Welcome to the Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, it's one of those nights. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. barbarous islands where men have no churches nor ceremonies and where they worship God reflected in the work of his thousand hands. And as you know from past broadcasts where this subject has come up on telephone inquiries, that is my church and that is the way I worship my God. But we're not speaking of the present day. Those ancient peoples were not long content with this simple service. Prayer, which had first been an inspiration, fell into a system. And men already grown wicked, prayed the deity to give them abundance of wild beasts, skins, and to destroy their enemies. They ascended great mountains. They sought out eminences and hills as if hoping that thus being nearer God, he would prefer their prayers to those of their rivals. That is the origin of that superstitious reverence for high places, which was universal throughout the whole of the heathen world. And then Orpheus was born. And he invented instruments which to his touch and to his lips gave forth notes of surpassing sweetness. And with these melodies he enticed the wandering savages into the recesses of the forest and there taught them precepts of obedience to the great soul and of loving kindness towards each other in harmonious words. So they devoted groves and forests to the worship of their God. And there were other men who had watched Orpheus and who had seen and envied his power over the herd who surrounded him what today we would call the masses the sheeple. They resolved to imitate him and having studied these barbarians they banded together and called themselves their priests and thus was born the priesthood. which exists to this day. Religion is divine but its ministers are men and sometimes they are demons with the faces and wings of angels. The simplicity of men and the cunning of their priests has destroyed or corrupted all the religions of the world. these priests taught the people to sacrifice the choicest herbs and flowers. They taught them formulas of prayer and bade them make so many obeisances to the sun and to worship those flowers which opened their leaves when the sun rose and which closed them as it set. They composed a language of symbols which was perhaps necessary since letters had not been invented but which perplexed the people and perverted them from the worship of the one God. Thus the sun and moon were worshipped as emblems of God and fire as an emblem of the sun and water as an emblem of the moon. the serpent was to be worshipped also as an emblem of wisdom and eternal youth since it renews its skin every year and thus periodically casts off all symptoms of old age. And the bull the most vigorous of animals and if you don't believe that you've never been to Spain to a ranch which specializes in raising the pure line of fighting bulls which are ultimately put to the death in the ring but nevertheless while they live are truly without a doubt the most vigorous the most robust the most challenging the most masculine of animals probably upon the face of this earth and whose horns resemble those of the crescent moon the priests observed the avidity with which the barbarians adored these symbols and increased them to worship the visible ladies and gentlemen is a disease of the soul inherent to all mankind and the disease which these men could have healed instead they pandered to now it is true that some of you would argue that the first generation of men might have looked upon these merely as the empty symbols of a divine being but I can assure you that it is also certain that in time the vulgar forgot the god in the emblem and worshipped that which their fathers had only honored as a manifestation of the power of the invisible Egypt that great civilization was the fountainhead of these idolatries and it was in Egypt that the priests first applied real attributes to the sun and to the moon whom they called his wife it might interest you to hear the first fable of the world and I told you this story before but I'm going to tell you again tonight because it never hurts to repeat a lesson even to those who have heard it many many times for with the retelling there was sometimes a new discovery from the midst of chaos was born Osiris and at his birth a voice was heard proclaiming the ruler of all the earth is born from the same dark and troubled womb were born Isis the queen of light and Typhon the spirit of darkness this Osiris traveled over the entire world and civilized its inhabitants and taught them the art of agriculture but on his return to Egypt the jealous Typhon laid a stratagem for him and in the midst of a banquet had him shut up in a chest which exactly fitted his body it was nailed down in his prison which cast into the Nile floated down to the sea by the Tychic mouth which even in the time of Plutarch was never mentioned by an Egyptian except with marks of detestation when Isis learned these sad news she cut off the lock of her hair and put on her mourning robes and wandered through the whole country in search of the chest which contained the dead body of her husband after a time she learned that the chest had been carried by the waves to the shore of Byblos and had there lodged in the branches of a tamarisk bush which quickly shot up and became a large and beautiful tree growing round the chest so that it could not be seen the king of the country amazed at the vast size the tree had so speedily acquired ordered it to be cut down to be hewn into a pillar to support the roof of his palace the chest being still concealed within the trunk the voice which had spoken from heaven at the birth of Osiris made known these things to poor Isis who went to the shore of Byblos and sat down silently by a fountain to weep the damsels of the queen met her and accosted her and the queen appointed her to be nursed to her child and Isis fed the infant with her finger instead of with her breast and put him every night into fire to render him immortal while transforming herself into a swallow she hovered round the pillar which was her husband's tomb and bemoaned her unhappy fate it happened that the queen thus discovered her and shrieked when she saw her child surrounded by flames and by that cry she broke the charm and deprived her child of immortality but by that cry Isis was summoned back to her goddess form and stood before the awestruck queen shining with light and diffusing sweet fragrances around she cut open the pillar took the coffin with her and opened it in a desert there she embraced the cold dead corpse of Osiris and wept bitterly she returned to Egypt and hid the coffin in a remote place but Typhon hunting by moonlight chanced to find it and divided the corpse into fourteen pieces again Isis set out on her weary search throughout the whole land sailing over the finny parts in a boat made of papyrus she recovered all the fragments except one which had been thrown into the sea each of these she buried in the place where she found it which explains why in Egypt there are so many tombs of Osiris and instead of the limb which was lost she gave the phalus to the Egyptians and placed it upon the altar of their temples the disgusting worship of which was thence carried into Italy into Greece and into all the countries of the east when Isis died she was buried in a grove near Memphis over her grave was raised a statue covered from head to foot with a black veil and underneath was engraved these divine words I am all that has been that is that shall be and none among mortals has yet dared to raise my veil beneath this veil are concealed all the mysteries and learning of the past many scholars throughout the ages fingers covered with the dust of venerable polios eyes weary and reddened by nightly toil me included have attempted over the years to lift a corner just a little corner of this mysterious and sacred covering and tonight I am revealing to you just a little of what I have found these two deities Isis and Osiris were the parents of all the gods and goddesses of the heathens or were indeed those gods themselves worshipped under different names the myth the fable the story itself was received into mythologies of the Hindus and the Romans Sira is said to have mutilated Brahma as Typhon did Osiris and Venus to have lamented her slain Adonis just as Isis wept for her husband God as yet the sun and moon alone were worshipped under these two names and as I have demonstrated besides these twin beneficial spirits men who had begun to recognize sin in their hearts had created an evil one who struggled with the power of life and fought with them for the souls of men men now folks it is natural for man to fabricate something that is worse than himself even as it is natural in times of terrible tragedy to look above for something that is greater than himself even in the theology of the Native Americans which is the purest probably of the modern world the most innocent very very close to that which existed in that long ago age there is found a Mahakau or dark spirit Osiris or the sun is now worshipped throughout the whole world though under many different names he was the Mithra of the Persians the Brahma of India the Baal or Adonis of the Phoenicians the Apollo of the Greeks the Odin of Scandinavia the Who of the Britons the Bywe of the Laplanders Isis also received the names of Isling Sarees Rhea Venus Vesta Sibyl Niobe Melissa Diana Nihalinia in the North Icy with the Indians Pusa among the Chinese and Carid Wyn among the ancient Britons the Egyptians were sublime philosophers who had dictated theology to the entire world and in Chaldea arose the first astrologers who watched the heavenly bodies with curiosity as well as with awe and who made divine discoveries and who called themselves the interpreters of God they believed they believed that the stars were the spirits of great men who had reached the point of apotheosis and had ascended into heaven as masters and so to each star they gave a name and to each day in the year they gave a star and the Greeks and Romans who were poets read these names into legends each name was a person each person was a god from these stories of the stars originated the angels of the Jews the genie of the Arabs the heroes of the Greeks and the saints of the Roman Catholic Church corruption grew upon corruption and superstition flung a black and hideous veil over the doctrines of religion a religion is lost ladies and gentlemen as soon as it loses its simplicity truth has no mysteries it is deceit alone that lurks in obscurity soon men multiplied God into a thousand names and created him always in their own image him to whom they had once deemed unworthy of any temple less noble than the floor of the earth and the vast dome of the sky they worshipped in caves and then in temples which were made of the trunks of trees rudely sculptured at first and ranged in rows to imitate groves and with other trunks placed upon them traversely such were the first buildings of worship erected by man from no reverence for the deity but to display that which they doubtless conceived to be a stupendous effort in art something to impress all and cower their flock it may not be needless to remind many of you that a superior being must view the elegant temples with which we contemplate the rude efforts of those early heathens who deemed God unworthy of the fruits and flowers which he himself had made and offered to him the entrails of beasts and the hearts of human beings that which he had created as sacrifices unto him how utterly absurd we can compare an ancient and fallen religion to the ship of the Argonauts which the Greeks desiring to preserve to posterity repaired it in so many different ways that at length there did not remain a fragment of the vessel which had borne to Colchis the conqueror of the golden fleece if he had lived to see the end result he would not recognize it as his own boat said to Thank you. 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