In 1928, Edmond Szekely, published a translation of a manuscript, ostensibly discovered in the Secret Archives of the Vatican, ‘The Essene Gospel of Peace.’ The Vatican says that Mr Sezeley has never been privileged with such intimate access to their Room of Wicked Books and detractors point to the fact that the original Aramaic manuscript has never been seen, so many dismiss Szekely as a fake.
But…
apocryphal texts have always had aspersions cast upon them. They are always illegitimate as far as the Establishment is concerned, yet somehow also sufficiently dangerous enough to it at the same time such that having a copy could get you killed.
Another prolific writer from a little later, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, was also accused of fraud. His first book, ‘The Third Eye’, purported to be an account of growing up in a monastery in Tibet. After massive sales, private detectives discovered he was Cyril Hoskin, the son of a Devon Plumber living in a basement flat in Pimlico, London.
Rampa denied none of this when confronted with ‘the facts’. He explained that he had hit his head falling out of a tree whilst trying to photograph an owl and that whilst summarily indisposed had been visited in a vision by the spirit of a lost Tibetan monk who’d asked him for corporeal refuge. So, he awoke as Tuesday Lobsang Rampa and thereafter not only dressed in Tibetan style but wrote dozens of books on Tibetan life and mystical practices, including one that was dictated to him by his cat, Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers.
Mad, right?
When I first came across the works of Rampa and had no idea of the controversy that raged as to his ‘legitimacy’, I decided to practice one of his mystical techniques, astral travel. I was sixteen. One of his books had just fallen into my lap and I read it avidly, fascinated by a culture, a way of experiencing life, so different from mine, intrigued by the author’s connection to magical realms and so one night, instead of just reading about it, I decided to try it.
My apprentice’s efforts seemed combined with dream and next morning I woke having remembered only something vague from the evening before, I had been floating down a road in the next town following a friend and his sister who turned into the gate of their new house, which I had not yet visited, and went inside. I noticed the family car had been in an accident and the offside rear door was all dented in. I soon forgot all about it.
A week later I went to visit that same friend in his new house. As soon as I saw the street I remembered the ‘dream’. Even the filigree work on the gate was correct. I rang the door bell and my friend answered saying I looked as white as a ghost. I staggered in and told him the story which he listened to carefully until I mentioned the dented car. ‘That’s the only bit that hasn’t happened,’ he said. Then his father arrived, having just been involved in an accident during which the offside rear door was bashed in.
Maybe Tuesday was really some deep part of Cyril but maybe that didn’t matter. Somehow, Tuesday spoke through Cyril in a way that was not only convincing but verifiable. Or are we to believe that folk stopped channeling the Divine after Jesus’ time just because the Church didn’t like it?
Perhaps the ‘Essene Gospel of Peace’, whilst similarly compromised as to its provenance, might still be considered of equal value as any other piece written out of divine inspiration. St Augustine was once asked how to tell the difference between god and the devil given that the latter often masqueraded as the former.’ By the taste in the back of your mouth,’ he replied. Suck it and see.
So let’s approach the Essene Gospel of Peace with the thought that its authorship is of secondary consideration to its content and that even if Szekely penned it himself, it might be just as worthy a revelation, as significant a teaching as any Dead Sea Scroll transcribed by similarly devoted folk separated from us only by time and geography. It was certainly attacked as much.
At the beginning of the Book we find afflicted souls pressing Jesus to relieve them of their suffering and dis-ease. Jesus responds by directing them straight to the Great Mother.
‘Happy are you that hunger for the truth for I will satisfy you with the bread of Wisdom..and lead you into the kingdom of the Mother’s angels where the power of Satan cannot enter.” page nine
When the gathered crowd press him to reveal the whereabouts of the Mother’s kingdom he replies,
She is in you and you in Her. Keep therefor her laws… Unless you follow the laws of the Mother you cannot escape death. None but she heals you.” page 10
”What are these laws?” they ask. ”We already do what Moses said.”
You already know Her laws, he replies….
”they are written in your heart and in your blood,..wherefor do you study dead scriptures that are the works of the hands of men? page 13.
It is said that when chief Sitting Bull was told the white God’s Commandments he replied, ‘you need to be told these things?’
The law of the Mother is the Principle of Relatedness. We are afflicted with sin and its suffering to the extent that we are separated from ourselves and from one another, to the extent we have missed the mark, ignored what we know in our marrow and gut.
Redemption is therefor to be found not in being good but in being connected, out of which goodness flows. Jesus goes on to point out that the prodigal son is redeemed not by giving up his vice but by being connected to and valuing his father. His sin was not so much his wayward life since this was merely the symptom of a deeper malaise. It was his separation from what he knew in his bones, the law of the Mother.
Satan then, is not really the Great Tempter after all. Temptation is simply the natural outcome of turning away from what you know to be true.
Jesus then gets up to leave but suggests before he goes that the crowd realign themselves with the Great Mother by deliberate encounter with her Angels of Air, Water and Sunshine, ritual acts of purification to at-one with Her.
The motley crew of beggars and invalids make their way to a stream where they ritually bathe. All manner of devilish excrescences are endured, including terrible farts..
‘many belched stinking gases from their bowels, like the breath of devils. And their stench became so great that none could bear it.”
To cast out a devil is to be conscious of something that has previously been on silent running, something with which you have been unconsciously identified, something that stinks, disconnection from Life.
For some, the worst afflicted, the rituals of the three Angels do not work and when Jesus returns these few beg him for further intervention…
‘Master, we are grievously tormented by pain; tell us what to do.’
For these, Jesus suggests a ritual to the Angel of the Earth, they must sink themselves into the physical embrace of the Great Mother to overcome the separation that has befallen them.
The worst of the bunch, his body as parched as a skeleton and skin yellow as a falling leaf for whom even this is not sufficient cries out…
‘Master have pity upon me, I know that you can straightway cast Satan from me..’
but Jesus rebukes him,
”Satan torments you because you do not pay to him his tribute. You do not feed him. You torment Satan with hunger and so in his anger he torments you also..page 32
Jesus is reminding this man that you have to have a relationship with the shadow if you are to get it off your back. His insistence on being a victim of fate reinforces his suffering, exacerbates separation.
Jesus makes a special concoction of Ewe’s milk enfused with the Mother’s Angels of Water, Air, Sunshine and Earth, the vapour (spirit) of which the afflicted man must breathe.
That does the job.
The crowd heap praise on him to which he replies,
‘Wisdom and Power can only come from the love of God, therefore love your Heavenly Father and Earthly Mother with all your heart…
Nothing in there about fearing the lord or having to obey anything. No wonder the Church had it in for Szekely, though technically, by 1923, the Inquisition had probably been reduced in executive power from thumbscrews and burning at the stake to a written complaint addressed to his Mum.
He might never have been to the Vatican. He might even have told some pork pies. The irony is that at the same time, Carl Jung was developing his depth psychology on the need for modernity to acknowledge its roots in the archetypal feminine, on the neuroses suffered as a result of separation from the Unconscious let alone its contents and the need to re-member, to reconnect with, to relate to, Cthonic powers.