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Updated: June 10, 2025
They should give out their books as the priest his sacrament, should wear sacred vestments, and bear about with them the priestlike aura, as of divine incarnations of the great spirit of Truth and Art in whose temples they are ministrants. The next step to this ideal ministry is to have our books given out to us by women.
The snake seems to have been generally revered, though it was sometimes regarded as hostile. In other cases they are revered as incarnations of deceased men.
The miraculous legends with which the life of Buddha was gradually invested, the almost idolatrous worship paid to him, the belief that he himself was but the last of many incarnations in which the Buddha had already revealed himself from the very beginning of creation all these later accretions represent, no doubt, the reaction upon Buddhism of its Hinduistic surroundings.
First of all the departed hero became a powerful ghost or deity in his own right, and then this deity was identified with a Brahmanic god. Many examples prove that a remarkable man receives worship after death quite apart from any idea of incarnation. The incarnations of Vishṇu are most commonly given as ten but are not all of the same character.
But in the absence of a personal god the Vedantist and Hindus in general have built up a system of numberless incarnations which "play" upon the imagination of the votaries and give ample scope to the remarkably poetic genius of this people.
When he got into Aries, they were in like manner considered but as incarnations of Cristna or Aries, and even Buddha and Cristna were originally considered the same, and had a thousand names in common, constantly repeated in their litanies a striking proof of identity of origin.
It denounces the incarnations of Vishnu as mere inventions, and therefore cuts up by the roots the whole Krishna cult and dissipates the glory of the Bhagavad Gita. It abhors polytheism, and not only proclaims the supremacy of one only true God, self-existent, the creator and upholder of all things, but it maintains that such was the teaching of the Vedas.
The deification of Buddha takes place before our eyes as we follow the course of history: the origin of Krishna's godhead is more obscure but it is probable that he was a deified local hero. After the period of the Brâhmaṇas the theory that deities manifest themselves to the world in avatâras or descents, that is in our idiom incarnations, becomes part of popular theology.
Enterable only after a prolonged novitiate, the adept then beheld an unfolding of the theosophy of the soul. In visions, possibly ecstatic, he saw the series of its incarnations, the seven cycles through which it passed, the Ship of a Million Years on which the migrations are effected and on which, at last, from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, it sails to its primal home.
Having presented the evidences in support of the apparently untenable assertion that, notwithstanding the numerous modes in which man has manifested his devotional proclivities, the world has virtually had but the one religion founded in the worship of personified nature, we are necessitated to recognize the facts that the Christian Scriptures like the sacred records of other forms of nature worship are, but a collection of astronomical allegories; that the gospel story is truly "the old, old story" which had been told of a thousand other Saviours before it was applied to the Christian Messiah; that Jesus is but one of the many names given to imaginary incarnations of the mythical genius of the sun; and that the Disciples and Evangelists are but the genii of the months and the seasons.
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