Читать книгу The Secret Source - Maja D'Aoust - Страница 21

The mind is a place of its own. It can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.

—John Milton

The healing methodologies of the New Testament Christ and those of the Hermetic Egyptians are strikingly similar. Faith healings were carried out long before Yesu arrived on the scene. Belief was used by the ancients to activate the healing powers within the patient. A perfect example of faith healing can be found in the caduceus story of Moses. Moses uses the serpent on the staff to heal his people in the wilderness, and this gesture is more tied to the mind cure than one might think.

The significance of looking on the bronze serpent and living is that the healing is based on faith, not on the copper serpent itself; this was emphasized later in John 3:14 and 3:15, when Jesus refers to this incident to say that the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that all who believe on Him will have eternal life. The bronze serpent illustrates that the “instrument of judgment becomes the means of deliverance.” In this episode, the symbol of pain and death becomes a symbol of healing.⁴⁶

In exorcisms of demons and the devil, Jesus cured a variety of physical ailments that were regarded as demonic possession, including blindness (John 9:2), dumbness (Matt 9:32, Luke 11:14), blindness and dumbness (Matt 12:22), the gout (Luke 13:11), dropsy (Luke 14:2), leprosy (Luke 17:12), palsy (Mark 2:5), fever (Luke 4:38) and dystrophy or paralysis (Mark 3:5). In one instance, not only is the victim not a follower of Jesus, but he rebukes him entirely:

And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God. And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of him. And when the unclean spirit had torn him, and cried with a loud voice, he came out of him. (Mark 1:23)

The majority of the healings were actuated by the faith of the sick, not the actions of Christ himself. He stated, “Your faith has made you well.” This, importantly, places the power of healing in the hands of the sick, rather than it being a supernatural act.

Faith healing has been taken to the extreme by some Pentecostal churches in America, and has come to resemble assembly lines rather than personal, individual healing sessions. Though they wouldn’t admit this, the churches’ faith healing owes a stylistic debt to the New Thought movement, and therefore the Hermetic ideals:

It is important to note at the outset that the bulk of [the Faith movement’s] theology can be traced directly to the cultic teachings of New Thought metaphysics. Thus, much of the theology of the Faith movement can also be found in such clearly pseudo-Christian cults as Religious Science, Christian Science, and the Unity School of Christianity. Although proponents of Faith theology have attempted to sanitize the metaphysical concept of the “power of mind” by substituting in its stead the “force of faith,” for all practical purposes they have made a distinction without a difference. New Thought writer Warren Felt Evans, for example, wrote that “faith is the most intense form of mental action.”⁴⁷

The Catholic church has disparaged the Evangelical movement as “prosperity gospel,” not viewing it as Christian at all. Many Christian leaders condemn the idea that God will reward the faithful with health and wealth. We might remember the scandals of popular televangelists of the 1980s who used people’s donations to support their lavish lifestyles. These televangelists—such as Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, Paul Crouch and Kenneth Copeland—encouraged their followers to “sow a seed” of faith by donating to their ministries in order to recoup prosperity in the future.

Whether Egyptians, Greeks, or another ancient civilization had a hand in it, the importance of stimulating the patients’ own healing energies was understood to be the cause for the miraculous cures which did take place, miracles equal to, and sometimes greater than, those performed by Jesus Christ, as described in the New Testament. The authors are not attempting to state that Jesus was erroneous or insincere in his teachings or practices, simply that a lineage of these traditions existed long before Jesus’ existence. The most overt similarities between the healing methods of Jesus and the Hermeticists can be found with Asclepius, a student of Hermes Trismegistus, as suggested by the existence of the Corpus Hermeticum writing, “The Asclepiad.” The cult of the Asclepians was popular around 300 BC, the same time that Alexandria began to flourish, when Asclepius was adapted by the Greeks and came to be known as the Greek god of healing. Like Christ, Asclepius died and descended to the underworld before being resurrected. Both Asclepius and Christ were the sons of a mortal woman and a god, Asclepius being born to Apollo and Christ being born to Jehova.

Asclepius, like Jesus, used no small amount of faith when healing the sick in his temples:

Tales of the marvelous cures effected at the healing temples spread the fame of the healing deity, Asklepios, throughout Greece. It was such common knowledge that the sick, in going to these sanctuaries for relief, were probably already imbued with a certain religious fervor, while their imagination was excited by the hope that they also might be the recipient of the divine grace.⁴⁸

In the Iamata, Asclepius is recorded as healing such illnesses as paralysis and blindness, some of Jesus’ most famous accomplishments. The early Christian church Fathers were not ignorant of these similarities, and went about replacing the Asclepian temples with Christian churches whenever possible. In the Byzantine empire, for example, where the popularity of Asclepius was rampant, the Christian church made quick work of pronouncing him an agent of the Devil, and then converted or killed all of his followers:

Despite the institutionalization of Christianity as the state religion of the Byzantine Empire, the popularity of the pagan cult of Asclepius was unshaken. Christianity’s inability to triumph provoked resentment on the part of the Church Fathers, which they released in demonizing Asclepius who, according to Lactantius and the Acta Pilati, cast out devils in the name of the Devil, and in ostracizing Asclepius’ medical disciples—the doctors. The vindictiveness unleashed in the destruction by Christians of Asclepius’ shrines, notably at Dor, was the popular expression and outlet of the same frustration. As Asclepius persisted in attracting followers, the Church changed its tactics. It absorbed physically the sacredness inherent in Asclepian sanctuaries by building churches over them, as at Dor, as well as appropriated and Christianized the healing rites of Christ’s main rival.⁴⁹

We also find parallels to the miracle “mind cure” healings of Jesus in the Hermetic individual known as Apollonius of Tyana. A contemporary of Christ, Apollonius of Tyana’s life was so similar to that of Jesus, many argue that they were the same individual⁵⁰

All through the third century, there is repeated mention of this (Apollonius’ teachings). But it was not until Hierocles, in the beginning of the fourth century, boldly charged upon the Christian priesthood their plagiarism of the teachings and works of Apollonius that the latter found it necessary to set every means at work that could in any way help to conceal the great truth that Hierocles proclaimed with such portentous force.⁵¹

Apollonius became known as a great healer when he spent time in the Asclepian temple of Aegae. Apollonius remained there for years, and he showed an astonishing gift for healing and clairvoyance. If one were to agree with several scholars’ suppositions that Apollonius and Jesus were in fact the same person, this would indicate that Christ was directly involved in a lineage to the Hermetic healing arts. Among Apollonius’ credits are raising the dead, exorcizing a devil afflicting a boy by writing the devil a threatening letter, and curing a blind man and a man with a withered hand. Apollonius was also resurrected and ascended to heaven in front of witnesses.⁵² We cannot confirm that the origins of the mind cure are solely Hermetic, either, as we also find this information in Indian and Chinese healing modalities that predate Egypt. Additionally, shamanic teachings that stretch back to pre-history echo Hermetic procedures.