Christos – The Christ Principle

According to original and genuine Theosophy – i.e. the writings and teachings of the Masters of the Wisdom and the one they called their “Direct Agent” and their Messenger, H. P. Blavatsky – Christ is not a being or an entity of any kind. Although certain beings can be symbolically and honorifically referred to as Christs, that is only a reverential title for them and does not mean that they themselves are Christ itself. Christ is not another name for Maitreya. Christ is not the “Master of the Masters.” Christ is not the so-called “World Teacher.” And there is no such thing as the “Second Coming” or “Reappearance” of Christ, for in reality Christ never had a first coming and has never appeared, nor can ever appear.

Why? Because Christ – from the Greek “Christos” – is simply a symbolic term and name for the purely impersonal and universal Divine Principle of Spirit which is present in everything in the Universe.

These other ideas which we have just briefly mentioned are not part of Theosophy. They are a central part of an thoroughly contradictory and opposing system of teaching which calls itself “Theosophy” but which is in fact derived almost entirely from the self-proclaimed clairvoyant revelations of C. W. Leadbeater nearly 20 years after HPB had passed away. The words of the Masters and HPB show clearly that the ideas and teachings about Christ that were presented and popularised by C. W. Leadbeater, Annie Besant, and Alice Bailey – not to mention others after them such as Torkom Saraydarian and Benjamin Crème – are in their sight nothing short of blasphemous, ignorant, and anti-Theosophical. They are not “Ageless Wisdom” . . . they are Christian superstition and theological lies repackaged for a modern and gullible audience who have been deliberately kept in the dark as to what Theosophy is actually all about and who at the same time may not be brave or bold enough to abandon their personal preference for the Christian religion and its “Saviour” figure. More can be explored about this in articles listed under the heading “Pseudo-Theosophy/Neo-Theosophy” on the Articles page.

The majority of those today who view themselves as Esoteric Christians or call themselves Christian Gnostics are nothing of the sort. How many of them really know the deep underlying philosophy and meaning of the early Gnostic Christianity and the Gnostic Gospels? How many of them have a true comprehension of real Theosophy – the Esoteric Teaching which underlies all the world’s religions? HPB once wrote, “Till now I have only found cacophony in the opinions of Christian Esotericists, cacophony and confusion.”

So what does real Gnosticism have to say about the Christ or Christos? How is the Christ viewed in the real teachings of Theosophy? The following compilation of quotations will make it clear and will also serve to highlight one of the many vitally important differences and contradictions that exist between authentic Theosophy and its later, Christianised imitation.

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BY THE MASTER K.H.

“Let these unfortunate deluded Christians know that the real Christ of every Christian is the Vach, the “mystical Voice,” while the man Jeshu was but a mortal like any of us, an adept more by his inherent purity and ignorance of real Evil, than by what he had learned with his initiated Rabbis and the already (at that period) fast degenerating Egyptian Hierophants and priests.”

[Letter to A. P. Sinnett]

BY H. P. BLAVATSKY

“Take Paul, read the little of the original that is left of him in the writings attributed to this brave, honest, sincere man, and see whether any one can find a word therein to show that Paul meant by the word Christ anything more than the abstract ideal of the personal divinity indwelling in man. For Paul, Christ is not a person, but an embodied idea. “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation,” he is reborn, as after initiation, for the Lord is spirit – the spirit of man. Paul was the only one of the apostles who had understood the secret ideas underlying the teachings of Jesus, although he had never met him.”

[Isis Unveiled Vol. 2, p. 574]

“Christos is neither the Christ of the Churches, nor yet the Jesus of the Gospels; it is only an impersonal Principle.”

[The Kabalah and the Kabalists]

“Note well, “Christos” with the Gnostics meant the impersonal principal, the Atman of the Universe, and the Atma within every man’s soul – not Jesus.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1, p. 132]

“No true theosophist will accept any more a carnalised Christ . . . than an anthropomorphic God, and still less a ‘Pastor’ in the person of a Pope . . .”

[On Pseudo-Theosophy]

“. . . “the coming of Christ,” means the presence of CHRISTOS in a regenerated world, and not at all the actual coming in body of “Christ” Jesus; this Christ is to be sought neither in the wilderness nor “in the inner chambers,” nor in the sanctuary of any temple or church built by man; for Christ – the true esoteric SAVIOUR – is no man, but the DIVINE PRINCIPLE in every human being. He who strives to resurrect the Spirit crucified in him by his own terrestrial passions, and buried deep in the “sepulchre” of his sinful flesh; he who has the strength to roll back the stone of matter from the door of his own inner sanctuary, he has the risen Christ in him.”

[The Esoteric Character of the Gospels]

“The Christ of esoteric science is the Christos of Spirit – an impersonal principle entirely distinct from any carnalised Christ or Jesus.”

[Footnote in response to the Abbe Roca’s “Esotericism of Christian Dogma”]

“Theosophy . . . hushes the “Lo here! and lo there!” and declares the Christ, like the kingdom of heaven, to be within. . . . With the advent of Theosophy, the Messiah-craze surely has had its day, and sees its doom.”

[Modern Apostles and Pseudo-Messiahs]

“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.”

[Reply to the Mistaken Conceptions of the Abbe Roca concerning my Observations on Christian Esotericism]

“In carnalizing the central figure of the New Testament, in imposing the dogma of the Word made flesh, 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 Oriental nations to prevent them from renouncing their philosophic doctrines in favour of that which degrades the Christos principle. . . .

“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 blending of religious ideas would be possible between them. . . .

“It is said that after the Kalki-Avatar (“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 [“Whether it be Krishna, Buddha, Sosiosh, Horus or Christos, it is a universal principle“] 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 that preceded Christianity, as do the Vedantins their Krishna: they distinguish the corporeal man from the divine Principle, which, in the case of the Avatar, animates him. Their Krishna, the historical hero, is mortal, but the divine Principle (Vishnu) which animates him, is immortal and eternal; Krishna – the man and his name – remains terrestrial at his death; he does not become Vishnu; Vishnu absorbs only that part of himself which had animated the Avatar, as it animates so many others. . . .

“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. . . .

“Once united to his Atman-Christos, the Ego, by that very act, loses the great illusion called ego-ism, and perceives at last the fullness of truth; that Ego knows that it has never lived outside the great All, and that it is inseparable from it. Such is Nirvana, which, for it, is but the return to its primitive condition or state. Imprisoned in its oubliette of flesh and matter, it had lost even the conception or memory of that condition, but once the light of Spirit has revealed to it the illusion of the senses, it places no more trust in earthly things, for it has learned to scorn them; the Son is now united to the Father; thenceforth the soul is one with Spirit! And when a man has reached this point in the Gnosis, or Theosophy, what has he then to do with the dogmas of any Church?”

[Notes on Abbe Roca’s “Esotericism of Christian Dogma”]