J. H. Hill

Astral Worship J. H. Hill

Religion having been based upon the worship of personified nature, it is evident that its founders fabricated its dogmatic element from their conceptions of her destructive and reproductive processes as manifested in the rotation and diversity of the seasons. The apparent retreat of the sun from the earth, in winter, and his return in the spring, suggesting the idea of a figurative death and resurrection of the genius of that luminary, they applied these phenomena of the year to man, and composed the allegories relative to his fall and redemption, as inculcated in the Exoteric Creed. In the allegory relating to the fall, it was taught that, after making the first human pair, the Lord of Good or the Lord God placed them in a beautiful garden-corresponding to the seasons of fruits and flowers or months of Spring and Summer, with the injunction, under a, penalty, not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree. When the Lord of Evil, or Devil, symbolized by the serpent and represented by the constellation "Serpens" placed in conjunction with the Autumnal Equinox, meeting them on the confines of his dominion, and tempting the woman, and she the man, they ate of the forbidden fruit; thus, falling from their first estate, and committing the original sin, they involved the whole human race in the consequences of their disobedience. Then the Lord God, pronouncing a curse against the serpent, clothed the man and woman with skins to protect them against the inclemency of his, dominion as Lord of Evil, and drove them from the garden; after which they were necessitated to earn their bread by tilling the ground.