "hell"), whose shadow blinds human beings everywhere.
The risen individual is no longer bound by the cycle which his birth on earth as a person had opened. He has emerged at long last as a center of divinity, as a Source of spirit-activity, as a "Celestial", as a Star in the Constellation which is the sacred Company of Those who like him are servants of the Great Orphan, humanity. He has become the component part of a vaster cycle, bound by "Man", rather than by an individual ego. He has transformed the conscious death of his Crucifixion into the prelude to a final entrance (i.e. Initiation) into the realm of divinity. He has made of an end a beginning a beginning which need have no end. For, as the end of the new cycle will come near, it can once more be made into a greater beginning; this, for ever and ever, from cycle to always vaster cycle. Immortality is the power to make of every conscious and significant end the beginning of a larger cycle.
Beyond the planet Pluto, symbol of the Guardian at the Gates of Immortality, we may already distinguish the presence of a new orb. I have suggested long ago the name Proserpine for the yet unknown planet; for in that name lies hidden the symbol of all resurrections. And the stage beyond Pluto can only be that of the Resurrection.
Resurrection can be the unconscious and fate-ordained resurgence of life in a framework of "material space" and earth-bondage, or the conscious, radiant and healing service of the triumphant Christ to humanity in the "spiritual space" of his Risen Body. In the ancient myth of Proserpine (or in the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, Kore) one can find references to both types of resurrection, though by far the more explicit and obvious meaning is that according to which Proserpine symbolized the spirit of ever-renascent vegetable life, the so-called Corn Spirit.
There is little doubt that the story of the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto, god of the Underworld, and of her return to the surface of the earth for two-thirds of each year, was in its earliest form a mythological representation of the yearly cycle of vegetation in temperate regions. Proserpine during her yearly stay in the realm of Pluto is vegetable life in the condition of seed; while through the remaining months of the year she is life in the condition of leaf, stem, flower and fruit. Thus the story tells of the constant rhythm of seasonal life in its below-the-horizon and above-the-horizon states; and throughout the vitalistic stage of human culture, particularly in evidence during the Taurus processional Age and in agricultural societies built along the banks of great rivers, this yearly life-rhythm was the substance of the "cults of fertility", about which much was written last century, but not always with great understanding.
However the myth, at least in its latter-day versions, contains some features which point to a deeper and spirit-revealing meaning a meaning dealing with the development of spiritual individuality and with the more conscious aspect of the "descent to hell". Characteristic is the division of the cycle of Proserpine into one-third and two-thirds, rather than into two halves the more obvious astrological pattern. It may correspond to the alternation of seed-period and leaf-period in the vegetation cycle of almost semi-tropical countries; but it also refers no doubt to the sequence of sleep-period and of hours of wakeful activity (one-third and two-thirds of the day cycle). Thus the abduction of Proserpine by Pluto represents the unconscious process of falling asleep, which (we saw previously) comes under the symbolism of Pluto.
The story in which Proserpine picks a black narcissus, after which the earth opens and she is ravished by Pluto, is deeply significant; for the black narcissus symbolizes the shadow image of the self, the dark form of the psyche, made up of all the fears and frustrations of the ego. It is the pull (or "perfume" of these psychic failures which forces the ego to let go of individualized consciousness and to blend its energies with those of man's common humanity. The threshold of consciousness (the "earth- surface") opens and Pluto draws Proserpine to the world of roots and of the disintegrating humus of ancient cycles, the realm of instinctive memories and of bondage to the past.
The name Pluto comes from a Greek radical signifying "rich". This god rules over all earthly wealth, because all wealth is the product of earth-conditioned activity, and his realm. Hades (the collective unconscious of psychology), is the repository of the collective past of mankind. Hades however is not a place of torment (the latter being Tartarus, still farther below); it is a place of unconscious identification (Proserpine "marries" Pluto) with the collective root-principle or substratum of human consciousness. Its denizens wander aimlessly without real (i.e., creative) individuality or purpose. Thus the human soul in this condition is undifferentiated and ghostly.
However, thanks to the plea of Proserpine's mother. Demeter (the Great Mother, Goddess of the fruitful earth), the gods of the Sky intervene and Proserpine is made to return to the earth-surface which becomes once more green and fruitful; and the alternation of above-the-earth and below-the-earth conditions begins for Proserpine. The important fact here is that Demeter's plea represents the conscious formulation of a need. Everything on earth needs Proserpine and her life-giving presence. The high gods answer to this need in compassion for mankind and for the Earth-Mother disconsolate in her barrenness.
The entire process becomes then a purposeful ritual (the central of the Elusinian Mysteries) in which the individualized consciousness, having assimilated the experience of man's common roots, rises drawn by the tragic need it has witnessed within the Great Mother, and at the same time being summoned by the celestial spirit, the Fatherhood of the Sky (Zeus-Jupiter being Proserpine's father).
Proserpine's cyclic journey, even if related to consciousness rather than to the yearly phases of vegetation, refers nevertheless to a compulsive and non-deliberate process. Proserpine culls the black narcissus unaware of what will befall her; and she carries into Hades no living remembrance of her celestial father. On the contrary, in the case of the Christ-mythos, Jesus meets his Crucifixion deliberately and in full consciousness. He can do so because he had experienced the Transfiguration; because the God-seed was germinating within him; because the Star had been realized by him as "heaven within". He can therefore carry to hell his own heaven, his own spiritual space and rise through the levitating power of his own spiritual intent, in the fullness of his spiritual fruition, the Christ Body.
The normal individual like the Proserpine of the popular myth returns to earth through the power of that over which he has no conscious or individual control; he falls asleep and awakens, he dies and is reborn, in unconsciousness. Only he who has realized fully the power of divine Sonship within his transfigured being, he who has not shrunk from the Crucifixion and who did accept his responsibility to humanity and the era to come, can succeed in experiencing death and the descent to hell in a consciousness illumined by the presence of the Star within. Only he can rise in the spiritual space of heaven-within and, as need arises, can condense the substantiality of this space into a Risen Body that will communicate to his disciples the message of his immortality within the realm of the "Celestials".
The Ascension concludes the process of transference from the lesser to the greater cycle. It symbolizes the final Initiation into the Spiritual Brotherhood, whose celestial representation is the Constellation in which the Star of the risen individual is a center of light and power. There, individuality still exists; but it is now "celestial" individuality the uniqueness of the Star, that perhaps is now a Sun radiating light and spirit upon planets and myriads of emergent lives.
It is said that when the Illumined Road is consummated, there are several paths open to the Son of God, some of which lead him entirely beyond all possible contacts with our humanity. Symbolically, likewise, there are various types of star-systems: binary stars, star-groups, solar systems, and probably many others. Yet every star that radiates light and there are range upon range of light! can be understood as a condensed nucleus of that creative divine Potency which forever emanates and differentiates Itself as light. To us, bound by our conception of space as a framework for objects (celestial or otherwise) to extend in and move through, this creative Potency appears to be, as it were, beyond or behind space; and poet-mystics have thought of stars and suns as "holes in the sky" through which the creative energies of a transcendent world of divine Beings stream forth, or as lenses focusing the one divine Potency in an infinity of directions, differentiating it into a multitude of cosmic forces and powers.
The concept seems to have, however, a static character still bound to the idea of extension of material objects. God is not beyond some infinitely extensive universal space, or beyond a dark sky shutting him from our mortal eyes. God is where God acts; and God acts where there is disharmony and need for the restoring of equilibrium. Spiritual space is where a center of divinity acts. It is a characteristic manifestation of the act of spirit, and this manifestation occurs wherever there is a polarizing need for it. Thus, in so far as our material space is concerned, "heaven" is potentially everywhere. Heaven is a unity thus symbolically a "kingdom". Spiritual space is a unity. An organism of spirit does not travel through it. The spirit creates it, as mind creates ideas and images which have no material extension, yet which, if the mind is spirit-energized, can condense into concrete bodily manifestations.
Indeed mind, in this sense, is essentially the substantiality of spirit. The associative power of the human intellect generalizing upon the perception of the senses is a shadowy and but materially significant manifestation of this cosmic and harmonic Mind which is the spiritual substance of the universal Whole. Initiation is the entrance into this realm of ideo-spiritual substantiality, the harmonic universal Mind entrance as a conscious individual established in permanent Identity. It is thus symbolically the Ascension from the realm of earth-substance to that of spirit-substantiality, from the disharmonic mentality of mostly unconscious, instinct-bound and passionate men to the creative Mind of divine Harmony in which transfigured individuals act as nuclei of divine compassion and as agents for the release of the forever harmonizing and healing spirit within, yet beyond, all existence.
The cloud that enfolds the ascending Christ-Body and hides it from the disciples' perception is that ever-shifting threshold of consciousness which appears to separate the Mind of divine Harmony from that of intellectual and ego-constrained human beings. The Illumined Road is a bridge between these two realms of consciousness. It is a path of the light-ray returning to its divine source; for light is the link between spiritual space and material spaceand, in man, the path of this returning light-ray is the path of unconditional service and of an unwavering will to harmony.
Following the path the individual person passes through all the stations of the Illumined Road. That they become nearly similar to the last "Stations of the Cross" means simply that at all times the would-be Christ-Individual must act in the midst of a humanity still estranged from God and confused by its own intellectual achievements. The Crucifixion is the drama of the release of the spirit-impelled individual from the outer collective mind of the society of his day and age. The Resurrection from hell is the release of this individual from the inner collectivity of mankind's ancient memories of fear and failures.
Thus released, the Christ-individual is free free to accomplish forever the acts of the spirit in terms of that divine "necessity" which is the essence of absolute Harmony. He is free to integrate his unwearied efforts with those of the Companions seeking forever to lift the cloud on the Mount of the Ascension, so that men may commune, in understanding and in truth, with the vast Mind whose source is God, and whose substantiality sustains and embodies the ever-present manifestations of Those whose countenance is light, whose hearts beat in unison with the rhythm of divine Purpose.
