“Is it possible,” queries further on the author, thus answering the intimate thought of every Christian and Occultist who reads and studies his work:
Is it possible that the events of humanity do run co‐ordinately with these number forms? If so, while Jesus Christ, as an astronomical figure, was true to all that has been advanced, and more, possibly, He may, as a man, have filled up, under the numbers, answers in the sea of life to predestined type. The personality of Jesus does not appear to have been destroyed, because, _as a condition_, he was answering to astronomical forms and relations. The Arabian says, “Your destiny is written in the stars.”(254)
Nor is the “personality” of Apollonius “destroyed” for the same reason. The case of Jesus covers the ground for the same possibility in the cases of all Adepts and Avatâras—such as Buddha, Shankarâchârya, Krishna, etc.—all of these as great and as historical for their respective followers and in their countries, as Jesus of Nazareth is now for Christians and in this land.
But there is something more in the old literature of the early centuries. Iamblichus wrote a biography of the great Pythagoras.
The latter so closely resembles the life of Jesus that it may be taken for a travesty. Diogenes Laërtius and Plutarch relate the history of Plato according to a similar style.(255)
Why then wonder at the doubts that assail every scholar who studies all these lives? The Church herself knew all these doubts in her early stages; and though only one of her Popes has been known publicly and openly as a Pagan, how many more were there who were too ambitious to reveal the truth?
This “mystery,” for mystery indeed it is to those who, not being Initiates, fail to find the key of the perfect similitude between the lives of Pythagoras, Buddha, Apollonius, etc.—is only a natural result for those who know that all these great characters were Initiates of the same School. For them there is neither “travesty” nor “copy” of one from the other; for them they are all “originals,” only painted to represent one and the same subject: the mystic, and at the same time the public, life of the Initiates sent into the world to save portions of humanity, if they could not save the whole bulk. Hence, the same programme for all. The assumed “immaculate origin” for each, referring to their “mystic birth” during the Mystery of Initiation, and accepted literally by the multitudes, encouraged in this by the better informed but ambitious clergy. Thus, the mother of each one of them was declared a virgin, conceiving her son directly by the Holy Spirit of God; and the Sons, in consequence, were the “Sons of God,” though in truth, none of them was any more entitled to such recognition than were the rest of his brother Initiates, for they were all—so far as their mystic lives were concerned—only “the epitomisers of the history of the same Sun,” which epitome is another mystery within the Mystery. The biographies of the external personalities bearing the names of such heroes have nothing to do with, and are quite independent of the private lives of the heroes, being only the mystic records of their public and, parallel therewith, of their _inner_ lives, in their characters as Neophytes and Initiates. Hence, the manifest sameness of the means of construction of their respective biographies. From the beginning of Humanity the Cross, or Man, with his arms stretched out horizontally, typifying his kosmic origin, was connected with his psychic nature and with the struggles which lead to Initiation. But, if it is once shown that (_a_) every true Adept had, and still has, to pass through the seven and the twelve trials of Initiation, symbolised by the twelve labours of Hercules; (_b_) that the day of his real birth is regarded as that day when he is born into the world spiritually, his very age being counted from the hour of his second birth, which makes of him a “twice‐born,” a Dvija or Initiate, on which day he is indeed born of a God and from an immaculate Mother; and (_c_) that the trials of all these personages are made to correspond with the Esoteric significance of initiatory rites—all of which corresponded to the twelve zodiacal signs—then every one will see the meaning of the travels of all those heroes through the signs of the Sun in Heaven; and that they are in each individual case a personification of the “sufferings, triumphs and miracles” of an Adept, before and after his Initiation. When to the world at large all this is explained, then also the mystery of all those lives, so closely resembling each other that the history of one seems to be the history of the other, and _vice versâ_, will, like everything else, become plain.