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| Ancient and Christian Mysteries |
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 Let us remember now the essential point of the Egyptian initiation (which would later become the initiation of the Cathars – the Perfects in Pyrenean Catharism). The candidate had to spend three days and three nights in a tomb. During this time, he accomplished his journey into the other world, which transpired according to his degree of achievement.
As he could remember this journey when awakening and as he had visited beforehand the empire of the dead, he was thus resurrected and ‘born twice’, according to the language of the temples. Christ, too, (like Jonah in the stomach of the whale) accomplished his cosmic journey during his burial and before his resurrection.
Here again, there is a parallel between the ancient initiations and the new mysteries brought to the world by Christ. It is not only a parallel but also a broad extension because the astral journey of a God, having passed through earthly death, had to be qualitatively different and of a much greater importance than the simple spree, on Isis’ boat, of a mere mortal into the kingdom of the dead. (That boat was in reality the initiate’s own ethereal body, detached from the physical body by the master.) Christ showed the celestial routes to those lost souls, such as those we see in the ‘first circle’ of Inferno in Dante's Divine Comedy.
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