Simon Magus: An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism Based on the Ancient Sources With a Re-Evaluation of His Philosophy and TeachingsMead, G. R. S. (George Robert Stow)
Religion
Simon Magus: An Essay on the Founder of Simonianism Based on the Ancient Sources With a Re-Evaluation of His Philosophy and Teachings
Mead, G. R. S. (George Robert Stow)
Simon, Magus, active 1st century
Nor again should we find cause to grieve at an attempted interpretation
of the Trojan Horse, that was fabricated by the advice of Athena
(Minerva-Epinoia), for did not George Stanley Faber, in the early years
of this century, labour with much learning to prove its identity with
the Ark. True he only turned similar myths into the terms of one myth
and got no further, but that was an advance on his immediate
predecessors. Simon, however, had centuries before gone further than
Faber, as far as theory is concerned, by seeking an interpretation in
nature. But, in his turn, as far as our records go, he only attempted
the interpretation of one aspect of this graphic symbol, saying that it
typified "ignorance." An interpretation, however, to be complete should
cover all planes of consciousness and being from the physical human
plane to the divine cosmic. The Ark floating on the Waters of the Deluge
and containing the Germs of Life, the Mundane Egg in the Waters of
Space, and the Mare with her freight of armed warriors, all typify a
great fact in nature, which may be studied scientifically in the
development of the germ-cell, and ethically by analogy, as the egg of
ignorance, the germs in which are, from the lower aspect, our own evil
passions.
In speaking of such allegories and tracing the correspondences between
certain symbologies and the natural facts of embryology, Simon speaks of
the "cave" which plays so important a part in so many religious
allegories. As the child is born in a "cave," so the "new man" is also
born in a "cave," and all the Saviours are so recorded to have been born
in their birth legends. The Mysteries of antiquity were for the most
part solemnized in caves, or rock-cut temples. The Epoptae deemed such
caverns as symbols both of the physical world and Hades or the Unseen
World, which surrounds every child of man. Into such a cave, in the
middle of the Ocean, Cronus shut his children, as Porphyry[136] tells
us. It was called by the name Petra, or Rock, and from such a Rock
Mithras is said to have been born.[137]
Faber endeavours to identify this symbolical cave with the Ark,[138]
which may be permissible from one aspect, as the womb of mother nature
and of the human mother correspond analogically.
In the "new birth" of the mysteries, the Souls were typified as bees
born from the body of an ox, for they were to gather the honey of
wisdom, and were born from the now dead body of their lower natures. In
the cave were two doors, one for immortals, the other for mortals. In
this connection the cave is the psychic womb that surrounds every man,
of which Nicodemus displays such ignorance in the Gospels. It is the
microcosmic Middle Distance; by one door the Lower Soul enters, and
uniting with its immortal consort, who descends through the door of the
immortals, becomes immortal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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