Course XXVII comparative religion

Teaching 17: The Romans

The Black Forest was inhabited by a nomadic tribe of early Aryans; attracted by mild weather of western lands, they came down through the present Brenner until Venetian countries, and from there went into the centre of the ancient Saturnia.

There they founded a flourishing community that consisted of clans, and lived by grazing, hunting and fishing.

Their religion was like that of any Aryan: purely natural.

They worshipped elements and their manifestations; their priests foretold the future by the flight of birds, by the sound of the wind through branches of the tress and by the form of flames in the holy fire.

From there the powerful people of the Racenes –later called Etruscans– came into being; the high level of their civilization can be ascertained today by remnants of monuments discovered in excavations of those missing cities.

But other peoples, of Semitic origin, and particularly those tribes later called Ligures, invaded the Italic peninsula, killed their old inhabitants and imposed their laws and religion of Egyptian and divine origin.

Since then the worship of ancestors begins, and also the transformation of a hero or dead chief of the tribe into God.

The origin of the ancient Romans is entirely mythological and based on beliefs of every ancient Aryan religion; a god made man.

Rhea Silvia, a priestess of the fiery or solar worship, secretly married to the God Mars, becomes Romulus’ and Remus’ mother. These two children consist of a human and divine manifestation. Abandoned in the river by a shepherd and suckled by a she-wolf, they symbolize the descent of the pure souls to the lower worlds in order to conquer them.

After he killed his brother, Romulus founded a people of outlaws, and they forged a kingdom by means of work and efforts.

So, like the Assyrians, their religion is based on strength, power, war, order, law and militarism.

The supreme religion of the Romans consists of courage, victory in combat and grandeur of the people.

Their only God, their only king is the king that rules, or a dictator or emperor. They have no other god, except for an indomitable pride that never stops them or lets them rest.

Certainly, the Eagle was the first religious image of the Romans because they wanted always to fly upper and upper like an eagle.

After they become great and extend extraordinarily their domains, by coming into contact with the Greeks, who had an inborn sense of religion and mythology, they choose gods.

The Romans never had their own gods, because these were carried away or copied from the Hellenic Olympus. Jupiter, king of heaven, is Zeus in Athens; Venus is Aphrodite; Mars is Ares; Apollo is Phoebus; Vulcan is Hephaestus; and so on.

But the concept of family worship or early worship declined because by imitating the Greeks, Romans undermined the greatness of Rome.

The Romans were particularly very superstitious or very skeptic, and because of their enormous power and splendor, they attracted any worship coming from other extant religions.

In the times of the empire there were countless sects in Rome, sometimes in detriment and belittlement of their own gods and worship. Therefore, it was to be expected certain reaction like that in the times of the Christians.

The Roman Empire had tolerated all and had admitted any god in its pantheon, but could not renounce to deify their ruler because the support and structure of the entire empire rested on the almost divine power of the soldiers in the control. Thence the violent persecution against those Christians that denied this basic divinity of the empire.

Romans were not rich in science or philosophy because they adapted Greek philosophers and foreign sciences, and in their view, war was the supreme interest and only desire of man.

The Roman religious worship can be divided into three stages:

1) Period of natural and family worship of a warlike people, that of its highest flourishing.

3) Christian period; quick decline in the great empire of eagles.

Teaching 18: Celestial Empire

Chung-Ku, center of earth, unshakeable place that the waters did not remove entirely from continental summits preserved like a relic a small group of Lemurian men, adapted to the weather of the new continents defeated or controlled by black Atlanteans or instructed at the same time by them. As the Aryan race emerges, still they survive; they do not die, but transform and adapt themselves; so we have a yellow man short, lengthened eyes, with characteristic idiosyncrasy, like a living relic of the missing Lemurian race colored in the Aryan race.

The origins of Chinese civilization (Chun-Chin) are lost in the mist of Vedic times, since Vedas were those tribes settled on Chung-Yang’s rock, defeating early inhabitants, assimilated and adapted among them.

This country, extended from Tibet to the Yellow sea, has kept better than anyone else the concept of a divine religion, since like the Egyptians they see the Supreme Being in their emperor that rules over men and gods; the Pantheon of Chinese gods, in their category, are subject to the emperor’s orders; thence the name of this kingdom: Celestial Empire.

Yu, of Hia’s dynasty, is the oldest and real emperor, since former dynasties are just myths and legends.

He erects cities, organizes armies, fights against his enemies and is always a winner.

Chinese annals are from those times and are perfect codes of social, moral and economic order.

This dynasty may go back to one thousand five hundred years before Jesus Christ. Its successors enlarged their domains and surrounded their lands by an immense rampart that still survives like a relic of Chinese grandeur.

But it is Confucius who transforms the imperial grandeur of China into a religion.

He transforms the military order into practical philosophy: obedience to the king into filial devotion, like that of a son or a daughter to his father, and of man to God. He establishes a discipline that should transform human pain into continuous happiness; but to make this possible, a leader, a chief must be necessarily perfect and of strictly moral living.

The Book of Annals, written by him, became a code, a religious text, which still is a guide of the high Chinese aristocracy.

But Confucius’ religion does not deal of life after death, since it is merely materialistic. Its entirely purpose consists of granting to man a happier, more comfortable living.

Lao-tse is a philosopher and great Chinese Initiate in metaphysics. He teaches the science of the soul; in his view, all we see is a manifested sublime principle, hidden and fundamental, and true bliss consists of looking for that unique truth, which is able to reinstate man in his early state.

Yang, male principle, and Yin, female principle, are the two energetic powers that sustain the universe.

Lao-tse’s disciples in China are so numerous that they form both a real army and a religion that still exists, called Taoism. “Tao” means “path”, “religion”; but in the course of times, the Tao’s religion lost its early concepts of pure spirituality and became magic religion. It is a Taoistic priest he who moves away evil spirits, consecrates family manes, makes amulets and relics, and prepares certain liquor extracted from peaches, which is like an elixir of life, a rejuvenating tonic.

Buddhism was the most disseminated religion in China, but today Shintoism prevails, which is a synthesis of the three, though independent and based on the worship of fire. The emperor professes this religion because it is the synthesis of the other three; the aristocracy follows Confucius’ laws; priests and sages follow those of Lao-tse, and the people is Buddhist.

Yellow man, over all religions, tends to preserve his own millenary religion, which is the most perfect synthesis of the two great religions intertwined –Arian and Atlantean– of the true eternal religion: Celestial Empire of the Souls.