The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909Besant, Annie
Religion
The changing world, and lectures to theosophical students.: Fifteen lectures delivered in London during May, June, and July, 1909
Besant, Annie
Theosophy; Theosophy -- Study and teaching
When Gautama was initiated as the Buddha, another then became what I
have called the “Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva. His first manifestation
upon earth was at the beginning of the next sub-race. That you will very
readily see, and for that reason I have been tracing down those names,
sub-race after sub-race, that you might realise the relation between the
new departure of mankind and the manifestation of the Supreme Teacher. So
when the fifth sub-race was being born, when there was the slow growth
of the Teuton in the forests of Germany, when the germs, the seeds of
that new sub-race were being sown over Northern Europe, then was made
manifest again the Supreme Teacher, and He came to the world once more
to found a new religion, once more to bless a dawning civilisation. The
religion that He founded, the civilisation that He blessed, gave to him
the Greek name, the Christ. Let us pause for a moment on that western
name—name, again, of an office. For it was not the name of the Buddha
that He wore; it was not the name of an individual. As we look at the
dominant Greek thought of the time we find that that thought embodied its
highest triumph in a certain institution known as the Mysteries. There
were Mysteries in ancient Egypt, in ancient Persia, in ancient India, in
all the countries of that elder past; and among the Greeks also there
were Mysteries—the Orphic Mysteries, to which I alluded, and many others
known to the students of Grecian history under many names of Grecian Gods
and Goddesses, as we call them, of the Teachers of the past. In those
Mysteries there was a certain grade marked with the name Christos; these
Mysteries the reflexion on our earth and in our poor worldly mirror of
the great Initiations that belong to the Occult Hierarchy that guides the
religious destinies of men, a shadow of those supreme Initiations thrown
down upon the mirror of earth for the helping of ordinary humanity. This
kind of reflexion is indicated, for instance, in the Christian Testament
when it is said that Moses, the great leader of the Jews, made all things
according to the pattern shown to him in the mount—a well-known ancient
phrase, the Mount of Initiation—an indication to the people who followed
him as lawgiver that the temple which he outlined, which for a time
was seen in the tabernacle that accompanied the Jews in the wilderness,
and then received its more gorgeous presentment in the Temple of King
Solomon, was formed after the pattern of the heavenly things. So the
heavenly and the earthly are thus related as object and image, and the
object, which is the great Initiations of the Hierarchy, was imaged here
in the civilisations of the past in the Mysteries, by which, by many
ordeals and in many difficult ways of training and of discipline, the
best men and women of the older civilisations were guided upwards from
the human to the superhuman path. In those Mysteries there was this
grade, the Christos, the anointed one.
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