An Inner-Teaching Reading of Orthodoxy
To understand the path of the inner teachings, we first need to disentangle the historical reality from the later theological construct. One helpful way is to speak of a three-fold figure at the heart of Western spirituality.
The task of the inner way is not to argue over which name is “correct,” but to see how these layers formed and to return to the living source.
The shift from the “religion of Yeshua” to the “religion about Jesus” is largely carried in the letters of Paul of Tarsus.
Paul, a Roman citizen writing to Gentile communities, used the language and imagination of the Mystery Cults to make a Jewish Messiah intelligible to a pagan audience. The concrete sayings and actions of the historical Yeshua almost vanish from his letters, replaced by a vast “Cosmic Christ.”
In Paul, the crucifixion is not simply a state execution but a cosmic sacrifice, aligning Jesus with Mediterranean dying-and-rising deities such as Osiris, Dionysus, and Attis, whose deaths and rebirths guaranteed the fertility of the earth and the salvation of the soul.
By applying the charged title Kyrios (“Lord”) to Jesus, Paul placed him in direct symbolic rivalry with Caesar and with cultic deities like Mithras. The language of imperial power and divine lordship is now concentrated in a single heavenly figure.
The ritual meal of bread and wine, interpreted as the body and blood of Christ, echoes the omophagia of Dionysian religion—the ritual consumption of the god to achieve union. In this way, Jewish resistance to blood-consumption was gradually overlaid with a pagan desire to ingest the deity.
The net effect is a decisive shift: the focus moves from the teachings of the master (ethics, wisdom, non-duality) to the person of the messenger (worship, belief, dogma).
The “Jesus” of imperial Christianity is a syncretic construct: a Jewish seed planted in Roman soil. To survive and unify the Empire, the developing church assimilated symbols, festivals, and myths from the surrounding pagan world.
The Ichthys (“Jesus Fish”): Long before it marked Christian identity, the fish and the vesica piscis shape were symbols of fertility and the Divine Feminine, associated with goddesses like Atargatis and Aphrodite. The almond-shaped opening represents the womb. Orthodoxy reinterpreted this yonic symbol as a sign of “fishers of men,” masculinizing its older associations.
The Cross: The cross is an ancient pre-Christian sign of the meeting of Spirit (vertical) and Matter (horizontal). The so-called Celtic cross, with its circle, is a direct remnant of solar worship, marking the sun’s four stations in the year.
December 25: The historical birth of Yeshua is unknown (and likely fell in spring or autumn). The later choice of December 25 aligned the Nativity with the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Birthday of the Unconquered Sun) and the festival of Saturnalia. In symbolism, the “Son” gradually displaced the “Sun.”
Easter: The English name “Easter” derives from Eostre/Ostara, a Germanic goddess of dawn and spring. Her symbols — the hare (fertility) and the egg (new life) — were absorbed into the celebration of the Resurrection, which tracks the spring equinox and the “resurrection” of nature itself.
While the Church absorbed pagan aesthetics and rhythms, it also launched a theological campaign to delegitimize the very sources of those aesthetics. This strategy of a kind of hostile takeover was crucial for political and spiritual consolidation: the forms could remain, but the meanings had to be renamed.
The Inversion of the Daimon: In Greek thought, a daimon was a neutral tutelary spirit, a personal genius or intermediary between gods and humans (Socrates famously spoke of his daimonion). The Church gradually reclassified such presences as demons—malevolent fallen angels in service to Satan. A more fluid spiritual landscape hardened into a binary: if a spirit was not of the Church, it was of the Devil.
The Archonic Reality: In a strange mirror of the inner teaching preserved in the Wisdom Gospels, the same planetary powers that pagans once called gods were now named demons. For the early wisdom circles, however, these planetary rulers (Zeus/Jupiter, Ares/Mars, and so on) were understood as Archons—cosmic jailers who, along with the Demiurge, help to keep the soul asleep in materiality.
The Yahwist Precedent: This consolidation of spiritual authority echoed an earlier movement within the Hebrew scriptures themselves. Just as Yahweh absorbed the titles of the high god El and the storm imagery of Baal while branding rival deities (such as Baal and Asherah) as abominations, so too did the Church absorb the “Sun God” archetype while condemning ongoing solar devotion as idolatry.
Why does any of this matter for the student of the inner way? Recognizing the pagan and political layers is not meant to mock the faith of ordinary believers, but to free the seeker from literalism and fear.
Orthodoxy asks you to treat these myths as unique historical events that, if believed correctly, will save you from the outside. Gnosis invites you to receive them as psychological and spiritual allegories—mirrors of your own inner life.
In this light, the “Resurrection” is not only a one-time event that happened to a man in Jerusalem, but the ever-present possibility of awakening within the dense rock of the material body. The cross becomes the meeting of Spirit and Matter in your own heart. The “Christ” becomes a name for the union of human and divine in you.
By gently stripping away the later “Jesus” construct — the politicized holidays, the solar myths, the heavy Pauline transaction — we can return to Yeshua, the master who did not say “Worship me,” but rather, in the words remembered in the Gospel of Thomas:
He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.— Gospel of Thomas, Logion 108