[Die geheime Bedeutung des Kreuzes]
Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl[1]
There is no real mystic, and certainly no educated “cleric” who does not know that behind the commonly assumed external meaning of the symbols of Christianity there is a deeper meaning, which the great multitude of people may not know, and every person who has any religious feelings and is not inseparably bound by any form of dogmatism will also feel this same truth. This is especially true in relation to the cross and crucifixion of Christ. Who has not quietly wondered how is it possible for all of of humanity can be redeemed through the execution of one person and the blood which was shed by him? For how many has this doubt tormented them even though they feared it and avoided it as supposedly sinful for thinking about it, and yet the idea keeps coming back even though it may be against what is contrary to reason and against all known laws of nature.
Historical research has increased the substantiation for doubts and brought science into conflict with religious superstition, although not with true religion. Researchers have proved that the redemption of mankind through the incarnation of God, in other words, the descent of the Logos into the material (the “flesh”) and its resurrection, is not an episode in the history of Judaism, but an eternal truth which is already represented in the oldest religious systems, long before the rise of the Christian era, by the symbol of the cross and the crucifixion. Various circumstances indicate that a crucifixion of the person of Jesus of Nazareth did not take place. The most pointed among the apostles, St. Paul, nowhere is it written of an external Christ nailed to a cross, but he does speak of the Christ in us, who is the “mystery of salvation,”[2] and the Bible often frequently mentions about the cross which everyone has to take up.[3]
Also, the narration of such a God-ordained slaughter contradicts the sense of justice. An old woman among the “gentiles,” who first heard of this from a missionary, replied, “Well, it is a very long time since this happened, and let us hope it is not true!”—But every righteous person also wishes this; for anyone who is not obsessed with self-interest, and seeks no advantage for himself in the sufferings of another, is reluctant to ascribe such cruelty to God, who is the embodiment of supreme wisdom, love, and goodness.
A scholar named Bierbauer, who has dealt extensively with this question, points out in his book “Was Christ Crucified?” that the narratives of the New Testament, if taken literally, agree neither with the practices of the Romans nor with those of the Jews. Christ was allegedly tried at night and put to death in the morning, that is, on the day of Easter; but according to the law, this feast could not fall on a Friday, and no executions could take place during this sacred time. The Jewish Sanhedrin was an assembly of serious and respected men and consisted of at least twenty-three judges. They did not hold their meetings at night, nor in the house of the high priest; nor were they allowed to pass judgment after sunset. They were required to grant the accused complete freedom of defense and are not likely to have beaten and spat on him. Nor is it at all credible that a Roman governor should have submitted his decision to a noisy mob, whom he deeply despised, and at whose clamor would have condemned an innocent man. All this, however, not only becomes clear, but becomes self-evident when we understand the deep meaning of this allegory, which we will go into in more detail later. The authorities are also very uncertain and contradict each other about the time and place where this crucifixion is said to have taken place. There is no doubt today that the places shown to strangers in Jerusalem are not the right ones.
It is not, of course, our intention to undermine or to do away with Christian myth, and thereby to support unbelief, but an unprejudiced inquiry will serve to set a higher view in place of a low and narrow one. The secret meaning of these symbols was well known to the first Christians, of which the Essenes are to be counted among them, as well as to the initiates of all denominations, but for the large, thoughtless crowd, an external and wrong conception had to and still has to take place, if she is not to succumb to unbelief; for the masses are unable to grasp that truth to which it cannot rise up to, and the church would lose the greater part of its adherents if its consolations were confined only to the blessings which each must win within himself. People are still so constituted today that everyone believes in everything else rather than in themselves, and everyone finds it more comfortable to seek help from outside and through others than to follow the path that alone leads to the goal and which is symbolically represented in the Bible as we find in the passion story of Jesus.
In fact, this story of suffering represents an eternal truth, a fact that not only happened once in Palestine, but is constantly taking place in the great universe as well as in the individual human being. Not only do the scriptures of all peoples teach it, but all nature, if we understand it rightly, bears witness to us that “the Word became flesh”: came unto our redemption, for the Logos is the organizing principle in all forms, from the atom to the solar system, in the spiritual (heaven) as well as in the material (earthly), and by the Word, which is God, “everything is made that is made”[4] [“all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made”]; it is the primal force of all evolution, and without it nothing has come into existence.
The cross signifies the descent of spirit into matter. The horizontal line indicates the realm of the material, the vertical line the penetrating spirit. But this penetration has the purpose of awakening the power dormant in matter and putting it into action. Thus light, when conceived by virgin nature, awakens the life of nature out of its hibernation, and the Spirit of God awakens the soul of man to the consciousness of its immortality. Therefore, the cross is the sign of evolution and the symbol of redemption through the awakening of divine life in the soul of man and its spiritual growth, which, like all organic life, works from the inside out. In the symbols of the Christian Church, this spiritual awakening is often indicated by rays emanating from the center of the Cross, where the two lines intersect, and the “Rosicrucians” of the Middle Ages placed a rose there as a symbol of wisdom, which blossoms and reveals itself through the influence of divine love in the heart of man.
This awakening of God-consciousness in man is his salvation. But it is also necessary so that these processes are not just understood as theories, but to understand them correctly and to experience them practically. Therefore, these teachings do not belong to everyday science, and dry philosophical or theological speculation does not bring true understanding of them, but one’s own inner and spiritual experience does. These things are sacred in nature, and it takes a certain degree of inward sanctification to have that inward experience which is necessary to grasp them clearly. They belong, in other words, to the higher science, which is called the “higher” because it arises from the knowledge of those who have been penetrated by the Spirit of Truth, enlightened and inwardly awakened, and thereby to a higher stage of evolution and self-knowledge.
The sages and saints of all peoples, the Indian yogis, as well as the Buddhists and Christian mystics, teach that in the course of the great evolution of the universe there are, as it were, three outpourings of the Godhead. In Greek they are referred to as the three Logoi, in Christian teaching as “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” The first Logos or the “Father” is the omnipresent spirit (Ātma) from which everything springs, and which is therefore rightly called the “Father of all”; the second Logos or “Son” is the monadic essence, the organizing principle in the cosmos (Buddhi); the third Logos or “Holy Spirit” (Manas) the all-animating principle which comes to us from the Father through the agency of the Son. However, all three Logoi are not essentially different from each other, but only three different aspects or “persons” (from “persona” = mask) of the Eternal One who is all in all. They are one, like thought, word, and revelation, when the word is the revelation of thought and thought becomes deed through word.
C. P. Heinrich demonstrated in his “Law of Life” by citing various passages from the Bible, “the Father is the holiest, purest primal thought, the epitome of all being, the primal source and sun of grace of the purest love and wisdom, the center of all life, the spiritual light, the ground and begetting principle of Deity; the Son is the expression of this thought, the Word, the primal power of all life; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, the common emanation of Father and Son, the effect of thought and word, the revelation of God. He is the divine being insofar as he has made known and revealed himself in the purest forms of the entire creation, but especially in man.” — That the world, or rather modern science, knows nothing of it is irrelevant. This unity of the essence of the Holy Trinity should never be disregarded, the more so as the supposed separation of the three aspects or modes of action of the deity has already wreaked havoc in the world. They are as inseparable as the three sides of a triangle, and man too will only become perfect when the unity of the Holy Trinity is restored in him, i.e., when his Word is the pure expression of his thought and becomes action.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not things that are alien and distant to us. The Father is the reason for our own existence; in ourselves the Son is crucified, we ourselves are the cross, and the hope of our salvation rests in the Holy Spirit of truth working in ourselves, through which alone we can attain true self-knowledge. But as long as the world sees nothing else in the symbol of the cross other than a reference to the execution of a human being, albeit godlike, who is at least mortal, this limited conception will also hinder the spread of true faith. The timid pious will remain stuck in their delusions, and the “enlightened,” who know nothing of the secret meaning of the symbols, will throw out the baby with the bathwater and reject everything that crosses their temporary horizon. We ourselves are that very Cross composed of wrong desires and erroneous opinions, which prevent us from realizing true self-knowledge. It is our divine self that is, as it were, born in this stable and chained to this cross and must go the way symbolized in the alleged life story represented by Jesus of Nazareth. The Pharisees and hypocrites are the apparent virtues that spring from self-delusion based self-importance, and to “scribes” who know nothing but what they have read somewhere, which we still do not suffer from a lack today. The miracles which Christ worked, he still performs today; the knowledge of the truth makes the blind see, it heals the diseases of the soul and the body and awakens the spiritually dead to true consciousness. In it, our assumed individuality dies, and in it we celebrate our resurrection when the stone of error that covers the grave of ignorance in which we are imprisoned, is rolled away.
The fact that the symbol of the crucifixion does not refer to a “historical” event in the history of the Jews is also evidenced by the oldest images about this, in which the god-man is not fastened to the cross, but is shown standing on it and spreading his arms out as if giving a blessing. Even today, especially in the Bavarian highlands, there are many crucifixes with the symbols of the crucifixion, which indicate a secret meaning. We see there, among other things, the rooster on the top, which announces the dawn of the day of knowledge; the three nails signify the three main passions which bind man to earthly existence: selfishness, lust and anger; the sponge with vinegar points to the inadequacy of the concocted scholarly stuff offered by the world to the soul thirsting for the knowledge of truth; the hammer with which the nails are fastened in the flesh is the self-will of man himself; the crown of thorns signifies the sufferings which he inflicts on himself as a result of his errors, etc. In a purely historical presentation of such an event these appendices would scarcely have ever come into consideration.
But the depiction of the Crucifixion has another, less well-known, historical reason, knowledge of which will make clear much that is still commonly misunderstood in this symbol and in the Christian creed. In fact, in the Egyptian mysteries, the candidate for initiation was placed on a cross which was partially hollowed out to accommodate his body. Thus, he had to spend three days and three nights in an underground room. During this time he fell into a state of somnambulism; That is to say, while his body lay in a sleep similar to apparent death, he travelled in his astral body, with full consciousness in the astral world, where he learned the secrets of the underworld and there passed the tests of which the descriptions by the ancient mysteries often speak, that we are talking about a ceremony which is still imitated today among the Freemasons, albeit in a very distorted manner.
From the little that has become known to us through tradition about the life story of Jesus of Nazareth, it emerges that he was a member of the religious order of the Essenes and was initiated into the mysteries in Egypt. Hence it is rightly said of him that he descended into Hell (the lower astral region) and “rose again,” i.e., awoke, on the third day. But much else that is otherwise asserted in the creeds of the Christian Church is partly true to misunderstandings and partly to incorrect translations of the original documents.[5]
Everyone will admit that there are religious mysteries, and there is no doubt that not everyone is mature enough to understand them. In spite of the large amount of metaphysical, occult and mystical writings, that part of natural science which relates to the “astral plane” or “supernatural world” is still an entirely unknown area for the majority of our physicists, and that which is a natural thing to anyone who has experience of this area, still belongs to the realm of fable for others. But the majority of the “pious” are content with a fantastic sky and misunderstood dogmas, hoping for help from the outside because they lack their own strength, and find it is more convenient to leave the thinking to others than to seek the truth himself. Now, we don’t want to disturb them in their dreams. But for those who are no longer comfortable with modern disbelief or superstition, what has been said may perhaps serve to be a hint that the symbols of religion refer to quite different things than is usually thought.
Notes
[1] Secret Meaning of the Cross. [Die geheime Bedeutung des Kreuzes. Franz Hartmann, M.D. Theosophischer Wegweiser 4, no. 6 (March 1902), 173-181] {This article was reformatted from the original, but with the content unchanged other than fixing minor typos. Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025}
[2] Colossians I, 27.
[3] Matthew X, 38.
[4] John I, 1-3.
[5] Compare, [C. W.] Leadbeater: “The Christian Creed.”