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For two thousand years the battle between darkness and light, between Christ and Antichrist, has raged in the world, in fulfillment of ancient prophecy. Now at last the forces of light are in the ascendant, and the secret powers of creation are emerging from their hiding places under the guiding hand of a New Science for the New Age. "My peace I give unto you," the Christ said to His disciples; and it was through that peace that they came to know the Comforter who taught them "all things."

That holy peace was for the advanced few, and it has remained the secret of the few in the centuries of sorrow which have elapsed since the Christ ascended; but once world peace is attained, mankind will experience the descent of the Comforter anew in a universal Pentecost. Increasing numbers of men and women will submit themselves to the self-discipline necessary for the reception of the Comforter, and will proclaim Her advent. We say "Her" advent advisedly, for the New Age Comforter will be recognized primarily as the feminine aspect of God, the Divine Feminine, predestined to play so outstanding a role in the coming Age of Aquaria. The Divine Feminine cannot manifest in a world at war, in a world of hatred and bloodshed. Her Glory knows no shadow, Her Presence is alien to bitterness, Her Voice speaks in the quiet places of the heart. The Spirit of Prophecy, the angelic Daughter of the Voice, is Her representative, and as such was She known to the prophets.

A world at peace will be prepared for Her Presence, and She will reveal Herself in Her highest human representative, the glorious Mary of Nazareth, mother of Jesus the Christ-bearer, who will proclaim Her in the Schools of Initiation. Consequently the coming Era will know a closeness and intimacy of communion with this blessed being approximating that of the early Christian centuries. Mary's abiding interest in humanity is demonstrated in more than one hundred apparitions since her last incarnation, nine of these having occurred during the last century.

Mary made possible the first coming of our blessed Lord, Christ Jesus. It will be through her intervention again that all mankind shall be made ready for His second coming.

It is divinely fitting that as humanity received its Saviour through the blessed sanctity of Mary, so in the Coming Age she will prepare the human race to be reunited with Him. The Coming Age of Mary will mark the beginning of a Christed humanity.

Grignon De Montfort, an illustrious medieval saint, wrote: "The happy time and age of Mary will soon come, when souls losing themselves in the abyss of the interior of the Queen of Heaven will become living copies of Mary in loving and glorifying Jesus Christ."

The beautiful truth was also revealed to the Venerable Mary of Agreda (1602-1665) that "in these latter ages the Lord wished to exalt and spread the glory of His most holy Mother and to manifest to the world hidden marvels and mysteries reserved by Divine Providence for the time of greatest necessity so that we may all avail ourselves of her help, her protection and her powerful intercession."

May all unite in the universal prayer: "That Thy kingdom may come, O Lord, let the kingdom of Mary come."

Throughout our work in elucidating the esoteric values of the sacred Scriptures of Christendom we have emphasized the importance of the feminine attributes in all spiritual unfoldment, whether we are concerned with the spontaneous and purely Devotional development known to orthodoxy or the scientific development and discipline of the occult Schools of Initiation. We point to the great women of the Church as examples of the work of the Divine Feminine on earth, and foremost among them all, to the holy Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ Jesus. In so doing there will no doubt be some readers who will be inclined on first impressions to regard such veneration as Mari-olatry. But as we proceed we trust it will become clear that our deep regard for Mary is of an impersonal nature; that we are dealing primarily with the Divine Feminine in humanity and that Mary is the most perfect embodiment which humanity has so far produced.

The Mysteries of the early Christians, which were the focus and secret of power, did not revolve about the person of the blessed Virgin, notwithstanding the knowledge that she was the highest of all those Initiates who have ever come to earth in a feminine body. The Initiations in those early Mysteries were concerned primarily with the awakening and nurturing of the Divine Feminine which is latent in all mankind as power of a particular kind, and which is fundamental to the regenerative process in the individual. The blessed Virgin was the perfect exemplification of the Feminine Redeemed. Therefore, her life was the type-pattern presented for the emulation of the early Church. She became its first great Teacher and most illustrious Ideal.

We find this Mary idealism exquisitely portrayed in the rare and ancient Ethiopic MSS. legend, written, it is said, with a "pen of light that shall never be destroyed." (The source of the legends used in this chapter is the Ethiopic MSS. "Our Lady Mary, the Perpetual Virgin," translated by Sir Wallis Budge. They are now in the British Museum.) "And Solomon built a sanctuary in the form of the Tabernacle, made of cedar wood and pine wood, and he covered the floor and the roof and the walls thereof with plates of gold, and on the doors thereof were engraved figures of palm branches and of figures that were like unto cherubs (Cancer Hierarchy) in fine gold. And inside the Holy of Holies at the place where the holy Tabernacle rested was a figure of Mary, the daughter of Joachim, and Solomon made two Cherubim of red gold which overshadowed her with their wings, and God was wont to appear there sometimes in visible form and sometimes in a dream and sometimes in vision unto those to whom He wished to appear from Moses to Zacharias." Obviously the "figure of Mary" was a goddess of the ancient Hebrews, whose existence is hinted even in the Old Testament canon.

Early religions stressed the importance of the Divine-Feminine, publicly dramatized, usually, in the worship of the Moon Goddess, or the Goddess of Heaven. The Moon astrologically governs the sign Cancer, and both govern the waters of the world, and their psychical equivalent, the emotions. Thus the pre-Christian Mysteries dealt largely with the emotional nature of man, the purification of the soul through moral discipline, and the development of the moral codes best known to us in the Decalogue of the Pentateuch, although all ancient religions have a similar code. This discipline and purification of the emotions and desires is described kabbalistically as redeeming or lifting the "fallen" feminine.

With the passing of the Sun by precession into the masculine sign Aries at the Vernal Equinox, the Mother phase of religion came to be all but forgotten and the intellectual attributes of the Father Principle were cultivated at the expense of the heart. As a result of this unequal development the true love nature remains relatively undeveloped. It expresses itself more in terms of the inconstant emotional nature and the selfish desire for possession than it does in terms of the unchanging spiritual nature and its selfless, universal sympathies and affections.

All that happens in this phenomenal world is the result of cosmic law; and it is because man has over-cultivated the masculine elements of his nature at the expense of the feminine that the modern world has fallen into universal chaos and conflict. Civilization has broken down for want of that binding principle we know as love, which is an aspect of the Divine Feminine.

Civilization will be restored in the New Age only by the recognition of the neglected Feminine, and a re-education of the masses to its importance in normal living. Egos in feminine bodies naturally express more of the Divine Feminine qualities of soul and are accordingly more in attunement with the subjective side of life. It is this "hidden" phase of woman's nature which constitutes her "mystery" and which man can approach only as he awakens the woman within himself.

In woman, the vital or life principle, is closely attuned to the Divine Feminine, the life of the World, "which flows through all and doth all unite." Intuition and Imagination are the two expanding wings of her soul power. Man, centered in the brain-consciousness of the positive physical body, finds his congenial expression in the outer, objective world. This accounts for much of the inharmony existing between the sexes, which a proper understanding would eliminate.

Experience proves what the early Christians knew, that it is through the awakening of the Feminine that vision and prophecy are made available to the New Age; and it is significant that many of the philosophical and spiritual movements in the foreground of world thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been headed by women, notably, Spiritualism, Theosophy and Christian Science.

In the early religions where the key figure was a World Mother, the neophytes in the Mysteries rendered homage and reverence in proportion to the development of the Feminine Principle within themselves. Sometimes, like Ramakrishna, the great saint of modem India, the neophyte imagined himself as a child in the arms of the Divine Mother, and attained Illumination thereby; or he imagined himself as Her servant, becoming a "eunuch for the Kingdom's sake." Transcendant ideals are easily misunderstood or perverted by unbalanced or primitive natures, and so history records many abuses of these spiritual doctrines in the last day of the pagan religions of the West.

The secret of the Divine Feminine is not a desire for pre-eminence over the Masculine. It is not desirable that either Principle should dominate over the other, for the Masculine and the Feminine are two wings of the divine creation; it is rather a secret of right adjustment between the two Principles — of co-operation, not competition. Thus Isis, the Egyptian goddess proclaims: "I have bourne the Sacred Vessel. I have entered the Bridal Chamber." And similarly the holy Mary has been likened to a precious Vase, and is called the Bride of the Holy Ghost.

As frequently mentioned elsewhere, the symbol of the humanity of the Aquarian Age is the Divine Androgyne, (the Man-Woman, Hermes-Aphrodite). This refers to the spiritual and psychical. humanity, however, and not to the corporeal man. The union of the two Divine Principles in the human soul will be reflected externally in a comradeship between men and women inconceivable at the present day, but which is most beautifully exemplified in the perfect relationship existing between Mary and Joseph.

Fertility and Divinity are the primary attributes of the Universal Feminine. Mary was a pattern of achievement for all women in the expression of both of these attributes. Her life as an individual was rounded and complete; she is the ideal mother, the perfect wife-companion. But in the glorious Rite of the Nativity she is also the Mother of all humanity as she is the wise Teacher of the Mysteries in the Rite of Pentecost. Upon her first came the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth.

The full orb of Divinity she manifests in the Degrees of the Mysteries of Mary, symbolized in the principal events of her life, beginning with her own Immaculate Conception by St. Anna (or Hanna), continuing in her Immaculate Conception of Jesus, and concluding with her Assumption into Heaven as Queen of the Angels.

Another lovely legend found in the Ethiopic MSS. describes most interestingly the indestructible perfection of the Feminine which lies in the human soul awaiting discovery: "God created Adam in His own form and likeness. At that time Mary, the daughter of Joachim, existed within the body of Adam in the form of a White Pearl, which shone in his right side and was a perfect likeness of her. From Adam she came down into the body of Seth, shining like a White Pearl, and from Seth she came into the body of Enos, and from Enos to Cainan, from Cainan to Mahalaleel, from Mahalaleel to Jared, from Jared to Enoch, from Enoch to Methuselah, from Methuselah to Lamech, from Lamech to Noah. In this wise she passed from one body to another. And again Mary dwelt in the bodies of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and from Jacob she came to Judah. Then she came to David and to Solomon, and passing from one to the other she came to Joachim."

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