Theos-Talk Archives (October 2003 Message tt00366)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, samblo@c... wrote:
> In the old Testament 
> there is a 
> of a son named Benjamin about how he traded his "Coat of Many 
Colors" for
> a bowl of porriage.

Joseph's coat of many colors is obviously a metaphor for the human 
aura.

As for the basis of my earlier statement that the "garment" 
esoterically represented the ethereal body which "clothes" the soul, 
Origen says that "after His resurrection, [Jesus] existed in a body 
intermediate, as it were, between the grossness of that which He had 
before His sufferings, and the appearance of a soul uncovered by such 
a body." (Origen, Contra Celsum, ii, lxii.) The legends make it 
clear these post mortem sightings were wraiths, a fact which was 
later obfuscated to counter the docetist heresy. This is why we find 
absurd stories of Jesus eating boiled fish after his death, something 
which a ghost clearly would not do. In making these statements, 
Origen is merely paraphrasing from Paul, who said:

"We do groan in this tabernacle of our earthly body, earnestly 
desiring to be clothed upon with the vesture which is from heaven, 
that having been unclothed, we shall not be found naked." (2 
Corinthians 5:1-4.)

The KJV translation obfuscates the meaning, as it tends to do when 
something esoteric is being discussed. I have therefore used the 
rendering in Thelwall's translation of Tertullian, Against Marcion, 
v, xii.

There are also no good books on esoteric Christianity, meaning you 
have to go back to ancient sources. It is also helpful to know 
something about the Kabbalah, since the major ideas which were first 
put in writing publicly in the Jewish community in the thirteenth 
century can be clearly traced in ancient Christian documents written 
1200 years earlier. This is true of the sephiroth, Adam Kadmon, 
etc., etc. This is of some historical interest since it shows that 
these ideas were NOT invented by Moses de Leon as some ignorant 
writers have asserted. It is also of use since when the medieval 
Kabbalists veiled what they were trying to say the ancient Christians 
frequently wrote plainly and vice versa. So most of the secret 
teachings can be recovered with some effort.

Lots of luck trying to read the Pistis Sophia if you do not yet have 
a background in this study. Mead is not much help since he had 
almost zero insight.