Contemplating Reincarnation as Church Doctrine
in the 21st Century

by C. Ravin, Esq.
January 2002

Reincarnation is not a dogma; it is a living standard of morality directly affecting human behavior.

It was an essential part of the early Gospels, and its removal by two macabre characters has never been satisfactorily accounted for. Scattered references still exist in the Bible, but the Encyclopedias have been steadily diminishing their emphasis on it since as far back as 1911 - the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica to deal frankly with it. We shall now put forth evidence that supports a general argument that unless and until the modern Church comes to accept reincarnation as plain and to support it and to seek its official re-adoption, there will remain this glaringly obvious example of where the efforts of churchmen today will continue to come up short in their efforts to measure the Church equally with other more common, progressive understandings on the subject, understandings which we will shortly learn were never incompatible with traditional ideas of the early Church fathers to begin with. It was only at the hands of an unscrupulous couple, a punk Emperor and his sorry-ass bride, of which the Church would no doubt like to forget, yet now will be examined to gain a proper insight of why the Church dropped the ball on reincarnation when it could have easily reaffirmed the teachings of early Church fathers who supported it.

I willingly concede that many a self-sustained bigot gives Voltaire short shrift; but until a wiser Daniel comes to judgement I am content to take my comfort from the common sense and logic of his critical perception. Along with the Socinians, I too give first importance to the “heretics” who died for the apocryphal gospels. I cannot conceive of them all as fanatics hurling themselves into the arenas, to be tortured or devoured, as fecklessly as the Norwegian lemmings swim out to sea every year in search of an island which long ago disappeared beneath the surface.

The first gospels must have contained teachings which the early Christians were prepared to preserve with their lives. Unfortunately they appear to have died in vain. Our orthodox versions of the Old and New Testaments date no further back than the 6th Century, when the Emperor Justinian summoned the Fifth Ecumenical Congress of Constantinople in 553 A.D. to expunge the Platonically inspired writings of Origen, an early Church Father, who had upheld reincarnation until his death three hundred years before.

The proceedings were about as open and aboveboard as the Reichstag Fire Trials which brought Hitler to power, and the instigators took the same care to eradicate all evidence of their methods. Contrary to the official belief of our contemporary Churches, this was not an unsecular Congress. The Pope was forbidden to attend, and his denunciation of it was flouted. It was instigated by the same substratum of moronic barbarians who had “converted” to Christianity under Constantine.

Before we examine this Fifth Congress in sharper detail, however, (and it will be not unlike trying to reconstruct a crime from the bare minimum of clues left by a consummate professional criminal), we should take into account the human attributes of the major protagonists.

The Byzantine Emperor Justinian, (483-565), as a fatherless youth, was brought up in austere obscurity by his mother and his uncle, the “peasant” Emperor Justin, while they rigidly groomed him to inherit the throne of Constantinople. The severity of his upbringing was responsible for an arid, erratic streak in him; he early developed an intellectual passion for law that is hardly commensurate with normal adolescence; and though he considered himself essentially a “good” man, he was easily swayed by flattery and, lacking in physical heroism, his judgment of his fellow men remained superficial and immature.

Only in his intuitive grasp of military strategy was he consistent. His youthful General, Belisarius, successfully subdued the Ostrogoths in Italy and the Vandals in Africa, thus restoring the foundering Roman Empire to a modicum of its former power.

Byzantine architecture flowered under Justinian, and he revised Roman civil law to the extent that it subsequently became the basis for all Western jurisdiction.

On the face of it, he should have risen to the heights of a Charlemagne. That he did not was due in part to his temperament - an incompatible mixture of dedicated zealotry and infirmity of purpose - and in part to his deterioration to the rank of pawn in a ruthless woman’s bid for self-deification.

Theodora (508-547), the commoner who became Justinian’s Empress, had sufficient authority over contemporary records to suppress most of the evidence of her dubious background; and her only biographer, Procopius, so bitterly detested her that his Secret History is rejected in as many academic quarters as it is accepted in others.

It is generally agreed that Theodora was the daughter of a bear-feeder in the amphitheatre in Constantinople, and made her debut as a child actress at a time when that profession ranked one lower than the world’s oldest. Of this too she rapidly became an accomplished member, and her insatiable ambition made capital of the obstacles it presented.

Her first and most influential teacher, Eutychius, a devotee of the Eastern Church, first emerges when she was the mistress of Hecebolus, the governor of Pentapolis in North Africa. When Hecebolus eventually threw her out of the city, Theodora and Eutychius gravitated first to Alexandria then to Constantinople, she as an ascending power in the lists of profane love, and he as the doyen of a series of Monophysite religious schools.

Now the Monophysite doctrine is, as it were, the “villain of the piece.” It was this sect that was later to renounce and discredit all allusions to reincarnation in the early gospels and split the church into two warring factions.

It must be remembered that not only had an unending series of conflicting schisms plagued the solidarity of the Christian Church, it still faced active resistance and sturdy competition from the pagan religions it had not yet superseded - many of which were not only gayer and more escapist, they even threw in the odd saturnalia. Now the Monophysites added to the confusion by contending that Jesus’ physical body was wholly divine, and had never at any time combined divine and human attributes. (It seemed to cause them no embarrassment that Jesus himself had declared that there was a spark of the divine in every human soul. They adhered militantly to their conviction that the mere act of donning the outer trappings of a mortal body would have defiled Jesus’ true origin).

Unfortunately, under the influence of Eutychius, Theodora became a convert to this suspect and controversial Monophysite dogma, its principal claim to her affections being its total rejection of those teachings of Origen which had so profoundly influenced the early Church Fathers. Origen not only believed in predestination, but argued that Christ the Logos, or Word, inhabited the human body of Jesus, thus sanctifying it.

It is difficult, today, when one wades through these laborious arguments between the Eastern and Western branches of the Church over the divinity of Christ, to realize the manic antagonism they aroused in both camps. The Monophysites continued to provoke strife and discord until the year 451, when a specially summoned Church Council, loyal to Origen’s teachings, split Christ into two separate natures, human and divine.

This well-intentioned decision, known as the Chalcedonian Decree, became in effect the launching-pad for all the black mischief that followed.

Indeed the split between the Monophysites and the Vatican eventually reached such violent proportions that “one of Justinian’s first public acts was to make the Patriarch of Constantinople declare his full adhesion to the creed of Chalcedon.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

This represents solid proof that, prior to Theodora’s arrival on the scene, Justinian was in complete sympathy with the Origenist leanings of the Church of Rome; yet in 543, at Theodora’s urging, he permitted a local synod to discredit and condemn the writings of Origen.

Theodora’s strategy was always to create a condition of organized confusion in which every man eventually found himself at daggers-drawn with his neighbor; enabling her to divide and conquer at her leisure. Once she had become Justinian’s mistress, she set her stakes even higher - she determined to become his Empress; and though Justinian’s mother opposed her with all the power at her command, Justinian proved to be too emotionally unstable to resist such a “blitzkrieg.”

Where his knowledge of his fellow men was faulty and shallow, Theodora’s was expert and innately predatory. Where he vacillated, she was as inflexible as iron. Although the law forbade men above senatorial rank to marry “actresses,” the law was conveniently abolished by Justinian on the death of his mother, and Theodora took her place beside him on the throne.

There is nothing historically unique about an unworldly monarch reduced to thralldom by a ruthless courtesan; but few courtesans in history possessed Theodora’s diabolism.

Witness the Encyclopedia Britannica:

“Officials took an oath of allegiance to her as well as to the Emperor. The city was full of her spies, who reported to her everything said against herself or the administration. She surrounded herself with ceremonious pomp, and required all who approached to abase themselves in a manner new even to that half-Oriental court.

“She constituted herself the protectress of unfaithful wives against outraged husbands, yet professed great zeal for the moral reformation of the city, enforcing severely the laws against vice and immuring in a ‘house of repentance’ on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus five hundred courtesans whom she had swept out of the streets of the capital.

“According to Procopius, she had before her marriage become the mother of a son, who when grown up, returned from Arabia, revealed himself to her, and forthwith disappeared forever.”

Most of the accessible public references, while they discredit Procopius on the strength of his bitter hatred of Theodora, put forward no conclusive argument to substantiate their bias; and the Encyclopedia Britannica even relaxes sufficiently to admit that “it rests on the solid witness of John of Ephesus that Theodora’s youth was disreputable. We gather too that she was harsh and tyrannical from the references to her in the lives of the popes, Liber Pontificalis.”

In very short order she became a tyrant in the grand manner of the more corrupt Caesars.

Her favorites catapulted to power and her enemies died by such thousands that eventually the public rose up against the royal couple. Confronted by the Nika insurrections of 532, Justinian, terrified and demoralized, would have fled before it; but the indomitable Theodora preferred death to obscurity. She made him sweat it out, and the riots were finally subdued.

After that, Justinian was no more impressive than a glove-puppet on her strong right hand, and she was free to concentrate her energies on the most formidable of her foes, the Church of Rome.

Theodora saw the Christian Church as her equivalent of the Great Pyramid - an eternal monument to her ego - and so to insure its permanency she set about the total reconstitution of its credenda, which was far too sublime for her purposes. That she actually succeeded was due to the fact that the Vatican had hardly recovered from its subjugation by Theodoric the Ostrogoth before it found itself under the over-solicitous “police protection” of Belisarius’ army of occupation.

It is fair to assume that Theodora conscripted two of her most devoted deacons, Virgilius and Anthimus, on the advice if not the instruction of Eutychius; just as she had inherited her antagonism to the theory of the soul’s progressing rebirths on this planet from the same subversive source.

Very much as the hero of Orwell’s 1984 “purified” the public files of the newspapers by rewriting political history and eliminating all reference to previous “Big Brothers,” Theodora now pursued a campaign designed to obliterate all and any passages in the Bible which might reduce to absurdity her hopes of instant apotheosis upon departing this life.

This brings us logically to the teachings of Origen, around which all the controversy was now to center.

Theodora’s first move in her grand strategy was to subdue and unify the various feuding factions of the Eastern Church until it was utterly under her domination. In open defiance of Vatican protocol she appointed her lackey Anthimus as Patriarch of Constantinople.

At once, she ran afoul of Pope Agapetus. At the Council of Menas in 536 he courageously denounced both Theodora and Anthimus.

Now Anthimus is a minor figure in the overall picture, but he was equipped for great mischief at this moment. Theodora had appointed him for the express purpose of revoking the Chalcedonian Decree. Justinian’s role, as usual, was to plead ignorance of the whole affair and play Pilate.

Unfortunately for the spiritual destiny of Europe, the saintly and incorruptible Agapetus died in that same year of 536; but he leaves a nobler and more honorable record behind him than any of the other participants in this sorry charade. This dignified old worthy traveled from Rome to Constantinople in bleak February weather, and when he discovered the full significance of Theodora’s intent, he became the only prelate ever to denounce her in Constantine s presence.

“With eager longing,” he informed the outraged Constantine, “have I come to gaze on the most Christian Emperor Justinian. In his place I find a Diocletian, whose threats, however, terrify me not.”

This unexpected rap on the royal nose pulled Justinian up short, and “being fully convinced that Anthimus was unsound in faith, he made no exception to the Pope’s exercising the plenitude of his powers in deposing and suspending the intruder Anthimus and, for the first time in the history of the Church, personally consecrating his legally elected successor, Mennas.” (Catholic Encyclopedia, at 203).

The death of Agapetus followed his triumph so swiftly that one can only assume that Theodora was instrumental in speeding him to a happier world. With Agapetus dead, Mennas was easily brought to the royal heel, and accommodatingly condemned the entire Diocese of Origenism in the Emperor s name.

From this point on, Justinian obediently sanctioned all Theodora’s further purges of Origenism.

It seems relevant at this point to illustrate from a completely independent and unbiased source, the Vita Silveri (Gesta Pont. Rom. I. 146), just how malevolent Theodora’s self-deification had become:

“Because the Empress was grieving for the Patriarch Anthimus, the most holy Pope Agapetus having deposed him on the grounds of heresy and replaced him with Mennas . . . the Emperor, after conferring with the deacon Virgilius, sent this letter to (Agapetus’ successor) Pope Silverius at Rome: ‘Make no delay in coming to us; or without fail recall Anthimus to his own place.’

“And when blessed Silverius had read this, he groaned and said: ‘I know very well that this affair has brought an end to my life,’ but replied by letter to the Empress: ‘Mistress Augusta, I shall never consent to do such a thing as to reinstate a man who is a heretic and who has been condemned in his own wickedness.’

“Then the Empress in a fury sent orders to the patrician Belisarius by the deacon Virgilius: ‘Seek out some grounds of complaint against the Pope Silverius that will remove him from the office of Bishop; or at least send him quickly to us. You have there the Archdeacon Virgilius, our most beloved deputy, who has promised us to recall the patriarch Anthimus.’

“The patrician Belisarius undertook the commission, and under urgent orders, certain false witnesses issued forth and actually made the statement that they had discovered the Pope Silverius sending messages to the King of the Goths. Upon hearing this, Belisarius refused belief, knowing that these reports were motivated by envy; but when many more persisted in this same accusation, he became afraid.

“Therefore he caused the blessed Pope Silverius to come to him in the Pincian Palace; and he stationed all the clergy at the first and second entrances; and when Silverius and Virgilius had come alone into the salon, the patrician Antonina was reclining on a couch, and her husband Belisarius was seated at her feet. Antonina said at once: ‘Tell me, Master Silverius, Pope; what have we done to you and the Romans, that you wish to betray us into the hands of the Goths?’

“And even while she was speaking these words, there entered John, the regional sub-deacon of the first ward, who lifted the blessed Pope Silverius’ collar from his neck and led him into a chamber. There he unfrocked him, put on him monk’s garb, and spirited him away.

“And Virgilius took him under his personal protection, as it were; and sent him into exile in Pontus, where he sustained him with the bread of tribulation and water of necessity. And he weakened and died and became a confessor.”

Theodora now stood revealed in her true colors, and her next move was her most ferocious so far. She became the only Empress in history to succeed in enthroning her own Pope, Virgilius, in Rome in 538. She had, in effect, ascended the papal throne in person; and it is more than likely that this is the source of the legend of the mythical Pope Joan.

Before we turn our attention to the eyewitness accounts supplied by Procopius, it is fitting to preface them with one last excerpt from an independent source.

Among the accredited historians of Byzantine history of this era are three of importance - Agathius, (530-582); John Lydus, (490-565); and Evagrius, (536-594) - and Evagrius in his Ecclesiastical History (iv.32), makes this comment:

“There was also another quality latent in the character of Justinian, a depravity which exceeded any bestiality which can be imagined; and whether this was a defect of his natural character or whether it was the outgrowth of cowardice and fear, I am unable to say; but in any case it manifested itself as a result of the popular Nika insurrection.”

Here is a side of the Emperor which Procopius documents in detail, yet it is discreetly ignored in the standard references; most of which content themselves with discrediting Procopius outright and whisking a whitewash-brush lightly across Theodora’s diabolism.

The version of the Anecdota, or Secret History, from which I shall quote here is one of seven volumes which include the History of the Wars and History of the Buildings, published in England by William Heinemann and distributed in America by the Harvard University Press. The translation is by H. B. Dewing, Ph.D., L.H.D., and the Anecdota translation was completed in 1935.

According to Dewing, the personable and well-educated Procopius arrived in Constantinople from Caesarea in Palestine while still a young man. Almost at once he was appointed legal adviser and private secretary to the patrician Belisarius, Justinian’s youngest and most illustrious General; so he can hardly be said to have hidden his light under a bushel. Indeed, we are immediately confronted by an unexpectedly articulate and imposing figure - the official historian of Justinian’s three wars against the Persians, the Vandals, and the Goths, respectively, in which capacity he traveled in the personal entourage of Belisarius and observed the wars firsthand. This is hardly a privilege accorded an anonymous scribbler of salacious gossip.

“Besides his intimacy with Belisarius, it should be added that his position gave him the further advantage of a certain standing at the imperial Court in Constantinople, and brought him the acquaintance of many of the leading men in his day. Thus we have the testimony of one intimately associated with the administration.

“One must admit that...the imperial favor was not won by plain speaking; nevertheless we have before us a man who could not obliterate himself enough to play the abject flatterer always; and he gives us the reverse, too, of this brilliant picture (in) the Anecdota, or Secret History. Here he freed himself of all the restraints of respect or fear, and set down without scruple everything which he had been led to suppress or gloss over in the History of the Wars through motives of policy.

“It is a record of wanton crime and shameless debauchery, of intrigue and scandal both in public and private life.., we seem to hear one speak out of the bitterness of his heart. It should be said at the same time that there are very few contradictions of fact.” (Dewing’s Introduction).

When we take into account the expert organization and efficiency of Theodora’s spies and assassins, any man with courage enough to compile a secret record of her crimes, not only from first-hand observation but during her own lifetime, was bound to have walked in permanent fear of having his own crime discovered, no matter how ingeniously he concealed his manuscript.

This anxiety and tension is self-evident in the Secret History. It is obviously written rapidly, in a tense state of outraged indignation, and seems not to have been polished or edited, but left in its first rough draft. It is inevitable that, writing under these conditions, Procopius often over-emphasized much that was minor at the cost of dwelling too briefly on more vital issues; but this doesn’t make him a liar.

An ominous note struck by the Secret History is the implication that a second volume may have been discovered and destroyed.

Quoting Dewing again: “It was the intention of Procopius to write a book on the subject of the doctrines of Christianity (and the long and often bitter debates, in the course of which these were formulated), as definitely stated in Chapter XI.33 of the Secret History - a promise which he repeated in the eighth book of the Histories, XXV. 13. “It is most unfortunate that he was prevented from fulfilling this promise, for his point of view was that of a liberal who was puzzled by the earnestness with which his contemporaries entered into the discussion of these matters.”

Even a cursory study of the War Histories reveals Procopius not only as a diligent and meticulous chronicler, but conscientious to such a degree that he was prepared to risk the ire of Justinian by rightfully crediting Belisarius with the success of the three campaigns.

If he promised to write a treatise on the religious confusion of the time, it is more than possible that he did write it, and that it fell into alien hands after his death. This does not necessarily point to foul play by his enemies, when one recalls the widowed Lady Burton burning her husband’s exotic translations from the Arabic “to keep his memory pure,” and Carlyle’s housemaid accidentally using the original manuscript of his History of the French Revolution to light the drawingroom fire.

Even so, we cannot ignore the fact that even if Procopius’ History of the Church had been as hastily compiled as the Anecdota, it could still have been so explosive in content that a timid bibliophile, discovering it on some forgotten shelf, would be impelled to deliver it into the hands of the authorities rather than offer it for sale to a private collector.

It was, after all, a private collector who discovered the Anecdota manuscript in Rome in the mid-19th Century. Written in Greek, and intact, it had obviously been lovingly protected for more than three hundred years. But as far as we may ever know, the History of the Church vanished as utterly as the Imperial Court archives in Constantinople, which did not even survive the remorse-ridden seniality of Justinian.

Because the Secret History can be found on few if any public shelves - even in the Colleges it is available only to advanced students - I feel it is essential that excerpts be included here, or I should hardly be justified in attaching such importance to their evidential value.

Those gifted with the patience to endure the archaism of Procopius’s style will find that a series of very real, living portraits will emerge, as distinct from the imaginary creations of a fertile literary brain. It will even become apparent that the accounts of Justinian’s insomnia and schizoid outbursts have a disturbingly familiar ring - they follow the same behavior pattern as Hitler’s: a fact which would have been inaccessible to Dewing in 1935, the year he completed his translation.

Procopius begins his Secret History by listing the atrocities committed by Belisarius’s wife Antonina, implying that her character was no better than Theodora’s, and that she employed witchcraft to install herself firmly enough in the good graces of her Empress to survive the rigors of that usually short-lived privilege.

“This woman, having in her early years lived a lewd sort of life, had become dissolute in character; not only having consorted with the cheap sorcerers who surrounded her parents, but eventually making use of the knowledge to become the wedded wife of Belisarius; having already mothered many children by other men.

“Straightway, therefore, she is established as an adulteress from her earliest beginnings, but she very carefully concealed this business - not because she was ashamed of her own practices, nor because she entertained any fear of their discovery by her own husband...but because she dreaded the punishment the Empress might inflict; for Theodora was all too prone both to storm at her and to bare her teeth in anger.

“But...by rendering many services to her in matters of the greatest urgency - having in the first place disposed of Pope Silverius…and later having brought about the ruin of John the Cappadocian, then at last she felt herself free to perpetrate all manner of wickedness, fearlessly and with no further concealment.”

This account of Antonina’s depravity culminates in her total and utter demoralization of Belisarius, in which she was enthusiastically supported by Theodora, who easily quashed Justinian’s token attempts to protect his once indispensable cohort:

“Belisarius had on one occasion come early in the morning to the Palace, accompanied as usual by a small and pitiful escort; and finding the Emperor and Empress not well disposed towards him, and having been insulted there by men of the base and common sort, he departed for his home late in the evening, repeatedly turning about as he walked, that he might observe the approach of any would-be assassin.

“Still in this state of terror, he retired to his chamber, bereft of worthy thought and unable to remember that he had ever been a man. He sat alone upon his couch, perspiring violently in helpless despair, tortured by servile fears and apprehensions which were both abject and wholly unmanly.

“Meanwhile Antonina pretended ignorance of what was next to befall, and to conceal her anticipation of it she (came before him and) paced up and down without cessation, pleading an indisposition of the stomach; for they still concealed their real mistrust from one another.

“In the meantime a man from the Palace, Quadratus by name, arrived after the sun had already set, and passing through the door of the court, suddenly appeared at the door of the men s apartments, stating that he had been sent there by the Empress.

“When Belisarius heard this, he drew up his hands and feet upon the couch, and lay there upon his back, completely resigned to destruction; so utterly had all his manhood left him.

“But when Quadratus came before him, he displayed to him a letter from the Empress. And the writing set forth the following: ‘You know, noble Sir, how you have treated us. But I, for my part, since I am greatly indebted to your wife, have decided to dismiss all these charges against you, giving to her the gift of your life. For the future, then, you may be confident concerning both your life and your property; and we shall assess your future behavior by your attitude towards her.’

“When Belisarius had read this, being overwhelmed with relief and wishing to give immediate evidence of his gratitude, he straightway threw himself at the feet of his wife. And clasping both her knees with either hand and constantly shifting his tongue from one of the woman’s ankles to the other, he kept calling her the savior of his life and his salvation, and promising henceforth to be, not her husband, but her faithful slave.

“Such, then, was the turn of events in the case of Belisarius the General; the man to whom, not long before, Fortune had delivered Gelimer and Vittigis as captives of war.”

If this was the kind of reward the most brilliant and loyal General in the kingdom could expect from the Royal couple, it is easy to understand why the Vatican stood to receive an even more savage onslaught at their hands.

Procopius then supplies a documented account of Theodora’s youthful promiscuity, which is, to put it mildly, too repulsive for inclusion here; although, when it is measured against the excesses of the more degenerate Caesars, it is credible enough.

“As for Theodora, she had a mind fixed firmly and persistently on cruelty. For she never heeded, at any time, the persuasion of another person; but she herself, applying a stubborn will, enforced her own decisions with all her might, and no one dared to intercede for the victim who had given offence.

“For neither length of time, nor surfeit of punishment, nor trick of supplication, nor threat of death - fully expected to fall from Heaven upon the whole race! - could persuade her to abate one jot of her wrath. And to state the matter briefly, no one ever saw Theodora soften towards one who had offended her, even after that person had died; for the son of the deceased inherited the Empress’ enmity just as he inherited all else that had been his father’s, and himself passed it on to the third generation. For her passion, while swiftly aroused to the destruction of man, was beyond any power to assuage.

“Now Theodora was fair of face and in general attractive in appearance, but short of stature and lacking in color; being, however, not altogether pale but rather sallow; and her glance was always intense and made with contracted brows. She lavished more care on her body than was necessary, but never as much as she considered adequate. For instance, she used to enter the bath very early and quit it very late; and go thence to her breakfast. After partaking of breakfast, she would rest. At luncheon and dinner, however, she partook incontinently of food and drink, so that sleep would constantly lay hold of her for long stretches of time; not only in the daytime up to nightfall, but at night up to sunrise; and although she indulged herself in every excess for so major a portion of the day, she still claimed the right to administer the whole Roman Empire.

“And if the Emperor should impose any favor upon a man without her consent, that man’s affairs would suffer such a turn of fortune that not long thereafter he would be dismissed from his office with the greatest indignities, and would die a most shameful death.

“Now for Justinian it was easy to keep an ear to the ground, not only because he rarely slept, but because he was the most accessible person in the world. Even obscure men of low estate had complete freedom not merely to enter the presence of this tyrant, but to converse with him in a relaxed and informal manner.

“The Empress, on the other hand, could not be approached, even by one of the magistrates, except at the expense of much time and labour. Nevertheless they all had to dance attendance upon her slightest whim, and were thus reduced to waiting in a small and stuffy anteroom with a servile kind of submission for endless hours at a time. For it was a risk beyond bearing for any one of the officials to be absent.

“And so they stood there, constantly upon the tips of their toes, each one straining to hold his head higher than the persons next to him, in order that the eunuchs, when they came out, might notice them. And those of them who were eventually summoned, after many days, entered her presence in great fear and very quickly departed, having simply done obeisance by touching the instep of each of her feet with the tips of their lips. For there was no opportunity to speak or to make any request unless she gave them leave to do so. For the Government had sunk into servile abasement, having her as slave-master. Thus the Roman State was being ruined partly by the tyrant, who seemed too good-natured; and partly by Theodora, who was harsh and exceedingly difficult. For whereas in the capriciousness of the one there was instability, in the obduracy of the other there was a bar to all action.”

All of which has the ring of firsthand reporting of a highly reputable order.

Procopius then presents in detail his theory that both Theodora and Justinian were “possessed by demons;” and here the same manic disorders that distinguished Hitler come into sharp focus, even if the language of that time lacked the advantage of modern psychiatric idiom.

“And I think it not inappropriate here to describe the appearance of this man. He was neither tall in stature nor particularly short, but of medium height; yet not thin but slightly fleshy; and his face was round and not uncomely, for his complexion remained ruddy even after two days of fasting. But if I were to describe his appearance as a whole in a few words, I would say that he very closely resembled Domitian, son of Vespasian, an Emperor who so incensed the Romans who suffered under him that even after they had hacked his whole body to pieces they determined by a decree of the Senate that not even the name of this Emperor should appear on documents, nor any likeness of him whatsoever be preserved...

“Such was Justinian in appearance; but his character I could not accurately describe, for this man was both an evil-doer and easily led into evil; a perfect artist in acting out an opinion which he pretended to hold; and even able to produce tears . . not from joy or sorrow, but contriving them for the occasion, according to the need of the moment. . always playing false, yet not carelessly, but adding both his signature and the most terrible oaths to bind his agreements; and that, too, in dealing with his own subjects...

“And he had no scruples whatever against the acquisition of other men’s money - putting forward justice as an excuse when appropriating estates which did not belong to him - yet once these had become his own he was at great pains to show his contempt for all wealth with a prodigality in which there was no trace of sanity. He never ceased to distribute vast bribes of money to all the barbarians - both those of the East and those of the West and those to the North and to the South - even those whom we had never so much as heard of before. For they, of their own accord, on learning the nature ot the man, kept streaming into Byzantium from all corners of the earth in order to get to him. And he, as if it were a source of vicarious gratification to him to bail out the wealth of the Romans and fling it to barbarians - or, for that matter, to the surging waves of the sea - continued to send them away with bulging purses.

“In this way the barbarians became the total inheritors of the wealth of the Romans, either in the form of gifts from the Emperor, or by plundering the Roman domain and then selling back their prisoners of war, or by auctioning off an armistice. To sum up the whole matter, Justinian, being unable to value or retain money himself, would allow no one else in the world to have it; as though he were not a victim of avarice, but simply consumed by envy of those who had conserved their fortunes. Consequently, he irresponsibly banished wealth from the Roman world and became the creator of poverty for all...

“And they say that a certain monk who was very dear to God set out for Byzantium in order to plead the cause of the people who lived near the monastery and were being wronged in an unbearable manner; and immediately upon his arrival he was granted admittance to the Emperor. But just as he was about to enter his presence, having already placed one foot across the threshold, he suddenly recoiled and stepped back.

“Now the eunuch who was his conductor, as well as others nearby, besought him earnestly to go forward; but he, acting like a man who had suffered a stroke, made no answer, but departed thence and went to the place where he was lodged.

“And when his attendants enquired why he had acted thus, he declared outright that he had seen the Lord of the Demons sitting on the throne, and had declined to suffer his presence long enough to ask anything from him.

“And they say that Justinian’s mother stated to some of her intimates that he was not the son of her husband Sabatius, nor of any man. For when she was about to conceive him, a demon visited her; he was invisible, yet affected her with the certain impression that he was there with her as a man having intercourse with a woman, and then disappeared as in a dream.

“And some of those who were present with the Emperor at very late hours of the night in the Palace - men whose souls were pure - seemed to see a sort of phantom spirit, unfamiliar to them, in place of his. For one observer asserted that the Emperor would rise suddenly from the imperial throne and begin to walk up and down, (indeed he was never accustomed to remain seated for long), and the head of Justinian would disappear suddenly, while the rest of his body seemed to continue pacing. Meanwhile the observer himself, fearing he must have something wrong with his eyesight, stood rooted to the ground, distressed and perplexed.

“And another observer said that he stood beside Justinian where he sat, and suddenly saw his face become like featureless flesh; for neither eyebrows nor eyes were in their proper place, nor did it retain any other means of identification whatsoever. After a time, however, he saw the features of the face return. Although I did not see these things myself, I received the accounts from men whose word I trust, who witnessed them in person.

“And how could this man fail to be some wicked demon; who never had a sufficiency of food, or drink, or sleep; but taking a haphazard taste of whatever was set before him, walked about the Palace at unseasonable hours of the night, though he was passionately devoted to the joys of Aphrodite? He was not given to sleep as a general thing, and he never filled himself to repletion with either food or drink, but he usually just touched the food with the tips of his fingers and went his way.

Justinian’s split personality is shrewdly and articulately observed in the following:

“However, he did not, on that account, blush before any of those destined to be ruined by him. Indeed, he never allowed himself to show anger or exasperation, thus to reveal his feelings to those who had given offence; but with gentle mien and lowered brow and in a restrained voice he would give orders for the death of thousands of innocent men; for the dismantling of cities; and for the confiscation of all monies to the Treasury. And one would infer from this characteristic that he had the spirit of the lamb. Yet if anyone sought to intercede through prayers and supplications for those who had given offence, thus to gain for them forgiveness, then, ‘enraged and shewing his teeth,’ he would seem to be ready to burst, so that no one of those who were supposed to be intimate with him had any further hope of obtaining the desired pardon.

“And while he seemed to have a firm belief as regards Christ, yet even this was for the ruin of his subjects. For he permitted the priests to plunder the estates of their neighbours with comparative freedom; and...he would congratulate them, thinking that thus he was shewing reverence to the Deity.

“And in adjudicating such cases, he considered that he was acting in a pious manner if he approved of any man seizing that which did not belong to him in the name of religion; and having awarded him the case, sent him on his way. For he thought that justice consisted solely in the priests prevailing over their antagonists.

“Nay, more, he carried out an indefinite number of murders to accomplish these ends. For in his eagerness to gather all men into one belief as to Christ, he kept destroying the rest of mankind in senseless fashion; and that, too, while acting with a pretence of piety. For it did not seem to him murder, if the victims chanced to be not of his own creed.

“And I shall show further, how . . . many other calamities chanced to befall; which some insisted came about through the aforementioned presence of this evil demon and through his contriving; while others said that the Deity, detesting his works, turned away from the Roman Empire and gave place to the abominable demons for the bringing of these things to pass in this fashion.

“Thus the Scirtus River, by overflowing Edessa, became the author of countless calamities to the people of that region, as will be written by me in a following book.

“And earthquakes destroyed Antioch, the first city of the East, and Seleucia which is close to it, as well as the most notable city in Cilicia, Anazarbus. And the number of persons who perished along with these cities, who would be able to compute?

“And one might add to the list Ibora and also Amasia, which chanced to be the first city in Pontus; also Polybotus in Phrygia, and the city which the Pisidians call Philomede; and Lychnidus in Epirus; and Corinth. And afterwards came the plague as well, mentioned by me before, which carried off about one half of the surviving population.”

Substitute the Allied bombing raids of Germany in World War II for the natural disasters, and Hitler’s “voices” for the demons which “possessed” Justinian, and the parallel is neither fortuitous nor far fetched.

Procopius has drawn two very real portraits, and it seems unwarranted to reduce his observations to the level of malicious chatter.

Theodora, having contrived the murder of two Popes, expected to imbue their successor Virgilius with her own zeal to exterminate all traces of the Chalcedonian Decree and its division of Christ into two separate entities, sacred and human. She failed.

What caused her death no one seems to know for certain, beyond the fact that the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica finally gives Procopius the benefit of the doubt and has altered it from 548 to 547. Internal combustion could be as acceptable a diagnosis as any; or she might (like the Borgia Pope, Alessandro VI) have inadvertently drunk from the wine prepared for an expendable guest at her own table.

One thing is certain: the course of events she had set in motion had gained such momentum that she can be said to have continued to preside over them in absentia. Justinian was by now so saturated by her particular brand of fanaticism that he conducted his affairs exactly as if she still stood at his elbow. He was determined to deify himself along with Theodora by totally obliterating any facet of the Christian religion that might in any way disqualify such a manic conceit.

Theodora’s demented obsession with her own divinity having survived with such a vengeance in Justinian, what religious doctrine could possibly have deranged him more than reincarnation’s dispassionate law of cause and effect? What other law could nullify his and his consort’s imperial privileges at the moment of death; reduce them both to the common denominator of all other souls; and then be all too likely to bundle them back into lives of abject atonement to balance the scales?

In Virgilius’ case, however, her hypnotic sway was short lived. During the six years following her death, he drew far enough away from Justinian’s domination to observe him with newfound objectivity.

When Justinian was finally ready to stigmatise the Chalcedonian Decree, his plans had reached such monstrous proportions that, like those of all madmen, they enslaved their master.

His opening gambit was to disinter a toothless and forgotten civil law, passed in 531, called the Three Chapters Edict. This had lashed out indiscriminately at three long defunct “heretical” author-bishops, Theodore, Theodret and Ibar. This unimposing Edict had apparently alarmed no one except Virgilius at the time; and now, in 558, his fears were fully confirmed when Justinian found it necessary to convene the lumbering weight of the Fifth Ecumenical Church Council to incorporate this very minor fuss-about-nothing into canon law. When he went so far as to exclude all but six Western bishops, while permitting the attendance of 159 Eastern bishops (all of them, presumably, faithful Monophysites), he aroused Virgilius to belated but courageous action. Virgilius demanded that the Eastern and Western bishops be given equal representation, a demand that was promptly and predictably quashed by Justinian.

Robbed thus of his last shreds of superficial authority, Virgilius refused to attend the Council; though his motive might have been less loyalty to the Vatican than self-preservation...Justinian was not above hastening his end with the same despatch that had been meted out to Agapetus and Silverius.

However, it seems more than fair to assume that once he repented the error of his ways he did everything in his power to make atonement. Unfortunately, like Becket, his past was against him: he found himself at odds both with the ill-omened pyrotechnics of his master and his own conscience.

If the Church of Rome had not been powerless to oppose the military supremacy of Byzantium, Virgilius could have forbidden Justinian to convene the Fifth Council on pain of excom-munication. Again, if there had been a bit more of the stuff of martyrs in Virgilius, he might have aroused sufficient protest in the West to make Justinian think twice; for the Emperor would have been in no haste to provoke a public uprising on the scale of the Nika insurrection of 523, which was still raw in his mind.

There was a jabberwocky non-sequitur in the procedure of this Congress, of which Henry R. Percival M.A., D.D., busily washes his hands in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: “Did the Fifth Synod examine the case of Origen and finally adopt the anathemas against him, which was usually assigned to it? It would seem that with the evidence now in our possession, it would be the height of rashness to give a dogmatic answer to the question. Scholars of the highest rank have taken, and do take today, the opposite sides of the case...”

What exactly was the real purpose of the Congress? It was to anathematize - or excommunicate - the writings of Origen; the immediate effect of which would, of course, be its repercussion on the Chalcedonian Decree of 451. It is therefore imperative that we never confuse the Chalcedonian Decree of 451 with the footling Three Chapters Edict of 531; for the sleight-of-hand of the Fifth Council was designed to deceive the eye in exactly this fashion.

Who really instigated the Council?

The unquiet wraith of Theodora. It was her posthumous coup d’etat to the autonomy of the Western Church in Rome. The Monophysites were henceforth to realign the church from their Eastern stronghold.

In brief, concealed beneath all the pomp and circumstance of the Fifth Council there was a witch hunt in full cry; and its victim was reincarnation in all its Platonist, Origenist, secular, and unsecular forms.

There is something stupefying in the haphazard lack of concern for the keeping of the Council’s minutes. None were kept. When the Council ended in an atmosphere suitably obscured by organized confusion and high-sounding bombast, Justinian officially announced that the Council’s sole purpose in convening was to legalize the well-worn Three Chapters Edict, and that this was now accomplished.

The Pope was served official notice that the Three Chapters Edict was now law; and so, to all intents and purposes the Council had fulfilled its declared function, and the Bishops departed.

Now the Three Chapters Edict, in itself, was very small political beer. If that had been Justinian’s only concern he could easily have had it incorporated into canon law without recourse to the elaborate machinery of a full-scale Ecumenical Council. This was like chopping down a whole orchard to pick one apple.

If, on the other hand, the Emperors purpose was to delete all reference to metempsychosis from the original Gospels, he most certainly would have needed the imposing might of the Fifth Council to cloak his mischief.

Emperor or no Emperor, he was a layman tampering with ecclesiastical law; the titular head of the Roman Church had been refused admittance to the Council; and the Western Bishops had not been permitted to vote.

This is tantamount to saying that the real findings of the Council, never having been submitted to the Church of Rome, were therefore never ratified by it.

Such, in fact, was so. No official mention whatever was made, then or at any later date, of the Chalcedonian Decree or the anathemas against Origen.

The Council had been no more than an elaborate thimble-rig to conceal a much more intimate conclave which had been held in secret a few days earlier. In this cabala, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “the bishops already assembled at Constantinople had to consider, by order of the Emperor, a form of Origenism that had practically nothing in common with Origen, but which was held, we know, by one of the Origenist parties in Palestine.”

The Encyclopedia concludes with the statement that the bishops obediently subscribed to the fifteen anathemas proposed by the Emperor against Origen; and that Theodore of Scythopolin, an admitted Origenist, was forced to retract, but (and we may attach the most vital significance to the following).

“there is no proof that the approbation of the Pope, who was at that time protesting against the convocation of the Council, was asked. It is easy to understand how this extraconciliatory sentence was mistaken, at a later period, for a decree of the actual ecumenical council.”

For whom is it so “easy to understand”?

During the nearly four hundred years which have elapsed since the Council, no ecclesiastical authority has subjected the problem to examination, or even shown a desire to do so.

Henry Percival has printed in full the fifteen anathemas against Origen. They are easily available in Head and Cranston’s admirable Reincarnation Anthology (The Julian Press, New York, 1961) and seldom have such grandiose dictums carried such disproportionate substance. Indeed, they read more like illiterate bombast than responsibly conceived tenets, and literally nowhere do they quote Biblical authority for their condemnations.

“If anyone assert the fabulous pre-existence of souls,” they begin grandiloquently, “and shall assert the monstrous restoration which follows it, let him be anathema.”

Clause 2: “If anyone shall say that the creation of all reasonable things includes only intelligences without bodies . . . and that there is unity between them all by identity of substance, force and energy, and by their union with and knowledge of God the Word; but that, no longer desiring the sight of God, they gave themselves over to worse things, each one following his own inclination, and that they have taken bodies more or less subtle, and have received names.., let him be anathema.”

(This would suggest an impeachment of the entire Bible, for even the Old Testament states that all living things were originally conceived in the mind of God, were given entity by Him, and subsequently rejected their source and their Maker).

Clauses 3 and 5 submerge themselves in their own unintelligibility, but Clause 7 announces: “If anyone shall say that Christ had pity upon the divers falls which had appeared in the spirits united in the same unity of which He himself is part; and that to restore them He passed through divers classes, had different bodies and different names, became all to all, an Angel among Angels, a Power among Powers... and finally has taken flesh and blood like ours and is become man for man...if anyone says all this and does not profess that God the Word humbled himself and became man; let him be anathema.”

(The unabbreviated text is even more labored in its effort to discredit Christ’s incarnation in a human form; and yet it tries to imply at the same time that He might have done something vaguely similar, but too obscure to be intelligible to mortal reason. This is typical of Theodora’s constant anxiety-neurosis to have her cake and obliterate it too).

Clause 8 is an even more complex non-sequitur: “If anyone shall not acknowledge that God the Word... is Christ in every sense of the word, but shall affirm that He is so only in an inaccurate manner and because of the abasement of the intelligence, and e converso that the intelligence is only called God because of the Logos, let him be anathema.”

(If any sense can be got out of this, it surely entirely discredits Christ’s own affirmation that he was both the Son of God and the Son of Man).

Clauses 9, 10 and 11 entangle themselves in each other’s verbiage to such an extent as to cancel out their combined rodomontade; but Clause 12 makes an effort to salvage the best of the preceding clauses: “If anyone shall say that the future judgment signifies the destruction of the body; and that...thereafter there will no longer be any matter, but only spirit, let him be anathema.”

(This makes Christ’s symbolic triumph over the flesh by His death and resurrection a pointless gesture, performed for absolutely no constructive purpose whatsoever).

Clause 14 blunders even more unwittingly into passive atheism: “If anyone shall say that all reasonable beings will one day be united in one.. . and the bodies shall have disappeared and that the knowledge of the world to come will carry with it the ruin of worlds...that in this pretended apocatastasis, spirits only will continue to exist, as it was in the feigned pre-existence; let him be anathema.”

(In short, “all this shall not pass away.”)

Clause 15: “If anyone shall say that the life of the Spirits shall be like to the life which was in the beginning, when as yet the spirits had not come down or fallen; so that the end. . . shall be the true measure of the beginning; let him be anathema.

Small wonder that even the intimidated Pope Virgilius moved heaven and earth to get such claptrap anathematized in its own turn, and that Justinian had to resort to a Byzantine filibuster to railroad it through.

But there was yet more idiocy to come.

In his autointoxication (for by now the whole process of creation must have seemed as clear as mud to the self-apotheosized Justinian), he personally contributed ten more gratuitous anathemas against Origen.

They are even more deranged in content than the first fifteen, except that two of the clauses are direct attacks on church concepts which even predate Origen. The first relates to the idea of Christ descending to purgatory and submitting to a form of crucifixion there, as the only means of redeeming the souls of the damned. (Reference to this appears often enough in the early church writings to establish that it must at one time have held an honored place in the Gospels).

“If anyone says or thinks that Christ the Lord in a future time will be crucified for demons, as he was for man, let him be anathema,” trumpets Justinian, gorgeously impervious to the possibility that he and his formidable spouse might one day languish among those selfsame demons, in abiding need of salvation from the Son of Man.

The second point lies even further back in antiquity - the poetic concept of the soul, once it is free of its material confines, as a luminous glow of pure light. It was one of Origen’s pet images, and Justinian skewers it grimly: “If anyone says or thinks that at the resurrection, human bodies will rise spherical in form and unlike our present forms, let him be anathema.”

(Here one senses the outraged Theodora refusing to conceive of herself on Judgement Day as anything less spherical than a heavily bejewelled Empress, diplomatic immunity intact.)

The last of the ten clauses is the most petulant.

“If anyone says or thinks that the punishment of demons and of impious men is only temporary, and will one day have an end, and that a restoration will take place of demons and impious men, let him be anathema.”

(So you can forget the parable of the Prodigal Son).

The findings of the Council did, of course, annihilate Origenism in the Christian church, even if a few stubborn sects went underground for a few more centuries, notably the Troubadours of Southern France.

Moreover, the attack on Origen now stood revealed as an attack on all the Early Church Fathers whose writings reflected their veneration of him. Copies of their works were not numerous and could easily be tracked down and “edited.” The early gospels were either in Latin or Greek, and were never allowed to fall into the hands of laymen.

Very few monasteries would have had the courage to defy their Emperor and hide their original versions. The Imperial spy system was still as efficient and thorough as any conceived by Stalin or Hitler; it would have possessed detailed records of all the religious libraries. Justinian’s deletions and alterations to the Gospels would have been completed in very short order; and so would the elimination of all and any evidence of the vandalism.

Even so, certain questions remain stubbornly unanswerable. Surely, if Virgilius had not felt assured that the Western church was solidly behind him, he would never have taken on Justinian single-handed? Yet nevertheless he did oppose the Council.

If we are expected to believe that the full sympathy of the Western bishops was solidly behind the Monophysite dogmas, why should Justinian have gone to such lengths to bar them from the Fifth Council? Surely he would have welcomed them in?

By what process did the Vatican eventually arrive at the conclusion that their Pope had voluntarily approved the anathemas and officially accepted them as canon law?

The absence of all but six Western bishops at the Council was hardly calculated to instill into the heart of the Mother Church a sudden trust in its bitterest foes, Theodora and Justinian. Was the Vatican prepared to submit to their intimidation for all eternity? Terror of Theodora’s avenging arm is understandable during her own lifetime...but in his old age Justinian distintegrated into a demoralized dotard; repenting his ways and desperately seeking absolution.

Why was the issue never re-examined by a properly authorized Ecumenical Council?

Head and Cranston quote the Catholic Encyclopedia’s dictum that Virgilius and the four Popes who followed him give recognition only to the Three Chapters Edict when referring to the Council, and speak of Origenism as if they knew nothing of its condemnation; then add this comment of their own: “It seems clear from the above that Catholic scholars are beginning to disclaim that the Roman Church took any part in the anathemas against Origen, suggesting that during the many centuries when the church believed it had condemned Origen, it was mistaken.

“However, one disastrous result of the mistake still persists; namely, the exclusion from the Christian creed of the teaching of the pre-existence of the soul, and by implication, reincarnation.”

Another puzzling aspect of the suppression is the ambivalence shown by the Greek church at the Council of Florence during the Renaissance. George Gemistus, attending as the Greek Church’s deputy, urged Cosimo de Medici, then at the height of his power, to form a Platonic Academy in Florence. This served to introduce metempsychosis into European philosophy, even though the Church remained firmly uninvolved. Voltaire’s caustic comment that “today Roman Catholics believe only in the councils approved in the Vatican, and Greek Orthodox Catholics believe only in those approved in Constantinople” implies an ironic reversal of loyalties to Platonism; Rome had to condemn it before the Greeks would condone it, even if they too excluded it from their creed.

Before I continue further I must make it clear that no reading by Edgar Cayce exists in which he infers that sections of the Bible had been re-edited with malice aforethought. When he was asked if such was so, he replied that the spirit of the Bible was still whole, and that its power lay in its spiritual strength, and was not dependent on its literal context. In short, it was still God’s assurance to the human race that He would never abandon it.

In his conscious state, Edgar Cayce read the Bible once through for every year of his life. Even its most obscure and unintelligible passages were more familiar to him than the Book of Common Prayer is to many a senior ordained minister. The Bible was his strength, and he accepted its contents unequivocally.

On the other hand he did not, in permissive sleep, deny that many sections had lost their original simplicity in the course of their translations from Hebrew to Greek, to classic Latin, and then to Jacobean English. A thorough study of Edgar Cayce’s readings centering round the Palestinian period in the time of Jesus Christ, reveals that he gave the Essens far greater credit for preserving the wisdom of the ancient scriptures than the established Hebrew Church which was, in effect, passing through the type of period which Pope Pius XII has defined as “heresy of action.”

When Christ preached in the synagogues he introduced nothing new or unfamiliar into his sermons; but, more devastatingly, he revived those sections of the old teachings which had either fallen into convenient disrepute, or been reinterpreted to suit the political exigencies of the Sanhedrin.

It is pertinent to inject here that the Dead Sea Scrolls, even in these cautious early stages of their deciphering, have established that much of Christ’s teaching is present in the same form, indeed often in the same words, in the Essene scriptures which were in existence for at least a hundred years before His birth.

This proves that He was in basic accord with the tenets of the Essenes, although in His own lifetime they were in such militant conflict with orthodox Judaism that no reference to them was permitted in the Hebrew Scriptures.

At this time Jerusalem was occupied by the Romans very much as France in our time was occupied by the Nazis - but the Essenes were a sect which had for so long been underground that they were virtually unaffected by the superimposition of Roman persecution over the existing persecution of the Sanhedrin. Nevertheless the sect met eventual annihilation at the hands of the Roman army, at the instigation of the Sanhedrin the same governing body which had instigated the crucifixion of Christ.

What the Dead Sea Scrolls are slowly establishing is the indigestible fact that the Essene beliefs were firmly rooted in the laws of metempsychosis.

Furthermore, they prophesied the coming of Christ. Just as the books of the Apocrypha and Revelation were worded in symbolism to preserve the truth they contained, this prophecy is worded in the past instead of the future tense, and in it Christ is called by variations of the Good Man, the Messiah, and the Son of Light, never by His real name; and the Sanhedrin is referred to as the Wicked Priest. In every other respect it is an exact foretelling of the events which came to pass a century later.

Edgar Cayce avers that the Essenes, being the only sect that was prepared for Christ’s appearance on earth, not only aided in the birth in the manger and the flight to Egypt, but taught Jesus in his childhood.

Unfortunately the sect possessed its fair share of firebrands and hotheads who believed that the ends justified the means, even to the extent of guerrilla attacks on the caravans of the Sadducees and the Pharisees. This group obviously found itself in conflict with Christ’s objurgation to resist all forms of violence; and even the two or three Essenes among His disciples forgot themselves often enough to provoke incidents which achieved no better purpose than to heighten the antagonism of His enemies.

If we deny that Christ included reincarnation in the laws He came to “uphold but not to change,” we face the fact that He was demanding of His followers an almost superhuman exercise of blind faith... He was offering a hit-or-miss, one-chance-only doctrine...only if we sin no more, may we enter heaven. Is it so easy to conceive of Him as such an impractical perfectionist? His other teachings are, in every sense, practical and realistic.

I find it much more consistent to believe that He defined the eventual redemption of the soul as a slow, patient retracing of one’s footsteps, rather than an instantaneous conversion to perfection. His listeners were thus able to draw comfort from the fact that the slowness of their plodding would not disqualify them at the outset. In this context, reincarnation is an uncomplicated incentive to the self-doubter not to despair as he watches his nimbler brothers apparently outstrip him.

He is taught that his free will can work for his best interests just as easily as it can work against them. He is shown the Way - after that, it is up to his own self reliance. He must take up his own bed and walk, not be carried piggyback into an ertsatz Heaven by an all too mortal Redeemer.

He is taught that if an innocent man, having suffered injustice at the hands of a powerful enemy, grimly takes a “just” revenge, he will gratuitously handcuff himself to that same enemy, and both of them will be compelled to return together and re-enact the whole dreary, negative conflict until they develop enough common sense to bury their axes and call it quits. The more advanced soul of the two is bound to delay his own spiritual progress, for he has been forced to proceed at the speed of the less-developed soul he has harmed.

If, on the other hand, he is smart enough to “turn the other cheek” rather than attempt a futile retaliation, he frees himself of all further involvement with his enemy. The onus is then on his enemy, who must return alone, in his own time to repair whatever damage he left in his own wake.

What else is Christ saying, when He bids us love our neighbor, except: “Don’t be such a fool as to hate him and involve yourself with the dead weight of another gratuitous enemy!”

CONCLUSION

Edgar Cayce’s readings accept it unequivocably, and repeatedly establish that faults and guilts from earlier lives actively affect behavior patterns in the present, and can be resolved and overcome, once a man is prepared to accept his problems as being entirely of his own making, and therefore responsive to his un-making.

Nowhere does it seem to have dangerous or harmful effects save to an inflated vanity, an ego which has become the tail that wags the dog.

Then why is the karmic law of rebirth and restitution so unpalatable to the 21th-century mind? Is it the fact that every soul in creation will have to return and experience the emotional equivalent, good and bad, of all that he has caused others to experience? The fact that whatever weakness we persecute in others we shall eventually inherit, with its attendant persecution?

The fact that each soul is its own judge and its own jury; and passes sentence only on itself?

The fact that the hereafter shelters no bribable judge; no jury to be bamboozled?

The fact that, in the last analysis, the only person anyone has ever kidded was himself - and unsuccessfully at that?

Is it only because we have rejected the law of reincarnation that we squander three quarters of our lives impressing others, pretending to be what we are not? Our obsessive preoccupation with external superficialities, and our servile anxiety to “conform to the norm,” not only rob us of individuality and stature, they corrode us until we become complacent and stultified. By that time, nothing is harder than to be honest with ourselves, nothing more painful, and nothing more desperately urgent.

Perhaps its unpalatable ingredient lies in the fact that, even when it is reduced to its humblest factors, reincarnation offers little if any consolation to the indolent neurotic who blames his blowsy mom and brutal dad for the fact that he has never taken the slightest trouble to make himself likeable - let alone lovable - to others; who sullenly sits and waits to be loved for all his faults, with emphasis on his shiftlessness, his furtive longing to play the bullyboy without being made to pay the piper for it, his goldbricking and his pharisaic buck-tossing. Says Cayce:

“So oft is the ego so enrapt in self, that it (constantly) fears it will lose its importance, its place, its freedom. Yet to have freedom to in self, Give it! To have peace in self, make it! Give it! These are immutable laws For in patience possess ye your souls.” In patience you become aware that the body is but a temple, an outward edifice; but the mind and the soul are the (permanent) furnish-ings thereof, the essentials in which you shall constantly abide.”

This certainly clashes with the fine old materialistic maxim that the world hates a “loser” and admires a selfmade big shot, no matter how many gratuituous human shipwrecks he leaves in his wake.

Have we, by discarding the law of reincarnation, discarded all concept of a just and loving Creator? Then we would seem to have created our own boobytraps with a vengeance; for surely his five senses are insufficient to enable a man to deny the existence of God with any real conviction.

He would need at least fifty-five.

So, until he develops them, he is on safer ground believing rather than denying Him…for once he succeeds in reducing all belief to nothing, he himself obviously no longer exists.

This would seem to indicate that a professed atheist is only a man who cannot contemplate the firmament without getting vertigo, because it offers him nothing familiar to compare it against.

Perhaps this explains why he has equal difficulty trying to contemplate the idea of reincarnation. The idea that it is one of the logical cornerstones of a valid faith lacks a comforting solid, materialistic basis. Therefore, it cannot be used to intimidate, it cannot be used to terrorize, and it cannot be used as coercion. These facts alone are enough to make it suspect to any self-condemned penitent who believes that he was “born in sin once and once only; that it is palpably demanding the impossible of him to be unselfish; and that the only way to his own conception of a bedraggled salvation is through senseless and interminable suffering.

To him, the abiding “heresy”of reincarnation is that man is a free agent and his God is a God of Love. This means that until he has learned to love his fellowmen no further knowledge of his Maker is available to him.

What confronts him next? The unpalatable fact that no man is capable of loving others until he has overcome the obstacles which have prevented him from loving himself. Therefore, he can never hope to become even remotely lovable to others until he has learned to love himself.

If he can never become lovable to others, it follows as logically as day follows night that others can never become lovable to him.

In which case, he is now in sore and mortal trouble, for if he can neither love nor be loved, he will be engulfed by the eternal night of implacable loneliness. Loneliness is man’s most lethal adversary, for it is the only poison which ultimately and inexorably exterminates the soul.

This is the doctrine that Christ ceaselessly propounded. And yet within three hundred years of His death, secular influences at work within His own church succeeded in twisting His words and obscuring His meaning.

I can think of no more fitting note on which to conclude than to quote the Reverend Dr. Weatherhead’s joyous manifesto:

“The intelligent Christian asks not only that life should be just, but that it shall make sense. Does the idea of reincarnation help here? I think it does…I have known people who, humanly speaking, have never had a chance, born with defects that appear to mar their lives, or else meeting with a whole series of misfortunes that shut them off from the happiness others know…Is human distress just luck then? If so, how unjust is life! Is it God’s will? Then how unlike any human father He must be, for a human father who thus exerted his will would be clapped into jail.

”But if we accept the idea that these inequalities are the result - in a cosmos of cause and effect - of earlier choices; then our sense of justice is preserved…

”An actor in his lifetime plays many parts and wears many costumes. I don’t want to be ‘identified’ with one part, let alone one costume called my ‘present body.’ I am already a very different person - in body, mind, and spirit - from the man I was a score of years ago. I want to be the player who has been made a better actor by every part that he has played, and I want the play to be a success, not just my acting. Life is God’s play, and - in parentheses - no one can wisely judge a play by one act.”

(The Case For Reincarnation)