Bøger af Alvin Boyd Kuhn

2015 Reprint of the 1940 edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. 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, but suggests that Kuhn's self-publishing may have resulted in a lack of attention to his work.

2019 Reprint of 1949 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Shadow of the Third Century begins with the assertions that a true history of Christianity has never before been written and that the roots of the Christian religion lie in earlier religions and philosophies of the ancient world. Christianity as we know it, says Kuhn, took the form it did due to a degeneration of knowledge rather than to an energization produced by a new release of light and truth into the world. In the ancient world, knowledge was commonly passed down by esoteric traditions, its inner meaning known only to the initiated. The Gospels, says Kuhn, should therefore be understood as symbolic narratives rather than as history. Sacred scriptures are always written in a language of myth and symbol, and the Christian religion threw away and lost their true meaning when it mistranslated this language into alleged history instead of reading it as spiritual allegory. This literalism necessarily led to a religion antagonistic toward philosophy. Moreover, it produced a religion that failed to recognize its continuity with, and debt to, earlier esoteric schools. As evidence of this, Kuhn finds that many of the gospel stories and sayings have parallels in earlier works, in particular those of Egypt and Greece. The transformation of Jesus' followers into Pauline Christians drew on these sources. Moreover, the misunderstanding of true Christianity led to the excesses of misguided asceticism. The book as a whole is, says Kuhn, a "clarion call to the modern world to return to the primitive Christianity which the founder of Christian theology, Augustine, proclaimed had been the true religion of all humanity." With its many citations from earlier works, Shadow of the Third Century also serves as a bibliographic introduction to alternative histories of Christianity.

2018 Reprint of 1936 Pamphlet Edition. 36 Pages. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880 -1963) was an American Theosophist. A publisher who wrote books that he published himself, he lectured and was a proponent of the Christ myth theory. 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.

2018 Reprint of 1945 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. How does gender and the sex drive manifest itself across human cultures? How is the dual nature of humanity; male and female, spiritual and physical, animal and divine; expressed in the tangible world? Alvin Boyd Kuhn, a prominent proponent of the early 20th-century doctrine of theosophy, which sought to find the universal truths that underlie all human religions, here explores the hidden connections across cultures that unify rites and customs found around the globe: circumcision, the secondary status of women, myths about communion with deities, and more. This treatise seeks to uncover a fundamental basis for human ideas about sex, gender, and love.

Kuhn, the author of the popular New Lectures on the Ancient Wisdom series, offers up an essay on the origins of Halloween and its traditions such as the candle in the pumpkin, broomstick riding witches, apple in a tub of water and the wearing of masks. He searches to find a meaning behind Halloween that goes beyond the sheer fun and deviltry of it as it has been practiced in the past and present.