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Stigmata - The manifestation on a living person''s body of bleeding marks resembling the wounds suffered by the mythical Jesus when he was crucified. They are manifested on the hands, on the feet, near the heart, and on the head and shoulders.
The attribution of religious significance to wounds and scars predates Christianity. In many primitive rites, wounds and scars were deliberately inflicted as part of the religious ritual. The stigmata of Christ, however, allegedly appear spontaneously on the bodies of extremely devout people. The stigmata are not usual bodily lacerations (the blood appears to discharge through the unbroken skin), do not deteriorate in the usual fashion of wounds, and are not susceptible to medical treatment.
Francis of Assisi (later Saint Francis) was the first and best-known stigmatic, in September 1224 he reportedly began to bleed from his palms and feet after meditating on the crucifixion of Christ.
More than 330 cases are known of Christians who have been stigmatized. Stigmatics are deeply pious, and the stigmata often appear after lengthy meditations on the crucifixion or contemplation of a sacred image or object. Bleeding is also likely to occur during the traditional times of commemoration of Christ''s passion - Fridays, Lent, and especially Good Friday.
In many cases stigmatization can be explained by natural causes such as the physical and psychic conditions of the person, along with a strong interest in and devotion to the sufferings of Christ. In a number of cases, however, stigmatization has been accepted by the Roman Catholic church as attributable only to supernatural causes; 60 stigmatics whose lives have been marked by great holiness and mystical experiences have been either canonized or beatified.
Eucharist - The principal act of worship of the Christian religion, otherwise known as the Divine Liturgy, Holy Communion, Lord''s Supper, or Mass.
This name has been used from at least the second century, and comes from the thanksgiving prayer that constitutes a principal element in the rite.
Christian myths tells the story of the last supper eaten by Jesus with his disciples on the night before he died, when he performed a Jewish grace-ritual before the meal (taking bread into his hands, saying a short blessing of God for it, breaking the bread, and sharing it with those present) and the customary festal thanksgiving prayer over a shared cup of wine at the end of the meal . The myth relates that these actions signified his imminent death, interpreting the bread as his body "given for you" and the wine as his blood, and as having instructed his disciples to perform them in future in remembrance of him.
The eucharistic observances of the earliest Christians were more than a memorial meal: in some traditions believers claimed to experience the living presence of the resurrected Christ in these communal gatherings. Historically, the rite of Mass (Mazd) was adopted by the Catholic Church from the religion of Sol Invictus in which is was a reinactment of a sacramental meal performed by Mithras.
Nazarenes - Nazarenes One of two early sects of Christians, the other sect being the Ebionites, which go back in their origin before the Christian era. They were disciples of that Jeshua ben Panthera who was an initiated teacher living in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, who ruled over the Jews from 104-79 BC, and around whom, some state, that the Gospels story of Jesus was built (cf IU 2:201).
The Greek for this name is Nazoraioi, confused both with Nazarenoi (inhabitants of Nazareth) and with the Jewish sect of Nazarites; for Matthew 2:23 says that Jesus came and dwelt in Nazareth, that the Jewish prophecy that he should be called a Nazoraios might be fulfilled. This word has been translated Nazarene, as is also the case in Acts 24:5, where Paul is said to belong to the sect of the Nararaioi.
It would appear that the Jews claimed Jesus as a Nazarite [from Hebrew nazar to set apart, consecrate; cf nazar] Like the Ebionites, the Nazarenes were followers of true esoteric teachings, and occupied themselves in adapting these to what they found around them; so that scholars cannot make up their minds whether to call them Jews, Christians, Judizing Christians, heretics, or what not.
Other names for them were St. John Christians, Mendeans, or Sabeans. Epiphanius, the 4th century Church Father, speaks of them as dwelling in Coele-Syria, where they had taken refuge after the expulsion of Jews in the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Both his and Jerome''s accounts represent them as partly Jewish and partly Christian, accepting the new covenant as well as the old. One of their main texts is the Codex Nazaraeus.
Atheism - Atheism, Atheists In modern times, those who do not accept the monotheistic Christian God or any god. It formerly signified those who did not believe in the accepted divinity or divinities of the State or populace.
The Roman Empire was entirely tolerant of religious beliefs, but took strong measures with the early Christians because they were, from the legal viewpoint of the conservative Roman magistrate, religious and quasi-political radicals of a dangerous type. They were atheists in that they did not accept the State gods. Later, to the Christians, the pagans in their turn became atheists because though they believed in gods, they did not believe in the orthodox Christian God.
Theosophists, Buddhists, Confucianists, etc., have been at various times called atheists because they do not accept monotheism. To strip a deity of personal human attributes is, in the eyes of monotheists, to deny the existence of that deity altogether.
Disciple - A pupil or follower of a religion, a person, or a movement. Christians often confuse this term with Apostle.
Alexandrian Library - Alexandrian Library Begun by Ptolemy Soter (367?-283 BC), and zealously pursued by his successor Ptolemy Philadelphus. The two principal libraries were in the Bruchium and the Serapeum; the number of rolls or "books" is variously estimated between 400,000 and 700,000, but these rolls had not the contents of a modern printed volume.
The Bruchium was accidentally set on fire when Caesar burnt the fleet in the harbor, but many rolls were rescued. The Bruchium quarter was destroyed by Aurelian in 273 and probably the library with it; and in about 390 Theodosius ordered the destruction of the Serapeum, and its books were pillaged by Christians. The Moslem Caliph `Omar is reputed finally to have destroyed the remainder of the library.
Codex Nazaraeus - Codex Nazaraeus (Latin) The "Book of Adam" - the latter name meaning anthropos, Man or Humanity.
The Nazarene faith is called sometimes the Bardesanian system, though Bardesanes (B.C. 155 to 228) does not seem to have had any connection with it. True, he was born at Edessa in Syria, and was a famous astrologer and Sabian before his alleged conversion. But he was a well-educated man of noble family, and would not have used the almost incomprehensible Chaldeo dialect mixed with the mystery language of the Gnostics, in which the Codex is written. The sect of the Nazarenes was pre-Christian.
Pliny and Josephus speak of the Nazarites as settled on the banks of the Jordan 150 years B.C. (Ant.Jud. xiii. p. 9); and Munk says that the "Naziareate was an institution established before the laws of Musah" or Moses. (Munk p. 169.) Their modern name is in Arabic - El Mogtasila; in European languages - the Mendeans or "Christians of St. John". (See "Baptism".)
But if the term Baptists may well be applied to them, it is not with the Christian meaning: for while they were, and still are Sabians, or pure astrolaters, the Mendeans of Syria, called the Galileans, are pure polytheists, as every traveller in Syria and on the Euphrates can ascertain, once he acquaints himself with their mysterious rites and ceremonies. (See Isis Unv. ii. 290, et seq.)
So secretly did they preserve their beliefs from the very beginning, that Epiphanius who wrote against the Heresies in the14th century confesses himself unable to say what they believed in (i. 122); he simply states that they never mention the name of Jesus, nor do they call themselves Christians (loc. cit. 190. Yet it is undeniable that some of the alleged philosophical views and doctrines of Bardesanes are found in the codex of the Nazarenes. (See Norberg’s Codex Nazareous or the "Book of Adam", and also "Mendeans ".)
Hermetic - Hermetic. Any doctrine or writing connected with the esoteric teachings of Hermes, who, whether as the Egyptian Thoth or the Greek Hermes, was the God of Wisdom with the Ancients, and, according to Plato, "discovered numbers, geometry, astronomy and letters".
Though mostly considered as spurious, nevertheless the Hermetic writings were highly prized by St. Augustine, Lactantius, Cyril and others. In the words of Mr. J. Bonwick, "
They are more or less touched up by the Platonic philosophers among the early Christians (such as Origen and Clemens Alexandrinus) who sought to substantiate their Christian arguments by appeals to these heathen and revered writings, though they could not resist the temptation of making them say a little too much.
Though represented by some clever and interested writers as teaching pure monotheism, the Hermetic or Trismegistic books are, nevertheless, purely pantheistic. The Deity referred to in them is defined by Paul as that in which "we live, and move and have our being" - notwithstanding the "in Him" of the translators.
Sacred Heart - Sacred Heart In modern times a Roman Catholic cult which uses the heart as a symbol, especially the heart of Jesus, to which they address devotions.
From time to time there have been various Christians who have particularly stressed this aspect of their religious views, among them St. Gertrude and St. Francis of Sales (17th century) who gave this symbol to his order as its object. By edict of Pope Pius IX (1856) the day is observed in the general calendar of the Church.
In ancient times the heart was also a sacred symbol, in Egypt associated with Horus, in Babylon, with Bel, while in Greece the lacerated heart was connected with Bacchus. "Its symbol was the persea. The pear-like shape of its fruit, and of its kernel especially, resembles the heart in form. It is sometimes seen on the head of Isis, the mother of Horus, the fruit being cut open and the heart-like kernel exposed to full view" (TG 283).
Charity - Charity (from French charite from Latin caritas)
Used in some parts of the New Testament to translate the Greek agape, which is oftener translated "love" or "affection." Agape with the early Christians meant that inner bond of blessed union which united the individual with divinity, and mankind with their fellowmen. Till our eyes are fully opened, "there abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity" (1 Cor 13). This use of the word is to be distinguished from its meaning of almsgiving.
Incarnation - Incarnation Imbodiments of an entity or monad in a body of flesh, usually human. It is also used of avataras, buddhas, etc., in treating of the manifold mystery of the union of godhood and humanhood. This mystery, both among Hindus and Christians, is a distorted and anthropomorphic understanding of the teaching as to the presence of the unseen cosmic principles throughout all nature and man, as symbolized by the circle and cross.
Divine incarnations do not mean that a divine being seizes upon and occupies the body of human being as by a kind of obsession; but that every person has within him the powers by which he can manifest his own innate divinity, and that a few people have these powers developed in a special degree. When properly understood, a truly divine incarnation, as in avataras, was one of the greatest of the mysteries of every archaic religious system.
Sarasvati - Sarasvati, Saraswati (Sanskrit) The ethereal, the elegant one; the divine consort or wife of Brahma, his feminine alter ego, a later form or aspect of Vach (voice or the Word), a title of the Third Logos in Greece as well as in India.
This parallels the Bath Qol (daughter of the voice, daughter of the Word) of mystical Hebrew thought, which can be taken either as the feminine aspect of the Logos itself, or as its daughter -- the inspiration flowing forth from, or the feminine or vehicular side of, the Logos. The goddess of hidden learning and esoteric wisdom, Sarasvati is usually shown riding on a peacock with its tail spread. She is similar to the Gnostic Sophia, to the Sephirah of the Hebrew Qabbalah, and to the Holy Ghost of the Christians.
Sarasvati is also a sacred river spoken of in the Vedas, and as a river goddess she was often invoked to bestow vitality, renown, and riches; elsewhere she is described as moving along a golden path and as destroying the monster-demon Vritra.
Saint George - Saint George Patron saint of England; the universal allegory of the dragonslayer reappears in Christian ecclesiasticism as the archangel Michael who slays the red dragon, and again as St. George.
It is a historical mystery both how this apocryphal legend came to be attached to the name of George of Cappadocia, the ecclesiastic put to death by Diocletian for opposing him in the persecution of the Christians; and that the Roman Catholic Church should have canonized so rabid an Arian.
His is another form of the story of Bel and the dragon, Apollo and Python, Osiris and Typhon, etc., which denote the fallen angels or kumaras who, by bringing intellectual life to earth, thereby truly conquer death.
Church - (from the Greek kyriokon -house of the lord) .
A building set aside for worship, especially by Christians.
An religious organization for believers, especially Christian.
By Christians, the word is used in two senses: the visible and the invisible church.
The visible church consists of all the people that claim to be Christians and go to church.
The invisible church is the actual body of Christians; those who are truly saved.
The Catholic churches claim to have been established by God, while the Protestants claim that the true church is not an organization on earth consisting of people and buildings, but is really a supernatural entity comprised of those who are saved by Jesus.
Ithyphallic - Ithyphallic (Ancient Greek). Qualification of the gods as males and hermaphrodites, such as the bearded Venus, Apollo in woman’s clothes, Ammon the generator, the embryonic Ptah, and so on.
Yet the phallus, so conspicuous and, according to our prim notions, so indecent, in the Indian and Egyptian religions, was associated in the earliest symbology far more with another and much purer idea than that of sexual creation. As shown by many an Orientalist, it expressed resurrection, the rising in life from death. Even the other meaning had nought indecent in it: "These images only symbolise in a very expressive manner the creative force of nature, without obscene intention," writes Mariette Bey, and adds, "It is but another way to express celestial generation, which should cause the deceased to enter into a new life". Christians and Europeans are very hard on the phallic symbols of the ancients.
The nude gods and goddesses and their generative emblems and statuary have secret departments assigned to them in our museums; why then adopt and preserve the same symbols for Clergy and Laity? The love-feasts in the early Church - its agape as pure (or as impure) as the Phallic festivals of the Pagans; the long priestly robes of the Roman and Greek Churches, and the long hair of the latter, the holy water sprinklers and the rest, are there to show that Christian ritualism has preserved in more or less modified forms all the symbolism of old Egypt. As to the symbolism of a purely feminine nature, we are bound to confess that in the sight of every impartial archeologist the half nude toilets of our cultured ladies of Society are far more suggestive of female-sex worship than are the rows of yoni-shaped lamps, lit along the highways to temples in India.
Immortality - Life without death anytime in the future. God is immortal. The souls of people are immortal though their bodies are not. All people can die in a physical sense but they continue on after death.
Therefore, it is the soul that is immortal. However, after the return of Christ and the resurrection, the Christians'' bodies will also become glorified and immortal (1 Cor. 15:50-58). The wicked will likewise be resurrected to immortality but they will be cast into hell for eternal.
Fall Of Man - Many Christians believe that in the Garden of Eden the first man, Adam, committed a terrible sin (eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) which separated all of creation from the presence of God and doomed Adam and his offspring to eternal separation from God. They beleive that God killed Jesus on the cross to "redeem" man from the consequences of Adam''s "sin". (See Adam and Eve)
Ruach Elohim - Ruach Elohim (Hebrew, Jewish). The Spirit of the gods; corresponds to the Holy Ghost of the Christians. Also the wind, breath and rushing water.
Soma-drink - Soma-drink. Made from a rare mountain plant by initiated Brahmans. This Hindu sacred beverage answers to the Greek ambrosia or nectar, quaffed by the gods of Olympus. A cup of Kykeon was also quaffed by the Mystes at the Eleusinian initiation. He who drinks it easily reaches Bradhna, or the place of splendour (Heaven).
The Soma-drink known to Europeans is not the genuine beverage, but its substitute; for the initiated priests alone can taste of the real Soma; and even kings and Rajas, when sacrificing, receive the substitute. Haug, by his own confession, shows in his Aitareya Brahmana, that it was not the Soma that he tasted and found nasty, but the juice from the roots of the Nyagradha, a plant or bush which grows on the hills of Poona. We were positively informed that the majority of the sacrificial priests of the Dekkan have lost the secret of the true Soma. It can be found neither in the ritual books nor through oral information. The true followers of the primitive Vedic religion are very few; these are the alleged descendants of the Rishis, the real Agnihotris, the initiates of the great Mysteries. The Soma drink is also commemorated in the Hindu Pantheon, for it is called King-Soma.
He who drinks thereof is made to participate in the heavenly king; he becomes filled with his essence, as the Christian apostles and their converts were. filled with the Holy Ghost, and purified of their sins. The Soma makes a new man of the initiate; he is reborn and transformed, and his spiritual nature overcomes the physical; it bestows the divine power of inspiration, and develops the clairvoyant faculty to the utmost. According to the exoteric explanation the soma is a plant, but at the same time it is an angel. It forcibly connects the inner, highest " spirit" of man, which spirit is an angel like the mystical Soma, with his "irrational soul ", or astral body, and thus united by the power of the magic drink, they soar together above physical nature and participate during life in the beatitude and ineffable glories of Heaven, Thus the Hindu Soma is mystically and in all respects the same that the Eucharist supper is to the Christian. The idea is similar. By means of the sacrificial prayers - the mantras - this liquor is supposed to be immediately transformed into the real Soma, or the angel, and even into Brahma himself. Some missionaries have expressed themselves with much indignation about this ceremony, the more so, seeing that the Brahmans generally use a kind of spirituous liquor as a substitute.
But do the Christians believe less fervently in the transubstantiation of the communion wine into the blood of Christ, because this wine happens to be more or less spirituous? Is not the idea of the symbol attached to it the same? But the missionaries say that this hour of soma-drinking is the golden hour of Satan, who lurks at the bottom of the Hindu sacrificial cup. (Isis Unveiled.)
Constantine - (died. 337) The first Roman emperor to be recognized as the head of all religions, including Christianity.
In 312, he established the Catholic Church as the container of all religions in the empire. His Edict of Milan (313) brought an end to the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. He summoned the First Council of Nicaea in 325 to establish a unified doctrine for the empire.
Pythagorean Pentacle - Pythagorean Pentacle (Ancient Greek). A Kabbalistic six-pointed star with an eagle at the apex and a bull and a lion under the face of a man; a mystic symbol adopted by the Eastern and Roman Christians, who place these animals beside the four Evangelists.
Agape - Agape (Ancient Greek). Love Feasts; the early Christians kept such festivals in token of sympathy, love and mutual benevolence. It became necessary to abolish them as an institution, because of great abuse ; Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians complains of misconduct at the feasts of the Christians. .
Exorcism - The act of ritual expulsion of demons or evil spirits or negative forces from an individual or place . In the New Testament, exorcisms are a central part of the public ministry of Jesus.
Christianity has utilized exorcisms in a variety of ways: as an integral part of baptismal liturgies in which prayers and rites are used to symbolize the person''s departure from sin and entrance into the body of Christians; as blessings to separate material things from profane use in order to dedicate them to divine use (e. g. , the exorcism of water used in baptism); and as a rite to free persons from demonic possession. In the Roman Catholic Church this rite can only be done with episcopal authorization.
Fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches attempt to drive out the demonic with sessions of prayer, the laying on of hands, and the reading of scripture. In some forms of early Christianity there was a separate clerical office for the exorcist.
Sadducees - Sadducees [from Greek saddoukaioi from Hebrew tsadoq supposed to be the founder of the sect, meaning just, righteous]
Among Europeans, a skeptic or doubter; originally the party of the Jewish priestly aristocracy which arose in the 2nd century BC under the later Hasmoneans. The Sadducees have come to be regarded as primarily a political party opposed to the Pharisees, called by some the party of the Scribes, but later Jewish tradition following Josephus more accurately regarded them as a philosophico-religious school.
The Sadducees, a sect of erudite philosophers, opposed a great deal of the commonly accepted beliefs of the majority of the Jews, who were actually nearly all Pharisees -- as for instance, the immortality of the personal soul, and the actual resurrection of the physical body; yet they strongly upheld what they considered the genuine meaning, and therefore the true authority, of the Jewish scriptures.
They likewise opposed no small number of doctrinal or religious innovations, some of them true, and some of them less true in nature, which had been accepted by the body of the Pharisees -- virtually by the Jewish people. And the reason for their reluctance to accept these innovations, whether of doctrine or interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, seems to be that they preferred a highly philosophical and even perhaps mystical interpretation, which they said the Jewish scriptures contained, rather than the more popular versions accepted by the Hebrew people as a whole.
One may say that what the Gnostics were to the body of the Christians in the early centuries of the Christian era, the Sadducees were to the body of the Jews or Pharisees. The Sadducees likewise claimed to be the scientists and genuine philosophers of the Hebrews; although it is apparently quite true that as time went on their attitude of opposition, and even of reluctance, often became, at least among individual Sadducees, an attitude of cynicism and even possibly of cynical disbelief.
"Surely there must have been some very good reasons why the Sadducees, who furnished almost all the high Priests of Judea, held to the Laws of Moses and spurned the alleged ''Books of Moses,'' the Penateuch of the Synagogue and the Talmud" (SD 1:320-1n) -- doubtless because they rejected the literal rendering of the Pentateuch, and in the beginning at least preferred their own interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures.
In regard to Jehovah: "Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite priests and philosophers -- the Sadducees, the most refined as the most learned of all the Israelite sects, who stand as a living proof with their contemptuous rejection of every belief, save the Law" (SD 2:472-3).
Yet it must not be understood that the Pharisees were but the hypocritical and exoteric worshipers of the letter that Christian scripture and legend has endeavored to make them; for among the Pharisees themselves, as for instance Josephus (the greatest of Jewish historians), there were found many learned men. The wisest among the Pharisees desired to bring to the Jewish people as a whole certain more secret teachings, whether innovations or not, which for their own purposes the Sadducees strongly opposed.
Holy City - Holy City Many spiritual traditions symbolize the goal of human attainment or the abode of the gods as a holy city. With the Hindus, Brahmapura is the capital of Brahma on Mt. Kailasa in the Himalayas or on Mt. Meru, as well as being the inmost chamber of the heart.
According to the Chhandogya Upanishad (8:1:1), within the Brahmapura "is an abode, a small lotus-flower; within it is a small space (antarakasa). What is within that, should be searched out; that, assuredly, is what one should desire to understand." Hiranyapura (golden city) stands for the sun and for the invisible, etheric regions of space; while the Siddhapura or White Island is both the indestructible home of adepts on earth and the poles of the earth or Mt. Meru.
The Jews and Christians speak of the City of God or heavenly Jerusalem, the secret or sacred Salem, which is the goal of human spiritual attainment. This is contrasted with the earthly Jerusalem, the earth or human world. In the Qabbalah, the Holy City symbolizes both the holy of holies and the maqom which is "(the Secret Place or the Shrine) on Earth: in other words, the human womb, the microcosmic copy and reflection of the Heavenly Matrix, the female space or primeval Chaos, in which the male Spirit fecundates the germ of the Son, or the visible Universe" (SD 2:84).
Nazarenes - Nazarenes (Hebrew, Jewish). The same as the St. John Christians; called the Mend or Sabeans.
Those Nazarenes who left Galilee several hundred years ago and settled in Syria, east of Mount Lebanon, call themselves also Galileans ; though they designate Christ "a false Messiah" and recognise only St. John the Baptist, whom they call the "Great Nazar".
The Nabatheans with very little difference adhered to the same belief as the Nazarenes or the Sabeans. More than this - the Ebionites, whom Renan shows as numbering among their sect all the surviving relatives of Jesus, seem to have been followers of the same sect if we have to believe St. Jerome, who writes: " I received permission from the Nazareans who at Berea of Syria used this (Gospel of Matthew written in Hebrew) to translate it.... The Evangel which the Nazarenes and Ebionites use which recently I translated from Hebrew into Greek.’ (Hieronymus’ Comment. to Matthew, Book II., chapter xii., and Hieronymus’ De Viris Illust. cap 3.) Now this supposed Evangel of Matthew, by whomsoever written, "exhibited matter", as Jerome complains (bc. cit.), "not for edification but for destruction"(of Christianity).
But the fact that the Ebionites, the genuine primitive Christians, "rejecting the rest of the apostolic writings, made use only of this (Matthew’s Hebrew) Gospel" (Adv. Her., i. 26) is very suggestive. For, as Epiphanius declares, the Ebionites firmly believed, with the Nazarenes, that Jesus was but a man "of the seed of a man" (Epiph. Contra Ebionites). Moreover we know from the Codex of the Nazarenes, of which the "Evangel according to Matthew" formed a portion, that these Gnostics, whether Galilean, Nazarene or Gentile, call Jesus, in their hatred of astrolatry, in their Codex Naboo-Meschiha or " Mercury". (See " Mendeans").
This does not shew much orthodox Christianity either in the Nazarenes or the Ebionites; but seems to prove on the contrary that the Christianity of the early centuries and modern Christian theology are two entirely opposite things.
Incubus - INCUBUS: an oversexed male demon or spirit. Male wraith form projected for purposes of sexual intercourse. In historical writings these Inccubi seem to be associated with Christians who have psycho, sexual problems.
Familiar Spirit - A Biblical term meaning ''familiar" which Christians use to describe a demon which has possessed the body of a human.
Apis - Apis (Egypt, Egyptian), or Hapi-ankh. The "living deceased one" or Osiris incarnate in the sacred white Bull. Apis was the bull-god that, on reaching the age of twenty-eight, the age when Osiris was killed by Typhon - was put to death with great ceremony. It was not the Bull that was worshipped but the Osiridian symbol; just as Christians kneel now before the Lamb, the symbol of Jesus Christ, in their churches.
Baptism - A practice of spiritual cleansing, known by other names in Asia for thousands of years. The belief that supports this practice among Christians is regeneration (i. e. , the new birth), and therefore salvation or eternal life, is conditioned upon being ritually immersed in water.
Most groups teaching this doctrine also add that proper mode (immersion or sprinkling) and/or proper minister (one authorized by the organization) is necessary. . The teaching that baptism is a prerequisite for salvation, is not accepted by all Christians The New Agers perform baptism in the same sense as do Hindus.
Essenes - Christ -- myth or man -- was only theoretically attached to the Essenes. It''s an assumption added on much after the fact. The "Messiah" of Xtianity was a formidable figure who had to be made palatable by throwing in a generous dollop of humanistic Essenianism.
So of course there would be similarities between the Essenes and the Xtians. The Xtians (as they have done with every rival for human attention ever since) took over the Essene trappings -- under linens, cap and bootstrap! If Xtianity could swallow an elephant, it would. A thousand years from now, if the world still stood, Elizabeth Clare Prophet would be hailed as the last Xtian saint because she raked in all the clutter of 20th Century occult cults, including the Anti-Christ, under one final, eschatological banner of Jesus.
It''s interesting to me that the early Xtians also tried to swallow up their arch-rival, Gnosticism, along with Essenianism (the Essenes and Gnostics held many ideas in common), but while it tried to hold onto the Essenianism, it had to spit out the Gnostic medicine.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more hope I hold out for the Keristans, whom the Christians probably will never appropriate, because they can''t. Its founder, an old, white-bearded geezer with young, hippie-like disciples, claims to have been told by a "voice" in his head at age 11 to form a new religion. In the second place, their mythos -- as written in comic book bible -- has Christ selling his (tennis) shoes to a cheap, plastic, children''s doll, who is the true Goddess. What''s more, the doll is brown.
Succubus - SUCCUBUS:
1) an oversexed female demon or spirit.
2) said to be a female wraith form projected for the purpose of sexual intercourse. In historical writings these Succubi seem to be associated with Christians who have psycho, sexual problems.
Ordination - The formal bestowal of ministerial office, with the authority of the Church publicly given by its agents competent to ordain (bishop, presbytery).
Since the Reformation wide divergence has prevailed alike as to the form and theory of the ministry, the liturgical forms used in ordination, and the proper person to administer ordination.
In the Eascern and Roman Catholic Churches ordination is held to confer grace and indelible character, and therefore not to he repeated. Many Anglicans share this position. In churches of Catholic order ordination is set in the framework of the Eucharistic liturgy and restricted to bishops of historic succession, as was the universal rule from the second to the 16th-century.
The essential form of ordination consists of the laying on of hands” with prayer. Admission to minor orders is by the giving of the appropriate symbol of office (out of which has developed the porrecijo isssts-um e,sto rum). This primitive simplicity has been retained by the Eastern Church, and to it the Reformed Churches have returned.
The practice of laying-on-of-hands for ordination comes first from the very ancient practice of the father laying his hands upon his sons to confer upon them their various parts of inheritance. (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph). Since the Bible says that Christians are inheritors of Abraham''s blessing through Jesus, it seemed appropriate to confer these blessings in the same way.
Christian - The word "Christian" comes from the Greek word christianos which is derived from the word christos, or Christ, which means "anointed one." A Christian, then, is someone who is a follower of Christ. The first use of the word "Christian" in the Bible is found in Acts 11:26, "And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch." It is found only twice more in Acts 26:28 and 1 Pet. 4:16. However, it is important to note that it is the true Christ that makes someone a Christian, not the Mormon one (brother of the devil), or the JW one (Michael the Archangel), the New Age Jesus (a man in tune with the divine Christ Consciousness), etc. The true Christ is God in flesh (John 1:1,14; 20:28; Col. 2:9; Phil. 2:5-8; Heb. 1:8): Jesus.
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