The Melchizedek Teachings in the Occident

98:1.1The Salem mis­sion­ar­ies might have built up a great re­li­gious struc­ture among the Greeks had it not been for their strict in­ter­pre­ta­tion of their oath of or­di­na­tion, a pledge im­posed by Ma­chi­venta which for­bade the or­ga­ni­za­tion of ex­clu­sive con­gre­ga­tions for wor­ship, and which ex­acted the prom­ise of each teacher never to func­tion as a priest, never to re­ceive fees for re­li­gious ser­vice, only food, cloth­ing, and shel­ter. When the Mel­chiz­e­dek teach­ers pen­e­trated to pre-Hel­lenic Greece, they found a peo­ple who still fos­tered the tra­di­tions of Adam­son and the days of the And­ites, but these teach­ings had be­come greatly adul­ter­ated with the no­tions and be­liefs of the hordes of in­fe­rior slaves that had been brought to the Greek shores in in­creas­ing num­bers. This adul­ter­ation pro­duced a re­ver­sion to a crude an­i­mism with bloody rites, the lower classes even mak­ing cer­e­mo­nial out of the ex­e­cu­tion of con­demned crim­i­nals.

98:1.2The early in­flu­ence of the Salem teach­ers was nearly de­stroyed by the so-called Aryan in­va­sion from south­ern Eu­rope and the East. These Hel­lenic in­vaders brought along with them an­thro­po­mor­phic God con­cepts sim­i­lar to those which their Aryan fel­lows had car­ried to In­dia. This im­por­ta­tion in­au­gu­rated the evo­lu­tion of the Greek fam­ily of gods and god­desses. This new re­li­gion was partly based on the cults of the in­com­ing Hel­lenic bar­bar­ians, but it also shared in the myths of the older in­hab­i­tants of Greece.

98:1.3The Hel­lenic Greeks found the Med­i­ter­ra­nean world largely dom­i­nated by the mother cult, and they im­posed upon these peo­ples their man-god, Dyaus-Zeus, who had al­ready be­come, like Yah­weh among the henothe­is­tic Semites, head of the whole Greek pan­theon of sub­or­di­nate gods. And the Greeks would have even­tu­ally achieved a true mono­the­ism in the con­cept of Zeus ex­cept for their re­ten­tion of the over­con­trol of Fate. A God of fi­nal value must, him­self, be the ar­biter of fate and the cre­ator of des­tiny.

98:1.4As a con­se­quence of these fac­tors in re­li­gious evo­lu­tion, there pres­ently de­vel­oped the pop­u­lar be­lief in the happy-go-lucky gods of Mount Olym­pus, gods more hu­man than di­vine, and gods which the in­tel­li­gent Greeks never did re­gard very se­ri­ously. They nei­ther greatly loved nor greatly feared these di­vini­ties of their own cre­ation. They had a pa­tri­otic and racial feel­ing for Zeus and his fam­ily of half men and half gods, but they hardly rev­er­enced or wor­shiped them.

98:1.5The Hel­lenes be­came so im­preg­nated with the an­ti­priest­craft doc­trines of the ear­lier Salem teach­ers that no priest­hood of any im­por­tance ever arose in Greece. Even the mak­ing of im­ages to the gods be­came more of a work in art than a mat­ter of wor­ship.

98:1.6The Olympian gods il­lus­trate man’s typ­i­cal an­thro­po­mor­phism. But the Greek mythol­ogy was more aes­thetic than ethic. The Greek re­li­gion was help­ful in that it por­trayed a uni­verse gov­erned by a de­ity group. But Greek morals, ethics, and phi­los­o­phy pres­ently ad­vanced far be­yond the god con­cept, and this im­bal­ance be­tween in­tel­lec­tual and spir­i­tual growth was as haz­ardous to Greece as it had proved to be in In­dia.