When one bears in mind the suffering of the divine goat Dionysos in the performance of the Greek tragedy and lament of the retinue of goats who identified themselves with him, one can easily understand how the almost extinct drama was revived in the Middle Ages in the Passions of Christ. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly, we feel His presence when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His Worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. Do you think God would be satisfied with half an oblation (peace offering)? I vehemently deny the charge of atheism. I am simply inveighed against the popular idol-worship of God as a substance, as another entity in the World, and against the vulgar eudemonistic morality which makes God a giver of sensuous rewards for good deeds and sensuous punishments for evil deeds. Such a conception—or, indeed, any attribution of personal characteristics to God—constitutes a lowering and limiting of the deity and has to be opposed in the interest of true religion. 

There can be no doubt that the notion of God as a separate substance is impossible and contradictory, and it is permitted to say this plainly.  When you would conceive of that great Being truly and fully, you must be able to realize the duration of eternity, obliterate the little periods of time and chronology, which require a starting and resting-place in our human minds—soar out of the reach of the sickly atmospheres which surround these little planets, and stand erect in the broad and fathomless light of God’s own atmosphere. Again, we need no other God [than the moral World order], and we cannot comprehend another one. There is no rational justification for going beyond the moral World order to a separate entity as its cause. God is too often a convenient stalking horse for human selfishness. However, the human soul is responsible for the origin of evil. God implants in the hearts of His people a desire to advance His ends, but human agents are compelled to employ natural means. The mystical union with the One is the ultimate goal of humans, and part of the soul makes such a union possible as superior to Intelligence. It is the flower of Intelligence.   

  In what ways did Christ obtain his amazing wisdom? Through careful study of the larger World in which we live and the smaller World of our human nature, it has emerged the duties of the heart: service of God, trust in God, wholehearted devotion to God, humility in God’s presence, repentance, self-communion, and renunciation. In this way, humans reach the height of the religious life, the love of God. Christ might have built up his teachings from the writings of Greek elders, which Providence could have out into his hands through his associations with Hellenistic Jews. Christ founded a kind of Freemasonry to assist him in his purpose to destroy superstition, restore reason to its rightful rule, and unite people in a rational faith in God, Providence and Immortality. The great message of spiritual vitality and force, directed to the human heart and resting on the threefold base of reason, revelation, and tradition. Apprehending the dimension of the spirit is a very succinct belief that cannot endure the acid test of rational examination in the product of life and time because it is a vision of reality that includes eternity, and immortality.  

In life, conjuring cannot be explained solely in material terms. From the traditionalist standpoint, it seemed an insoluble mystery how the mind knows just what motor nerves to activate when, for instance, expecting a blinding light to be switched on, it causes the eyes to close in advance. The spirit of God is not inert like levers but possess an inherent spontaneity, and this spontaneity means that the expectation of the painful glare is inseparably associated with preparations to close the eyes. And having faith in God inherently means we will spontaneously treat others with the kind of love and respect that God would expect so we escape the painful doctrine of damnation. The belief arises in the context of free will. We are on Earth and inseparable from a preparation to act in which one seriously expects alleviation from suffering is in reach. In trying to grasp salvation, the belief in God is inevitably put to the test: We believe first and prove or disprove afterwards.   

The essence of the human situation is a kind of circle of activity in which we inevitably acquire new nonrational beliefs as a direct consequence of practically and experimentally testing those we start with. The point is that our actions have unforeseen consequences. Disorder and tension on an individual level, and consequently, social level are the result of ignorance of the self and the World around. The mind stays without rest, running, jumping, and churning aimlessly, lashed by a white squall of feelings and emotions. The emotive pole of consciousness, where absorption in one’s pains or pleasures presents the objective assessment of one’s situation, and the cognitive pole, where pleasures and pains are forgotten in the business of mapping one’s own World and where emotions appears only in the shock of scientific discovery, as a feeling that, like boredom, is outside the pleasure-pain sphere. The movement from feeling to knowledge in consciousness is linked with the same facts that give human life the character of a passage from belief to self-criticism.   

When Christianity began its entry into the ancient World it met with the competition of the religion of Mithras and for a long time it was doubtful which deity was to be the victor. The Bright figure of the youthful Persian god has eluded our understanding. Perhaps we may conclude from the illustrations of Mithras slaying the steers that he represented the son who carried out the sacrifice of the father by himself and this released the brothers from their oppressing complicity in the deed. There was another way of allying this sense of guilt and this is the one that Christ took. He sacrificed his own life and thereby redeemed the brothers from primal sin. The theory of primal sin is Orphic origin; it was preserved in the mysteries and thence penetrated into the philosophic schools of Greek antiquity. Men were the descendants of Titans, who had killed and dismembered the young Dionysos—Zagreus; the weight of this crime oppressed them. A fragment of Anaximander says that the unity of the World was destroyed by a primordial crime and everything that issues from it must carry on the punishment for this crime.   

Although the features of banding together, killing, and dismembering as expressed in the deeds of the Titans very clearly recall the totem sacrifice described by St. Nilus—as also many other myths of antiquity, for example, the death of Orpheus himself—we are nevertheless disturbed here by the variation according to which a youthful god was murdered. In the Christian myth, man’s original sin is undoubtedly an offense against God the Father, and if Christ redeems humankind from the weight of original sin by sacrificing his own life, he forces us to the conclusion that this sin was murder. According to the law of retaliation which is deeply rooted in human feeling, a murder can be atoned only by the sacrifice of another life; the self-sacrifice points to a blood-guilt. The suicidal impulses of our neurotic regularly prove to be self-punishments for death wishes directed against others. And id this sacrifice of one’s own life; the self-sacrifice brings about a reconciliation with God, the father, then the crime which must be expiated can only have been the murder of the father.   

Thus, in the Christian doctrine humankind most unreservedly acknowledges the guilty deed of primordial times because it now has found the most complete expiation for this deed in the sacrificial death of the son. The reconciliation with the father is the more thorough because simultaneously with this sacrifice there follows the complete renunciation of woman, for whose sake humankind rebelled against the father. However, not, also the psychological fatality of ambivalence demands its rights. In the same deed, which offers the greatest possible expiation to the father, the son also attains the goal of his wishes against the father. The religion of the son succeeds the religion of the father. As a sign of this substitution the antiquated totem feast is revived again in the form of communion in which the band of brothers now eats the flesh and blood of the son and no longer that of the father, the sons thereby identifying themselves with him and becoming holy themselves.  

Thus, through the ages we see the identity of the totem feast with the animal sacrifice, theanthropic human sacrifice, and the Christian Eucharist, and in all these solemn occasions we recognize the after effects of that crime which so oppressed men but of which they must have been so proud of. At bottom, however, the Christian communion is a new setting aside of the father, a repetition of the crime that must be expiated. We see how well the Christian communion has absorbed within itself a sacrament which is doubtless far older than Christianity. Full fathom five thy father lies: Of his hones are coral made; those pearls that were his eyes; nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange…But what, then, is this consciousness that underlies both the emotional side and the intellectual side? First, we are unconscious of the undifferentiated. A constant impression is to the blank mind—if temperature were unvarying we would not notice it. Second, we are conscious of the constant only in the midst of variety and difference.   

The essence of consciousness is thus to be discriminative, discriminations involved in the consciousness, the most liable to be misunderstood is that implicit in the problem of the external World.  Many people dismiss discrimination as meaningless the notion of material objects independent of experience, and they frequently overlook an important point—that a distinction can be drawn within experience between the person sensing it and the sensation sensed. There is a profound sense of the complexity of the problem in the external World. Thus, in dealing with the emotions the important role some give to pure malice, or sadism, as human motive contrast refreshingly with the more commonplace views have been justly appreciated in our time. Tragic guilt is not always easy to explain; it is often not a guilt in the ordinary sense. Almost always consisted of rebellion against a divine or human authority and the chorus accompanied the hero with their sympathies, trying to restrain and warn him, and lamented his fate after he had met with what was considered fitting punishment for his daring attempt.   

However, why did the hero of the tragedy have to suffer, and what was the tragedy have to suffer, and what was the meaning of his tragic guilt? We will cut short the discussion by a prompt answer. He had to suffer because he was the primal father, the hero of that primordial tragedy the repetition of which he serves a certain tendency, and the tragic guilt is the guilt of which he had to take upon himself in order to free the chorus of theirs. The scene upon the stage came into being through purposive distortion of the historical scene, or, one is tempted to say, it was the result of refined hypocrisy. Actually, in the antiquated situation, it was the members of the chorus themselves who had caused the suffering of the hero; here, on the other hand, they exhaust themselves in sympathy and regret, and the hero himself is to blame for his suffering. The crime foisted upon him, namely, presumption and rebellion against great authority, is the same as that which in the past oppressed the colleagues of the chorus, namely, the band of brothers. Thus, the tragic hero, through still against his will, is made the redeemer of the chorus.