According to the pre-Christian sages, we are each made up of a mortal eidolon (the embodied self, the physical body and personality) and the immortal Daemon (the Spirit, the true Self which is each person's spiritual connection to God).

The mystical death
If we are alive to our personal identity as the eidolon, we are dead to our eternal identity as the Daemon. Initiation in the Mysteries was a way of bringing the soul back to life. By undergoing the mystical death of the eidolon the initiate could arise reborn as the Daemon. The Gnostics taught the same Mystery doctrine.

The anonymous teacher of the Gnostic sage Rheginos explains that ordinary human existence is spiritual death and, therefore, we all need to be ‘resurrected from the dead’.

Just as Pagan initiates who witnessed the grand Mystery pageant at Eleusis metaphorically suffered with Dionysus and were spiritually reborn, likewise, initiates in the Gnostic Mysteries metaphorically shared in the suffering and triumph of their godman Jesus. Rheginos’ teacher explains:

‘We suffered with him, and we arose with him, and we went to heaven with him.’

Initiates who shared in Jesus' passion as an allegory for their own mystical death and resurrection could say along with Jesus in the Gospel of John: ‘That's why my Father loves me, because I lay down my life to get it back again.’

For the Gnostics the resurrection was simply ‘the revealing of what truly exists’. For initiates with ‘eyes to see’, therefore, this mystical resurrection had ‘already taken place’. It could not possibly be a future event, because it was an awareness of what was real in the present moment. An initiate’s true identity did not become the Daemon through the process of initiation. It had always been the Daemon. The resurrection was actually only a change in awareness. The teacher of Rheginos proclaims:

‘Already you have the resurrection. Consider yourself as risen already. Are you – the real you – mere corruption? Why do you not examine your own Self, and see that you have arisen?’

The Treatise of the Resurrection teaches:

‘Everything is prone to change. The world is an illusion! The resurrection is the revelation of what is, and the transformation of things, and a transition into newness. Flee from the divisions and the fetters, and already you have the resurrection.’

Although the Gnostics saw the resurrection as an allegory, they did not see it as unreal. On the contrary, to the initiated the mystical experience of spiritual resurrection was more real than the so-called reality of normal consciousness. The teacher of Rheginos explains:

‘Do not suppose that resurrection is an illusion. It is not an illusion; rather it is something real. Instead, one ought to maintain that the world is an illusion, rather than the resurrection.’

A common phrase in the Pagan Mysteries, often quoted by Plato, was soma sema, ‘The body is a tomb.’ Gnostic initiates also understood that those who identified with the incarnate physical self were spiritually dead and needed to be reborn into eternal Life. Initiates who experienced mystical resurrection realized their true identity as the Christ and discovered, like the women in the Jesus story, that ‘the tomb is empty’. The body is not their identity. They are not the eidolon that lives and dies, but the eternal witness that is forever unborn and undying.

Becoming Christ
The Pagan sages also taught that in the Inner Mysteries an initiate discovered that what appeared to be their individual Daemon was actually the Universal Daemon, which they pictured as having been torn into fragments and distributed amongst all conscious beings. Epictetus teaches: ‘You are a fragment torn from God. You have a portion of Him within you.’ Osiris-Dionysus represents this Universal Daemon, the Mind of God conscious in all living things.

In many myths Osiris-Dionysus meets his death by dismemberment. This is often taken to mean the threshing of the corn to produce bread and the trampling of grapes to produce wine. Initiates of the Inner Mysteries, however, understood this motif on a more mystical level, as encoding teachings about the dismemberment of the Universal Daemon by the power of evil. In the myth of Osiris, for example, the godman is murdered and dismembered by his evil brother Set, and then the goddess Isis collects together all of Osiris’ limbs and reconstitutes him. This myth encodes the Mystery teaching that God needs to be ‘re-membered’, that the spiritual path is the process of reuniting the fragments of the Universal Daemon, of perceiving One in all.

Describing Osiris’ death, Plutarch writes: ‘Set scatters and destroys the sacred Logos which the goddess Isis collects and puts together and delivers to those undergoing initiation.’

This motif of dismemberment is completely foreign to Christianity as we now know it, but was fundamental to Gnosticism. Like their Pagan predecessors, Gnostic Christians believed each individual human self to be a fragment of one single heavenly being which had been dismembered by evil forces, robbed of all memory of its heavenly origins and forced into individual physical bodies.

Like the Pagan godman Osiris-Dionysus, the Christian godman Jesus symbolically represents the Universal Daemon or Logos which has been dismembered. In the Pistis Sophia, Jesus declares: ‘I have torn myself asunder and come into the world.’ In The Acts of John, he teaches that ‘the multitude that is about the cross’ represents the ‘Limbs of Him’ that have yet to be ‘gathered together’.

A Gnostic hymn to be sung on the ‘great day of supreme initiation’, beseeches Jesus: ‘Come unto us, for we are Thy fellow-members, Thy limbs. We are all one with Thee. We are one and the same, and Thou art one and the same.’

From The Jesus Mysteries, © Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy 1999, published in the UK by Thorsons.