THE INDIVIDUAL MAN AND THE COLLECTIVE MAN. 59

praise which the good Genii, and those who before were wicked, will offer in choir to the Supreme Being.

Such is the goal of the Zend religion, offering to man, whose activity is roused through his senses, the splendid spectacle of boundless felicity, colored by a brilliant imagination, and contrasted by a fright. ful mass of torments calculated to impress deeply and to fix itself in the soul of man. (Anquetie Du Perron.)

In our studies on the Solar religions it is necessary to recognize equally the material and the spiritual aspect of every fact; not to make a shallow denial of evil, because it can be identified in the region of causes with cold and darkness, nor like the silly Orthodox church people who confine their attention simply to the spiritual aspect of evils as they show themselves in the individual soul; to neglect both the organic conditions under which these evils have developed themselves in the individual, and the social relations or structure of the collective man; of which individual lives are merely phenomenal.

Man exists as a concrete being, at once spiritual and material; he exists also as a compound being, at once individual and social. A true life and salvation imply at the same time organic religion and purity of the body-spiritual religion or purity of the soul-individual goodness or the internal harmony of the individual within himself by the equilibrium and co-operation of all his faculties and passions; and collective goodness, or the social harmony which assures justice and general prosperity by rightly providing for the industrial and passional capacities of the individuals composing it. There is individualism, and there is solidarity. Every one of us must be judged, rewarded, or punished by mathematical consequence of the actions he performs and of the feelings which he entertains, all the while that he is representative and phenomenal of the state of the society into which he is born, and of the influences it has brought to bear on him. We are responsible for ourselves, and we are also responsible for one another, and what a terrible and glorious reality this responsibility is, I shall bring home to you, when I speak on passional affinities.

Those whose idiosyncrasy leads them to dwell on the truths of individual destinies, and the consequences of their lives here in the life to which they pass at death, need to add to their private religion and its ceremonial observances in regard to their organic health and spiritual culture, the social religion; and to co-operate even from the necessity of their own salvation, in organizing the structure of society, so that it shall cease to lead individuals into temptation, but bring forth perpetually in the individual characters pheno

60 NO PRIVATE SAFETY OUT OF THE DIVINE SOCIAL ORDER.

menal of its structure, a virtue and a blessing for every crime and misery that now prevails; for so long as poverty continues to be an organic character of society, so long it is necessary that the great majority of individuals should be poor; so long as fraud continues an organic fact, it is necessary that most individuals should be dishonest, etc.

Now, he who aids and abets a crime, or is even privy to it, is justly considered by the law as involved in the same guilt as the person who directly commits it. It avails little to the civilized saint that he in person have plenty of money; that he does not steal or violate the laws respecting property; that he conforms to the standard of honesty in a society which is dishonest in its very structure; that he refuses military duty, and only supports armies by paying government taxes; that he does not own chattel slaves, but does his oppression up less visibly within his own family circle, and by the medium of wages-slavery which oftener changes the personal relation of the employer to the employed, and deprives the former of his responsibility to provide for the latter.

Every one of us that sustains civilization, the society in which all these vices are organic, is virtually a personal accomplice in them, as in every crime of the decalogue, and must suffer accordingly, both in this world and in the next, though not indiscriminately. We are damned now collectively and individually, and every one that has ever had a glimpse of man's true life of harmony on earth, knows this very well. Our salvation, alike for this life and the other, lies in the conquest of this destiny. Do not be deceived by the now so common reply of spirits, whether real or imagined, by the clairvoyants, who tell you they are happy. You accost an acquaintance in the street thus, and he replies, "I am very well, I thank you," and we all become habituated to conceal our ills, to put the best foot foremost, and affect to be happy, or at least at ease, all the while that we feel hard enough what a tug life is.

There is no safety for any individual out of the divine social order. On the socialist, on the other hand, it is necessary to urge, that his efforts to realize this do not exculpate him in the slightest degree from the consequences of his private misdeeds, but only render them more conspicuous and pernicious. He will inherit the hell of his own disorders and vices just as surely as though he had never been preoccupied with anything else than himself, and it behoves him with all speed to prove his sincerity, by showing himself a harmonist in his private life, as he aspires to become a harmonian in his social relations.

CHRIST, THE SOLAR MAN.

THE Solar ray reveals the Divine Trinity; its heat corresponds to Love; its light to Truth; its electric element, determining chemical changes, to Use or practical ultimation.

The Divine Passional principles, embodied in the stellar sphere, constitute the Sun; descending into our own sphere of life, they constitute Man, who, as the divine incarnation is fulfilled in him, becomes the representative and true image of God on the Earth.

The Human race, in its unity and its harmony, will then radiate an influence beneficent like the Sun's, on all its fellow-creatures, and Man, the Pivotal Being of his native planet, will be recognized by the subject elements, and vegetable and animal beings; Sovereign of nature and intelligent mediator of attraction.

These attributes are potentially resumed in the Omniarch, pivotal character, or natural chief of the human race; a character yet latent, not developed or recognized, since there yet exists no human unity or unitary system of relations, whose first principle, the Passional Group, is revealed to us by the Sun, which as Pivot and Passional Chief, attracts around him in movement the planets of our system, with a gravitative force directly in proportion to their masses and inversely to the square of their distances.

An ideal and spiritual type of this Solar and Pivotal man exists in the historical character and the mystical but not less real influence of that being known to us as Christ, to other climes and nations perhaps by other names.

This being is called, by Mr. Doherty, in his profound and subtile theological studies, to which he applies the principles of analogy, the amphimundane Pivot, connecting under his spiritual regency the souls now embodied on the earth, and those which yet await their incarnation, or which have passed the transition of death.

We shall perceive from a comparison of the Christian narrative with that of the Egyptian Osiris, the Grecian Bacchus, the Phoenician Adonis, the Persian Mithra, and even the Peruvian Manco Capac, that

62

MANKIND INTUITIVELY

the existence of such a specific solar incarnation is a subjective or internal necessity in the constitution of the human mind; at all events a national or individual necessity, so imperious that the crudest fables which priests have fabricated on this basis have met with ready acceptance by the most advanced peoples of both hemispheres.

The doctrine, at first aspect startling, of a Sun-Man or Human Sun, of a God-Man or Man-God, becomes easy and natural when we find it the objective correspondence to a pre-existent subjective fact, or psychical demand.

It grows still clearer as we consider the other terms or grades of the same solar incarnation; for as that of the collective human race resumes its virtues in the Omniarch or Amphimundane Pivot, so within this series, has every race, state, province, and phalanx, its own Subpivot, who, if truly elected, in a social medium where characters can pronounce themselves distinctly, will represent or resume their collective virtues, as the Omniarch that of entire humanity.

The second distinct term, or grade of the Solar incarnation in humanity, will be found in the associated township or phalanx, whose industrial and social arrangements so develop and satisfy the divine nature in man in its three great branches-Affection, the love principle; Order and distribution, the intellectual or truth principle; and Sensation, the material or practical use principle-that the human beings, living in such relations, will each complete his subjective existence through a practical development by objective affinities, and thus the whole society constitute an integral human soul, composed of numerous individual souls of both sexes, and become the first element of the human Unity. A third term or grade of the Solar incarnation, differing only from the first and second as another aspect of the same fact, is fulfilled in every man, woman, or child, each of whom exhibits faithfully the same Solar, planetary, and human life, under the particular limitations and circumstances which have given his or her individual sphere of birth, being, and action. The same divine passional principles, already thus divided and refracted, become still more so in passing into lower or denser media, as those of animal life in its successive grades of organization, those of vegetable, and those of mineral or inorganic forms, which, to our apprehension, constitute the ultimate term at once of creation and creative influence.

Leaving aside, at present, his moral and spiritual character, his teachings and human relations, to regard exclusively his external history, let us see whether Christ, "that light which enlightens every

REQUIRE A SOLAR CHIEF.

63

eye which comes into the world," has the characters ascribed by mystical astrology to the Sun-God, and especially in his incarnation and his resurrection.

The Sun, in reality, is neither born nor dies, but is always equally brilliant and majestic, yet relatively to us, in day and night, summer and winter, there is increase and diminution, lending themselves to the personifications of sacred allegory, which paint the four seasons under the figures of infancy, youth, maturity, and old age.*

In the short days of the winter solstice, at the twenty-fifth of December, was celebrated the birth of the Day-God, in the image of a new born child taken from the recesses of the sanctuary, from the sacred cavern, from the temple of the virgin Isis in Egypt, or the mystical cave of Mithra in Persia. It is the constellation of the celestial virgin, which, by its ascent in the horizon, presided over this birth of the Day-God, and seemed to produce him from her chaste womb. The Magi, as well as the Egyptian priests, sang this incarnation of the Day-God in the womb of the virgin, who brought forth without ceasing to be a virgin; and they traced in the sphere the image of the new born Day-God in the arms of the constellation, whilst the images of the virgin, presented to the veneration of the people, depicted her as in the planisphere, suckling the mystical child who was to destroy evil, confound the prince of darkness, regenerate nature, and rule over the universe.

The Greeks represented the Sun as Bacchus, in the four phases of child, youth, maturity, and decline of age.

The Egyptians celebrated, at the winter solstice, the birth of the son of Isis, born in the midnight darkness. This child, according to Macrobius, was the light God Apollo, or the Sun, painted with his head despoiled, his radiant locks shaved and with but one hair left. Thus was designed the feebleness of the winter sun and short duration of the day, as well as the obscurity of the deep cavern where the God seemed to be born and whence he commenced his northern course towards the summer solstice to regain his glory and rule. In the inscription of the temple of Isis at Sais, were found these words, "The fruit which I have engendered is the Sun."

The famous feast of light celebrated at Sais corresponds to the Christian chandelier, or feast of the light of purification.

The Romans celebrated solar feasts and circus games at the winter solstice on the 8th day before the kalends of January, i. e., on

* Vide Dupin's Origine de tous les cultes, for what follows here.