The Lost Light: An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures by Alvin Boyd Kuhn

The Lost Light

An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures

Highly influenced by the work of Gerald Massey and Godfrey Higgins, Kuhn contended that the Bible derived its origins from other Pagan religions and much of Christian history was pre-extant as Egyptian mythology. He also proposed that the Bible was symbolic and did not depict real events, and argued that the leaders of the church started to misinterpret the bible at the end of the third century. Many authors including Tom Harpur and John G. Jackson were influenced by the works of Kuhn. Harpur even dedicated his best-selling 2004 book, “The Pagan Christ” to Kuhn, calling him “a man of immense learning and even greater courage” and “one of the single greatest geniuses of the twentieth century” [who] “towers above all others of recent memory in intellect and his understanding of the world’s religions.” Harpur notes that Kuhn gave nearly 2,000 public lectures which were lengthy, detailed and well-attended. …


Book Details

Author: Alvin Boyd Kuhn
Print Length: 605
Publisher: The Academy Press
Contributor: Blindshiva
Book format: Pdf
Language: English


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Contents

  • PROLOGUE
  • I. TRAGEDY DIES IN LAUGHTER
  • II. ECCE HOMO—ECCE DEUS
  • III. TRUTH CRUSHED TO EARTH
  • IV. WISDOM HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
  • V. LOOSING THE SEVEN SEALS
  • VI. THE DESCENT TO AVERNUS
  • VII. COLONISTS FROM HEAVEN
  • VIII. IN DURANCE VILE
  • IX. ALIVE IN DEATH
  • X. THE MUMMY IN AMENTA
  • XI. DISMEMBERMENT AND DISFIGUREMENT
  • XII. AMBROSIA AND NECTAR
  • XIII. EARTH, WATER, AIR, FIRE
  • XIV. FIRE ON HEAVEN’S HEARTH
  • XV. NOXIOUS FUMES AND LURID FLARES
  • XVI. BAPTISM AT THE CROSSING
  • XVII. THE ARK AND THE DELUGE
  • XVIII. THE LAKE OF EQUIPOISE
  • XIX. WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE
  • XX. SUNS OF INTELLECT
  • XXI. AT THE EAST OF HEAVEN
  • XXII. SKYLARK AT HEAVEN’S GATE

Sample

Chapter I

TRAGEDY DIES IN LAUGHTER

Little could the ancient mythologists and sages have foreseen that the “fabulous narrations” which their genius devised to cloak high truth would end by plaguing the mind of the Western world with sixteen centuries of unconscionable stultification. They could not possibly imagine that their allegorical constructions to dramatize spiritual truth would so miscarry from their hidden intent as to cast the mental life of half the world for ages under the cloud of the most grotesque superstition known to history. Nor could they have dreamed that the gross blindness and obtuseness of later epochs would cite these same marvelously ingenious portrayals as the evidence of childish crudity on the part of their formulators. Who could have suspected that a body of the most signal instrumentalities for conveying and preserving deep knowledge ever devised by man would become the means of centuries of mental enslavement?

Nothing more clearly evidences the present age’s loss of fixed moorings in philosophical truth than the inconsistency of its attitudes toward the sacred scriptures of antiquity. The general mind, indoctrinated by priestcraft, regards them as infallible revelations and holds them as fetishes, which it were a sacrilege to challenge; while theological scholarship hedges from pious veneration of them over to outright skepticism of their divine origin, swinging more recently to a view which takes them to be the simple conceptions of men just emerging from cave and forest barbarism. The character of divine dictation and absolute wisdom assigned to them on the one thesis has yielded to that of ignorant speculation of primitive folk on the other. That there is a possible truer characterization of them lying midway between the extravagances of these two extreme views has not seemed to come through to intelligence at any time.


About Author: Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, Kuhn studied the Ancient Greek language at university. He obtained his B.A. in 1903 and started his career working as a language teacher in high schools. In 1927 he quit teaching to devote to full-time studies in 1927. His thesis, Theosophy: A Modern Revival of the Ancient Wisdom was, according to Kuhn, the first instance in which an individual has been “permitted” by any modern American or European university to obtain his doctorate with a thesis on Theosophy. Kuhn spent the next 30 years writing, lecturing, and running his own publishing house, Academy Press in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Highly influenced by the work of Gerald Massey and Godfrey Higgins, Kuhn contended that the Bible derived its origins from other Pagan religions and much of Christian history was pre-extant as Egyptian mythology. He also proposed that the Bible was symbolic and did not depict real events, and argued that the leaders of the church started to misinterpret the bible at the end of the third century.

The author of over 150 books, essays and published papers, Kuhn completed his final book, A Rebirth for Christianity, shortly before his death on September 14, 1963, in Morristown, New Jersey.

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