On his final journey to Jerusalem, in all the synoptic accounts Jesus tells his disciples that he is to be ignominiously crucified, but that he will rise on the “Third Day” (Mt 20,17-19; Mk 10,32-34; Lk 18,31-33). In vs 34, Luke then says, “But they understood none of these things; this saying was hid from them, and they did not grasp what was said.” The full “grasp” was not to come to humanity for centuries, aside from the insights (“seeing,” Is 6,9-10) granted to the few who were to become “Witness” to it for posterity. Humanity was not ripe for it in that “generation” (Jn 16,12; Heb 5,11; 9,5b).

In order for Christ to give humanity a “sign” of what lay ahead for it and to become a “First Fruit,” he had to “die” a real earthly death so that the final deathlike condition (Jn 11,4,11) in the “temple sleep” of the Mysteries would be carried over into the real “Death” that every human being experiences.

John’s version of what the synoptics expressed (Mt 20,17-19; Mk 10,32-34; Lk 18,31-33) is given in Jn 12,32-33:

(32) “and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” (33) He said this to show by what death he was to die.

Exoterically, vs 33 meant Jesus’ death on the Cross; but esoterically, as it applies to the consequential “lifting up” of each of us followers (vs 32), it means the eventual “crucifixion” of our mineral-physical body so that we do not have to “die any more” (Lk 20,36), i.e., reincarnate. The “first death” (in the context of Rev 20,6,14, i.e., the “Second Death” when the etheric body will also be permanently laid aside) will have occurred and we will be “lifted up” into the etheric existence (cf. 1 Th 5,16-17; 1 Cor 15, 51-56).

This passage carries us to the more cryptic passage where Jesus earlier expressed the knowledge of how it was necessary that he die in the manner that was to come about:

Jn 3,14: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up.”

There is an analogy between the “Serpent” and the dual nature of the “Zodiac(al)” sign of the scorpion. We shall see in “Peter, James and John” that the lower “I Am,” the scorpion (literally, probably Iscariot), becomes the eagle—for Lazarus/John for a time replaces Judas among the “Twelve,” and his Gospel has carried the symbol of the eagle from time immemorial. And we shall see later how “Serpent” carries this double meaning. In its lower aspect it is represented by the fallen snake and the tempter, but in its higher aspect it relates to the serpent of the Oriental “kundalini fire,” when the “lotus flowers” (Job 40,21-22) are so stimulated as to engender perception in the spiritual world.³ This perception leads to the first stage of spiritual development in the human being, that called “Manna” (or manas, see I-9) when the Ego has gained ascendancy over the astral body. It was Moses who first brought Manna to the people (Num 11) and he who first “lifted up the serpent” in the “Wilderness” (loneliness of the soul) for their healing and life. Paul recognized this as spiritual food, 1 Cor 10,3, as did Lazarus/John, Rev 2,17. We will also see later that “Son of Man” indicates the spiritual offspring of the human Ego, i.e., “man,” when it has converted its “Three Bodies” into the fullness of, and thus given birth to, the higher “I Am” of Christ (Mt 13,33).

To more fully appreciate the significance of the profuse Biblical indications about the Mysteries, we must steal a further look at the creation (evolution) of the human being. (The “Overview” gave a quite brief portrayal. An even fuller one is to be found in the first essay in Volume 2, “Alpha and Omega > Creation and Apocalypse,” in its discussion of “The Creation.” The fullest account must await the Commentary.)

At the point in its evolution pictured in Gen 2,15-17,

(15) The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (16) And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; (17) but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.

the human being was still in the etheric world, not yet having descended into sense-perceptible mineral (material) existence. Its being was composed of “Three Bodies,” physical, etheric and astral, not yet joined by the Ego (they do not speak the name “I,” Gen 3,10, until after they have eaten the forbidden fruit). Various beings of such character (i.e., also consisting of “three bodies”) retarded from prior evolution, in accordance with their etheric “kind” (Gen 1,21,24,25), began to descend into materiality. These represented all the various shades of “astrality” that the human astral body encompassed (those “Wild Animals” taken into the “Ark,” the post-Atlantean human physical body, in the Noah account, Gen 6,14-7,3), and as they descended into materiality the human being was able, from the “garden” to give them “Names” appropriate to their astral character. This coming into existence of the Animal Kingdom is described in Gen 2,19-20a:

(19) So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. (20) The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field.

The human being, in its essential character, was still androgynous, a circumstance that was to change contemporaneously with the change that was to come about in its astral body. The division into sexes took place during a pralaya, “Deep Sleep,” a “timeless” period of evolutionary transformation when there was a lull in human consciousness. This is described in Gen 2,20b-24.