The "questions that make people heretics" are, wrote the second century Church Father Tertullian: "Where does humanity come from and how? Where does evil come from and why?" But these are also the most fundamental questions of human existence!

In Cosmic Battle: An Introduction to the Beginning and the End we explore these very same questions, regardless of Tertullian’s warning.

When, in the fourth century AD, the Roman Catholic Church Fathers assembled together the books we today call the Bible, many texts were deliberately left out as they didn’t conform to Church dogma. Some of these books came to be known as ‘apocryphal,’ while others were destroyed altogether.

It is more than significant that just fifty years ago two discoveries, one at Nag Hammadi in Egypt (1946) and the other at Qumran near the Dead Sea (1947), brought to light scriptures and texts from the time before, during and after the establishment of the first communities devoted to the message brought by Jesus the Christ.

The Dead Sea Scrolls date from between 200 BC and 70 AD, while the Nag Hammadi texts, buried in the desert of Upper Egypt during the fourth century persecution of Gnostic Christians, are copies of manuscripts dating back to the first century AD.

The importance of the Nag Hammadi texts is that they disclose the seminal ideas and lost teachings of the first followers of Jesus the Christ, known as Nazarenes. Moreover, the scrolls discovered at Qumran introduce us to the Essene Order, revealing the influences that shaped the period in which Jesus lived.

These writings unveil a dynamic Way or Path of spiritual liberation. A careful study of the Nag Hammadi texts, in the light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, confirms that the original ‘Christians’ or Nazarenes, were Gnostics.

The Greek word gnosis means knowledge and especially, knowledge of God. This is quite different from knowledge about God found in theology and religious dogmas. It is also distinct from mere belief, or blind faith based on hearsay. Gnosis is both a quest for redeeming knowledge and a quest for one’s inner self.

Even the Church Fathers Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD) and Origen (185-254 AD) admit that the followers of Jesus the Christ were Gnostics. Clement called the perfect Christian "the gnostic" and pointed out that the apostle Paul uses the term gnosis in his letters. Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, used the word gnosis in quoting biblical texts (Isaiah 11:9, Hosea 6:6, Job 35:16) and frequently applied it to a specifically mystical kind of knowledge. For the Israelites, "to know" meant "to experience."

Gnosis is not a religion among others, but is the heart of all authentic religions and the core of the messages brought by the Prophets of the Eternal One. Gnosis is a Path of pure worship based on knowledge combined with love, rather than fear.

Being a Gnostic Christian or Nazarene meant discovering one’s spiritual nature, discovering, as one teacher put it:

 Who we are, and what we have become; where we were and where we have been cast; toward what end we hasten and whence we are redeemed; what is birth and what is regeneration.

The reader will immediately notice that we are on the same territory Tertullian deemed the breeding ground of "heretics." These very questions always infuriate and challenge the purveyors of so-called ‘orthodoxy.’

By the fourth century, in the time of the Emperor Constantine, the Gnostic Nazarene communities had been suppressed and the few authentic teachers were either exterminated or driven underground. Thanks to the power of the State, Roman Catholicism was now the undisputed ‘orthodox’ Christian Church. From this Roman Church later came the various protestant sects.

Despite continued persecution, the message of the Gnostics survived, their teachings forming the basis of what became known as the Secret Tradition. This wisdom was only termed ‘secret’ because concealment was often used to preserve it in purity from the tyranny sanctioned by the official Church and State.

Cosmic Battle: An Introduction to the Beginning and the End draws extensively on the Gnostic scriptures and the writings of the Essenes, presenting concepts long suppressed or distorted by the world order.

The complex themes outlined in this booklet are not offered as mere beliefs, or a dogma to be accepted or rejected. For, as one writer on Gnosticism observed, "Truth is not manifest and accessible, it is covert and has to be diligently sought out.’ The Cosmic Battle: An Introduction to the Beginning and the End aims to address the inner self and assist the reader’s process of awakening and liberation. It is a gift for those few seekers who can truly read between the lines and look beyond the language into the fundamental principles.

The ageless message of the Gnostics is the original Science of Life due to its psychological relevance and appeal. Gnosis is the Science of Life that speaks directly to the true inner being of each person with ‘ears to hear’ (Matthew 11:15). Ultimately, true knowledge comes not from books or rational arguments but from within, through the inner self. The power of God enlivens the holy spark within, surpassing mere intellectual debates. We find no more obvious proof of this than in the life of Jesus the Christ, who did not write lengthy books and did not give long discourses. In His life and message he displayed the divine power within and demonstrated it in a concrete manner.

Joseph Campbell, writing in Occidental Mythology, says:

 Actually, in Gnosticism... there was diversity because (as the Church was to find out in due time) individuals have differing spiritual capacities and requirements, so that... no one can safely pretend to have grasped Truth once and for all, least of all a committee (whether of cardinals or of presbyters) legislating in the name of the great majority of a popular, so-called universal religion, for whom metaphysical speculation, experience, and symbolisation must remain on a fairly elementary level.... Moreover, the paramount concern of a popular religion cannot be, and never has been, ‘Truth,’ but the maintenance of a certain type of society; the inculcation in the young; and refreshment in the old of an approved ‘system of sentiments’ upon which the local institutions and government depend.

A central characteristic of the Gnostic Tradition, in all its multifarious forms down through time, is total refusal to compromise with a damned world contaminated by evil and the devil. The Gnostics declare that all institutions, laws, churches and systems are nothing but a sham and a trap, the perpetuation of an age old deception.  Consequently they were hated and relentlessly persecuted by the powers-that-be. In the words of Jacques Lacarriere:

 The Gnostics saw themselves as rebels, misfits in a malign system on a cosmic scale. And like rebels in society they felt compelled to act provocatively, to express their inability to submit and to attract others away from the system’s stranglehold. They deliberately set about standing everything on its head, inverting all standards, beliefs and preconceptions. (The Gnostics)

The Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic text discovered at Nag Hammadi, records Jesus as declaring:

 Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.

Scholars now admit that while the four New Testament Gospels were written between 60 AD and 110 AD, the Gospel of Thomas contains material dating to 50-100 AD. A 1995 joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature announced that the Gospel of Thomas should be a part of the New Testament.

A concise introduction to the Gnostic formula in the Gospel of Thomas is offered by John P. Meier:

 In the gnostic myth implied in the Gospel of Thomas, the individual spirits originally dwelt in the kingdom of light, the kingdom of the Father, who is the first principle of ‘the All’ [the spiritual universe of divine beings]. By their very nature, these sparks were all united with and of one substance with the divine. Through some sort of primeval catastrophe, some of the spirits entered into the poverty of this material world and are imprisoned in the fleshly garments of human bodies. This fall and imprisonment have caused them to fall asleep spiritually, have caused them to forget their true origin in the kingdom of light; they are like drunkards and blind men in the realm of darkness. The ‘living’ Jesus comes into this world to wake these spirits up, to remind them of their true origin and destiny, to free them from the illusion that they belong to this material world of death. (A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 1)

In the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, we read that the Alpha and Omega are one (Revelation 22:13). The Beginning and the End are linked, and it is not possible to understand the destiny of things if one does not understand their beginning.

Cosmic Battle: An Introduction to the Beginning and the End brings together scattered facts pertinent to the genesis of human kind on this planet and unravels a vast conspiracy to keep us blind to our real origin and potential destiny.

Developing the ideas in the Gnostic scriptures, we arrive at profound answers to those perennial questions that so frighten the Establishment and the grey forces of conformity.

May this booklet aid in representing the ceaseless Gnostic Call and help each reader to arrive at a higher, more authentic level of life.

Life Science Fellowship International,
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
January 1997

 It may be that mankind has been invited to participate in a bizarre kind of contest with some undeclared cosmic opponents. Man may have been challenged to play the Reality Game; and if he can once apprehend the true significance of the preposterous clues, if he can but master the proper moves, he may obtain a clearer picture of his true role in the cosmic scheme of things. -- Brad Steiger, author and lecturer

The god of this world and the god most people believe in, is Satan the Devil. To some readers this may appear to be an appalling and disturbing statement. Equally, it may be shocking to learn that human kind’s real origin was outside the earth, and is unquestionably not terrestrial. Yet is it true? Truthful knowledge, the acquisition of which may be painful or unpleasant, is always preferable to so-called blissful ignorance that in the end destroys totally.

The first followers of Jesus taught that evil was a truly real force, not merely the privation of some good. One may, for simplification, regard this Evil Principle as the Adversary, Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Samael, Baal, or the Serpent. The fallen material world was seen as Satan’s domain, the source of suffering and corruption. This idea is preserved till today in the orthodox baptismal formula, where the candidate renounces the world and the flesh along with "the Devil.’

Satan, the Adversary, the devil, is the god of this world and the one worshipped by humanity. From a study of the New Testament Gospels we are left in no doubt that this was a fundamental teaching of Jesus. In the Gospel of Matthew we read how Jesus was promised earthly power and glory if He would worship the Adversary.’ Contemporary Christians pass over the elementary meaning of these verses: Satan, the Adversary, is the ruler of the world.

The impartial reader cannot fail to be struck by the implications of Jesus’ statements such as: "I testify of the world that the works thereof are evil;" 2 "Ye are of this world, I am not of this world,’3 "The prince of this world is judged;"4 "Ye [His disciples] are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world," "I pray not for the world but for them which Thou hast given me, for they are mine;"5 "They are not of the world even as I am not of the world."6 In the Gospel of John the world is seen as the opposite pole to God and human beings are either "of God" or "of the world." To be of the world is to be of the devil.

Throughout the Gospels we see the quite prominent antithesis that Jesus the Christ makes between His Father and "the Prince of this world"(7) who is credited with the power to dispose of this world’s goods.(8)

When Jesus was before Pilate he declared, "My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not he delivered to the Jews..."(9)

Early documentary evidence of the continuation of such an outlook among the first century followers of Jesus is found in the writings of Ignatius, disciple of the apostle John and bishop of the ecclesia (community) in Antioch, who was martyred in Rome in 107 AD.

Ignatius was believed to be one of the last Nazarene leaders who knew the ‘Mysteries of the Kingdom imparted by the Christ to his closest disciples. Asked by his community about the mysteries, Ignatius replied:

 I could write to you about the mysteries of the heavens, but I am afraid to do so. It would do you harm. I am able to understand the orders of the heavens, the degrees of the angels, the variations among them, and the differences of dominions, of thrones and powers, and of the elevation of the Holy Ghost and of the kingdom of the Lord, and the highest of all rules of God over everything else. There is an infinity of hierarchy in the world.

In his short Epistle to the Ephesians, Ignatius wrote: "Be ye not anointed with the bad odour of the doctrine of the prince of this world; let him not lead you away captive from the life which is set before you.’ Apparently this was a subtle allusion to the odour of burnt offerings in the deluded worship of the god of this world. In his Epistle to the Romans he says: "The prince of this world would fain carry me away, and corrupt my disposition towards God.’ In the long version of Ignatius’s Epistle to the Trallians he definitely identifies "the prince of this world" as "the devil."

Another early Nazarene writing the Epistle of Barnabas affords similar evidence. Clement of Alexandria ascribed this epistle to the apostle Barnabas, the companion of Paul. Barnabas warns his fellow-Nazarenes that the days are evil and that Satan possesses the power of this world.

Standing in opposition to God the Father, Satan is known as the slanderer (diabolos), from which is derived the English devil, and the Arabic Iblis. The Bible speaks of Satan as the old serpent(10) embodying all evil and wickedness, and full of conspiracies to keep humans enslaved to falsehood, in ignorance of truth, and in love with self and the world.

Within modern Christianity the notion of Satan is relegated to the confines of a mythical image of wrongdoing or even a bizarre supernatural personality responsible for leading people into transgression of ethical and moral codes. Few Christians understand the implications of Christ’s teaching that Satan is the god of this world" to whom humanity is in bondage.

Paul wrote to the Romans, "For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."(12) The true or inner man naturally longs for his true home. (13) He is trapped by his ignorance and blindness in a world of corruption and ruination.

Evil is not to be considered in terms of moral or social concerns. What people may regard as crimes and vile acts, are not the essential evils, though they may be the fruit of evil. Jesus stated that publicans and harlots - the most despised people of His day - would enter the kingdom.(14) He forgave the adulteress, and promised paradise to the thief on the cross. Christ taught that God looks on the heart, on the inner man, not on the transient actions of the outward man. In this way He exposed the real character of evil. The apostle Paul understood this when he wrote, "To the pure all things are pure, but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure."(15)

Marcion, who, in the first half of the second century sought to purify the rapidly expanding Christian community and return it to the pristine message of Christ, shocked the established Church when he wrote in his book Antitheses:

 When Jesus descended into Hell, the sinners listened to his words and were all saved. But the saints, believing as usual that they were being put to the test, rejected his words and were all damned.

"For when gnostic Christians inquired about the origin of evil," Dr. Elaine Pagels reminds us, "they did not interpret the term, as we do, primarily in terms of moral evil. The Greek term kakia (like the English term ‘ill-ness’) originally meant ‘what is bad’ - what one desires to avoid, such as physical pain, sickness, suffering misfortune, every kind of harm."(16)

The extremes of human experience and expression, largely defined by man-made laws and social conventions, are definitely not equivalent to the good and evil, light and darkness, order and chaos, of the Gnostic Tradition. What men regard as supremely ‘evil’ in one particular cultural setting or period of history, may be viewed as perfectly ‘good’ in another place or time. Therefore we must categorically state that what society commonly perceives as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has little, if anything, to do with what is termed Good and Evil in this booklet.

Evil is that which contributes to entropy, alienates all consciousness, and consolidates the false order of existence. The origin of evil is found in the nature of matter itself. It is the consequence of imperfection.

"No one can know what evil is," wrote the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg "unless he knows what the love of self and the love of the world are." Swedenborg, in his commentary on the Bible, tells us that Satan or Lucifer signifies self-love, the profaning of holy things.

The Adversary, Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, and the Serpent, are all names, metaphors and symbols of the Evil Mind or Principle - spiritual blindness, the spirit of ignorance, the ultimate separation from the source of light and life.

The author Anthony Roberts highlights the centrality of this Evil Principle in the religious literature of mankind:

 The idea that the human race has been consistently plagued throughout its history by ‘dark forces’ is of course not a new one. All religions make reference to the ‘powers of evil’ and have elaborate hierarchies of spirits, angels and demons engaged in an endless struggle for mastery of the cosmic environment and incidentally, human destiny. The great pagan religions that preceded Christianity and Islam were all possessed of an intimate knowledge of these spiritual forces, categorising them as gods and goddesses, fairies and elementals, and various personifications of the diverse energies of nature. Far back in the depths of so-called ‘pre-history’ it is now known that the human race was aware of, and paid homage to, transcendent beings that existed outside the realms of temporal reality but manifested within it. All over the world these beings are variously represented among the detritus of religious experience, leaving a residue in philosophy, art, architecture and, most important of all, in the wondering souls of this planets most dominant lifeform. In nearly every culture, past and present, the religious ethos consistently takes on a polarising dualistic form .(17)

 The destruction which Ahriman [Evil Mind] produced in the world was terrible. Nevertheless the more evil he tried to do, the more he ignorantly fulfilled the counsels of the Infinite, and hastened the development of good. -- Zoroastrian System

Turning to the New Testament Gospel of John, chapter 8, verse 21, we find that Jesus quite plainly told the religious leaders of His day, "whither I go, ye cannot come." Reading on we discover in verses 22 to 23:

 Then said the Jews, Will He kill Himself because He saith, Whither I go ye cannot come?

 And He said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world.

Jesus here distinguishes two basic patterns; one from "above" (the heavenly realm) and one from "below" (the earth). This is the very same profound truth we discover in the Essene Manual of Discipline where there is a clear distinction between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. In the 3rd chapter of John, Jesus tells Nicodemus that no one shall see the Kingdom of God "unless he is born again." As any good Bible commentary will show, the word here "translated as "again" should be correctly rendered "above." Unquestionably, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born from above." (18)

Long before the birth of Jesus, the Aryan prophet Zarathustra, known to the Greeks as Zoroaster prophesied the coming of a ‘Promised One.’ Many centuries later the Gospels would tell the story of the three wise men who were guided by a ‘bright star’ to the child Jesus in Palestine. They were Magi, mystic astrologers versed in Zarathustra’s prophecies.

Zarathustra, like Ikhnaton in Egypt, taught of one supreme deity synonymous with Dyaus Pitar, or "Heavenly Father." Jesus repeatedly identified the Absolute as the "Heavenly Father," instructing His disciples to direct their prayers to "Our Father" in Heaven.

In his reform of the religion of the early Aryans, Zarathustra also called the one and only God, Ahura-Mazda, the Lord or Spirit (Ahura) of Enlightenment or Knowledge (Mazda), who had prepared a Paradise, which was the term in the Avesta, the Zarathustrian sacred writing for heavenly realm. Paradise was a place reserved for all those who were just (artavan) and took the side of the Good in the battle against Evil. Zarathustra taught that in life there exists two opposing forces of the Good Mind and the Evil Mind waging a continuous battle.

Zarathustra’s teachings were noble and pure. He taught that Truth was the prime attribute of AhuraMazda and the essential basis of the Good; that the lie, in leading men away from the Truth, was the primary source of all evil; that men should seek the Right through Truth and reject lying and deceit. He also taught about sinister influences in the material world that issued from the Evil Mind and strove to mislead humanity by lies and falsehood; and that it was the allotted task of men to overcome and dissipate these evil influences by learning and living a greater Truth.

Ahura-Mazda is the supreme Good and Holy (spenta), the "first and the last." Accompanying him are an escort of divine beings (the Amesha Spentas or ‘Bountiful Immortals"): Asha (justice), Vohu Manah (Good Thought), Armaiti (Devotion), Xshathra (Kingdom, Power), Haurvatat (Integrity/Health) and Ameretat (Immortality). These divine beings or "Archangels," as some writers term them, parallel the Mighty Ones (Elohim) and Archangels of the Israelites. Together with Ahura-Mazda’s "Holy or Beneficent Spirit," Spenta Mainyu, they are equivalent to the "Seven Spirits before the Throne of God" listed in the Book of Revelation, also symbolised by the seven-branched candlestick (the Mosaic symbol of the Planetary Governors). Also, the Hebrew apocryphal book, Tobit, mentions seven Archangels in the presence of Yahweh.

The prophet Zarathustra taught that in addition to the Heavenly Father Ahura-Mazda, (the God of Light, Wisdom and Order, the source of life and immortality), there is Ahriman, (the Evil One identified as the Prince of the Air in this world, possessing the power of death, destruction and chaos, the source of darkness.)

Ahura-Mazda’s Holy Spirit Spenta Mainyu or the Good Mind is opposed by the Evil Mind, the Destroying Spirit Angra Mainyu or Ahriman. In the beginning, states a famous Zarathustrian Gatha, one of these two spirits chose good and life, while the other chose evil and death. The primordial separation, known also as the Primal Scission between good and evil, is the consequence of those decisions. Ahura-Mazda, the Supreme God of Light and Wisdom, is the Heavenly Father of the Good Spirit. By choosing the Good Spirit over the Evil Spirit, the righteous man chooses good over evil, the true Way over that of the false.

The Good Spirit (Spenta Mainyu) of Ahura-Mazda declared to the Evil Spirit Ahriman: at the "beginning of existence neither our thoughts nor our doctrines, nor our mental powers, neither our choices, nor our words, nor our acts, neither our consciences, nor our souls are in agreement."

Ahura-Mazda first created through his inborn lustre the multitude of celestial bodies and through His intellect the good creatures, governed by the inborn good mind. The Zarathustrian poems known as Gathas declare:

 So I acknowledge thee, O Ahura, to be first in greatness: to be worshipped in mind, as father of the intellect; wherefore, I saw thee, revealed to my eyes as the truth of religion, and the creator of existence.

The world first came into existence in spiritual form together with the archetypal perfect man. As Ahriman’s instinct is to destroy, he attacked the Good Creation. He released his miscreants to attack the archetypal man. Whenever the Beneficent Spirit brought forth a good thing, Ahriman countered with an evil one. Whereas Ahura-Mazda created the universe in purity, order and harmony, Ahriman added his own forms to create disorder and disharmony. Ahura-Mazda, in the sacred Avesta writings, is styled "the Creator, the Brilliant, the Majestic," who will in due course triumph utterly over Evil, which derives from a lesser, inferior source.

Ahura-Mazda, the God of Light, created the race of Aria (Valiant Warriors) of pure light. Ahriman, the Prince of Darkness, prompts the fall of the Aria by drawing them into mortal bodies. The Aria recognise the sun as the paramount symbol of their Heavenly Father, the God of Light. Ahriman makes it so the sun burns them. Ahriman presides over the Children of Darkness or Serpents, who are a race of lawless demons. The Aria await a Saviour (Saoshyant), who will defeat injustice and establish a Golden Age on earth, the final assault of Evil on the Good bringing about the last Great Battle. At the end of time this Promised One will come, say the Zarathustrian sacred texts, "from the region of the dawn, to free the world from death and decay, corruption and rottenness." This is the righteous judgement when, as it is written, "the dead shall rise and immortality commences.

The last judgement is heralded by monstrous upheavals, the sun and moon will not give their light, religious devotion will wane and respect for elders and family will disappear. But ultimately the climax of the Great Battle will see the victory of the Good and the annihilation of the power of Evil! Ahriman himself is rendered eternally impotent, and all existence experiences a time of renovation or ‘refreshment, the final judgement being one of purification. Similar to the destruction of the earth by fire described in the New Testament, Zarathustra’s ‘End Time’ fire purifies and spiritualises the world. Also, like the first followers of Jesus, Zarathustra hoped for the imminent "transfiguration" of the world, declaring: "May we be those who will renew this existence!"

Man is originally "of the Light" but, since he became mortal, suffers from the malevolent influence of Ahriman. On earth, according to his deeds, he belongs either to AhuraMazda or Ahriman. By fighting against the Powers of Darkness, a person may attain to a part of the Light again, thereby achieving a share in the recreation of order. Such a holy one, who on earth lives for Ahura-Mazda and maintains good thoughts, words and deed, will win a seat near Him in Heaven.

The purpose of life on earth is to assist the expansion of the Good Creation, thereby living in such a way that the spirit progresses and attains union with Ahura-Mazda -- the ultimate goal of existence!

In the Cosmic Battle between the forces of the Good Mind and the Evil Mind, rites and ceremonies play a defining role. The Gathas and the Zend-Avesta mention "secret doctrines." Through a sacred rite the initiate achieved ‘illumination," the separation of his spiritual essence from his corporal nature. This awakened the spiritual seeker to the condition of purity that preceded the mixing of the two essences that took place as a consequence of Ahriman’s attack. Initiation was said, by the Zoroastrians, to be an induction into the army of Ahura-Mazda, consisting of a donning of the armour of light and a girding with the swordbelt of faith preparatory to waging war against Evil. Consequently, the Valiant Warrior faithful to the Wise Lord Ahura-Mazda can commune with Him.

Convinced of his divine calling, Zarathustra attempted to bring the pure teachings of the primordial Religion of Light unto men. He insisted that he was not establishing a new teaching but simply reiterating a primordial teaching that had been embraced by their noble forebears. His uplifting message championed religious purity and social justice; while denouncing the corrupt priests and potentates of his time.

Remarkably, Zarathustra, while recognising Ahura-Mazda as the one Supreme Lord of all humanity, was tolerant of other religions. He urged his followers to side with all just and virtuous creeds and men in the Great Battle against Evil.

Professor Bleeck, (translator of the first English version of the Zend-Avesta in the 19th century), wrote of this religion:

...which certainly taught the immortality of the soul and a future state of rewards and punishments, (for centuries before these doctrines were prevalent among the Jews)  - a religion which, for ages prior to Christianity, announced that men must be pure in thought and word and deed, and that sins must be repented of before they could be atoned for; a religion whose followers were forbidden to kill even animals wantonly... such a pure and venerable religion is one which must always command the respect of the civilised world.

The teachings of Zarathustra had a tremendous impact on the Judeans. The Hebrew Moses, an initiate of the wisdom of Egypt(19) was held to be a prophet and lawgiver like Zarathustra. However, the message brought by Moses, which, in common with the laws of Egypt, enunciated the principle of exclusion, was influenced at every period by the creeds with which it came in contact.

Beginning with Moses, the history of the Israelites is marked by a long struggle between the prophet and his people. The Old Testament chronicles the tribes of Israels' torn allegiances between the Way of Light and the Way of Darkness.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible we can discern this difficulty beginning from the times of Moses and Aaron through those reigns of David and Solomon, extending into the milieus of Ezekiel and Jeremiah. All along, a righteous remnant led by inspired prophets dutifully preserved a secret wisdom within their geographically separated communities. These brotherhoods of Nebiim or ‘Schools of the Prophets’ were the guardians of the Israelite's Secret Tradition stemming from the original revelation bequeathed to the Hebrew patriarchs. These sacred schools vehemently opposed the priesthood, accusing them of having miscreated a national cult founded upon degraded superstitions.

Long after Zarathustra lived and taught, the deluded tribes of Israel worshipped the nature-gods known as Moloch, Molech, or Baal. Along with the fertility goddess Astoreth, altars to these deities were erected throughout the land of Israel. In numerous Old Testament passages we see repeated condemnations of the popular cult prevalent among the people of Judah, who routinely sacrificed their first-born by burning them to propitiate the fire god, Moloch. As the prophet Jeremiah noted: "For the children of Judah have done evil in My sight, saith Yahweh: they have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name, to pollute it. And they built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I command them not..."(20)

In the tradition of the embattled prophets, Amos, writing in the eighth century BC challenged the hypocrisy and blindness of the priests who condoned a harsh system of exploitation and privilege for the motive of financial profit. Amos confirms that the Israelites were deluded in that they worshipped God, when in fact they served Moloch or Baal. "Did you offer to me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness for forty years, O house of Israel? But you carried the tabernacle of your idol Moloch and the star of your god, Chiun, which you made for yourselves."(21)

The Hebrew records display no antipathy to the Aryan Zarathustra, confirming that he was not regarded as an alien prophet. In fact, so great was the influence of his revolutionary message on the Hebrews that certain Judean mystical sects identified him with the righteous patriarch Seth, son of Adam. Others made Zarathustra a teacher of Abraham or an associate of Ezekiel.

It is noteworthy that the Avesta, while maintaining that Zarathustra is inspired by Ahura-Mazda and His appointed messenger, makes him the successor of a much more ancient Messenger of Light. Behind the particular revelation shaped by current events, one grasps here the chain of divine consecutive revelation uniting all true believers. This is the primeval revelation originating at the beginning, of which humanity is reminded down through the corridors of time by the faithful Messengers of Light. This Religion of Light requires repetition and restatement in changing historical circumstances, yet it remains a golden chain linking Seth, Enoch, Zarathustra, Moses, the Essene savants, Jesus the Christ, Muhammed, and all the Emissaries of Light.

Cyrus the Aryan, a worshipper of Ahura-Mazda, in the Old Testament proclaims that a ‘Messiah’ appointed by Yahweh shall effect the return of Judah to Jerusalem from captivity in Babylon. When a remnant of the tribes of Judah, Levi and Benjamin did eventually return to Palestine around 545 BC, their priests substantially edited and reassembled the Books of the Law.

Before the Babylonians captured the people of the kingdom of Judah in 586 BC, priests had already begun to rework and fabricate the original Law given to Moses. The prophet Jeremiah denounced these corrupt scribes and charged them with falsifying the Law. He declared, "How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of Yahweh is with us? Lo, the false pen of the scribes have falsified them and written them wrong."(22) In Babylon the priests incorporated ideas and customs from their Babylonian captors. The return to Jerusalem marked the culmination of this ‘pious fraud’.

By the time of the building of the Second Temple in 515 BC, the Judeans had established a priest-state in which there was no place for prophets. The possibility of spiritual progress had been effectively stifled by the Rabbinic doctrine that the whole duty to Yahweh was contained in the ritual law and the priestly code.

The Law (Torah) was regarded as the final expression of absolute truth, and left no room for any further revelation. This led to legalism, bondage and the complete loss of spiritual perception, so that the Judeans did not recognise the Christ when He appeared. Judaism looked forward to the advent, not of another prophet but of a conquering Messiah, who would establish the worldly dominance of a victorious Judah.

Epiphanius, the celebrated scholar of the fourth century AD, who lived a considerable period in Palestine wrote that:

 The Nazarenes held that the Jewish form of the Pentateuch was not that which Moses received but a later fabrication; the Nazarenes claimed that they possessed the true law.

The forerunners of these Nazarenes were the Essenes.

The Secret Tradition survived among a remnant of old Israel, being preserved by the Essenes who were devout worshippers of the God of Wisdom and were the rightful heirs of the true prophets. "If it is true," wrote Fabre d’Olivet, as everyone attests, that Moses has left an oral law, it is among the Essenes that it has been preserved."

Of the environment that gave rise to these elements "opposed to the official (predominantly Pharisaic) Judaism of Jerusalem, centred on the Temple and the Jerusalem Sanhedrin," Dr. Michael Black says:

 It was represented in the North by strongly anti-Jerusalem, anti-Pharisaic Samaritan groups (Galilee fell well within the sphere of influence of these powerful Samaritan sectaries). In the South its best known representative was the monastic or semi-monastic sect of the Essenes, located by the ancient historians at the Dead Sea, and quite certainly to be identified with the sect of the scrolls. Although these were splinter groups, they were solidly united in their opposition to the Judaism of Jerusalem and they had much in common. Samaritan type Pentateuchs’, e.g. have been found at Qumran, and patristic evidence locates a group of Essenes in Samaria. There is a strong probability that these anti-Jerusalem sectaries were the descendants of the remnant Israel of the period of the Exile.(23)

Dr. Martin Larson makes the salient point that, "The permanent contribution of Zoroastrianism to European life and culture has come to us through its enormous influence upon the Gospel Jesus via the Essenes."24 The religious scholar R.C. Zaehner in his book The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism quotes Essene passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls that are directly borrowed from Zarathustrian sources. We should not be surprised that there is a continuity of the Cosmic Battle originated by Zarathustra's Avesta through the later Essene writings. As Dr. Frank M. Cross observed, 'there are intimate parallels between the Essene and primitive Christian communities.’

 According to the Revelation of the Mysteries, which has been kept in silence through all times eternal, but now is manifested. -- Manual of Discipline

From about 104 BC, as we learn from the Judean historian Josephus, the Essene Order emerged with its own communes, its own code of laws, discipline, and organisation, which included a total withdrawal and separation from this corrupt world. Josephus wrote of the "great holiness" of these Essenes who "loved one another very much." They saw themselves as the last custodians of the forgotten Israelite "religion of the wilderness." They lived in expectation of the day when an all-powerful divine personage would appear and establish the Kingdom of the Saints (the Sons of Light).

Our knowledge of the Essene communities was elucidated by the discovery, in the middle of the twentieth century, of scrolls at Qumran near the Dead Sea dating back to the first and second century BC. John Allegro analysed these Dead Sea Scrolls in his book, The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He concluded, as we will show, that the Essenes were a secret Order incorporating highly developed grades of initiation and rituals in which they pledged to never divulge the Secret Tradition to the profane.

Walter Birks and R.A. Gilbert highlight some of the essential characteristics of the Essene writings:

 The origin of evil in the world is attributed to the unholy union of angels and women as recorded in the 6th chapter of Genesis, ‘when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bare children unto them.’ After the earth had been cleansed by the Flood these wicked angels and their half-human offspring became demons of the air, hovering over the earth ‘seeking rest and finding none’ unless they could take possession of some human or animal body. They are permitted to work their will until the final judgement, when they will be chained or burned in fire. This is the conception of evil spirits which is assumed throughout the Synoptic Gospels.

 A second characteristic is the idea of the Day of Judgement which will end the present age and inaugurate ‘the Age to Come.’ The wicked, both angels and men, will be cast into outer darkness or burned in fire, the earth will be cleansed and the righteous ‘faithful remnant,’ the true Israel will live in a regenerated world, ‘the kingdom of the saints’...

 Thirdly, this Kingdom of the Saints will be ruled by the Messiah, who will also preside at the Day of Judgement. He will establish a New Jerusalem, the dispersed of Israel will be gathered in, and the Gentiles will be converted and subject to him. In the Book of Enoch this coming Messianic ruler is identified with that ‘Son of Man’ chosen before the world was created and he will be revealed from Heaven in a supernatural manner when the ‘End of the Age’ shall come. (25)

Throughout their existence, the Essenes were violently opposed to official Judaism, to the priests at Jerusalem. Their writings condemn "The priests of Jerusalem, who will heap up wealth and unjust gain from the plunder of the people.’ The compromises and distortions of the dominant Judean sects are denounced by the Essenes who call for a return to the original teachings of Moses. Old Testament experts John Robertson and Philip Davies say that the aim of the Essene Order "was to found a new type of social and religious life based not upon kinship but upon free acceptance of a new covenant made with God."

The Essenes held that the Judaic form of the Mosaic Law was not that which Moses received but a later fabrication. Dr. Theodore Caster, after translating the scrolls, wrote of the Essenes:

 They were not waiting to receive the law - they already possessed it. Their aim was to deliver it from the realms of darkness in which it had been engulfed. They believed that the Torah, the divine teachings as revealed to Moses, had been compoundedly perverted by successive false expositors.(26)

Mirroring the protests of the prophet Jeremiah, the Essene writings warn:

 But for thy people lying priests flatter them, and deceitful scribes lead them astray. They have plotted wickedness, seeking to exchange thy holy engraved word for the smooth things they address to thy people, making them to turn their gaze into the errors they teach, revelling in their feasts, ensnaring themselves with lusts. (27)

Without a doubt the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal the Essene conception of the Absolute as fundamentally different and irreconcilable with that of official Judaism. The Essenes scrutinised the Hebrew Scriptures for their deeper inner meaning. To them the Bible was a coded text telling of the Cosmic Battle in terms of the creation (the beginning) and the coming apocalypse (the end).

They cherished the sacred wisdom that had been overlaid by the external dead letter of the Law. "Thou hast made me the authorised interpreter of profound mysteries," the Essene Teacher announces, "Thou hast given me understanding of thy faith and the knowledge of thy wonderful secrets".(28)

The Essenes recognised the rising sun as the primal cosmic symbol of the God of Light. Similar to a Zarathustrian priest reading from the Avesta, an Essene teacher might have been heard at sunrise chanting: "In the wellspring of light is the birthplace of truth; But from the womb of darkness come the children of error."(29) The Sorbonne Professor Charles Guignebert believed this "indicates that in their belief, the sun was not only the source of daylight, but a conscious cosmic power."

To initiates of the Secret Tradition the sun is the perfect symbol of the Absolute, the ineffable
 First Cause, therefore the popular symbol of Ahura-Mazda was the sun. Modern archaeological discoveries indicate that the early Israelites employed the sun as a symbol of the Most High God. Plato utilised the image of the sun to represent the idea of the Good and the source of existence.

The centrality of the Cosmic Battle to the Essene Community permeates all their sacred literature. They reiterated the entire history of Israel in terms of this Great War between the Two Principles. In their Manual of Discipline we read that the world is divided between the spirits of Light and the spirits of Darkness:

 From the God of Knowledge comes all that is and happens...He has created man to govern the world, and has appointed for him two Spirits in which to walk until the time of his visitation: the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Falsehood. Those born of Truth spring from a fountain of Light, but those born of Falsehood spring from a source of Darkness. The children of righteousness are ruled by the Prince of Light and walk in the ways of Light, but the children of falsehood are ruled by the Angel of Darkness and walk in the ways of Darkness.

Not only are "the sons of error" completely under the rule of "the angel of darkness;"  even ‘the sons of righteousness" can be led astray by him and suffer affliction "in the dominion of his enmity," but ’the God of Israel and his angel of truth have helped all the sons of light." All men are under the dominion of one or the other of the two spirits, which struggle for mastery even within the individual soul. But this is only for the duration of the present world. God has ordained an "appointed time of visitation," when He will destroy evil and "make the upright perceive the knowledge of the Most High and the wisdom of the sons of heaven."

In the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, an apocryphal work known to Gnostic communities in the Balkans and discovered at the Essene Qumran community, man must choose between the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Untruth, the law of God and the law of Belial [Baal].

The Essenes maintained that Satan-Belial was the force temporarily prevailing in the world. The Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah reveals him as the "angel of iniquity" who had ruled "this world" from the beginning.

The Book of Enoch constituted one of the principal Essene sacred books. Later it formed part of the scriptures of the first Nazarene communities and is quoted directly in the New Testament Epistle of Jude. Enoch narrates the epic of the Cosmic Battle, recounting how the angel Samael falls from his dignity and is cast into the abyss, becoming the ‘prince of this world." The Book of Enoch elaborates on the fall of the Watchers and the conflict between the forces of Light and Darkness. ‘The motif of the fallen angels," Dr. Charles Potter reiterates, "was a favourite legend among the Essenes." (30)

This fall is analogous to the origin of evil in the world. In the words of Dr. Paul D. Hanson, the myth of the fallen angels "offers an etiology (a code of behaviour) of evil in the world: all of the evil in the world stems from a heavenly event, the rebellion of certain divine beings, and more immediately, from the resulting generation of their pernicious offspring in the world’ .(31)

Human beings are caught up in this struggle of Light and Darkness, and what they are is dependent upon which side they fight for: Man’s relationship to the Prince of Light or to the Angel of Darkness is an existential one.

The Essenes knew that the Cosmic Battle, veiled as it was in the Scriptures, could not be fully understood by all people. It was reserved for those ‘few’ who had experienced the inner light of Gnosis. The God of Knowledge and Light was the Revealer of Wisdom to the Sons of Light.

Within the Essene community baptism was an outward sign of the initiate’s spiritual experience. This marked the seekers’ ‘new beginning, ‘the change of mind,’ that ‘inner rebirth.’ Through this process of awakening or illumination, the Essene became a Son of Light. Only "those who choose the Way" were permitted to remain in the Community. They were admonished in order "to guide them in knowledge and so to give them understanding in the marvellous mysteries and the truth."(32) Total commitment was required from all Essene communal members and all their worldly goods became community property. The Manual of Discipline states that those who "enter the covenant" are required "to love all the Sons of Light" and "to hate all the Sons of Darkness."

The Essene priests and novices renounced owning property, were celibate and lived separate from the world, while the common members lived among the wider society, engaged in trade and were permitted to marry. ‘The precise reason for the practice of celibacy at Qumran (or among the Essenes in general)," says John P. Meier, "is still debated: a Sinai-covenant theology that demanded sexual abstinence in preparation for encounter with God (Exodus 19:15); the extension of the rules for priestly cultic purity to the whole community, which was a living temple worshipping God in the company of the angels; or the belief that the group was or would be engaged in a holy war in the company of the angels against the powers of evil at the end of time." (33)

Celibacy was highly regarded by the Essene Order precisely because they saw themselves as holy warriors in the Cosmic Battle. This is in keeping with the biblical rules for holy war, which prohibit sexual intercourse during wartime.

All members of the Essene Order were divided into three groups or ranks, designated ‘Israel,' ‘Levi’ and ‘Aaron.’ Israel was the name given to the postulants or common members, the Levites were lower priests or novices and Aaron designated the initiates or holy priests.

The Essenes embodied the ethos of Ahura-Mazda’s Valiant Warriors and saw themselves as the Warrior Priests in preparation for the cataclysmic Messianic war. They considered themselves to be Soldiers of God ready for the fast approaching battle at the End of Time. Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise elucidate this in their book The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered:

 What one seems to have reflected in this Qumran literature is a Messianic elite retreating or ‘separating’ into the wilderness as in Isaiah 40:3’s ‘make a straight Way in the Wilderness for our God.’ The elite seems to have inhabited ‘desert camps’ where they were actually ‘preparing’ to be joined by the Angels, referring to them as ‘the Heavenly Host,' and for what appears to be a final apocalyptic Holy War against all evil on this earth. This would appear to be the reason they are practising the regimen of extreme purity in the wilderness in these texts - not the somewhat more retrospective presentation in the New Testament as it has come down to us. This movement consists of a small core of committed 'volunteers’ or ‘Joiners for War,’ or ‘Holy Ones’ or Messianic Saints ‘shock troops’ if one prefers preparing in the wilderness through ‘Perfection of the Way’ and ‘zeal for the Law for the time of the Day of Vengeance.’

The Essenes, who kept alive the ancient Secret Wisdom, were set apart to prepare for a new spiritual dispensation. Linked to past historical manifestations of the Religion of Light, the Essene Order prepared the Way for the coming of the Anointed One, the Christ.

American historian Will Durant remarked that the Essenes were the only sect in Judea that did not oppose the work of Jesus. Of the three major Judean sects, Jesus repeatedly condemned only the Pharisees and the Sadducees, not the Essenes. His denunciation of the two dominant groups forming official judaism is, in fact, notably akin to the position of the Essenes. This is perfectly understandable once we recognise that Jesus, like John the Baptist, was nurtured by the Essene Order. The teachings of Jesus arose not from official Judaism but from the Essenes, long regarded as heretics by the Jerusalem priesthood.

Legends abound concerning the ‘missing years’ in the life of Jesus, who after the age of 12, is said to have travelled to Britain, Egypt and Tibet as an Essene Teacher, only returning to Palestine eighteen years later, around age 30, to complete His mission. During the few final years of His work Jesus expanded on the Secret Tradition of the Essenes and, in the words of one scholar:

...strode forth proclaiming a doctrine that went beyond theirs. For Jesus flouted the ceremonials of the Mosaic Law; and He denounced the Pharisees in the most scathing terms. He made Himself as offensive as possible to the orthodox and the respectable... Jesus proclaimed that outward observances or formal respectability would mean nothing in His Kingdom; that social justice is worth more than religious ceremonials; and that hypocrisy is the ultimate sin.(34)

Only the Essenes were spiritually mature to receive the message of Jesus. Their apocalyptic hope was realised in Jesus the Christ and many of them formed the nucleus of the founding Nazarene ecclesias. The dream of the Essene Order was redeemed in the Gnostic Nazarene communities of the first century AD. As the Essene Teacher of Righteousness searched out the inner meaning of the Old Testament, so the Gnostic Christians looked to the esoteric teachings of the New Testament.

Developing out of the earlier streams of the Religion of Light the Gnostic Nazarenes stressed that self knowledge, not blind worship of a wrathful tribal deity, led to salvation. The Heavenly Father, the God of Light revealed by Jesus, can only be known through realisation of the holy spark within. For, as we find in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, "There is a light within a man of light and he illuminates the whole world."

A Gnostic text, the First Apocalypse of James, gives instruction with respect to the true mission of the Christ. Speaking of the Christ, James says: "You have come with knowledge, that you might rebuke their forgetfulness. You have come with recollection, that you might rebuke their ignorance."

The respected British authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, John Allegro, explains the crucial role the Essenes played at the inception of the Gnostic Nazarene communities:

 The gnostic (‘knowing’) Essenes reappear on the literary scene as ‘gnostic Christians,’ but... there is really no justification for the heavy black dividing line that is customarily drawn across the page of history between them. There is a continuous development of religious thought, influenced by the turn of political events, which is perfectly comprehensible chronologically and doctrinally without the artificial separation of ‘Christian’ from ‘pre-Christian.'(35)

Biblical scholar R. M. Grant in Gnosticism and Early Christianity came to the conclusion that after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD the Essene remnant reinterpreted the messianic hope of divine intervention and looked within for illumination. While studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, Grant observed that "nearly all the ingredients later found in Gnosticism were already present in the life and literature of these Essenes."

 Hitherto all the theories of modern scholarship have, as Lenin observed, been based on the assumption that we are alone in the universe. The possibility that our whole development has been influenced by extraterrestrial forces, with which we may again have to reckon some time in the future, is still hardly considered. Yet, as we have seen, this idea lay behind all the study and religious observances of antiquity. Our disregard for life outside the earth is something new, an attitude which we may not be able for much longer to maintain.

 The reappearance of flying saucers and our reawakening interest in extraterrestrial life represents, therefore, a return to an orthodoxy temporarily abandoned. -- John Michell, The Flying Saucer Vision

When Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, there was considerable opposition to the whole idea of evolution because it challenged the biblical account of Creation. The controversy continues to this day. Evolution and Darwinism, however, do not mean the same thing even though they are often misunderstood as being the same. Evolution is a process of change. Evolution of life forms over a very long period of time is a fact based on evidence from geology, palaeontology, molecular biology and other scientific disciplines.

Darwinism, on the other hand, is a theory that tries to explain this evolutionary process, and despite many efforts, it has not been proved. Darwin believed that new species evolved out of existing ones, that fish evolved into amphibians, amphibians into reptiles, reptiles into birds, and ultimately man evolved from an ape-like ancestor as the result of gradually accumulated improvements. But fossils showing key transitions from one life form to another have never been found. The fossil record often reveals a pattern of evolutionary leaps rather than the gradual changes Darwin foresaw.

Prehistorians, blinded by modem age materialism, see mankind’s ‘ancestral’ homosapiens evolving from the level of anthropoids, making flint tools, and then laboriously climbing the steps of ‘progress’ to our day. All humans, however, whether they are American Indians, Polynesians, Africans, Chinese, Japanese or Europeans, consistently maintain they came from elsewhere, that their real origins are not terrestrial!

"Human beings," wrote the respected UFO researcher Brinsley Le Poer Trench, "have forgotten where their real home is, where their fathers reside, and are playing the role of prodigal sons, immersed and enmeshed in the delusion and unreality of chemical life. Humanity is playing with shadows."(36)

Numerous writers and researchers such as W. Raymond Drake, John A. Keel, Richard Mooney, Robert Charroux and NASA specialist Maurice Chatelain who, a decade ago, wrote a book called Our Ancestors Came from Outer Space, popularised this UT (ultraterrestrial) link in a stream of paperbacks. Some of these books are overlaid with a number of modernist absurdities, yet they do contain a profound kernel of solid truth, i.e. that human beings originated "as a result of colonisation from elsewhere in space, and, further, that all civilisations we know were founded upon the wreckage of an earlier, greater culture which was destroyed."(37)

The Japanese preserve myths and legends that claim their islands were first settled by beings who descended from the sky. The Mikados of Japan claim descent from the sun. "Obeying a command, I have descended from heaven,’ we read in the Ko-gi-ki with respect to the founding father of imperial Japan.

The Eskimos preserve the notion that their ancestors originated in the skies and that they were somehow transported to the Arctic circle. Tradition asserts that the Eskimos of Alaska and Greenland are the mixed descendants of survivors from the lost civilisation of Thule and invaders from other lands. Their legends include a memory of teachers with shining faces coming from the stars. The folklore of the Sahara desert nomads tells of blue skinned people from the sky who had such an impact that certain tribes still dye their skins blue in emulation of these ancient cosmic beings.

Deep in the Bayan-Kara-Ula Mountains of China there is a tribe of diminutive people about four feet high. Hieroglyphs were found in that region (on the border of China and Tibet) by Russian archaeologists. When translated, these records describe how members of the Dropa tribe came to earth in some type of flying disc. The stone structures bearing these inscriptions were dated at about twelve thousand years. Ancient graves were also discovered there containing small human bodies with huge craniums and underdeveloped skeletons.

Anthropologist Richard Leakey claims a human skull found in Tanzania is a staggering 2.5 million years old. Many African religions tell how the first people were sent down by the ‘gods" to build the world, and in that remote "time before Time" there was no great separation of people from the gods. But there came a moment when people offended the gods by their acts of greed and selfishness, and the gods decided to withdraw from the people. In some versions the gods simply pulled up the ladder or rope that joined Heaven with the world, and on which the first African people could move up and down as they wished.

The Sumerians, the Mayans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Celts, the Scandinavians, the Hopi Indians of North America, and indeed, practically every people in the world all have their own tale of a time of contact with forces outside our tiny planet.

Does this explain why every civilisation of antiquity - including ancient Egypt and Sumer appeared fully formed?  When civilisation appears it is already full grown," states Dr. H.R. Hall in History of the Near East. While the archaeologist P.J. Wiseman notes:

 No more surprising fact has been discovered by recent excavation, than the suddenness with which civilisation appeared in the world. It was expected that the more ancient the period, the more primitive would excavators find it to be, until traces of civilisation ceased altogether and aboriginal man appeared. Neither in Babylonia nor Egypt, the lands of the oldest known habitations of man, has this been the case.(38)

To again quote from Robert Mooney’s Colony Earth:

 Homo sapiens appear, suddenly, out of the blue, complete, intelligent, with clothing, weapons, fire, with a curious mythology that owes nothing to an animal ancestor, and with an ability that, at the beginning, is at least equal to that of today.

The so-called myths and legends of antiquity, together with the challenging discoveries of archaeology, confirm that civilisations existed on planet earth tens of thousands, even millions, of years ago.

In the vast cycles of pre-history fabulous civilisations came and went. The temples of India, Egypt and South America still encode traditions concerning these vanished cultures. These civilisations owed their genesis to the direct intervention of beings from another dimension!

This explains the finding of ethnology and anthropology, as Prof. Howells concludes in Mankind So Far: "The great, familiar racial stocks, the White, Yellow, and Black, obviously represent an ancient separation." In the words of one of England’s finest nineteenth century scholars:

 Mankind sprang not from one, but from many centres over the globe! Turn withersoever we may, on every hand, we behold the giant shapes of ancient empires, which flit like dim shadows evoked by a master hand!

The division of mankind into four successive races was accepted by the oldest priests of Egypt. They are represented by four figures of different types and skin colours in the paintings of the tomb of Seti I at Thebes. The red race bears the name Rot; the Asiatic race with yellow skin, Amu; the African race with black skin, Halasiu; the Lybico European race with white skin and blond hair, Tamahu.(39)

Can these ‘troubling’ findings be reconciled with the biblical creation story? Further, is there a correlation between the constant theme of Good versus Evil found in all the ancient cultures, and the genesis of humanity?

 Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed. -- Heracles, 500 BC

The Genesis creation story, as recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, far from discounting the ideas put forward, actually verifies them.

The writer of the Book of Genesis had the task of explaining infinite happenings in finite words intelligible to finite minds. As Bellamy says in Moons, Myths, and Man:

 But we must not forget that the report in Genesis has only come down to us in its sublimated and therefore from the mythologists’ standpoint, very unorganised corrupted form. Nevertheless, if we listen carefully to the Hebrew wording of the first verses in Genesis, we still find traces of the original meaning which no priestly editor has been able to erase.

Unfortunately, many people completely reject the Genesis story due to its simplistic, literal interpretation. By doing so, they miss the profound meaning hidden in the symbolic language, thereby isolating themselves from the real inner teachings of the Scriptures. Take, for example, the first two verses of Genesis:

 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

When we go back to the Hebrew language, in which these verses were first recorded, we discover that the word ‘God’ is Elohim, a uniplural word correctly translated as ‘Mighty Divine Ones.’ Elohim conveys a concept akin to ‘the gods.’ In the Book of Job, "The Most High God" is pictured as presiding over the Eloah ("God-council") of the Elohim ("gods.")

The words translated "without form and void" are Tohu Va Bohu. Young’s Concordance gives the following meanings to these Hebrew words: Tohu = "a ruin," "vacancy;" Bohu = "emptiness." While Strong’s Concordance renders Tohu = "to lie waste. The Hebrew word bara, here rendered "created," means "to beget’ and "to bring into being."

Considering these facts, verses one and two of Genesis 1 may correctly be translated: ‘In the beginning the Elohim (Mighty Divine Ones) brought into being the heavens and the earth. And the earth was laid to waste becoming a ruin of emptiness." The translator Ferrar Fenton renders the first verse of Genesis: "By periods God [Elohim] created that which produced the Solar Systems; then that which produced the Earth."

We cannot say how old the earth is because we do not know when the beginning was. The process of creation and re-creation outlined in the 1st chapter of Genesis actually covered immense periods of time. This beginning that opens the Book of Genesis only signals the commencement of a new cycle. Creation is depicted as the imposing of form on chaos. The Egyptians, recent research by E.A.E. Raymond concludes, taught that the creation of the earth was really a re-ordering by "transforming substances" that had already been used in the creation of other worlds.

When old worlds pass away, a general state of confusion is passed through. Ponder this statement in the apocryphal book the Apocalypse of Abraham, where Abraham addressing God, says:

 O Thou, who abolishes the confusion, the mixing up of the universe, the confusion that follows that disintegration of the world of evil and of righteousness alike, thou renewest the world of the righteous.

Despite the delusions of Christian fundamentalists, this much is certain, the Bible confirms the earth is more than six thousand years old, and there were inhabitants on this planet before the much later days of Adam.(40)

Recall that in the second verse of Genesis we find the remarkable declaration, "And the earth was laid to waste becoming a ruin of emptiness." Rotherham’s Emphasised Bible renders this verse, "Now the earth had become chaotic and empty." That is, some early catastrophe had wrecked this planet, which was not "chaotic and empty" before that.

Keep in mind that this period mentioned in the second verse of Genesis is many millions of years after that of the first. Turning to the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah chapter 4, verses 23-27, we discover what transpired. We find that there were people and civilisations on earth at this time. Then disaster struck and the earth became a "ruined waste." Other ancient records tell of mighty wars that raged in the heavens during this vast time period.

There are countless universal myths referring to lost primordial civilisations that all ended in apocalyptic cataclysms. Many of these can be understood as faint memories, albeit distorted, of now vanished empires. Then there are the related arcane legends telling of how old races degenerated and disappeared altogether or were absorbed by newly arrived dominant races. The Hopi Indians of Arizona preserve a clear picture of these earlier times:

 The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an all-consuming fire that came from above and below. The second world ended when the terrestrial globe toppled from it’s axis and everything was covered with ice. The third world ended in a universal flood. The present world is the fourth. (41)

Author Graham Hancock, in his best selling book Fingerprints of the Gods, says:

 Like the Hopi Indians of North America, the Avestic Aryans of pre-Islamic Iran believed that there were three epochs of creation prior to our own. In the first epoch men were pure and sinless, tall and long lived, but at its close the Evil One declared war against Ahura Mazda, the holy god, and a tumultuous cataclysm ensured. During the second epoch the Evil One was unsuccessful. In the third good and evil were exactly balanced. In the fourth epoch (the present age of the world), evil triumphed at the outset and has maintained supremacy ever since.

Plato in Timaeus quotes an Egyptian priest as saying:

 There have been and there will be many and divers destructions of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water, the less ones by countless other means.

Archaeology confirms that there were periods in earth’s history when monstrous holocausts transpired. Then after these upheavals came long periods of silence. There were people who survived these cataclysms and migrated over the earth.

The early Mesopotamian records mention battles in the heavens above between the great gods Tiamat and Marduk. Tiamat, a demon of primeval chaos, was slain in fearsome combat by Marduk the son of Ea, the god of wisdom. The demon’s mutilated body formed the features of the world we know today. Ea slew the vile demon Apsu, the consort of Tiamat, and from his corpse came dry land. These ‘gods’ formed the primordial world out of this chaos.

According to the British historian Sayce in his Religion of Egypt and Babylon:

 The Deep over which Tiamat - the Spirit of Chaos - held sway, was without limits or law, whose only progeny was a brood of monsters.

In all ancient cosmologies we find the original creative principle battling with some evil cosmic demon, out of whose body the physical world was formed.

The timeworn Akkadian records tell a similar story and how, in the battle between the great gods, the evil demons brought warlike ‘swordsmen and axemen’ down to this planet from outer space. The Titans of Greece made war upon Zeus and for their impiety were hurled down to Tartarus.

Among the peoples of India there is the story of powerful deities who battled in the sky in flying vehicles called vimanas, and the description of what appears to be ancient atomic war. Maha-sur, the great spirit, envying Brahma his glory, led a legion of rebellious spirits against him, but Shiva cast them down into the place of darkness.

The 1st chapter of Genesis, commencing with "the Beginning," relates how spiritual beings were involved with materiality at all different levels, from the highest to the lowest.

Genesis chapter 1 is an allegorical explanation of Great Migrations, over immense periods of time, to this area of the universe. UFO researcher Otto Binder emphatically concludes in his book Flying Saucers are Watching Us, "that mankind appeared so suddenly on the scene because he was a planned hybrid, a cross between superintelligent sky people and subintelligent ape-men on Earth."

The most ancient traditions teach that our universe was originally spiritual and etheric, only after an immense catastrophe did it become dense and material. Defeated in the first stage of the Cosmic Battle, banished to our solar system, the Adversary/ Evil Mind fashioned the physical world. He then proceeded to populate earth with a slave species, robotic humanoid life forms.

Several writers postulate, in keeping with a tradition handed down from remote times, that divine extraterrestrials descended to this planet from Venus millions of years ago. These Elohim, as part of a strategy to counter the Adversary, brought the evolving indigenous life forms of earth out of their animal state. This encounter roughly corresponds to the sixth day creation of Genesis where we read:

 And Elohim said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heaven.... So Elohim created man in His image, in the image of Elohim created He him; male and female created He them. And Elohim blessed them and Elohim said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth...(42)

Keep in mind you cannot ‘replenish’ something that was never filled before and that this sixth day creation was brought about by the simple Word of the Elohim. Elohim is spirit, and therefore the image is spiritual. Elohim gave particles of their divine nature - imparted consciousness - to earth man.

Arcane legends tell of these ‘Lords of the Flame’ descending to earth in ‘Celestial Chariots or ‘Discs of Light.’ Today, in our materialist age, they would be misrepresented as mere ‘space men’ coming in spaceships or UFOs. This is because, at the end of the current Dark Age, we do not possess the ability to properly identify these mysterious Discs of Light. They were the Pilgrim Ships of Michael, warriors from the most holy of wars, from an eternal, cosmic war. These divine extraterrestrials came to what was at first an etheric and immaterial region in the north of the planet known as Hyperborea.

They were the Elohim who came to teach the emerging peoples of earth, and are held to be the instructors of the first Priest-Kings of Atlantis. These nonphysical Sons of the God of Light had auras that were visible to the earth people of those days. In remembrance ever since, the righteous saints are always depicted surrounded by haloes and earthly kings have worn artificial haloes, aureoles, coronas and nimbus fashioned into representative golden crowns.

This was the Golden Age of antiquity, when "gods walked with men," It was a time when extraterrestrial intervention brought advanced civilisations to earth. During this age the planet was very different from the gross planet it is now. In this Golden Age, according to both the Greeks and Romans, men and immortal gods (Elohim) shared one common life. Hesiod declares that in the Golden Age, "The first race of mortal men created by the immortals... lived like gods, their hearts carefree and untroubled... no miserable old age came their way." The Celts identified this age with the "Land of Youth, in which there is no death or old age."

Plato describes the impact of the divine extraterrestrials on earth man in Critias:

 For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affected towards the gods, who were their kinsmen; for they possessed honourable and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life....They despised everything but virtue, little esteeming their present state of life, and bearing lightly the burden of gold and other property they possessed; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control and thereby cause their downfall. On the contrary, in their soberness of mind, they saw clearly that all these good things are increased by mutual good will combined with virtue, whereas to honour and strive after these goods destroys not only the goods themselves, but also virtue with them.

The ancient Egyptians claimed their first dynasties were formed by a race known as the "companions of the god Horus." Egyptian religious texts refer to an original homeland and how in the days of this ‘First Time’ (Tep zepi) the gods (the Elohim) used to come and go from heaven to earth in their Celestial Chariots.

The Egyptologist R.T. Rundle Clark describes this epoch in Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt:

 ... all that was good or efficacious was established on the principles laid down in the ‘First Time’ - which was, therefore, a golden age of absolute perfection - ‘before rage or clamour or strife or uproar had come about.’ No death, disease or disaster occurred in this blissful epoch, known variously as ‘the time of Re,’ ‘the time of Osiris,’ or ‘the time of Horus’...

Thousands of years later the Egyptians recalled this lost Golden Age in the duty of the Pharoah, the son of god on earth, to re-enact rites that would one day restore the world to the perfection of the First Time. All their religious ceremonies preserved a memory of this First Time (Tep zepi) which existed ‘before anger, or noise, or conflict, or disorder made their appearance."

The Adversary, the ruler of this solar system, waged war on the Elohim and countered their attempts to spiritualise the planet. Through his fallen angels the Adversary gradually trapped the evolving races and blocked any opportunity of spiritual advancement by keeping them earth-bound. As these peoples lacked astral abilities, the Adversary locked them into a cycle of reincarnation, so that on death they would take the pitriyana, the Way of the Ancestors, and return to earth again and again.

The twilight of the Golden Age is believed to be identical with the last days of Atlantis, the collapse of which is directly attributable to the work of the Dark Gods who led the people into depravity.

Due to the consorting of a large portion of the Atlantean race with demonic entities, the Dark Gods seized control of Atlantis. Plato wrote that Atlantis drowned because of an indiscriminate mingling. The divine strain in their ancestry became more and more diluted, and their lower animal natures predominated. Violence and injustice, yearning for power, and covetousness are the qualities Plato ascribed to the degenerated inhabitants of Atlantis.

Natalie Banks informs us of the cause of the eventual destruction of Atlantis:

 However, owing to a temporary seizing of control by those known as ‘the dark brothers,’ the Great White Lodge [Elohim/divine extraterrestrials] withdrew for a while from their close contact with humanity, with the result that a large portion of the later Atlantean race became a prey to the influence and actual use of black magic (the selfish use of power). This gained entry and operated through the people’s low-grade emotional excesses, which were simulated by a very undeveloped mentality. This terrible disaster, the nature of which we today can hardly imagine, led in time to the downfall of Atlantis when the whole continent was gradually submerged by a slow succession of floods.(43)

Toward the end of the Golden Age and prior to the final collapse of Atlantis, the Elohim, with their centre in Hyperborea, founded an outpost in a remote central Asian region on the western edge of the Gobi Desert. But as the malevolent Dark Gods gained control over the earth peoples of that time, the Golden Age receded and so ended the interaction of the Sons of God with this planet.

The Elohim, repelled by the lower qualities of the purely sensual earth men who had no reverence for higher principles, retreated as it were, to the planes of spirit, ready in the fullness of time to bring forth a new humanity. They left behind a promise that, in time, the Sons of Light would return. The reason for their return was that the Family of the God of Light, in the proper time, would overthrow the darkness of the Adversary, set the people free and cleanse this area of the universe from the aberration of the Evil Mind.

The Sons of God, who were still in the spiritual realm and conscious of the Light, volunteered to come to this planet to combat the Adversary. It was their great adventure to incarnate to rescue the peoples enslaved by the Evil Mind and begin a ministry of education and healing.

Unfortunately, the records of the interaction of the divine extraterrestrials with earth were largely destroyed when shattering cataclysms eventually destroyed Atlantis. The famous Alexandrian Library once housed a magnificent collection of over 400,000 scriptures and records. Scholars and priests from all over the world were said to travel there to study the old papyri that survived from lost Atlantis. The entire Hellenistic world was once familiar with the Secret Tradition concerning mankind’s origin and destiny. When the last documents perished along with the Alexandrian Library, a grand conspiracy brought on a terrible darkness that enveloped the real history of human kind.

 He who has known the world has fallen into a corpse; and he who has fallen into a corpse, the world is not worthy of him! -- Gospel of Thomas

Before continuing our examination of the Book of Genesis it is critical that we recognise there are two different texts fused together in the opening chapters. Hence the Hebrew sages always made a distinction when reading the first and second chapters. The second chapter of Genesis introduces Adam and Eve, the Serpent, the Two Trees and the Garden of Eden. Behind this highly symbolic language we can discern a profound message.

The story of Adam and Eve is found in the writings of the Phoenicians, Sumerians, Hebrews, and many other peoples. The name "Adam" is the Anglicised version of Adamu, the Sumerian designation for "human species." In the Hebrew Bible "Adam’ is translated from Aw-dawm meaning, according to Strong’s Concordance, a "human being." The eminent nineteenth century Oxford Professor Max Mueller wrote:

 Man, a derivative root, means to think. From this we have the Sanskit Manu, originally the thinker, then man. The name Adam, man, a thinker, suggests that the living soul breathed into Adam raised him above the other existing races.

An examination of Young’s Analytical Concordance shows that in over 500 cases the Hebrew word for man in the Old Testament is ‘Adam," making it self-evident that the Scriptures deal only with what its Hebrew says, the Adam and his descendants.

Considering the vast panorama of time and the fabulous lost civilisations of yesteryear, the late British author Le Poer Trench was quite correct when he recognised in the biblical story of Adam and Eve only one of many visits to Earth from advanced civilisations."

The coming of Adam to earth is related in the 2nd chapter of Genesis, verses 7 and 8: "And Yahweh Elohim formed man [the Hebrew word Adam] of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man [Adam] became a living soul. And Yahweh Elohim planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there He put the man [Adam] whom he had formed." Verse 21 and 22 state: ‘And Yahweh Elohim caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man [Adam], and he slept: and He took the tsela and closed up the flesh instead thereof, And the tsela which Yahweh Elohim had taken from man, made He a women and brought her unto the man."(44)

Remember that in the opening chapter of Genesis the Elohim said, "Let us make man’ - creation by divine fiat. In Genesis chapter 2, Yahweh "formed’ Adam (see George M. Lamsa’s Holy Bible from the Ancient Eastem Text). Both a literal and archetypal meaning apply. Adam can be seen as representative of the astral lifestream, those spirits who were exiled on the earth plane. But this is also the experience of the first Adam.

The first phase of the Fall of Adam into physical nature is represented in the 2nd chapter of Genesis as the "deep sleep" of Adam, i.e. the loss of his spiritual consciousness and the physical separation of the sexes by the formation of Eve.

Adam in his first estate as a pure spirit was androgynous. This is why all the sages and Messengers of Light taught that on man’s return journey, as he regains his original spiritual nature, he must combine both the ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in himself, or, as the German mystic Jacob Boehme says, must re-become that which he was "before his Eve."

Evidently, there are two distinct creation stories in the Book of Genesis and this is acknowledged by biblical scholars. Adam was the prototype for a new humanity, the youngest in terms of earth time. Though this new race cannot be adequately identified by blood and physical features, being one of Spirit whose members are recognised by a common mode of thought consciousness, action and primordial origin.

Genesis 1 concerns the Elohim’s imposing of form on chaos and the imparting of consciousness to earth men and women by the Elohim to "replenish the earth" following the time of colossal catastrophe. The 2nd chapter relates how Yahweh Elohim, at a period following the earlier Elohim creation, forms a body and places in it the "breath of life" so that "Adam became a living soul."

Adam enters into a "deep sleep" as Eve is separated from him. Beginning with Adam and Eve, the Bible becomes the log book of the children of Adam.(45)

All through the Old Testament we encounter a representation in a more or less allegorical or semi-historical form of man in his ‘fallen’ condition. The story of the patriarchs, the experience of the children of Israel in the "wilderness," the struggles of the beleaguered prophets - all can be taken as representative of mans plight in the world. As the Old Testament, notably the first four books of Moses, broadly treats man’s Fall, so the New Testament, chiefly the four Gospels, treats his return; the return to his lost estate as a pure spiritual being.

This explains why the Old Testament is addressed exclusively to the Adamic Israelite people and shows little concern with other peoples, except in relation to the Israelites. This is because the authentic ‘Israel’ is representative of the Children of Light, the heavenly people. Jesus the Christ came to "save that which was lost"(46) and to redeem "the lost sheep of the house of Israel,"(47) by which the heavenly people are represented. Hence the Nazarenes, like the Essene Order, saw themselves as the ‘New Israel.’ All true Israelites are offspring of the same spirit. That spirit is the Spirit of the Heavenly Father. The exile of Israel symbolised the exile of spiritual beings.

The coming of the Adamic lifestream signifies a new beginning, the dawning of another cycle in earths history. Adam was the true Son of God(48) being not only of the heavens, but from the heavens.

Incidentally, in the arcane science of Gematria, the letters of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets possess a numerical value. The number of Adam is 8, which signifies "a new beginning, and is carried onward through righteous Seth to Jesus, who has the supreme number 888.

Examining the story of Adam found in the numerous sacred texts left out of the Bible we find quite detailed accounts of the coming of Adam to this planet.

Adam, in his first estate as a pure spiritual being is portrayed by early Gnostic writings as an androgynous figure with a bright shining form, resplendent in his beauty. He was called Adamus, ‘invincible,’ or Adamel. Before he descended into the gross world of forms Adam was a divine extraterrestrial, a being of transparent light.

Muslim scholars teach that prior to his Fall the dwelling place of Adam was not in a physical garden but rather in a higher sphere (the angelic or astral world) watered by four mystical steams of life. After his banishment from Paradise, Adam alighted on a northern mountain from which the human race migrated.

The sacred book of Islam, the Holy Quran, plainly teaches that Adam was brought forth in Paradise, the celestial planes. The Quran states Adam was allocated dominion over earth as the viceroy of the Most High God.(49)

The Quran says that the Adversary grew angry at the important place assigned to Adam, and jealous of the glorious destiny promised to him. "And behold, We [Allah the Most High God] said to the angels: ‘Bow down to Adam’: and they bowed down: Not so Iblis [Satan] he refused and was haughty...We [Allah] said: ‘O Adam! dwell thou and thy wife in the Garden..."

Iblis or Satan in Arabic is Shaitan, Lord of the Shadows, because he ‘turned away’ and refused to acknowledge the Light of the Household of the Most High.

The Muslim writer, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, in his commentary on this Quranic verse asks the question.

 Was the Garden of Eden a place on this earth? Obviously not. For, in verse 36, ft was after the
 Fall that the sentence was pronounced: ‘On earth will be your dwelling-place.’ Before the Fall, we must suppose man [Adam) to be on another plane altogether - of felicity, innocence, trust, a spiritual existence; with the negation of enmity, want of faith, and all evil.

The venerable Anglo-Saxon chronicler Bede, Europe’s leading scholar in the eighth century AD, drew on an age-old notion when he asserted that Paradise was on a level with the moon. Obviously a nonterrestrial plane.

The Zohar, a Hebrew biblical commentary, explains that:

...the Holy One formed man from these four elements and placed him in the garden of Eden, into which a man enters again whenever he repents of his wrongdoing and conforms his life to the good law, until at length, divested of mortality, he is placed again in the heavenly garden; that is, he enters into and becomes a conscious participant of the divine life and clothed with immortality.

The "Garden of Eden," also known as Paradise, the Continent of the Spirit and the Mountain of God (50) was etheric and outside the ‘Circle of Circles’ of the earth. It was no isolated geographical spot guarded by an angel with a flaming sword,(51) but a spiritual plane or vibration. In the "Garden of Eden" Adam was a radiant being, spiritual in nature.

This otherworldly Paradise paralleled the primordial earthly Paradise known as Hyperborea, the northern mountain and centre of the Golden Age. After the Fall the heavenly Paradise was barred to mortal men and this corresponds with the end of the Golden Age.

Although the expulsion from Paradise can be placed at the end of the Golden Age, amidst the catastrophe of Atlantis, the writers of Genesis are not concerned with the details of history. Their sole concern centred on the Fall of the Adamic man and its implications.

The Book of the Secrets of Enoch describes the patriarch Enoch’s ascent through the seven heavens, his personal vision of the divine, and his return to earth to write books of instruction for his sons.(52) Enoch discloses how God said He created Adam "from invisible and visible nature." In his original estate Adam was an "angel, honourable, great, and glorious," appointed by God "as ruler on earth." God communicates to Enoch how he showed Adam ‘the two ways, the light and the darkness, and told him, ‘This is good and this is evil’; that I should know whether he has love for Me or hate ... I knew his nature, he did not know his nature. Therefore his ignorance is a woe to him."

Enoch records how God declared that Adam was in "Paradise" but "lord on earth.’ We are told that:

...there was light without any darkness continually in Paradise. And the devil took thought, as if wishing to make another world, because things were subservient to Adam on earth, to rule it and have lordship over it. The devil is to be the evil spirit of the lowest places; he became Satan, after he left the heavens. His name was formerly Satanael... [Satan] nurtured thoughts against Adam. He entered his world and seduced Eve.

The original mission of Adam was to exercise stewardship over this area of the universe by taking it from the rule of the Adversary and his Dark Gods. Adam was to be the medium for the cleansing and spiritualising of this area of the cosmos.

The two trees in the Garden of Eden(53) symbolise the Two Ways set out before man at the very beginning. A soul can choose to eat from the Tree of Life and thereby maintain his connection to the higher Realm of Light, the Source of Light and Life. Or a soul may become enamoured with the things of the material world, which result in separation and death.

The Book of Genesis tells us of the seduction of Eve by the Serpent and Adam’s acquiescence, in direct violation of the divine injunction. Eve accepted the philosophy or Way of the Adversary, the enemy Satan, which was love for the world, love of material things, lust for the flesh.(54) Adam followed Eve and as a consequence they fell from their ultraterrestrial state, lost their radiant glory and their bodies became wholly physical subject to sickness and death.

Their faculty of spiritual perception was spoiled by the Fall, trapping them in the material world of the Adversary.(55) In this way, Light Souls fell from their original high estate and became entangled in the dark planes of matter. Exiled from Paradise they dwelt in a gross world of ignorance. Adam, after the Fall, signifies the True Man as he is now, a spark of divine light in a material body, and exiled in Satan’s physical world.

Robert W. Krajenke says:

 The Fall of Adam is representational of the fall in flesh of the perfect race. They also were tempted by the possibilities for experience in a material world. Eventually they lost the consciousness of their spiritual ideal and purpose for entering the world. (56)

One ancient Gnostic text graphically describes the capture of the Light Souls in physical bodies:

 The Soul once turned toward matter, she became enamoured of it, and burning with the desire to experience the pleasures of the body, she no longer wanted to disengage herself from ft. Thus the world was born. >From the moment the Soul forgot herself, She forgot her original habitation, her true centre, her eternal being.

The Adversary and the Dark Gods conspired to catch Light Souls in ignorance and darkness causing misery and corruption. Through the Fall Adam forfeited his celestial status, giving his authority to the Adversary. Satan, lord of dark matter, was the undisputed Rex Mundi, the king of the world. With the appearance of the Adamic astral race in bodies of flesh the Great War of Evil against Good, the Cosmic Battle between Light and Darkness, was concentrated on the human soul.

The Fall of Adam and Eve is synonymous with the final fall of the earth itself as it sunk into the depths of materiality. The earth’s axis shifted, the seasons were introduced and time as we know it was born. This all paralleled the end of the Golden Age and the catastrophe of Atlantis. Everything changed, becoming degenerate.

The planet dramatically changed from its previous state and the final degenerative process set in. So much so, that as the early second century treatise known as the Pistis Sophia explains:

 Other worlds cannot possibly be described in terms of this world. Not only is there less in common between other worlds and this world, they differ as widely among themselves as any of them does from us.

"In the limited confines of the flesh," says another apocryphal text, ‘which condition all our thinking, we can’t possibly grasp the nature of other existences or even begin to count the number of other worlds."

In the apocryphal book The Conflict of Adam and Eve we find a description of Adam’s dilemma:

 Then Adam wept and said, ‘O God, when we dwelt in the garden, and our hearts were lifted up, we saw angels singing praises in heaven, but now we do not see as we were used to do ... Then God the Lord said unto Adam, ‘When thou wast under subjection to Me, thou hadst a bright nature within thee, and for that reason couldst thou see things afar off. But after thy transgression thy bright nature was withdrawn from thee; and it was not left to thee to see things afar off, but only near at hand; after the ability of the flesh; for it is brutish.

Due to the Fall, Adamic man entered into a deep sleep regarding the authentic knowledge of his Heavenly Father. On earth Adam and his offspring were in a spiritually unconscious-dead-state. The incarnating astral seed, the children of Adam, lost the remembrance of their heavenly origin and their original mission. These Sons of God in mortal bodies of flesh, exiles from the Realm of Light, were trapped in the material world of the Adversary. They became ‘strangers and pilgrims in the earth’.

We discover in the sacred book known as the Ginza (the ‘Treasure’ or ‘Great Book’) of the Gnostic Mandaeans: "The tribe of souls was transported here from the House of Life." Another verse in the Ginza poses the question:

 Who has carried me into captivity away from my place and my abode, from the household of my parents who brought me up? ... Why did ye carry me away from my abode into captivity and cast me into the stinking body?

The descendants of Adam not only lost awareness of their spiritual heritage, but were enamoured ‘with the things of this world," becoming subject to them. The poet William Blake caught a glimpse of their plight when he wrote, "The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth the cause of its life and the sources of all activity."

The venerable Gnostic writings attributed to the patriarch Seth elaborate on the biblical creation story. Adam before his death, we are told, imparted to his righteous son Seth what he experienced before and after his Fall, and then what he learned about the destiny of Seth’s descendants. These Sethian writings corroborate that Adam and Eve were originally spiritual beings and "eternal angels.’ The paradisical condition and "the eternal knowledge of the God of truth" were lost through the wrathful activity of the Adversary and they fell into the power of the "ruler of the aeons and powers (of this world order);" as "men" (physical beings) they were instructed only about "dead things."

 Forgetting their true home the Adamic lifestream meekly submitted to the captivity. Hence, the age-old savants and wisemen depicted man on earth as living in darkness, deafened by the noisy tumult of his senses, and blinded by greed, sensuality and ambition. He is bemused, intoxicated and sunk in sleep, his home forgotten, his glory renounced.

The Gospel of Thomas recounts Jesus saying:

 I manifested myself to men in the flesh. I found them drunk, I found them blind, and none athirst among them. When they have slept off their wine they will repent.

Jesus came to wake man up, to remind him of his origin, responsibility and neglected destiny. "I am the voice of awakening in the eternal night," announces a Gnostic hymn.

 From the Conflict of Adam and Eve we learn how the descendants of Adam were divided into two branches: the Cainites and the Sethites. The former, descendants of Cain, were devoted to Satan, the pleasure of the flesh, and immorality. The Sethites, descendants of Seth, had remained faithful to the God of Light, but they soon began mingling with the children of Cain, "sullied themselves with their impurities and engendered with them children."

A Hebrew biblical commentary, Pirke, of Rabbi Eliezeer, maintains that Samael [Serpent/Satan] seduced Eve who then conceived Cain, the father of a wicked race. Rabbi Simeon says that "from Seth were born and descended all the generations of the just. From Cain were born and descended all the generations of the wicked.’

Clearly all these texts recount Adam’s being driven out of Paradise as the saga of someone who came to earth from elsewhere. A race of divine extraterrestrials had become trapped in animal bodies of flesh.

Yes, Adam came to the earth from the celestial realm, but there had been cultures and mighty civilisations here for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years prior.

Just a cursory reading of Genesis will confirm that there were other people on earth at the time of Adam and Eve. Who were those by whom Cain was afraid of being killed(57) if he and Adam and Eve (for it is not even said that Eve had daughters, though Cain found a wife(58) were all the people in the world? Well may we ask the biblical literalist, how could Cain build a city(59) without people to inhabit it? The fundamentalist is left to conclude that all humanity is the fruit of incest. The advancing Adamites found cultures and tribes, contesting their advance, and when conquered, fusing and blending with them. Migrating in separate waves they encountered races enslaved to the earth cult of demons and mixed with the animal nature.

The planet was already inhabited by various life forms. There were peoples that survived from past wondrous civilisations and the ‘time before Time when the Elohim walked with men. There were also thousands, if not millions, of nonphysical beings from the world of higher frequencies.

With the arrival of the Adamic lifestream the earth had come a long way from the timeless yesterdays and was entering the final short round of human civilisation. Age-old prophecies attest that the Adversary and the Dark Gods were given a symbolic epoch of just 6,000 years to rule. This is the period of the Kali-Yuga or ‘Black Age’...the ‘Iron Age.’ The stage was now set for the battle between the Adamic lifestream, the children of the women, and the children of Satan.(60) At the end of this Dark Age the Light would vanquish the Darkness. A closed system - planet earth - was now prepared for the final grand scene of the Cosmic Battle!

Pre-existent Adamic man was around a long time before this earth came into being and in his real nature he is older than any of it. Two different offspring came from the heavens to finish the Cosmic Battle, a ‘Battle of the Ages’ here on the earth. The legendary battle of Michael and the armies of the God of Light against the Adversary and his minions, was just a prelude to the last Great Battle. What happened in the heavens between Michael and the Adversary is now taking place in the earth, and ultimately there will be the same result.

Dr. George Hunt Williamson, one of the foremost authors on UFOs, wrote: "All people on Earth are true space beings for another very basic and important reason. Our ancestors came here as the ‘Sons of God,’ and since true ‘human’ life came from outer space in the first place we are all descended from that migration. Hence, we are true space people."

Well may we ask, is our contemporary interest in UFO’s and outer space in response to an inner longing to return home? Are we intuitively acknowledging our part in the Cosmic Battle?

 Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. One will not receive truth in any other way. -- Gospel of Philip

Now we must pass beyond the immediate and apparent meaning of the outline provided above and examine the deeper esoteric content.

Remember that Moses, the supposed compiler of the original Genesis text, was schooled in the wisdom of Egypt and the Egyptian priests had three ways of expressing their ideas. The first was clear and obvious, the second symbolic and figurative, the third sacred and hieroglyphic.

All authentic Gnostic teachings use allegory, symbolism and myth in describing the origin of the universe and of man. The Church historian Eusebius admitted: "Those who preside over the Holy Scriptures, philosophise over them, and expound their literal sense by allegory."

All Holy Books can only point the way to the truth, because ultimate truth cannot be written. Being beyond language and the constraints of form, the very nature of sacred truth demands that it is coded, adapted or concealed within the form of religion. True religion is internal, not external, being a process that connects the individual with their true spiritual origin.

The apostle Paul, in the 4th chapter of his Epistle to the Galatians, speaking of the simple accounts of the Old Testament, asserts that they are an allegory. In the 3rd chapter of the 2nd letter to the Corinthians, he declares himself a minister of the New Testament, appointed by God, "Not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter killeth." The Church Father Athanasius admonished that: ‘Should we understand the sacred writ according to the letter, we should fall into the most enormous blasphemies."

The Bible is a sign post or guide book. If you were travelling to an unfamiliar city and became fixed on the sign post you wouldn’t reach your destination. The sign post is not your destination, it can only point to the Way.

This helps us to appreciate why to the Gnostics literal formalities were of little value. Their interest was in the meaning and deeper conceptual context of the Scriptures.

The origin of the spirit is God, but the origin of the human race on earth is the descent of the spirit into matter. That man has lost and sacrificed much can be seen in the world around us, for the physical life of man is a privation and a struggle. Man now lives in darkness and comprehends it not. His real element of life is light. In turning toward matter and wanting to experience the pleasure of the body, the soul forgets its own true identity. As the Gnostics say, "It forgets its original dwelling place, its true centre, its eternal being.’

Those who have undertaken to explain the sublime mystery of the creation of the universe by an Immaterial Deity, have interposed between the two, and between God and man, diverse manifestations of, or emanations from, or personified attributes or agents of, the Absolute.

All the sacred books tell how the Almighty God works through agents. Both the Bible and the Gnostic writings refer to angels (messengers) and heavenly beings that act as divine emissaries and helpers of humanity. Biblical research verifies that the oldest Israelite notion held the Most High God to be surrounded by many ‘Mighty Ones’ or Elohim.(61) This is obvious in the "Song of Moses: "When the Most High gave the nations their heritage, When He divided mankind, He fixed the territories of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God; But Yahweh’s share was his people, Jacob was his inherited possession."(62)

The religious scholar Dunlap reminds us that:

 The doctrine of the emanation of all creation out of the Godhead, is one of the oldest theories of religion. It is found in all ancient religions ... Hence, all these religions were light-religions; for the human kind could only picture the Deity to itself as the purest of light. Not merely the corporeal world, but the world of spirits were considered emanations of the Godhead.

We discover in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John that, "In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word [Logos] was with God, and the Word [Logos] was God" and "All things were made by Him." The Word or Logos is then identified as the Light or the Christ. We can conclude that the Logos brought all things into being in their original purity through the agency of the Elohim. The Psalmist declares that God called the heavens into being by His Word.(63) Moreover the Word of God is synonymous with His Will and some authorities even translate "He willed’ instead of "He spake." As one apocryphal text explains, "The Father instructed the Son, who in turn instructed the great angel to go down and form a new world."

Similarly, Stephen declared that the Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai was "by the disposition of angels."(64) Paul says plainly that the Law was "ordained by angels."(65) In the Old Testament, however, it is unquestionably with Yahweh Elohim that Moses confers face to face on Mt. Sinai and it is from him that Moses is said to receive the Law. The 70 elders of Israel see Yahweh, and the entire population stands at the foot of Mt. Sinai and hears Yahweh speak the commandments. But in the Gospel of John, Jesus says of His Heavenly Father, "Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape."(66)

It is significant that nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus speak of His God as Yahweh, but only as His Heavenly Father. He obviously made a careful distinction between His Heavenly Father and the Yahweh of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Initiates of the Secret Tradition know that the Supreme Being did not personally create the earth. The 1st chapter of Genesis, as we previously discovered, assigns the creation or rather the re-modelling or reordering of the planet from elements already existing in confusion, to Elohim, well known to the ancients as Sons of God, Subordinate Deities, Mighty Ones, or Divine Manifestations. In the Gnostic Mandaean creation story the divine creative act is carried out by angelic helpers.

The 2nd chapter of Genesis involved with the bringing forth of Adam is the work of YHWH [Yahweh Elohim]. Here Yahweh Elohim is the reduction of the cosmic and universal creative force to the human and personal level. In Genesis Yahweh is the cosmic creative force in involution, heralding the Fall into that corruption called matter.

Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages, showed that all the teachings of Abraham and the laws of Moses were only designed to break the people from their idolatrous ways and inculcate self-restraint.(67) The dispensation outlined in the Old Testament was devoted mainly to ritualism and social observance. The Hebrew Bible dwells on rewards and punishments in this temporal life on earth, and says nothing about the superior Realm of Light. The Law of Moses addressed carnally minded man. The Absolute, the Eternal Father, is beyond the Law.

Jesus, as the New Testament reveals, brought a unique revelation of the Eternal One far more profound than anything contained in the Old Testament. For the Nazarenes, knowledge of the Heavenly Father is a gift supremely obtainable through knowledge of the Christ. Consequently, Gnostics distinguish between God as He is and God in manifestation. God as He is in Himself is the Limitless, the Ultimate Source, Father of the All. But God as manifest in the Scriptures is interpreted by limited, carnal human minds.

All this is in harmony with the Zarathustrian teaching that the Supreme God of Light, Ahura-Mazda, first brought forth the cosmos in spiritual form through His Holy Beneficent Spirit. Ahura-Mazda is the One God, wise and beneficent, but He creates by the Amesha Spentas, and His qualities are personified by them. By command of Ahura-Mazda the earth was fashioned in a state of pure light, and only afterwards, due to the corrupting influence of Ahriman, descended into the state of ‘mixture’ with material substance.

Every Gnostic system outlines Two Ways and Two Principles, one of things spiritual and incorporeal, the other one of things corruptible, corporeal, and visible. The first being the
 Father, the Supreme and One True God, who resides in the Realm of Light in perfect purity and perfection. The other, matter, that inert, shapeless, darksome mass, which is the source of all evils and the dwelling place of the Adversary. We can see in evil the striking contrast that it produces in life: darkness and light, error and delusion, spirit and matter.

To the Gnostics of the early centuries of the Christian era, as well as the Cathars and Bogomils of the Middle Ages, the fallen world is the counterfeit of a superior world of Light. The assault of the Darkness on the Light eventually gave rise to the gross world of forms, ignorant of the higher realms. What we identify as this world of appearances separated, as it is, from the higher world.

Perfection abides exclusively in the Realm of Light, the world of eternity, infinity and permanence. All beings of Light derive their life from the Supreme Being. The nearer a being is to Him, the more perfect it is. The more remote in the scale, the less its purity. A ray of Light from the Deity is the cause of all actual life and existence.

The earth was once a reflection of the higher Realm of Light. In its primordial first state the earth was etheric and spiritual. In his rebellion Satan attacked the higher Realm of Light. Unable to create a world like that of the Father, he distorted the vibrational patterns and in the process fashioned the gross material world, a world of imperfection and impermanence. Satan as the Demiurge (craftsman) is the ‘ape of God’ who made a counterfeit, illusory realm.

Even the structure of the lower universe reveals the wisdom of the Kingdom of Light. The gross world may be permeated with Darkness, but Light is mixed with it. Trapped in materiality, Light nevertheless shows itself in nature. Prosper Alfaric points out in L’Evolution intellectuelle that this Gnostic idea of the mixing of Light with Darkness actually led to a profound regard for nature:

 Thus a perfect Manichaean would strive to live in peace with the whole nature. He knows that everything in it leads to the triumph of the good. Therefore he will refrain from upsetting its harmony.

Indeed the Manichaeans, in common with all Gnostics, held a respectful attitude to all living things. They were forbidden to kill animals or otherwise shed blood. They taught:

 The sages and the righteous are able to recognise the pure goodness of Paradise, infinite in space and time, in the mixed, limited and transient goodness of this world. And, likewise, in the itemised and limited evil of this world, the global and unlimited evil of hell.

There can be no existence or life without the Heavenly Father. For the Gnostic, everything in the world is mixed and only the original principles are pure. One Gnostic text contends that the structure of the natural world is the work of the Elohim who planned it in such a manner that there were ways open for the liberation of imprisoned light. The sun is a constant, beneficial presence that reveals in this world the coming Paradise of Light. The ‘fragrance’ of the Heavenly Father, the God of Light and Wisdom, abides even in His absence. In the Gospel of Thomas, Christ the Logos says, "Lift the stone and you will find me; cleave the wood and I am there."

The Heavenly Father is the First Cause and the Source of all life and light, whereas Satan is only the Demiurge (craftsman) of the lower world. Consumed by arrogance the Adversary believes he is the creator. Satan only crafted the things of this world because the attack of the Evil Principle brought about this fallen world pervaded with impermanence, suffering and anxiety.

The Gnostic Bogomils said that Satan’s diabolic universe is a very poor copy of the higher divine one, but the elements of the former were created by God. Their writings also mention seven upper realms of the universe of Light and seven lower realms of Darkness. The expulsion of Satanael and his deceived followers from the upper realm led to their retreat to the lower realms.

As a consequence of the Fall a heavy veil separates the Heavenly Father from the lower world. On the other side of the veil lay ‘the secrets of heaven.’ The Fall also quarantined this planet from other worlds and as we read in one Gnostic text "veiled their worlds, surrounding them like a wall ... If you want to go to the Father, you must pass through the Veil."

Only the blind Samael (Satan), leader of the fallen angels insists: "We are alone, and there is none besides us"! The Ginza says these fallen ones declare, "There is only one world - ours."

Satan, the Demiurge, is the angry, vengeful, ignorant god, demanding blind adoration. From ignorance, the hallmark of the Demiurge, the gross world arose:

 Ignorance of the Father brought about anguish and terror. And the anguish grew solid like a fog so that no one was able to see. For this reason error became powerful; it fashioned its own matter foolishly, not having known the truth. It set about making a creature (all its) might preparing, in beauty the substitute for the truth.(68)

The Hebrew mystical text the Zohar contains a number of tenets derived ultimately from the Secret Tradition of the original Israelites. Commenting on Genesis, the Zohar says there is "no greater impurity,’ than that "personified evil called and known as ‘The God of this world’... It is that ‘which poisons all within and hardens all the feeling.’ It causes the death of the soul and transforms it into an idolater, a worshipper of the world and its golden image of wealth. Its occult name is Samael, ‘The poison God.’ Though Samael was the name of the serpent that tempted and seduced Adam and Eve, yet are they one and the same and are both cursed alike."

The Gnostic always looks beyond the temporal to the things that are unseen and eternal. This is why myths, parables and legends are so important in conveying transcendent principles to the inner man. We must appreciate the Cosmic Battle on several levels. Yes, the closed gross plane was the outcome of Satanael’s rebellion and the human condition is the consequence of the Fall of Adam into materiality.

On another level we can recognise the Demiurge distinguished by all too human base qualities - as people’s narrow, limited, decidedly satanic, conceptions of the deity. We can rightly say that people worship Satan/the Demiurge and do not know the True God. In the words of the famed Egyptologist Dr. Wallis Budge, "Man always has made his gods after his own image."

Tobias Churton explains in The Gnostics that:

 The demiurge is an image of ‘God’ which we have conjured in our minds, or an image which exists in the being of this tragic creation - a part of the fabric of suffering that goes with it.

A religion or belief system that keeps people fixed on the earth and in ignorance of the transcendent Realm of Light, is fully under the influence of the demiurge, and is truly satanic.

All the Gospels agree that Jesus came to reveal the True God - the Heavenly Father - and his message made it possible to distinguish between the real Source of the All and the repelling appearances with which a wrong presentation of the Scriptures and the base anthropomorphic ideas of passion-driven men invested Him. The Gnostics, heirs to the Mysteries of the Kingdom(69) understood that "God created man and man created God. So is it in the world. Men make gods and they worship their creations.’(70)

Valentinus, the famed Gnostic teacher of the second century, insisted on discriminating between the popular image of God as creator, avenger, master, and judge - and what that image represented. Most Christians, Valentinus observed, mistake mere images of the deity for the reality. The Gospel of Phillip, a book cherished by the followers of Valentinus, recognises that names can be:

...very deceptive, for they divert our thoughts from what is accurate to what is inaccurate. Thus one who hears the word ‘God’ does not perceive what is accurate, but perceives what is inaccurate. So also with ‘the Father,’ and ‘the Son,’ and ‘the Holy Spirit, and ‘life,’ and ‘light, and ‘resurrection,’ and ‘the Church,’ and all the rest - people do not perceive what is accurate, but they perceive what is inaccurate...

Throughout history and in all sacred literature we can discern two diametrically opposed views of the Godhead. They correspond to the Two Ways. One is open and obvious, the ignorant mundane god of moralistic religion, whom men fear. This is the wrathful god who ignorantly asserts, "We are alone, and there is none besides us" and "There is only one world - ours." The Gnostics exposed this god as Satan, the ruler of the shadows, the Arch-Deceiver! The other is hidden and unfathomable, the Supreme One, Lord of Light and Wisdom, the loving Heavenly Father of whom it is written, "No man hath seen God at any time." Here is the One True God and the Ultimate Reality.

This world of impermanence and ignorance must be transcended and our inner self purified. Man, like Lucifer, underwent a fall and was ‘cast down from heaven.’ The story of the Fall of man parallels the rebellion of the proud Lucifer, hurled down to the bottomless pit. Is not the story of Lucifer also that of the fallen man? The Fall is the error of seeing the world and the ego as the only reality instead of God, who alone is Real. Humans live in an absurd world that they create and sustain through their ignorance and forgetfulness. Valentinus wrote:

 Perfect redemption is the cognition itself of the ineffable greatness: for since through ignorance came about the defect ... the whole system springing from ignorance is dissolved in Gnosis. Therefore Gnosis is the redemption of the inner man...

Part of the liberating message of Gnosis is that the True Man was conceived, not on earth, but in the Divine Mind and came forth in the upper Realm of Light. This is why Jesus the Christ proclaimed, "Blessed is Man since he existed before he was born. For all things were created, but Man pre-existed."

The survival of this original mystic doctrine is seen in the prayer of a Syrian sect that implores, "Deliver us from these human forms and reclothe us in the light among the stars."

A true human being is a holy spark fallen into the world of birth, generation, fate and decay. Hence the Gospel of John identifies the Logos or Word with "The true Light" that "lighteth every man that cometh into the world."

The American Gnostic scholar David Fideler explains:

 Putting on the rags of mortality, we have descended from the ‘Fullness’ (Pleroma) of Light, the timeless realm of perfection, and have forgotten our true nature, heritage and birthright. Our existence on Earth is a sleep, until some type of call, messenger, or revelation awakens us to the recognition of our origin and true nature. This recollection represents the birth of gno