Theos-Talk Archives (June 2005 Message tt00571)

June 22 2005 / Sunday, June 26, 2005

Dear Friends:

As I understand it "Agni Yoga" is acquisition of that wisdom-discriminationthat burns all ignorance and folly to ashes by the light of Truth Eternal.It is a knowledge of the history of our world and universe, and includes all events and sciences. HPB speaks of this both the prefaces to ISIS UNVEILED and the SECRET DOCTRINE 

It is also clear that the language used in the Bible has been altered in the past by many who copied and retranslated it.

What remains that is reliable ? Only the key ideas.

We need to draw out and assure ourselves of such key ideas. We need to shed all the dogmas that organized churches have imposed on the pure and original teachings of Jesus.

Apparently the Gnostics preserved and studied those original teachings. Why, then, was the early Church (as shown by history) so determined to eliminate and destroy the Gnostic influence?

In a Universe in which GOD is omnipresent, how can a "Devil" exist?  

What is the origin of "evil?" 

Are these paradoxes irresolvable?

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In a memorable exchange of views with the Abbe Roca, HPB offers as opening comments:


HPB
"In the opening pages of this essay—so remarkable for its sincerityand its boldness—the author [Abbé Roca] raises and solves this question: 

“Who can say whether the time in history in which we find ourselvesis not the one when the great saying of Jesus Christ shall be fulfilled: ‘And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd’.” [John, x, 16.] 

Several facts of past and present history militate against this optimistic hope.

To begin with, there are the teachings and the doctrines of Eastern Esotericism, which anticipate the Kalki-Avatara at the end of Kali-Yuga, while we are only at the beginning of it now. [ The Kali-Yuga lasts 432,000 years, and the first 5,000 years thereof will not have expired until 1897.]

Then there is the esoteric interpretation of the Christian texts which, read in the light of, and translated into, "the language of the Mysteries," show us the identity of the fundamental and definitely universal truths; by this means, the four Gospels, as well as the Bible of Moses and everything else, from the first to the last, clearly appear to be a symbolic allegory of the same primitive mysteries and the Cycle of Initiation.

In carnalizing the central figure of the New Testament, in imposing the dogma of the "Word Made Flesh" [Jesus], the Latin Church sets up a doctrine diametrically opposed to the tenets of Buddhist and Hindu Esotericism and the Greek Gnosis.

Therefore, there will always be an abyss between the East and the West, as long as neither of these dogmas yields. Almost 2,000 years of bloody persecution against Heretics and Infidels by the Church looms before the Orientalnations to prevent them from renouncing their philosophic doctrines in favor of that which degrades the Christos principle.

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HPB

The New Testament is but a Western allegory founded upon the universal Mysteries, the first historical traces of which, in Egypt alone, go back at least to 6,000 years before the Christian era. ...

The allegory is that of the Cycle of Initiation, a new version of the mysteries, at once psychical and astronomical. Sabeism and Heliolatry are therein intimately linked to that other mystery, the "Incarnation of the Word" orthe descent into the human race of the divine Fiat, symbolized in the story of Elohim-Jehovah and the Adam of clay. Hence, psychology and astrolatry (whence astronomy) cannot be separated therein.

These same fundamental mysteries are found in the sacred texts of every nation, of every people, from the beginning of the conscious life of humanity;but when one legend based upon these mysteries attempts to arrogate exclusive rights to itself above all the rest; when it declares itself an infallible dogma to force the popular faith into a dead letter belief, to the detriment of the true metaphysical meaning, such a legend must be denounced, its veil torn away, and itself` displayed in its nakedness to the world!

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HPB

Thus it is useless to speak of the esoteric identity of universal beliefs until one has thoroughly studied and understood the true esoteric sense of these two original terms: Chrêstos and Christos : two poles as opposed in their significance as night and day, suffering and humility, joy and glorification, etc.

The true Christians died with the last of the Gnostics, and the Christians of our day are but the usurpers of a name they no longer understand. As long as this is the case, Orientals cannot agree with Occidentals; no blendingof religious ideas would be possible between them.

It is said that after the Kalki-Avatara (“He who is expected” on the White Horse, in the Apocalypse) the Golden Age will begin and every man will become his own guru (spiritual teacher or “Shepherd”) because the divine Logos, whatever name it may be given will reign in each regenerated mortal. 

There can be no question, then, of a common “Shepherd” unless that Shepherd be entirely metaphorical. 

Moreover, the Christians, by localizing and isolating this great Principle,and denying it to any other man except Jesus of Nazareth (or the Nazar), carnalize the Christos of the Gnostics; that alone prevents them having any point in common with the disciples of the Archaic Wisdom.

Western Theosophists accept the Christos as did the Gnostics of the centuries which preceded Christianity, as do the Vedântins their Krishna: they distinguish the corporeal man from the divine Principle which, in the case of the Avatara, animates him. [Whether it be Krishna, Buddha, Sosiosh, Horus or Christos, it is a UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE; the “God-Men”are of all periods and innumerable.]

Their Krishna, the historical hero, is mortal, but the divine Principle (Vishnu) which animates him, is immortal and eternal; Krishna— the manand his name— remains terrestrial at his death; he does not become Vishnu; Vishnu absorbs only that part of himself which had animated the Avatara, as it animates so many others.

Now the word Christos is in reality but a translation of the word "KRIS," and that name is certainly anterior to the year 1 of our era by thousands of` years. The proof of this is in that fragment of the Erythraean Sibyl where we find the words: ---- ----- ------ ----- [ An esoteric term for the word "anointed." Georg Curtius sees the origin of all these terms ...in the Sanskrit gharsh (Greek).––"Principles of Greek Etymology," Vol. I, p. 236. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1858-62). -- This is an example ofHPB's 'scholarship' and ability to secure references from recondite sources. DTB ] and that name is certainly anterior to the year 1 of our era by thousands of` years...that phrase which has become so famous among Christians, is in reality but a series of nominatives of which one can make what he likes. 

The Church has hastened to draw from it a prophecy of the coming of Jesus. The phrase had, however, nothing to do with our era, as is proved both by history—from the 1st of January of the year 1, to the 1st of January, 1888 A. D.—and the actual text of the Sibylline fragment. [Vide H. P. B.’s explanation of this Sibylline oracle in the second installment of her essay on “The Esoteric Character of the Gospels...” ]

In fact, this universal and entirely pagan prophecy, dating from the beginning of our race, promises us the return of the golden age as soon as "the Child," that has been foretold, is born, and whose birth is as allegorical as it is metaphysical. It has nought to do with any particular man, any immaculate woman; it is entirely mythological in its form; astronomical and theogonic in its hidden meaning. 

In all ages and among all peoples, the Myth-Messiah is born of a Virgin-Mother. Witness Krishna and Devaki; see the Buddhist legend grafted upon the historical Gautama the Buddha and his Mother Maya; notice that which was added to the biography of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, born of a Virgin-Mother, Queen Mut-em-ua, during the XVIIth Dynasty. 

Examine also the inside walls of the Sanctum Sanctorum in the temple of Luxor, built by the same Pharaoh, and you will see four very significant scenes: first, there is the god Thoth the lunar Mercury, the Egyptian Gods’ Messenger of the annunciation, the Gabriel of the Book of the Dead) saluting the Virgin Queen and announcing to her the birth of a son; then, there is the god Kneph helped by Hathor (the Holy Ghost under its two aspects, masculine and feminine, like the Sophia of the Gnostics which was transformed into the Holy Ghost), preparing and making ready the germ of the coming child; then, the mother in travail, seated on the stool of the mid-wife,who receives the newly-born in a cave; and, lastly, the scene of the Adoration. ....

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HPB

It is unnecessary to repeat the legend of Krishna and Devaki, of his miraculous birth, of the shepherds who took care of him, of the Rishis who saluted him, or of the Indian Herod, King Kamsa, who ordered the massacre of 40,000 new-born males, in the hope of killing Krishna, one who was to dethrone him, among them.

And has the golden age, sung by Virgil and the Sibyl, come at last? Where shall we look for it? 

Is it in the first centuries of Christianity when the pagans, in order to protect their Gods, massacred the Nazarenes? 

Is it when the latter, openly declaring themselves Christians, started drowning the gods of the heathens in torrents of human blood, in the name of Him who had preached to them, as they said, brotherly and universal love, even to their enemies, charity unto forgiveness, and the forgetting of injuries? 

Or is it in those centuries when the Holy Inquisition ruled, that humanity enjoyed its golden Age, its universal peace, material or moral? 

Or again, is it when the armies of Europe stand prepared to spring upon andexterminate each other, while legions of unfortunates perish of hunger andcold under the blessing of the Vicar of Christ (endowed with 20 millions for his jubilee) and morality in Christian and civilized countries sinks below that of wild beasts?

The fact is that the true meaning of the Sibyl’s words is really known only to the Adepts; and it is not by the Cross of Calvary that they canbe interpreted.

I have not the slightest intention of hurting the feelings of those who believe in Jesus, the carnalized Christ, but I feel myself compelled to emphasize our own belief while explaining it, because the Abbé Roca wishes to identify it with that of the Roman Church; never can these two beliefs beunited, unless the Catholicism of the Latin Church returns to its earliesttenets, those of the Gnostics. 

For the Church of Rome was Gnostic—just as much as the Marcionites were—until the beginning and even the middle of the second century;Marcion, the famous Gnostic, did not separate from it until the year 136, and Tatian left it still later. 

And why did they leave it? Because they had become heretics, the Church pretends; but the history of these cults contributed by esoteric manuscripts gives us an entirely different version. These famous Gnostics, they tell us,separated themselves from the Church because they could not agree to accept a Christ made flesh, and thus began the process of carnalizing the Christ-principle. 

It was then also that the metaphysical allegory experienced its first transformation—that allegory which was the fundamental doctrine of all the Gnostic fraternities. [The Gnostics were actually divided into various fraternities, such as: Essenes, Therapeuts, Nazarenes or Nazars (from which "Jesus of Nazareth"); “James,” the Lord’s brother, head of the Church of Jerusalem, was a Gnostic to his finger tips, an ascetic of the old Biblical type, i.e., a Nazar dedicated to asceticism from hisbirth. The razor had never touched his head or beard. He was such a one asJesus is represented to be in legends or pictures and such as are all the “Brother-Adepts” of every country; from the yogi-fakir of India to the greatest Mahatmas among the Initiates of the Himâlayas.]

One fact is enough to prove that the Roman Church has abandoned even the tradition preserved by the Greek Church, in that it has adopted the solar tonsure proper to the Egyptian priests of the public temples, and to the lamasand bonzes of the popular Buddhist cult: this is sufficient to demonstratethat the Church of Rome is the one that has wandered farthest from the real religion of the mystical Christ. [ Magnetic and psychic force resides in the hair; hence the myth of Samson and others like him in antiquity.]

Therefore, the time is still far distant when “all the people of the universe will form one flock under one shepherd.” Human nature will have to be completely modified before it occurs. We will have to attain the Seventh Race, according to the prophecy ...."

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Friends:

This is only a portion of HPB's response. More can be quoted if desired.


[ As an example, HPB continues in her next:  

"Now, as I have nothing to say of the first, and as I deny in toto the Christ invented by the Church, as well as all the doctrines, all the interpretations, and all the dogmas, ancient and modern, concerning that personage...

I may be allowed to inform him that Theosophy is neither Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, nor any other ism: it is the esoteric synthesis of the known religions and philosophies. .....

Of his “Law of Ram” and his “Ab-Ram, issue of Ram” (?) —I know nothing. I know perfectly well the VAMSAVALI or genealogy of the Surya and the Chandra races * from Ikshvaku and Buddha † to Rama and Krishna, the common source whence the Purânas (ancient Scriptures), the Bhagavata, the Skanda, the Agni and the Bhavishya-Purana, have drawn their divine, human, and dynastic genealogies. 

A copy of it is to be found in the royal library of the Mahârâjâs of Udaipur (the most ancient of the Indian royal houses, whose family genealogy has been examined and sanctioned by the Anglo-Indian government). Rama is a historical personage. The ruins of cities built by him and buried under several successive strata of other cities, more recent but stillprehistoric, still exist in India; they are known as well as the ancient coins with his effigy and name. What then is this “ Ab-Ram, issue ofRam”? ‡ 

A-BRAHAM

A-bram or A-brahm, in Sanskrit, means a non-Brahmana, hence a man driven out from the Brahmin caste, or a man of inferior caste. Abra is the name of Indra’s elephant; its female is called Abramu. The words are Sanskrit, and the name Abramu is found again in Chaldea, but the Abraham of the Jews has nothing to do with the Hindu Rama; * he cannot have issued from the latter, for it is Rama, on the contrary, who has issued from Brahman (neuter) through his terrestrial aspect, Vishnu, of which he is the Avatara.† ...

As I am neither a priest nor under the ferocious rod of a Church which declares itself infallible, I, myself, am ready to accept the truth from whenceit comes. 

....the spirit of partisanship cannot exist in a Society as universal and impartial as ours, which has chosen for its motto “There is no religion higher than Truth.” 

Our Masters being Sages far too great to bedizen themselves with the peacock’s feathers of infallibility or even to boast of the possession ofabsolute Truth, their disciples always keep an open mind to facts which can be demonstrated to them. 

Let the Abbé demolish the proofs we offer against the existence of a carnalized Christ, hence Christ-Man, whether called Jesus or Krishna; let him demonstrate that there has never been any other incarnated God than his “Jesus-Christ,” and that this one is the “only” as well as the “greatest” of the Masters and Doctors—not only the greatest of the Mahatmas but God in person! 

Yes, he is right in saying that “it is so difficult to rid oneself of all personal interest, and, still more, of all partisanship of school, sect, church, caste”; as that sentence could in no way apply to me, for I do not hold to any special school nor belong to any sect, Church or caste, since I am a Theosophist....

The fundamental idea of my observations was in fact that he who would say “Ego sum veritas” ["I am the Truth."] is yet to be born; that the “Vos Dii estis” ["You are all Gods."] applies to all, and that every man born of woman is “the son of God,” whether he be good, bad, or neither the one nor the other....

I write in every letter that a divine Christ (or Christos) has never existed under a human form outside the imagination of blasphemers who have carnalized a universal and entirely impersonal principle. I venture to believe that this is perfectly clear. ....

In fact, to say that Christ (we say Christos) is an impostor would be to proffer, not a blasphemy, but a simple stupidity: a personal adjective cannotbe applied to an ideal principle, to an abstraction; it would be like saying: “Infinite Space is a devotee.” An Occultist-Theosophistwould laugh...

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HPB

I am first of all a Theosophist, and ... I am personally a disciple of the Buddhist philosophy. Now a true Buddhist would not even strike a dog to stop him from barking. The Buddhists practice all the virtues preached in the “Sermon on the Mount” of Gayâ–– on theMount of Galilee six centuries later— virtues which are heard of but rarely in the churches of the Christian countries, and that are practised still less frequently. ....


JESUS

For me Jesus Christ, i.e., the Man-God of the Christians, copied from the Avataras of every country, from the Hindu Krishna as well as the Egyptian Horus, was never a historical person. 

He is a deified personification of the glorified type of the great Hierophants of the Temples, and his story, as told in the New Testament, is an allegory, assuredly containing profound esoteric truths, but still an allegory. 

It is interpreted by the help of the seven keys, similarly to the Pentateuch. ..

The legend of which I speak is founded, as I have demonstrated over and over again in my writings and my notes, on the existence of a personage called"Jehoshua" (from which "Jesus" has been made) born at Lud, or Lydda, about120 years before the modern era. 

And if this fact is denied— to which I can hardly object— one must resign oneself to regard the hero of the drama of Calvary as a mythpure and simple. As a matter of fact, in spite of all the desperate research made during long centuries, if we set aside the testimony of the “Evangelists,” i.e., unknown men whose identity has never been established, and that of the Fathers of the Church, interested fanatics, neither history, nor profane tradition, neither official documents, nor the contemporaries of the soi-disant drama, are able to provide one single seriousproof of the historical and real existence, not only of the Man-God but even of him called "Jesus of Nazareth," from the year 1 to the year 33. 

All is darkness and silence. Philo Judaeus, born before the Christian Era, and dying quite some time after the year when, according to Renan, the hallucination of a hysterical woman, Mary of Magdala, gave a God to the world, made several journeys to Jerusalem during that interval of forty-odd years.He went there to write the history of the religious sects of his epoch in Palestine. No writer is more correct in his descriptions, more careful to omit nothing; no community, no fraternity, even the most insignificant, escaped him. 

Why then does he not speak of the Nazarites? Why does he not make the leastallusion to the Apostles, to the divine Galilean, to the Crucifixion? The answer is easy. 

Because the biography of Jesus was invented after the first century, and noone in Jerusalem was better informed on the subject than Philo himself. Wehave but to read the quarrel of Irenaeus with the Gnostics in the 2nd century, to be certain of it. Ptolemaeus (180 A.D.), having remarked that Jesuspreached one year according to the legend, and that he was too young to have been able to teach anything of importance, Irenaeus had a bad fit of indignation and testified that Jesus preached more than ten or even twenty years! Tradition alone, he said, speaks of ten years ("Contra Haereses," lib. II, cap. 22, para. 4-5). Elsewhere, he makes Jesus die at the age of fifty years or more!! 

Now, if as early as the year 180, a Father of the Church had recourse to tradition, and if no one was sure of anything, and no great importance was attributed to the Gospels— to the Logia of which there were more thansixty—what place has history in all of this? Confusion, lies, deceit, and forgery, such is the ledger of the early centuries. 

Eusebius of Caesarea, king of falsifiers, inserted the famous 16 lines referring to Jesus in a manuscript of Josephus, to get even with the Gnostics who denied that there ever had been a real personage named Jesus. Still more: he attributed to Josephus, a fanatic who died as he had lived, a stubborn Jew, the reflection that it is perhaps not correct to call him (Iasous) aman ...because he was the Lord’s Anointed, i.e., the Messiah!! (Vide Josephus, Antiq., lib. XVIII, cap. iii, 3.)†

It is hardly necessary to say that for the words of Jesus to possess any value as proof, the authenticity of the Gospels must first be proved. 

Jesus, whether he lived at that epoch or earlier, never wrote anything, andwhat he has been made to say in the four Gospels is sometimes terribly contradictory. 

As to Paul, undoubtedly a historical personage, it would be difficult to separate, in his writings, what he said himself and what his editors and correctors have made him say. However, there remains—doubtless by inadvertence—one expression, by him or by his collaborators, which sums up in two words what was thought about Jesus. Look up the Epistle to the Hebrews, ii, 9; you will read there that Jesus was made “inferior to the angels.” That is enough for us.

Can one who is inferior to the angels be God, the Infinite and the Only?

Indeed, every man, every Ju-su (a name of Horus, Khonsu, the Son, the type of humanity), above all, every initiate whose body is made inferior to thatof the angels, can say, in the presence of his Atman (Divine Spirit): Vivit vero in me Christus, [Assuredly lives in me the ----] as he would say: Krishna, Buddha, or Ormuzd lives in me.... [ In Hebrew, man or Aïsh gives this other form by Kabalistic derivation : Jesh, in Greek and in French Jes-us, signifying at once fire, sun, divinity, and man. This word (with its masoretic points) was pronounced : Aish or Jesh, man in this case. The feminine form was Issa, woman; in Egyptian Isi-s, Isis. The collateral form of it was Jesse, or Isi, of which the feminine in Egyptian was Isi-s. But Isi is the equivalent of Jesse, the father of David, of the race from which came Jesus, Jes-us. It is necessary that one should know the Mystery language and that of Symbolism before speaking with so much authority, and that language the Church has lost. ]

In that Church where everything is bought, crimes and indulgences, amulets and beatitudes (on earth, at least; as to Heaven — after me the Deluge !), the way and the gate become wider in proportion to the sums paid bythe faithful. 

Be gone, religion of Judas! It was to (saint) Peter that his Master said: VADE RETRO SATANAS! [Get thee behind me, Satan.] The proof of this is in theGospel itself ...

I prefer by far to remain the humblest of esoteric Buddhists than the greatest of orthodox and exoteric Christians. I have the most profound respect for the transcendental idea of the universal Christos (or Christ) which lives in the soul of the Bushman and the savage Zulu, as well as in that of theAbbé Roca, but I have the keenest aversion for the Christolatry of the Churches. I hate those dogmas and doctrines which have degraded the idealChristos by making of it an absurd and grotesque anthropomorphic fetish, ajealous and cruel idol which damns for eternity those who decline to bow down before it....I have merely to open "The Tablet," the leading organ of the English Roman Catholics. Here is an excerpt from it:

“The official statement as to the moral and material progress of India which has recently been published, supplies a very interesting contribution to the controversy on the missionary question. It appears from these figures that while we effect a very marked moral deterioration in the natives by converting them to our creed, their natural standard of morality is sohigh that, however much we Christianize them, we cannot succeed in making them altogether as bad as ourselves. The figures representing the proportions of criminality in the several classes, are as follows:—Europeans, I in 274; Eurasians, 1 in 509; Native Christians, I in 799; Mohammedans, I in 856; Hindus, 1 in 1361; and Buddhists, 1 in 3787. The last item is a magnificent tribute to the exalted purity of Buddhism, but the statistics are instructive throughout, and enforce with resistless power the conclusion that, as a mere matter of social polity, we should do much better if we devoted our superfluous cash and zeal, for a generation or two, to the ethicalimprovement of our own countrymen, instead of trying to upset the morality, together with the theology, of people who might reasonably send out missions to convert us.” What a superb confession!


The least of the Gnostic Docetae who claimed that Jesus crucified was nothing but an illusion, and his story an allegory, was much nearer the truth than a “saint” Augustin or even an “Angel of the Schools.” A pagan living a simple and patriarchal life, loving his neighbour and doing his duty, is a thousand times nearer the angusta porta, etarcta via than was ever a (saint) Cyril, the ferocious murderer of Hypatia, or a (saint) Constantine, probably beatified because he killed his son with his own hands, boiled monks in pitch, disemboweled his wife, and made himself as miserably famous as Nero. *

Oh, the Abbé informs us, “if the sublime conception of that Christian ideal [the Christos living within man] is that of the Mahatmas, honour to them!” That ideal is not Christian, nor has it been inventedby the Mahatmas; it was the apotheosis of the Mysteries of Initiation. As to the “Word made Flesh,” it is the heritage of the whole of humanity, received by man the moment the universal Soul incarnated in him, i.e., from the appearance of the first perfect man—who, by the way, was not Adam.

By way of proving that Jesus was God, we are offered his martyrdom on the Cross and his voluntary sacrifice. Before believing a “Master” the equal of “Christ,” he should have to agree to drinkfrom the chalice that Jesus drained at Gethsemane and to pardon his executioners for his moral and physical tortures. A strange idea, truly! But it is exactly the insignificance of those sufferings that makes every pagan smile in pity. What are three years of sermons and of living in the open, ended by a few hours of suffering on the cross, compared with the eighty years of moral torture of Gautama the Buddha, before which all the tortures of the flesh fade into insignificance! Ah, Monsieur l’Abbé, it is more difficult, more meritorious and more divine, to live voluntarily for Humanity than to die for it. And how? By a violent and inevitable death from which escape is attempted by praying his heavenly Father to 


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Best wishes,


Dallas

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-----Original Message-----
From: sova7777
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 6:10 AM
To: 
Subject: Re: H. Roerich claims

"Konstantin Zaitzev" <kay_ziatz@y...> wrote:

She didn't like that very idea at all:
 
"And now that we have shown that we must indeed "bid an eternal 
farewell to all the rebellious angels," we naturally pass to an 
examination of the God Jesus, who was manufactured out of the man
Jesus to redeem us from these very mythical devils..." (Isis, vol.2)
 
Not only one devil is mythical, but many devils too. Since many 
devils cannot be antithesis to one God, her expression is obviously 
applicable to the lesser devils, and to H.Roerich's Lucifer in 
particular.

We can interpret this in a different way. Not only the God is 
mythical, but the Devil or rebellious angel in any of its popular 
versions as well. But if Jesus was a real man, why not that bad guy 
HR spoke about as well? Your interpretation versus mine. Who will 
prevail? :)

Again, in HPB's texts there is NO mention of such a story as HR told 
it, neither positive nor negative.


Agni Yoga says that Christianity is a culmination all classical 
wisdom;

It's not about various teachings of many churches, it is about the 
teaching of Jesus.
CUT