I. H. U. H. emanated the FIRST-BORN of God, the Universal FORM, in which

are contained all beings; the Persian and Platonic Archetype of things,
united with the Infinite by the primitive ray of Light.

This First-Born is the Creative Agent, Conservator, and animating
Principle of the Universe. It is THE LIGHT OF LIGHT. It possesses the
three Primitive Forces of the Divinity, LIGHT, SPIRIT, and LIFE Φώς,
Πνευμά, and Ζωη. As it has received what it gives, Light and Life, it is
equally considered as the generative and conceptive Principle, the
Primitive Man, ADAM KADMON. As such, it has revealed itself in ten
emanations or _Sephiroth_, which are not ten different beings, nor even
beings at all; but sources of life, vessels of Omnipotence, and types of
Creation. They are _Sovereignty_ or _Will, Wisdom, Intelligence,
Benignity, Severity, Beauty, Victory, Glory, Permanency_, and _Empire_.
These are attributes of God; and this idea, that God reveals Himself by
His attributes, and that the human mind cannot perceive or discern God
Himself, in his works, but only his mode of manifesting Himself, is a
profound Truth. We know of the Invisible only what the Visible reveals.

_Wisdom_ was called NOUS and LOGOS [and Νου̃ς Λογος], INTELLECT or the
WORD. _Intelligence_, source of the oil of anointing, responds to the
Holy Ghost of the Christian Faith.

_Beauty_ is represented by green and yellow. _Victory_ is
YAHOVAH-TSABAOTH, the column on the right hand, the column _Jachin:
Glory_ is the column _Boaz_, on the left hand. And thus our symbols
appear again in the Kabalah. And again the LIGHT, the object of our
labors, appears as the creative power of Deity. The circle, also, was
the special symbol of the first Sephirah, Kether, or the Crown.

We do not further follow the Kabalah in its four Worlds of Spirits,
_Aziluth, Briah, Yezirah_, and _Asiah_, or of _emanation, creation,
formation_, and _fabrication_, one inferior to and one emerging from the
other, the superior always enveloping the inferior; its doctrine that,
in all that exists, there is nothing purely material; that all comes
from God, and in all He proceeds by irradiation; that everything
subsists by the Divine ray that penetrates creation; and all is united
by the Spirit of God, which is the life of life; so that all is God; the
Existences that inhabit the four worlds, inferior to each other in
proportion to their distance from the Great King of Light: the contest
between the good and evil Angels and Principles, to endure until the
Eternal Himself comes to end it and re-establish the primitive harmony;
the four distinct parts of the Soul of Man; and the migrations of impure
souls, until they are sufficiently purified to share with the Spirits of
Light the contemplation of the Supreme Being whose Splendor fills the
Universe.

The WORD was also found in the Phœnician Creed. As in all those of Asia,
a WORD of God, written in starry characters, by the planetary
Divinities, and communicated by the Demi-Gods, as a profound mystery, to
the higher classes of the human race, to be communicated by them to
mankind, created the world. The faith of the Phœnicians was an emanation
from that ancient worship of the Stars, which in the creed of Zoroaster
alone, is connected with a faith in one God. Light and Fire are the most
important agents in the Phoenician faith. There is a race of children of
the Light. They adored the Heaven with its Lights, deeming it the
Supreme God.

Everything emanates from a Single Principle, and a Primitive Love, which
is the Moving Power of All and governs all. Light, by its union with
Spirit, whereof it is but the vehicle or symbol, is the Life of
everything, and penetrates everything. It should therefore be respected
and honored everywhere; for everywhere it governs and controls.

The Chaldaic and Jerusalem Paraphrasts endeavored to render the phrase,
DEBAR-YAHOVAH דבר יהוה, the Word of God, a personalty, wherever they met
with it. The phrase, "And God created man," is, in the Jerusalem Targum,
"And the Word of IHUH created man."

So, in xxviii. Gen. 20,21, where Jacob says: "If God [יהיה אלהי IHIH
ALHIM] will be with me..." then shall IHUH be my ALHIM [Hebrew ]; UHIH
IHUH Li LALHIM; and this stone shall be God's House [[Hebrew].. IHIH
BITH ALHIM]: Onkelos paraphrases it, "If the word of IHUH will be my
help ... then the word of IHUH shall be my God".

So, in iii. Gen. 8, for "The Voice of the Lord God" [[Hebrew], IHUH
ALHIM], we have, "The Voice of the Word of IHUH."

In ix. Wisdom, 1, "O God of my Fathers and Lord of Mercy! who has made
all things with thy word.. [Greek: έν λόγου σου.]"

And in xviii. Wisdom, 15, "Thine Almighty Word [Greek: Λογος] leaped
down from Heaven."

Philo speaks of the Word as being the same with God. So in several
places he calls it "[Greek: δεύτερος Θείος Λóγος]," the Second Divinity;
"[Greek: είμώντουΘεού]," the Image of God: the Divine Word that made all
things: "the [Greek: υπαρχος]," substitute, of God; and the like.

Thus, when John commenced to preach, had been for ages agitated, by the
Priests and Philosophers of the East and West, the great questions
concerning the eternity or creation of matter: immediate or intermediate
creation of the Universe by the Supreme God; the origin, object, and
filial extinction of evil; the relations between the intellectual and
material worlds, and between God and man; and the creation, fall,
redemption, and restoration to his first estate, of man.

The Jewish doctrine, differing in this from all the other Oriental
creeds, and even from the Alohayistic legend with which the book of
Genesis commences, attributed the creation to the immediate action of
the Supreme Being. The Theosophists of the other Eastern Peoples
interposed more than one intermediary between God and the world. To
place between them but a single Being, to suppose for the production of
the world but a single intermediary, was, in their eyes, to lower the
Supreme Majesty. The interval between God, who is perfect Purity, and
matter, which is base and foul, was too great for them to clear it at a
single step. Even in the Occident, neither Plato nor Philo could thus
impoverish the Intellectual World.

Thus, Cerinthus of Ephesus, with most of the Gnostics, Philo, the
Kabalah, the Zend-Avesta, the Puranas, and all the Orient, deemed the
distance and antipathy between the Supreme Being and the material world
too great, to attribute to the former the Creation of the latter. Below,
and emanating from, or created by, the Ancient of Days, the Central
Light, the Beginning, or First Principle [[Greek: Αρχή]], one, two, or
more Principles, Existences or Intellectual Beings were imagined, to
some one or more of whom [without any immediate creative act on the part
of the Great Immovable, Silent Deity], the immediate creation of the
material and mental universe was due.

We have already spoken of many of the speculations on this point. To
some, the world was created by the LOGOS or WORD, first manifestation
of, or emanation from, the Deity. To others, the beginning of creation
was by the emanation of a ray of LIGHT, creating the principle of
_Light_ and _Life_. The Primitive THOUGHT, creating the inferior
Deities, a succession of INTELLIGENCES, the Iynges of Zoroaster, his
_Amshaspands_, _Izeds_, and _Ferouers_, the _Ideas_ of Plato, the
_Aions_ of the Gnostics, the _Angels_ of the Jews, the _Nous_, the
_Demiourgos_, the DIVINE REASON, the _Powers_ or _Forces_ of Philo, and
the Alohayim, Forces or Superior Gods of the ancient legend with which
Genesis begins,--to these and other intermediaries the creation was
owing. No restraints were laid on the Fancy and the Imagination. The
veriest Abstractions became Existences and Realities. The attributes of
God, personified, became Powers, Spirits, Intelligences.

God was the _Light of Light_, _Divine Fire_, the _Abstract
Intellectuality_, the _Root_ or _Germ_ of the Universe. _Simon Magus_,
founder of the Gnostic faith, and many of the early Judaizing
Christians, admitted that the manifestations of the Supreme Being, as
FATHER, or JEHOVAH, SON or CHRIST, and HOLY SPIRIT, were only so many
different _modes_ of Existence, or _Forces_ [[Greek: δυναμεις]] of the
same God. To others they were, as were the multitude of Subordinate
Intelligences, real and distinct beings.

The Oriental imagination revelled in the creation of these Inferior
Intelligences, Powers of Good and Evil, and Angels. We have spoken of
those imagined by the Persians and the Kabalists. In the Talmud, every
star, every country, every town, and almost every tongue has a Prince of
Heaven as its Protector. JEHUEL is the guardian of fire, and MICHAEL, of
water. Seven spirits assist each; those of fire being _Seraphiel_,
_Gabriel_, _Nitriel_, _Tammael_, _Tchimschiel_, _Hadarniel_, and
_Sarniel_. These seven are represented by the square columns of this
Degree, while the columns JACHIN and BOAZ represent the angels of fire
and water. But the columns are not representatives of these alone.

To Basilides, God was without name, uncreated, at first containing and
concealing in Himself the Plenitude of His Perfections; and when these
are by Him displayed and manifested, there result as many particular
Existences, all analogous to Him, and still and always Him. To the
Essenes and the Gnostics, the East and the West both devised this faith;
that the Ideas, Conceptions, or Manifestations of the Deity were so many
Creations, so many Beings, all God, nothing without Him, but more than
what we now understand by the word _ideas_. They emanated from and were
again merged in God. They had a kind of middle existence between our
modern ideas, and the intelligences or ideas, elevated to the rank of
genii, of the Oriental mythology.

These personified attributes of Deity, in the theory of Basilides, were
the [Greek: Πρωτόγονος] or _First-born_, [Greek: Νου̃ς][_Nous_ or
_Mind_]: from it emanates [Greek: Λογος] [_Logos_, or THE WORD] from it
[Greek: Φρόνησις]: [_Phronesis, Intellect_]: from it [Greek: Σοφια]
[_Sophia, Wisdom_]: from it [Greek: Δύναμις] [_Dunamis, Power_]: and
from it [Greek: Δικαιοσύνη] [_Dikaiosune, Righteousness_]: to which
latter the Jews gave the name of [Greek: Ειρηνη] [_Eirene, Peace_, or
_Calm_], the essential characteristics of Divinity, and harmonious
effect of all His perfections. The whole number of successive emanations
was 365, expressed by the Gnostics, in Greek letters, by the mystic word
[Greek: ΑΒΡΑΞΑΣ] [_Abraxas_]; designating God as manifested, or the
aggregate of his manifestations; but not the Supreme and Secret God
Himself. These three hundred and sixty-five Intelligences compose
altogether the Fullness or _Plenitude_ [[Greek: Πληρωμα]] of the Divine
Emanations.

With the Ophites, a sect of the Gnostics, there were seven inferior
spirits [inferior to Ialdabaoth, the Demiourgos or Actual Creator]:
_Michaël, Surièl, Raphaël, Gabriel, Thauthabaoth, Erataoth_, and
_Athaniel_, the genii of the stars called the Bull, the Dog, the Lion,
the Bear, the Serpent, the Eagle, and the Ass that formerly figured in
the constellation Cancer, and symbolized respectively by those animals;
as _Ialdabaoth, Iao, Adonaï, Eloï, Oraï_, and _Astaphaï_ were the genii
of Saturn, the Moon, the Sun, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury.

The WORD appears in all these creeds. It is the _Ormuzd_ of Zoroaster,
the _Ainsoph_ of the Kabalah, the _Nous_ of Platonism and Philonism, and
the _Sophia_ or _Demiourgos_ of the Gnostics.

And all these creeds, while admitting these different manifestations of
the Supreme Being, held that His identity was immutable and permanent.
That was Plato's distinction between the Being always the same [Greek:
τό όυ] and the perpetual flow of things incessantly changing, the
Genesis.

The belief in dualism in some shape, was universal. Those who held that
everything emanated from God, aspired to God, and re-entered into God,
believed that, among those emanations were two adverse Principles, of
Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. This prevailed in Central Asia and in
Syria; while in Egypt it assumed the form of Greek speculation. In the
former, a second Intellectual Principle was admitted, active in its
Empire of Darkness, audacious against the Empire of Light. So the
Persians and Sabeans understood it. In Egypt, this second Principle was
Matter, as the word was used by the Platonic School, with its sad
attributes, Vacuity, Darkness, and Death. In their theory, matter could
be animated only by the low communication of a principle of divine life.
It resists the influences that would spiritualize it. That resisting
Power is Satan, the rebellious Matter, Matter that does not partake of
God.

To many there were two Principles; the Unknown Father, or Supreme and
Eternal God, living in the centre of the Light, happy in the perfect
purity of His being; the other, eternal Matter, that inert, shapeless,
darksome mass, which they considered as the source of all evils, the
mother and dwelling-place of Satan.

To Philo and the Platonists, there was a Soul of the world, creating
visible things, and active in them, as agent of the Supreme
Intelligence; realizing therein the ideas communicated to Him by that
Intelligence, and which sometimes excel His conceptions, but which He
executes without comprehending them.

The Apocalypse or Revelations, by whomever written, belongs to the
Orient and to extreme antiquity. It reproduces what is far older than
itself. It paints, with the strongest colors that the Oriental genius
ever employed, the closing scenes of the great struggle of Light, and
Truth, and Good, against Darkness, Error, and Evil; personified in that
between the New Religion on one side, and Paganism and Judaism on the
other. It is a particular application of the ancient myth of Ormuzd and
his Genii against Ahriman and his Devs; and it celebrates the final
triumph of Truth against the combined powers of men and demons. The
ideas and imagery are borrowed from every quarter; and allusions are
found in it to the doctrines of all ages. We are continually reminded
of the Zend-Avesta, the Jewish Codes, Philo, and the Gnosis. The Seven
Spirits surrounding the Throne of the Eternal, at the opening of the
Grand Drama, and acting so important a part throughout, everywhere the
first instruments of the Divine Will and Vengeance, are the Seven
Amshaspands of Parsism; as the Twenty-four Ancients, offering to the
Supreme Being the first supplications and the first homage, remind us of
the Mysterious Chiefs of Judaism, foreshadow the Eons of Gnosticism, and
reproduce the twenty-four Good Spirits created by Ormuzd and inclosed in
an egg.

The Christ of the Apocalypse, First-born of Creation and of the
Resurrection, is invested with the characteristics of the Ormuzd and
Sosiosch of the Zend-Avesta, the Ainsoph of the Kabalah and the
Carpistes [Greek: Καρπιστης] of the Gnostics. The idea that the true
Initiates and Faithful become Kings and Priests, is at once Persian,
Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic. And the definition of the Supreme Being,
that He is at once Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end--He that
was, and is, and is to come, _i.e._, Time illimitable, is Zoroaster's
definition of Zerouane-Akherene.

The depths of Satan which no man can measure; his triumph for a time by
fraud and violence; his being chained by an angel; his reprobation and
his precipitation into a sea of metal; his names of the Serpent and the
Dragon; the whole conflict of the Good Spirits or celestial armies
against the bad; are so many ideas and designations found alike in the
Zend-Avesta, the Kabalah, and the Gnosis.

We even find in the Apocalypse that singular Persian idea, which regards
some of the lower animals as so many Devs or vehicles of Devs.

The guardianship of the earth by a good angel, the renewing of the earth
and heavens, and the final triumph of pure and holy men, are the same
victory of Good over Evil, for which the whole Orient looked.

The gold, and white raiments of the twenty-four Elders are, as in the
Persian faith, the signs of a lofty perfection and divine purity.

Thus the Human mind labored and struggled and tortured itself for ages,
to explain to itself what it felt, without confessing it, to be
explicable. A vast crowd of indistinct abstractions, hovering in the
imagination, a train of words embodying no tangible meaning, an
inextricable labyrinth of subtleties, was the result.

But one grand idea ever emerged and stood prominent and unchangeable
over the weltering chaos of confusion. God is great and good, and wise.
Evil and pain and sorrow are temporary and for wise and beneficent
purposes. They _must_ be consistent with God's goodness, purity, and
infinite perfection; and there _must_ be a mode of explaining them, if
we could but find it out; as, in all ways we will endeavor to do.
Ultimately, Good will prevail, and Evil be overthrown. God alone _can_
do this, and He _will_ do it, by an Emanation from Himself, assuming the
Human form and redeeming the world.

Behold the object, the end, the result, of the great speculations and
logomachies of antiquity; the ultimate annihilation of evil, and
restoration of Man to his first estate, by a Redeemer, a Masayah, a
Christos, the incarnate Word, Reason, or Power of Deity.

This Redeemer is the Word or Logos, the Ormuzd of Zoroaster, the Ainsoph
of the Kabalah, the Nous of Platonism and Philonism; He that was in the
Beginning with God, and was God, and by Whom everything was made. That
He was looked for by all the People of the East is abundantly shown by
the Gospel of John and the Letters of Paul; wherein scarcely anything
seemed necessary to be said in proof that such a Redeemer was to come;
but all the energies of the writers are devoted to showing that Jesus
was that Christos whom all the nations were expecting; the "Word," the
Masayah, the Anointed or Consecrated One.

In this Degree the great contest between good and evil, in anticipation
of the appearance and advent of the Word or Redeemer is symbolized; and
the mysterious esoteric teachings of the Essenes and the Cabalists. Of
the practices of the former we gain but glimpses in the ancient writers;
but we know that, as their doctrines were taught by John the Baptist,
they greatly resembled those of greater purity and more nearly perfect,
taught by Jesus; and that not only Palestine was full of John's
disciples, so that the Priests and Pharisees did not dare to deny John's
inspiration; but his doctrine had extended to Asia Minor, and had made
converts in luxurious Ephesus, as it also had in Alexandria in Egypt;
and that they readily embraced the Christian faith, of which they had
before not even heard.

These old controversies have died away, and the old faiths have faded
into oblivion. But Masonry still survives, vigorous and strong, as when
philosophy was taught in the schools of Alexandria and under the
Portico; teaching the same old truths as the Essenes taught by the
shores of the Dead Sea, and as John the Baptist preached in the Desert;
truths imperishable as the Deity, and undeniable as Light. Those truths
were gathered by the Essenes from the doctrines of the Orient and the
Occident, from the Zend-Avesta and the Vedas, from Plato and Pythagoras,
from India, Persia, Phœnicia, and Syria, from Greece and Egypt, and from
the Holy Books of the Jews. Hence we are called Knights of the East and
West, because their doctrines came from both. And these doctrines, the
wheat sifted from the chaff, the Truth separated from Error, Masonry has
garnered up in her heart of hearts, and through the fires of
persecution, and the storms of calamity, has brought them and delivered
them unto us. That God is One, immutable, unchangeable, infinitely just
and good; that Light will finally overcome Darkness,--Good conquer Evil,
and Truth be victor over Error;--these, rejecting all the wild and
useless speculations of the Zend-Avesta, the Kabalah, the Gnostics, and
the Schools, are the religion and Philosophy of Masonry.

Those speculations and fancies it is useful to study; that knowing in
what worthless and unfruitful investigations the mind may engage, you
may the more value and appreciate the plain, simple, sublime,
universally-acknowledged truths, which have in all ages been the Light
by which Masons have been guided on their way; the Wisdom and Strength
that like imperishable columns have sustained and will continue to
sustain its glorious and magnificent Temple.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]




XVIII.


KNIGHT ROSE CROIX.

[Prince Rose Croix.]


Each of us makes such applications to his own faith and creed, of the
symbols and ceremonies of this Degree, as seems to him proper. With
these special interpretations we have here nothing to do. Like the
legend of the Master Khūrūm, in which some see figured the condemnation
and sufferings of Christ; others those of the unfortunate Grand Master
of the Templars; others those of the first Charles, King of England; and
others still the annual descent of the Sun at the winter Solstice to the
regions of darkness, the basis of many an ancient legend; so the
ceremonies of this Degree receive different explanations; each
interpreting them for himself, and being offended at the interpretation
of no other.

In no other way could Masonry possess its character of Universality;
that character which has ever been peculiar to it from its origin; and
which enables two Kings, worshippers of different Deities, to sit
together as Masters, while the walls of the first temple arose; and the
men of Gebal, bowing down to the Phœnician Gods, to work by the side of
the Hebrews to whom those Gods were abomination; and to sit with them in
the same Lodge as brethren.

You have already learned that these ceremonies have one general
significance, to every one, of every faith, who believes in God, and the
soul's immortality.

The primitive men met in no Temples made with human hands. "God," said
Stephen, the first Martyr, "dwelleth not in Temples made with hands." In
the open air, under the overarching mysterious sky, in the great
World-Temple, they uttered their vows and thanksgivings, and adored the
God of Light; of that Light that was to them the type of Good, as
darkness was the type of Evil.

All antiquity solved the enigma of the existence of Evil, by supposing
the existence of a Principle of Evil, of Demons, fallen Angels, an
Ahriman, a Typhon, a Siva, a Lok, or a Satan, that, first falling
themselves, and plunged in misery and darkness, tempted man to his fall,
and brought sin into the world. All believed in a future life, to be
attained by purification and trials; in a state or successive states of
reward and punishment; and in a Mediator or Redeemer, by whom the Evil
Principle was to be overcome, and the Supreme Deity reconciled to His
creatures. The belief was general, that He was to be born of a Virgin,
and suffer a painful death. The Indians called him Chrishna; the
Chinese, Kioun-tse; the Persians, Sosiosch; the Chaldeans, Dhou-vanai;
the Egyptians, Har-Oeri; Plato, Love; and the Scandinavians, Balder.

Chrishna, the Hindoo Redeemer, was cradled and educated among Shepherds.
A Tyrant, at the time of his birth, ordered all the male children to be
slain. He performed miracles, say his legends, even raising the dead. He
washed the feet of the Brahmins, and was meek and lowly of spirit. He
was born of a Virgin; descended to Hell, rose again, ascended to Heaven,
charged his disciples to teach his doctrines, and gave them the gift of
miracles.

The first Masonic Legislator whose memory is preserved to us by history,
was Buddha, who, about a thousand years before the Christian era,
reformed the religion of Manous. He called to the Priesthood all men,
without distinction of caste, who felt themselves inspired by God to
instruct men. Those who so associated themselves formed a Society of
Prophets under the name of Samaneans. They recognized the existence of a
single uncreated God, in whose bosom everything grows, is developed and
transformed. The worship of this God reposed upon the obedience of all
the beings He created. His feasts were those of the Solstices. The
doctrines of Buddha pervaded India, China, and Japan. The Priests of
Brahma, professing a dark and bloody creed, brutalized by Superstition,
united together against Buddhism, and with the aid of Despotism,
exterminated its followers. But their blood fertilized the new doctrine,
which produced a new Society under the name of Gymnosophists; and a
large number, fleeing to Ireland, planted their doctrines there, and
there erected the round towers, some of which still stand, solid and
unshaken as at first visible monuments of the remotest ages.

The Phœnician Cosmogony, like all others in Asia, was the Word of God,
written in astral characters, by the planetary Divinities, and
communicated by the Demi-gods, as a profound mystery, to the brighter
intelligences of Humanity, to be propagated by them among men. Their
doctrines resembled the Ancient Sabeism, and being the faith of Hiram
the King and his namesake the Artist, are of interest to all Masons.
With them, the First Principle was half material, half spiritual, a dark
air, animated and impregnated by the spirit; and a disordered chaos,
covered with thick darkness. From this came the WORD, and thence
creation and generation; and thence a race of men, children of light,
who adored Heaven and its Stars as the Supreme Being; and whose
different gods were but incarnations of the Sun, the Moon, the Stars,
and the Ether. _Chrysor_ was the great igneous power of Nature, and
_Baal_ and _Malakarth_ representations of the Sun and Moon, the latter
word, in Hebrew, meaning Queen.

Man had fallen, but not by the tempting of the serpent. For, with the
Phœnicians, the serpent was deemed to partake of the Divine Nature, and
was sacred, as he was in Egypt. He was deemed to be immortal, unless
slain by violence, becoming young again in his old age, by entering into
and consuming himself. Hence the Serpent in a circle, holding his tail
in his mouth, was an emblem of eternity. With the head of a hawk he was
of a Divine Nature, and a symbol of the sun. Hence one Sect of the
Gnostics took him for their good genius, and hence the brazen serpent
reared by Moses in the Desert, on which the Israelites looked and lived.

"Before the chaos, that preceded the birth of Heaven and Earth," said
the Chinese Lao-Tseu, "a single Being existed, immense and silent,
immutable and always acting; the mother of the Universe. I know not the
name of that Being, but I designate it by the word Reason. Man has his
model in the earth, the earth in Heaven, Heaven in Reason, and Reason in
itself."

"I am," says Isis, "Nature; parent of all things, the sovereign of the
Elements, the primitive progeny of Time, the most exalted of the
Deities, the first of the Heavenly Gods and Goddesses, the Queen of the
Shades, the uniform countenance; who dispose with my rod the numerous
lights of Heaven, the salubrious breezes of the sea, and the mournful
silence of the dead; whose single Divinity the whole world venerates in
many forms, with various rites and by many names. The Egyptians, skilled
in ancient lore, worship me with proper ceremonies, and call me by my
true name, Isis the Queen."

The Hindu Vedas thus define the Deity:

"He who surpasses speech, and through whose power speech is expressed,
know thou that He is Brahma; and not these perishable things that man
adores.

"He whom Intelligence cannot comprehend, and He alone, say the sages,
through whose Power the nature of Intelligence can be understood, know
thou that He is Brahma; and not these perishable things that man adores.

"He who cannot be seen by the organ of sight, and through whose power
the organ of seeing sees, know thou that He is Brahma; and not these
perishable things that man adores.

"He who cannot be heard by the organ of hearing, and through whose power
the organ of hearing hears, know thou that He is Brahma; and not these
perishable things that man adores.

"He who cannot be perceived by the organ of smelling, and through whose
power the organ of smelling smells, know thou that He is Brahma; and not
these perishable things that man adores."

"When God resolved to create the human race," said _Arius_, "He made a
Being that He called The WORD, The Son, _Wisdom_, to the end that this
Being might give existence to men." This WORD is the _Ormuzd_ of
Zoroaster, the _Ainsoph_ of the Kabalah, the [Greek: Νου̃ς] of Plato and
Philo, the _Wisdom_ or _Demiourgos_ of the Gnostics.

That is the True Word, the knowledge of which our ancient brethren
sought as the priceless reward of their labors on the Holy Temple: the
Word of Life, the Divine Reason, "in whom was Life, and that Life the
Light of men"; "which long shone in darkness, and the darkness
comprehended it not;" the Infinite Reason that is the Soul of Nature,
immortal, of which the Word of this Degree reminds us; and to believe
wherein and revere it, is the peculiar duty of every Mason.

"In the beginning," says the extract from some older work with which
John commences his Gospel, "was the Word, and the Word was near to God,
and the Word was God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was
not anything made that was made. In Him was Life, and the life was the
Light of man; and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did
not contain it."

It is an old tradition that this passage was from an older work. And
Philostorgius and Nicephorus state, that when the Emperor Julian
undertook to rebuild the Temple, a stone was taken up, that covered the
mouth of a deep square cave, into which one of the laborers, being let
down by a rope, found in the centre of the floor a cubical pillar, on
which lay a roll or book, wrapped in a fine linen cloth, in which, in
capital letters, was the foregoing passage.

However this may have been, it is plain that John's Gospel is a polemic
against the Gnostics; and, stating at the outset the current doctrine in
regard to the creation by the Word, he then addresses himself to show
and urge that this Word was Jesus Christ.

And the first sentence, fully rendered into our language, would read
thus: "When the process of emanation, of creation or evolution of
existences inferior to the Supreme God began, the Word came into
existence and was: and this word was [Greek: προς τον Θεον] _near to_
God; _i.e._ the immediate or first emanation from God: and it was God
Himself, developed or manifested in that particular mode, and in action.
And by that Word everything that is was created."--And thus Tertullian
says that God made the World out of nothing, by means of His Word,
Wisdom, or Power.

To Philo the Jew, as to the Gnostics, the Supreme Being was the
_Primitive Light_, or _Archetype of Light_,--_Source_ whence the rays
emanate that illuminate Souls. He is the _Soul_ of the World, and as
such acts everywhere. He himself fills and bounds his whole existence,
and his forces fill and penetrate everything. His Image is the WORD
[LOGOS], a form more brilliant than fire, which is not pure light. This
WORD dwells in God; for it is within His Intelligence that the Supreme
Being frames for Himself the Types of Ideas of all that is to assume
reality in the Universe. The WORD is the Vehicle by which God acts on
the Universe; the World of Ideas by means whereof God has created
visible things; the more Ancient God, as compared with the Material
World; Chief and General Representative of all Intelligences; the
Archangel, type and representative of all spirits, even those of
Mortals; the type of Man; the primitive man himself. These ideas are
borrowed from Plato. And this WORD is not only the Creator ["_by Him was
everything made that was made_"], but acts _in the place_ of God; and
through him act all the Powers and Attributes of God. And also, as first
representative of the human race, he is the protector of Men and their
Shepherd, the "Ben H'Adam," or Son of Man.

The actual condition of Man is not his primitive condition, that in
which he was the image of the Word. His unruly passions have caused him
to fall from his original lofty estate. But he may rise again, by
following the teachings of Heavenly Wisdom, and the Angels whom God
commissions to aid him in escaping from the entanglements of the body;
and by fighting bravely against Evil, the existence of which God has
allowed solely to furnish him with the means of exercising his free
will.

The Supreme Being of the Egyptians was _Amūn_, a secret and concealed
God, the Unknown Father of the Gnostics, the Source of Divine Life, and
of all force, the Plenitude of all, comprehending all things in Himself,
the original Light. He _creates_ nothing; but everything _emanates_ from
Him: and all other Gods are but his manifestations. From Him, by the
utterance of a Word, emanated _Neith_, the Divine Mother of all things,
the Primitive THOUGHT, the FORCE that puts everything in movement, the
SPIRIT everywhere extended, the _Deity of Light and Mother of the Sun_.

Of this Supreme Being, _Osiris_ was the image, Source of all Good in the
moral and physical world, and constant foe of Typhon, the Genius of
Evil, the Satan of Gnosticism, brute matter, deemed to be always at feud
with the spirit that flowed from the Deity; and over whom Har-Oeri, the
Redeemer, Son of Isis and Osiris, is finally to prevail.

In the Zend-Avesta of the Persians the Supreme Being is _Time without
limit_, ZERUANE AKHERENE.--No origin could be assigned to Him; for He
was enveloped in His own Glory, and His Nature and Attributes were so
inaccessible to human Intelligence, that He was but the object of a
silent veneration. The commencement of Creation was by emanation from
Him. The first emanation was the Primitive Light, and from this Light
emerged _Ormuzd_, the _King of Light_, who, by the WORD, created the
World in its purity, is its Preserver and Judge, a Holy and Sacred
Being, Intelligence and Knowledge, Himself Time without limit, and
wielding all the powers of the Supreme Being.

In this Persian faith, as taught many centuries before our era, and
embodied in the Zend-Avesta, there was in man a pure Principle,
proceeding from the Supreme Being, produced by the Will and Word of
Ormuzd. To that was united an impure principle, proceeding from a
foreign influence, that of Ahriman, the Dragon, or principle of Evil.
Tempted by Ahriman, the first man and woman had fallen; and for twelve
thousand years there was to be war between _Ormuzd_ and the Good Spirits
created by him, and _Ahriman_ and the Evil ones whom he had called into
existence.

But pure souls are assisted by the Good Spirits, the Triumph of the Good
Principle is determined upon in the decrees of the Supreme Being, and
the period of that triumph will infallibly arrive. At the moment when
the earth shall be most afflicted with the evils brought upon it by the
Spirits of perdition, three Prophets will appear to bring assistance to
mortals. Sosiosch, Chief of the Three, will regenerate the world, and
restore to it its primitive Beauty, Strength, and Purity. He will judge
the good and the wicked. After the universal resurrection of the Good,
the pure Spirits will conduct them to an abode of eternal happiness.
Ahriman, his evil Demons, and all the world, will be purified in a
torrent of liquid burning metal. The Law of Ormuzd will rule everywhere;
all men will be happy; all, enjoying an unalterable bliss, will unite
with Sosiosch in singing the praises of the Supreme Being.

These doctrines, with some modifications, were adopted by the Kabalists
and afterward by the Gnostics.

Apollonius of Tyana says: "We shall render the most appropriate worship
to the Deity, when to that God whom we call the First, who is One, and
separate from all, and after whom we recognize the others, we present no
offerings whatever, kindle to Him no fire, dedicate to Him no sensible
thing; for he needs nothing, even of all that natures more exalted than
ours could give. The earth produces no plant, the air nourishes no
animal, there is in short nothing, which would not be impure in his
sight. In addressing ourselves to Him, we must use only the higher word,
that, I mean, which is not expressed by the mouth,--the silent inner
word of the spirit.... From the most Glorious of all Beings, we must
seek for blessings, by that which is most glorious in ourselves; and
that is the spirit, which needs no organ."

Strabo says: "This one Supreme Essence is that which embraces us all,
the water and the land, that which we call the Heavens, the World, the
Nature of things. This Highest Being should be worshipped, without any
visible image, in sacred groves. In such retreats the devout should lay
themselves down to sleep, and expect signs from God in dreams."

Aristotle says: "It has been handed down in a mythical form, from the
earliest times to posterity, that there are Gods, and that The Divine
compasses entire nature. All besides this has been added, after the
mythical style, for the purpose of persuading the multitude, and for the
interest of the laws and the advantage of the State. Thus men have given
to the Gods human forms, and have even represented them under the figure
of other beings, in the train of which fictions followed many more of
the same sort. But if, from all this, we separate the original
principle, and consider it alone, namely, that the first Essences are
Gods, we shall find that this has been divinely said; and since it is
probable that philosophy and the arts have been several times, so far as
that is possible, found and lost, such doctrines may have been preserved
to our times as the remains of ancient wisdom."

Porphyry says: "By images addressed to sense, the ancients represented
God and his powers--by the visible they typified the invisible for those
who had learned to read in these types, as in a book, a treatise on the
Gods. We need not wonder if the ignorant consider the images to be
nothing more than wood or stone; for just so, they who are ignorant of
writing see nothing in monuments but stone, nothing in tablets but wood,
and in books but a tissue of papyrus."

Apollonius of Tyana held, that birth and death are only in appearance;
that which separates itself from the _one_ substance (the _one_ Divine
essence), and is caught up by matter, seems to be born; that, again,
which releases itself from the bonds of matter, and is reunited with the
one Divine Essence, seems to die. There is, at most, an alteration
between becoming visible and becoming invisible. In all there is,
properly speaking, but the one essence, which alone acts and suffers, by
becoming all things to all; the Eternal God, whom men wrong, when they
deprive Him of what properly can be attributed to Him only, and transfer
it to other names and persons.

The New Platonists substituted the idea of the Absolute, for the Supreme
Essence itself;--as the first, simplest principle, anterior to all
existence; of which nothing determinate can be predicated; to which no
consciousness, no self-contemplation can be ascribed; inasmuch as to do
so, would immediately imply a quality, a distinction of subject and
object. This Supreme Entity can be known only by an intellectual
intuition of the Spirit, transcending itself, and emancipating itself
from its own limits.

This mere logical tendency, by means of which men thought to arrive at
the conception of such an absolute, the [Greek: όν], was united with a
certain mysticism, which, by a transcendent state of feeling,
communicated, as it were, to this abstraction what the mind would
receive as a reality. The absorption of the Spirit into that
superexistence ([Greek: τό έπέκεινα τής ούσίας]), so as to be entirely
identified with it, or such a revelation of the latter to the spirit
raised above itself, was regarded as the highest end which the spiritual
life could reach.

The New Platonists' idea of God, was that of One Simple Original
Essence, exalted above all plurality and all becoming; the only true
Being; unchangeable, eternal [[Greek: Εϊς ών ένί τώ νύν τό άει πεπλήρωκε
καί μόνον έστι τό κατά τούτον όντως ών]]: from whom all Existence in its
several gradations has emanated--the world of Gods, as nearest akin to
Himself, being first, and at the head of all. In these Gods, that
perfection, which in the Supreme Essence was inclosed and unevolved, is
expanded and becomes knowable. They serve to exhibit in different forms
the image of that Supreme Essence, to which no soul can rise, except by
the loftiest flight of contemplation; and after it has rid itself from
all that pertains to sense--from all manifoldness. They are the
mediators between man (amazed and stupefied by manifoldness) and the
Supreme Unity.

Philo says: "He who disbelieves the miraculous, simply as the
miraculous, neither knows God, nor has he ever sought after Him; for
otherwise he would have understood, by looking at that truly great and
awe-inspiring sight, the miracle of the Universe, that these miracles
(in God's providential guidance of His people) are but child's play for
the Divine Power. But the truly miraculous has become despised through
familiarity. The universal, on the contrary, although in itself
insignificant, yet, through our love of novelty, transports us with
amazement."

In opposition to the anthropopathism of the Jewish Scriptures, the
Alexandrian Jews endeavored to purify the idea of God from all admixture
of the Human. By the exclusion of every human passion, it was sublimated
to a something devoid of all attributes, and wholly transcendental; and
the mere Being [Greek: όν], the Good, in and by itself, the Absolute of
Platonism, was substituted for the personal Deity [[Hebrew: יהוה]] of
the Old Testament. By soaring upward, beyond all created existence, the
mind, disengaging itself from the Sensible, attains to the intellectual
intuition of this Absolute Being; of whom, however, it can predicate
nothing but existence, and sets aside all other determinations as not
answering to the exalted nature of the Supreme Essence.

Thus Philo makes a distinction between those who are in the proper sense
Sons of God, having by means of contemplation raised themselves to the
highest Being, or attained to a knowledge of Him, in His immediate
self-manifestation, and those who know God only in his mediate
revelation through his operation--such as He declares Himself in
creation--in the revelation still veiled in the letter of
Scripture--those, in short, who attach themselves simply to the Logos,
and consider this to be the Supreme God; who are the sons of the Logos,
rather than of the True Being, (όν)

"God," says Pythagoras, "is neither the object of sense, nor subject to
passion, but invisible, only intelligible, and supremely intelligent In
His body He is like the _light_, and in His soul He resembles truth. He
is the universal _spirit_ that pervades and diffuseth itself over all
nature. All beings receive their _life_ from Him. There is but one only
God, who is not, as some are apt to imagine, seated above the world,
beyond the orb of the Universe; but being Himself all in all, He sees
all the beings that fill His immensity; the only Principle, the _Light_
of Heaven, the Father of all. He _produces everything_; He orders and
disposes everything; He is the REASON, the LIFE, and the MOTION of all
being."

"I am the LIGHT of the world; he that followeth Me shall not walk in
DARKNESS, but shall have the LIGHT OF LIFE." So said the Founder of the
Christian Religion, as His words are reported by John the Apostle.

God, say the sacred writings of the Jews, appeared to Moses in a FLAME
OF FIRE, in the midst of a bush, which was not consumed. He descended
upon Mount Sinai, as the smoke of a _furnace_; He went before the
children of Israel, by day, in a pillar of cloud and, by night, in a
pillar of _fire_, to give them _light_. "Call _you_ on the name of
_your_ Gods," said Elijah the Prophet to the Priests of Baal, "and I
will call upon the name of ADONAI; and the God that answereth _by fire_,
let him be God."

According to the Kabalah, as according to the doctrines of Zoroaster,
everything that exists has emanated from a source of infinite light.
Before all things, existed _the Primitive Being_, THE ANCIENT OF DAYS,
_the Ancient King of Light_; a title the more remarkable, because it is
frequently given to the Creator in the Zend-Avesta, and in the Code of
the Sabeans, and occurs in the Jewish Scriptures.

The world was His Revelation, God revealed; and subsisted only in Him.
His attributes were there reproduced with various modifications and in
different degrees; so that the Universe was His Holy Splendor, His
Mantle. He was to be adored in silence; and perfection consisted in a
nearer approach to Him.

Before the creation of worlds, the PRIMITIVE LIGHT filled all space, so
that there was no void. When the Supreme Being, existing in this Light,
resolved to display His perfections, or manifest them in worlds, He
withdrew within Himself, formed around Him a void space, and shot forth
His first emanation, a ray of light; the cause and principle of
everything that exists, uniting both the generative and conceptive
power, which penetrates everything, and without which nothing could
subsist for an instant.

Man fell, seduced by the Evil Spirits most remote from the Great King of
Light; those of the fourth world of spirits, Asiah, whose chief was
Belial. They wage incessant war against the pure Intelligences of the
other worlds, who, like the Amshaspands, Izeds, and Ferouers of the
Persians are the tutelary guardians of man. In the beginning, all was
unison and harmony; full of the same divine light and perfect purity.
The Seven Kings of Evil fell, and the Universe was troubled. Then the
Creator took from the Seven Kings the principles of Good and of Light,
and divided them among the four worlds of Spirits, giving to the first
three the Pure Intelligences, united in love and harmony, while to the
fourth were vouchsafed only some feeble glimmerings of light.

When the strife between these and the good angels shall have continued
the appointed time, and these Spirits enveloped in darkness shall long
and in vain have endeavored to absorb the Divine light and life, then
will the Eternal Himself come to correct them. He will deliver them from
the gross envelopes of matter that hold them captive, will re-animate
and strengthen the ray of light or spiritual nature which they have
preserved, and re-establish throughout the Universe that primitive
Harmony which was its bliss.

Marcion, the Gnostic, said, "The Soul of the True Christian, adopted as
a child by the Supreme Being, to whom it has long been a stranger,
receives from Him the Spirit and Divine life. It is led and confirmed,
by this gift, in a pure and holy life, like that of God; and if it so
completes its earthly career, in charity, chastity, and sanctity, it
will one day be disengaged from its material envelope, as the ripe grain
is detached from the straw, and as the young bird escapes from its
shell. Like the angels, it will share in the bliss of the Good and
Perfect Father, re-clothed in an aerial body or organ, and made like
unto the Angels in Heaven."

You see, my brother, what is the meaning of Masonic "Light." You see why
the EAST of the Lodge, where the initial letter of the Name of the Deity
overhangs the Master, is the place of Light. Light, as
contradistinguished from darkness, is Good, as contradistinguished from
Evil: and it is that Light, the true knowledge of Deity, the Eternal
Good, for which Masons in all ages have sought. Still Masonry marches
steadily onward toward that Light that shines in the great distance, the
Light of that day when Evil, overcome and vanquished, shall fade away
and disappear forever, and Life and Light be the one law of the
Universe, and its eternal Harmony.

The Degree of Rose teaches three things;--the unity, immutability and
goodness of God; the immortality of the Soul; the ultimate defeat and
extinction of evil and wrong and sorrow, by a Redeemer or Messiah, yet
to come, if he has not already appeared.

It replaces the three pillars of the old Temple, with three that have
already been explained to you,--Faith [in God, mankind, and man's self],
Hope [in the victory over evil, the advancement of Humanity, and a
hereafter], and Charity [relieving the wants and tolerant of the errors
and faults of others]. To be trustful to be hopeful, to be indulgent;
these, in an age of selfishness, of ill opinion of human nature, of
harsh and bitter judgment, are the most important Masonic Virtues, and
the true supports of every Masonic Temple. And they are the old pillars
of the Temple under different names. For he only is wise who judges
others charitably; he only is strong who is hopeful; and there is no
beauty like a firm faith in God, our fellows and ourself.

The second apartment, clothed in mourning, the columns of the Temple
shattered and prostrate, and the brethren bowed down in the deepest
dejection, represents the world under the tyranny of the Principle of
Evil; where virtue is persecuted and vice rewarded; where the righteous
starve for bread, and the wicked live sumptuously and dress in purple
and fine linen; where insolent ignorance rules, and learning and genius
serve; where King and Priest trample on liberty and the rights of
conscience; where freedom hides in caves and mountains, and sycophancy
and servility fawn and thrive; where the cry of the widow and the orphan
starving for want of food, and shivering with cold, rises ever to
Heaven, from a million miserable hovels; where men, willing to labor,
and starving, they and their children and the wives of their bosoms, beg
plaintively for work, when the pampered capitalist stops his mills;
where the law punishes her who, starving, steals a loaf, and lets the
seducer go free; where the success of a party justifies murder, and
violence and rapine go unpunished; and where he who with many years'
cheating and grinding the faces of the poor grows rich, receives office
and honor in life, and after death brave funeral and a splendid
mausoleum:--this world, where, since its making, war has never ceased,
nor man paused in the sad task of torturing and murdering his brother;
and of which ambition, avarice, envy, hatred, lust, and the rest of
Ahriman's and Typhon's army make a Pandemonium: this world, sunk in sin,
reeking with baseness, clamorous with sorrow and misery. If any see in
it also a type of the sorrow of the Craft for the death of Hiram, the
grief of the Jews at the fall of Jerusalem, the misery of the Templars
at the ruin of their order and the death of De Molay, or the world's
agony and pangs of woe at the death of the Redeemer, it is the right of
each to do so.

The third apartment represents the consequences of sin and vice and the
hell made of the human heart, by its fiery passions. If any see in it
also a type of the Hades of the Greeks, the Gehenna of the Hebrews, the
Tartarus of the Romans, or the Hell of the Christians, or only of the
agonies of remorse and the tortures of an upbraiding conscience, it is
the right of each to do so.

The fourth apartment represents the Universe, freed from the insolent
dominion and tyranny of the Principle of Evil, and brilliant with the
true Light that flows from the Supreme Deity; when sin and wrong, and
pain and sorrow, remorse and misery shall be no more forever; when the
great plans of Infinite Eternal Wisdom shall be fully developed; and all
God's creatures, seeing that all apparent evil and individual suffering
and wrong were but the drops that went to swell the great river of
infinite goodness, shall know that vast as is the power of Deity, His
goodness and beneficence are infinite as His power. If any see in it a
type of the peculiar mysteries of any faith or creed, or an allusion to
any past occurrences, it is their right to do so. Let each apply its
symbols as he pleases. To all of us they typify the universal rule of
Masonry,--of its three chief virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity; of
brotherly love and universal benevolence. We labor here to no other end.
These symbols need no other interpretation.

The obligations of our Ancient Brethren of the Rose were to fulfill
all the duties of friendship, cheerfulness, charity, peace, liberality,
temperance and chastity: and scrupulously to avoid impurity,
haughtiness, hatred, anger, and every other kind of vice. They took
their philosophy from the old Theology of the Egyptians, as Moses and
Solomon had done, and borrowed its hieroglyphics and the ciphers of the
Hebrews. Their principal rules were, to exercise the profession of
medicine charitably and without fee, to advance the cause of virtue,
enlarge the sciences, and induce men to live as in the primitive times
of the world.

When this Degree had its origin, it is not important to inquire; nor
with what different rites it has been practised in different countries
and at various times. It is of very high antiquity. Its ceremonies
differ with the degrees of latitude and longitude, and it receives
variant interpretations. If we were to examine all the different
ceremonials, their emblems, and their formulas, we should see that all
that belongs to the primitive and essential elements of the order, is
respected in every sanctuary. All alike practise virtue, that it may
product fruit. All labor, like us, for the extirpation of vice, the
purification of man, the development of the arts and sciences, and the
relief of humanity.

None admit an adept to their lofty philosophical knowledge, and
mysterious sciences, until he has been purified at the altar of the
symbolic Degrees. Of what importance are differences of opinion as to
the age and genealogy of the Degree, or variance in the practice,
ceremonial and liturgy, or the shade of color of the banner under which
each tribe of Israel marched, if all revere the Holy Arch of the
symbolic Degrees, first and unalterable source of Free Masonry; if all
revere our conservative principles, and are with us in the great
purposes of our organization?

If, anywhere, brethren of a particular religious belief have been
excluded from this Degree, it merely shows how gravely the purposes and
plan of Masonry may be misunderstood. For whenever the door of any
Degree is closed against him who believes in one God and the soul's
immortality, on account of the other tenets of his faith, that Degree is
Masonry no longer. No Mason has the right to interpret the symbols of
this Degree for another, or to refuse him its mysteries, if he will not
take them with the explanation and commentary superadded.

Listen, my brother, to _our_ explanation of the symbols of the Degree,
and then give them such further interpretation as you think fit.

The _Cross_ has been a sacred symbol from the earliest Antiquity. It is
found upon all the enduring monuments of the world, in Egypt, in
Assyria, in Hindostan, in Persia, and on the Buddhist towers of Ireland.
Buddha was said to have died upon it. The Druids cut an oak into its
shape and held it sacred, and built their temples in that form. Pointing
to the four quarters of the world, it was the symbol of universal
nature. It was on a cruciform tree, that Chrishna was said to have
expired, pierced with arrows. It was revered in Mexico.

But its peculiar meaning in this Degree, is that given to it by the
Ancient Egyptians. _Thoth_ or _Phtha_ is represented on the oldest
monuments carrying in his hand the _Crux Ansata_, or _Ankh_, [a Tau
cross, with a ring or circle over it]. He is so seen on the double
tablet of Shufu and Noh Shufu, builders of the greatest of the Pyramids,
at Wady Meghara, in the peninsula of Sinai. It was the hieroglyphic for
_life_, and with a triangle prefixed meant _life-giving_. To us
therefore it is the symbol of _Life_--of that life that emanated from
the Deity, and of that Eternal Life for which all hope; through our
faith in God's infinite goodness.

The ROSE was anciently sacred to Aurora and the Sun. It is symbol of
_Dawn_, of the resurrection of Light and the renewal of life, and
therefore of the dawn of the first day, and more particularly of the
resurrection: and the Cross and Rose together are therefore
hieroglyphically to be read, _the Dawn of Eternal Life_ which all
Nations have hoped for by the advent of a Redeemer.

The _Pelican_ feeding her young is an emblem of the large and bountiful
beneficence of Nature, of the Redeemer of fallen man, and of that
humanity and charity that ought to distinguish a Knight of this Degree.

The Eagle was the living Symbol of the Egyptian God _Mendes_ or
_Menthra_, whom _Sesostris-Ramses_ made one with _Amun-Re_, the God of
Thebes and Upper Egypt, and the representative of the Sun, the word RE
meaning _Sun_ or _King_.

The _Compass_ surmounted with a crown signifies that notwithstanding the
high rank attained in Masonry by a Knight of the Rose Croix, equity and
impartiality are invariably to govern his conduct.

To the word INRI, inscribed on the Crux Ansata over the Master's Seat,
many meanings have been assigned. The Christian Initiate reverentially
sees in it the initials of the inscription upon the cross on which
Christ suffered--_Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudæorum_. The sages of Antiquity
connected it with one of the greatest secrets of Nature, that of
universal regeneration. They interpreted it thus, _Igne Natura renovatur
Integra_; [entire nature is renovated by fire]: The Alchemical or
Hermetic Masons framed for it this aphorism, _Igne nitrum roris
invenitur_. And the Jesuits are charged with having applied to it this
odious axiom, _Justum necare reges impios_. The four letters are the
initials of the Hebrew words that represent the four elements--_Iammim_,
the seas or water; _Hour_, fire; _Rouach_, the air, and _Iebeschah_, the
dry earth. How we read it, I need not repeat to you.

The CROSS, [Illustration: Glyph] was the Sign of the Creative Wisdom or
Logos, the Son of God. Plato says, "He expressed him upon the Universe
in the figure of the letter X. The next Power to the Supreme God Was
decussated or figured in the shape of a Cross on Universe." Mithras
signed his soldiers on the forehead with a Cross. [Glyph] is the mark
of 600, the mysterious cycle of the Incarnations.

We constantly see the Tau and the Resh united thus [Glyph]. These two
letters, in the old Samaritan, as found in Arius, stand, the first for
400, the second for 200-600. This is the Staff of Osiris, also, and his
monogram, and was adopted by the Christians as a Sign. On a medal of
Constantius is this inscription, "_In hoc signo victor cris_ [Glyph]."
An inscription in the Duomo at Milan reads, "[Glyph] et [Glyph].
_Christi-Nomina-Sancta-Teneï_."

The Egyptians used as a Sign of their God Canobus, a [Glyph] or a
[Glyph] indifferently. The Vaishnavas of India have also the same Sacred
Tau, which they also mark with Crosses, thus [Glyph], and with
triangles, thus, [Glyph]. The vestments of the priests of Horus were
covered with these Crosses [Glyph]. So was the dress of the Lama of
Thibet. The Sectarian marks of the Jains are [Glyph]. The distinctive
badge of the Sect of Xac Japonicus is [Glyph]. It is the Sign of Fo,
identical with the Cross of Christ.

On the ruins of Mandore, in India, among other mystic emblems, are the
mystic triangle, and the interlaced triangle, [Glyph]. This is also
found on ancient coins and medals, excavated from the ruins of Oojein
and other ancient cities of India.

You entered here amid gloom and into shadow, and are clad in the apparel
of sorrow. Lament, with us, the sad condition of the Human race, in this
vale of tears! the calamities of men and the agonies of nations! the
darkness of the bewildered soul, oppressed by doubt and apprehension!

There is no human soul that is not sad at times. There is no thoughtful
soul that does not at times despair. There is perhaps none, of all that
think at all of anything beyond the needs and interests of the body,
that is not at times startled and terrified by the awful questions
which, feeling as though it were a guilty thing for doing so, it
whispers to itself in its inmost depths. Some Demon seems to torture it
with doubts, and to crush it with despair, asking whether, after all, it
is certain that its convictions are true and its faith well founded:
whether it is indeed sure that a God of Infinite Love and Beneficence
rules the Universe, or only some great remorseless Fate and iron
Necessity, hid in impenetrable gloom, and to which men and their
sufferings and sorrows, their hopes and joys, their ambitions and deeds,
are of no more interest or importance than the motes that dance in the
sunshine; or a Being that amuses Himself with the incredible vanity and
folly, the writhings and contortions of the insignificant insects that
compose Humanity, and idly imagine that they resemble the Omnipotent.
"What are we," the Tempter asks, "but puppets in a show-box? O
Omnipotent destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us mercifully off our
miserable little stage!"

"Is it not," the Demon whispers, "merely the inordinate vanity of man
that causes him now to pretend to himself that he is like unto God in
intellect, sympathies and passions, as it was that which, at the
beginning, made him believe that he was, in his bodily shape and organs,
the very image of the Deity? Is not his God merely his own shadow,
projected in gigantic outlines upon the clouds? Does he not create for
himself a God out of himself, by merely adding indefinite extension to
his own faculties, powers, and passions?"

"Who," the Voice that will not be always silent whispers, "has ever
thoroughly satisfied himself with his own arguments in respect to his
own nature? Who ever demonstrated to himself, with a conclusiveness that
elevated the belief to certainty, that he was an immortal spirit,
dwelling only temporarily in the house and envelope of the body, and to
live on forever after that shall have decayed? Who ever has demonstrated
or ever can demonstrate that the intellect of Man differs from that of
the wiser animals, otherwise than in degree? Who has ever done more than
to utter nonsense and incoherencies in regard to the difference between
the instincts of the dog and the reason of Man? The horse, the dog, the
elephant, are as conscious of their identity as we are. They think,
dream, remember, argue with themselves, devise, plan, and _reason_. What
is the intellect and intelligence of the man but the intellect of the
animal in a higher degree or larger quantity?" In the _real_ explanation
of a single thought of a dog, all metaphysics will be condensed.

And with still more terrible significance, the Voice asks, in what
Respect the masses of men, the vast swarms of the human race, have
proven themselves either wiser or better than the animals in whose eyes
a higher intelligence shines than in _their_ dull, unintellectual orbs;
in what respect they have proven themselves worthy of or suited for an
immortal life. Would that be a prize of any value to the vast majority?
Do they show, here upon earth, any capacity to improve, any fitness for
a state of existence in which they could not crouch to power, like
hounds dreading the lash or tyrannize over defenceless weakness; in
which they could not hate and persecute, and torture, and exterminate;
in which they could not trade, and speculate, and over-reach, and entrap
the unwary and cheat the confiding and gamble and thrive, and sniff with
self-righteousness at the short-comings of others, and thank God that
they were not like other men? What, to immense numbers of men, would be
the value of a Heaven where they could not lie and libel, and ply base
avocations for profitable returns?

Sadly we look around us, and read the gloomy and dreary records of the
old dead and rotten ages. More than eighteen centuries have staggered
away into the spectral realm of the Past, since Christ, teaching the
Religion of Love, was crucified, that it might become a Religion of
Hate; and His Doctrines are not yet even nominally accepted as true by a
fourth of mankind. Since His death, what incalculable swarms of human
beings have lived and died in total unbelief of all that we deem
essential to Salvation! What multitudinous myriads of souls, since the
darkness of idolatrous superstition settled down, thick and
impenetrable, upon the earth, have flocked up toward the eternal Throne
of God, to receive His judgment?

The Religion of Love proved to be, for seventeen long centuries, as much
the Religion of Hate, and infinitely more the Religion of Persecution,
than Mahometanism, its unconquerable rival. Heresies grew up before the
Apostles died; and God hated the Nicolaītans, while John, at Patmos,
proclaimed His coming wrath. Sects wrangled, and each, as it gained the
power, persecuted the other, until the soil of the whole Christian world
was watered with the blood, and fattened on the flesh, and whitened with
the bones, of martyrs, and human ingenuity was taxed to its utmost to
invent new modes by which tortures and agonies could be prolonged and
made more exquisite.

"By what right" whispers the Voice, "does this savage, merciless,
persecuting animal, to which the sufferings and writhings of others of
its wretched kind furnish the most pleasurable sensations, and the mass
of which care only to eat, sleep, be clothed, and wallow in sensual
pleasures, and the best of which wrangle, hate, envy, and, with few
exceptions, regard their own interests alone,--with what right does it
endeavor to delude itself into the conviction that it is _not_ an
animal, as the wolf, the hyena, and the tiger are, but a somewhat
nobler, a spirit destined to be immortal, a spark of the essential
Light, Fire and Reason, which are God? What other immortality than one
of selfishness could this creature enjoy? Of what other is it capable?
Must not immortality commence _here_ and is not _life_ a part of it? How
shall death change the base nature of the base soul? Why have not those
other animals that only faintly imitate the wanton, savage, human
cruelty and thirst for blood, the same right as man has, to expect a
resurrection and an Eternity of existence, or a Heaven of Love?"

_The world improves_. Man ceases to persecute,--when the persecuted
become too numerous and strong, longer to submit to it. That source of
pleasure closed, men exercise the ingenuities of their cruelty on the
animals and other living things below them. To deprive other creatures
of the life which God gave them, and this not only that we may eat their
flesh for food, but out of mere savage wantonness, is the agreeable
employment and amusement of man, who prides himself on being the Lord of
Creation, and a little lower than the Angels. If he can no longer use
the rack, the gibbet, the pincers, and the stake, he can hate, and
slander, and delight in the thought that he will, hereafter, luxuriously
enjoying the sensual beatitudes of Heaven, see with pleasure the
writhing agonies of those justly damned for daring to hold opinions
contrary to his own, upon subjects totally beyond the comprehension both
of them and him.

Where the armies of the despots cease to slay and ravage, the armies of
"Freedom" take their place, and, the black and white commingled,
slaughter and burn and ravish. Each age re-enacts the crimes as well as
the follies of its predecessors, and still war licenses outrage and
turns fruitful lands into deserts, and God is thanked in the Churches
for bloody butcheries, and the remorseless devastators, even when
swollen by plunder, are crowned with laurels and receive ovations.

Of the whole of mankind, not one in ten thousand has any aspirations
beyond the daily needs of the gross animal life. In this age and in all
others, all men except a few, in most countries, are born to be mere
beasts of burden, co-laborers with the horse and the ox. Profoundly
ignorant, even in "civilized" lands, they think and reason like the
animals by the side of which they toil. For them, God, Soul, Spirit,
Immortality, are mere words, without any real meaning. The God of
nineteen-twentieths of the Christian world is only Bel, Moloch, Zeus,
or at best Osiris, Mithras, or Adonaï, under another name, worshipped
with the old Pagan ceremonies and ritualistic formulas. It is the Statue
of Olympian Jove, worshipped as the Father, in the Christian Church that
was a Pagan Temple; it is the Statue of Venus, become the Virgin Mary.
For the most part, men do not in their hearts believe that God is either
just or merciful. They fear and shrink from His lightnings and dread His
wrath. For the most part, they only _think_ they believe that there is
another life, a judgment, and a punishment for sin. Yet they will none
the less persecute as Infidels and Atheists those who do not believe
what they themselves imagine they believe, and which yet they do _not_
believe, because it is incomprehensible to them in their ignorance and
want of intellect. To the vast majority of mankind, God is but the
reflected image, in infinite space, of the earthly Tyrant on his Throne,
only more powerful, more inscrutable, and more implacable. To curse
Humanity, the Despot need only _be_, what the popular mind has, in every
age, imagined God.

In the great cities, the lower strata of the populace are equally
without faith and without hope. The others have, for the most part, a
mere blind faith, imposed by education and circumstances, and not as
productive of moral excellence or even common honesty as Mohammedanism.
"_Your property will be safe here_," said the Moslem; "_There are no
Christians here_." The philosophical and scientific world becomes daily
more and more unbelieving. Faith and Reason are not opposites, in
equilibrium; but antagonistic and hostile to each other; the result
being the darkness and despair of scepticism, avowed, or half-veiled as
rationalism.

Over more than three-fourths of the habitable globe, humanity still
kneels, like the camels, to take upon itself the burthens to be tamely
borne for its tyrants. If a Republic occasionally rises like a Star, it
hastens with all speed to set in blood. The kings need not make war upon
it, to crush it out of their way. It is only necessary to let it alone,
and it soon lays violent hands upon itself. And when a people long
enslaved shake off its fetters, it may well be incredulously asked,

Shall the braggart shout
For some blind glimpse of Freedom, link itself,
Through madness, hated by the wise, to law,
System and Empire?

Everywhere in the world labor is, in some shape, the slave of capital;
generally, a slave to be fed only so long as he can work; or, rather,
only so long as his work is profitable to the owner of the human
chattel. There are famines in Ireland, strikes and starvation in
England, pauperism and tenement-dens in New York, misery, squalor,
ignorance, destitution, the brutality of vice and the insensibility to
shame, of despairing beggary, in all the human cesspools and sewers
everywhere. Here, a sewing-woman famishes and freezes; there, mothers
murder their children, that those spared may live upon the bread
purchased with the burial allowances of the dead starveling; and at the
next door young girls prostitute themselves for food.

Moreover, the Voice says, this besotted race is not satisfied with
seeing its multitudes swept away by the great epidemics whose causes are
unknown, and of the justice or wisdom of which the human mind cannot
conceive. It must also be ever at war. There has not been a moment since
men divided into Tribes, when all the world was at peace. Always men
have been engaged in murdering each other somewhere. Always the armies
have lived by the toil of the husbandman, and war has exhausted the
resources, wasted the energies, and ended the prosperity of Nations. Now
it loads unborn posterity with crushing debt, mortgages all estates, and
brings upon States the shame and infamy of dishonest repudiation.

At times, the baleful fires of war light up half a Continent at once; as
when all the Thrones unite to compel a people to receive again a hated
and detestable dynasty, or States deny States the right to dissolve an
irksome union and create for themselves a separate government. Then
again the flames flicker and die away, and the fire smoulders in its
ashes, to break out again, after a time, with renewed and a more
concentrated fury. At times, the storm, revolving, howls over small
areas only; at times its lights are seen, like the old beacon-fires on
the hills, belting the whole globe. No sea, but hears the roar of
cannon; no river, but runs red with blood; no plain, but shakes,
trampled by the hoofs of charging squadrons; no field, but is fertilized
by the blood of the dead; and everywhere man slays, the vulture gorges,
and the wolf howls in the ear of the dying soldier. No city is not
tortured by shot and shell; and no people fail to enact the horrid
blasphemy of thanking a God of Love for victories and carnage. Te Deums
are still sung for the Eve of St. Bartholomew and the Sicilian Vespers.
Man's ingenuity is racked, and all his inventive powers are tasked, to
fabricate the infernal enginery of destruction, by which human bodies
may be the more expeditiously and effectually crushed, shattered, torn,
and mangled; and yet hypocritical[1] Humanity, drunk with blood and
drenched with gore, shrieks to Heaven at a single murder, perpetrated to
gratify a revenge not more unchristian, or to satisfy a cupidity not
more ignoble, than those which are the promptings of the Devil in the
souls of Nations.

When we have fondly dreamed of Utopia and the Millennium, when we have
begun almost to believe that man is _not_, after all, a tiger half
tamed, and that the smell of blood will not wake the savage within him,
we are of a sudden startled from the delusive dream, to find the thin
mask of civilization rent in twain and thrown contemptuously away. We
lie down to sleep, like the peasant on the lava-slopes of Vesuvius. The
mountain has been so long inert, that we believe its fires extinguished.
Round us hang the clustering grapes, and the green leaves of the olive
tremble in the soft night-air over us. Above us shine the peaceful,
patient stars. The crash of a new eruption wakes us, the roar of the
subterranean thunders, the stabs of the volcanic lightning into the
shrouded bosom of the sky; and we see, aghast, the tortured Titan
hurling up its fires among the pale stars, its great tree of smoke and
cloud, the red torrents pouring down its sides. The roar and the
shriekings of Civil War are all around us: the land is a pandemonium:
man is again a Savage. The great armies roll along their hideous waves,
and leave behind them smoking and depopulated deserts. The pillager is
in every house, plucking even the morsel of bread from the lips of the
starving child. Gray hairs are dabbled in blood, and innocent girlhood
shrieks in vain to Lust for mercy. Laws, Courts, Constitutions,
Christianity, Mercy, Pity, disappear. God seems to have abdicated, and
Moloch to reign in His stead; while Press and Pulpit alike exult at
universal murder, and urge the extermination of the Conquered, by the
sword and the flaming torch; and to plunder and murder entitles the
human beasts of prey to the thanks of Christian Senates.

Commercial greed deadens the nerves of sympathy of Nations, and makes
them deaf to the demands of honor, the impulses of generosity, the
appeals of those who suffer under injustice. Elsewhere, the universal
pursuit of wealth dethrones God and pays divine honors to Mammon and
Baalzebub. Selfishness rules supreme: to win wealth becomes the whole
business of life. The villanies of legalized gaming and speculation
become epidemic; treachery is but evidence of shrewdness; office becomes
the prey of successful faction; the Country, like Actæon, is torn by its
own hounds, and the villains it has carefully educated to their trade,
most greedily plunder it, when it is _in extremis_.

By what right, the Voice demands, does a creature always engaged in the
work of mutual robbery and slaughter, and who makes his own interest his
God, claim to be of a nature superior to the savage beasts of which he
is the prototype?

Then the shadows of a horrible doubt fall upon the soul that would fain
love, trust and believe; a darkness, of which this that surrounded you
was a symbol. It doubts the truth of Revelation, its own spirituality,
the very existence of a beneficent God. It asks itself if it is not idle
to hope for any great progress of Humanity toward perfection, and
whether, when it advances in one respect, it does not retrogress in some
other, by way of compensation: whether advance in civilization is not
increase of selfishness: whether freedom does not necessarily lead to
license and anarchy: whether the destitution and debasement of the
masses does not inevitably follow increase of population and commercial
and manufacturing prosperity. It asks itself whether man is not the
sport of a blind, merciless Fate: whether all philosophies are not
delusions, and all religions the fantastic creations of human vanity and
self-conceit; and, above all, whether, when Reason is abandoned as a
guide, the faith of Buddhist and Brahmin has not the same claims to
sovereignty and implicit, unreasoning credence, as any other.

He asks himself whether it is not, after all, the evident and palpable
injustices of this life, the success and prosperity of the Bad, the
calamities, oppressions, and miseries of the Good, that are the bases of
all beliefs in a future state of existence? Doubting man's capacity for
indefinite progress here, he doubts the possibility of it anywhere; and
if he does not doubt whether God exists, and is just and beneficent, he
at least cannot silence the constantly recurring whisper, that the
miseries and calamities of men, their lives and deaths, their pains and
sorrows, their extermination by war and epidemics, are phenomena of no
higher dignity, significance, and importance, in the eye of God, than
what things of the same nature occur to other organisms of matter; and
that the fish of the ancient seas, destroyed by myriads to make room
for other species, the contorted shapes in which they are found as
fossils testifying to their agonies; the coral insects, the animals and
birds and vermin slain by man, have as much right as he to clamor at the
injustice of the dispensations of God, and to demand an immortality of
life in a new universe, as compensation for their pains and sufferings
and untimely death in this world.

This is not a picture painted by the imagination. Many a thoughtful mind
has so doubted and despaired. How many of us can say that our own faith
is so well grounded and complete that we never hear those painful
whisperings within the soul? Thrice blessed are they who never doubt,
who ruminate in patient contenment like the kine, or doze under the
opiate of a blind faith; on whose souls never rests that Awful Shadow
which is the absence of the Divine Light.

To explain to themselves the existence of Evil and Suffering, the
Ancient Persians imagined that there were two Principles or Deities in
the Universe, the one of Good and the other of Evil, constantly in
conflict with each other in struggle for the mastery, and alternately
overcoming and overcome. Over both, for the SAGES, was the One Supreme;
and for _them_ Light was in the end to prevail over Darkness, the Good
over the Evil, and even Ahriman and his Demons to part with their wicked
and vicious natures and share the universal Salvation. It did not occur
to them that the existence of the Evil Principle, by the consent of the
Omnipotent Supreme, presented the same difficulty, and left the
existence of Evil as unexplained as before. The human mind is always
content, if it can remove a difficulty a step further off. It cannot
believe that the world rests on nothing, but is devoutly content when
taught that it is borne on the back of an immense elephant, who himself
stands on the back of a tortoise. Given the tortoise, Faith is always
satisfied; and it has been a great source of happiness to multitudes
that they could believe in a Devil who could relieve God of the odium of
being the Author of Sin.

But not to all is Faith sufficient to overcome this great difficulty.
They say, with the Suppliant,_"Lord! I believe!"_--but like him they are
constrained to add,_"Help Thou my unbelief!"_--Reason must, for these,
co-operate and coincide with Faith, or they remain still in the darkness
of doubt,--most miserable of all conditions of the human mind.

Those, only, who care for nothing beyond the interests and pursuits of
this life, are uninterested in these great Problems. The animals, also,
do not consider them. It is the characteristic of an immortal Soul, that
it should seek to satisfy itself of its immortality, and to understand
this great enigma, the Universe, If the Hottentot and the Papuan are not
troubled and tortured by these doubts and speculations, they are not,
for that, to be regarded as either wise or fortunate. The swine, also,
are indifferent to the great riddles of the Universe, and are happy in
being wholly unaware that it is the vast Revelation and Manifestation,
in Time and Space, of a Single Thought of the Infinite God.

Exalt and magnify Faith as we will, and say that it begins where Reason
ends, it must, after all, have a foundation, either in Reason, Analogy,
the Consciousness, or human testimony. The worshipper of Brahma also has
implicit Faith in what seems to us palpably false and absurd. His faith
rests neither in Reason, Analogy, or the Consciousness, but on the
testimony of his Spiritual teachers, and of the Holy Books. The Moslem
also believes, on the positive testimony of the Prophet; and the Mormon
also can say, _"I believe this, because it is impossible."_ No faith,
however absurd or degrading, has ever wanted these foundations,
testimony, and the books. Miracles, proven by unimpeachable testimony
have been used as a foundation for Faith, in every age; and the modern
miracles are better authenticated, a hundred times, than the ancient
ones.

So that, after all, Faith must flow out from some source within us, when
the evidence of that which we are to believe is not presented to our
senses, or it will in no case be the assurance of the truth of what is
believed.

The Consciousness, or inhering and innate conviction, or the instinct
divinely implanted, of the verity of things, is the highest Possible
evidence, if not the _only real_ proof, of the verity of certain things,
but only of truths of a limited class.

What we call the Reason, that is, our imperfect human reason, not only
may, but assuredly will, lead us away from the Truth in regard to things
invisible and especially those of the Infinite, if we determine to
believe nothing but that which _it_ can demonstrate, or _not_ to
believe that which it can by its processes of logic prove to be
contradictory, unreasonable, or absurd. Its tape-line cannot measure the
arcs of Infinity. For example, to the Human reason, an Infinite Justice
and an Infinite Mercy or Love, in the same Being, are inconsistent and
impossible. One, it can demonstrate necessarily excludes the other. So
it can _demonstrate_ that as the Creation had a beginning, it
necessarily follows that an Eternity had elapsed before the Deity began
to create, during which He was inactive.

When we gaze, of a moonless clear night, on the Heavens glittering with
stars, and know that each fixed star of all the myriads is a Sun, and
each probably possessing its retinue of worlds, all peopled with living
beings, we sensibly feel our own unimportance in the scale of Creation,
and at once reflect that much of what has in different ages been
religious faith, could never have been believed, if the nature, size,
and distance of those Suns, and of our own Sun, Moon, and Planets, had
been known to the Ancients as they are to us.

To them, all the lights of the firmament were created only to give light
to the earth, as its lamps or candles hung above it. The earth was
supposed to be the only inhabited portion of the Universe. The world and
the Universe were synonymous terms. Of the immense size and distance of
the heavenly bodies, men had no conception. The Sages had, in Chaldæea,
Egypt, India, China, and in Persia, and therefore the sages always had,
an esoteric creed, taught only in the mysteries and unknown to the
vulgar. No Sage, in either country, or in Greece or Rome, believed the
popular creed. To them the Gods and the Idols of the Gods were symbols,
and symbols of great and mysterious truths.

The Vulgar imagined the attention of the Gods to be continually centred
upon the earth and man. The Grecian Divinities inhabited Olympus, an
insignificant mountain of the Earth. There was the Court of Zeus, to
which Neptune came from the Sea, and Pluto and Persephoné from the
glooms of Tartarus in the unfathomable depths of the Earth's bosom. God
came down from Heaven and on Sinai dictated laws for the Hebrews to His
servant Moses. The Stars were the guardians of mortals whose fates and
fortunes were to be read in their movements, conjunctions, and
oppositions. The Moon was the Bride and Sister of the Sun, at the same
distance above the Earth, and, like the Sun, made for the service of
mankind alone.

If, with the great telescope of Lord Rosse, we examine the vast nebulæ
of Hercules, Orion, and Andromeda, and find them resolvable into Stars
more numerous than the sands on the seashore; if we reflect that each of
these Stars is a Sun, like and even many times larger than ours,--each,
beyond a doubt, with its retinue of worlds swarming with life;--if we go
further in imagination, and endeavor to conceive of all the infinities
of space, filled with similar suns and worlds, we seem at once to shrink
into an incredible insignificance.

The Universe, which is the uttered Word of God, is _infinite_ in extent.
There is no empty space beyond creation on any side. The Universe, which
is the Thought of God pronounced, never was _not_, since God never was
inert; nor WAS, without thinking and creating. The forms of creation
change, the suns and worlds live and die like the leaves and the
insects, but the Universe itself is infinite and eternal, because God
Is, Was, and Will forever Be, and never did _not_ think and create.

Reason is fain to admit that a Supreme Intelligence, infinitely powerful
and wise, must have created this boundless Universe; but it also tells
us that we are as unimportant in it as the zoöphytes and entozoa, or as
the invisible particles of animated life that float upon the air or
swarm in the water-drop.

The foundations of our faith, resting upon the imagined interest of God
in our race, an interest easily supposable when man believed himself the
only intelligent created being, and therefore eminently worthy the
especial care and watchful anxiety of a God who had only this earth to
look after, and its house-keeping alone to superintend, and who was
content to create, in all the infinite Universe, only one single being,
possessing a soul, and not a mere animal, are rudely shaken as the
Universe broadens and expands for us; and the darkness of doubt and
distrust settles heavy upon the Soul.

The modes in which it is ordinarily endeavored to satisfy our doubts,
only increase them. To _demonstrate_ the necessity for a cause of the
creation, is equally to demonstrate the necessity of a cause for that
cause. The argument from plan and design only removes the difficulty a
step further off. We rest the world on the elephant, and the elephant on
the tortoise, and the tortoise on--nothing.

To tell us that the animals possess instinct only and that Reason
belongs to us alone, in no way tends to satisfy us of the radical
difference between us and them. For if the mental phenomena exhibited
by animals that think, dream, remember, argue from cause to effect,
plan, devise, combine, and communicate their thoughts to each other, so
as to act rationally in concert,--if their love, hate, and revenge, can
be conceived of as results of the organization of matter, like color and
perfume, the resort to the hypothesis of an immaterial Soul to explain
phenomena of the same kind, only more perfect, manifested by the _human_
being, is supremely absurd. That organized matter can think or even
_feel_ at all, is the great insoluble mystery. "Instinct" is but a word
without a meaning, or else it means inspiration. It is either the animal
itself, or God _in_ the animal, that thinks, remembers, and reasons; and
instinct, according to the common acceptation of the term, would be the
greatest and most wonderful of mysteries,--no less a thing than the
direct, immediate, and continual promptings of the Deity,--for the
animals are not machines, or automata moved by springs, and the ape is
but a dumb Australian.

Must we _always_ remain in this darkness of uncertainty, of doubt? Is
there _no_ mode of escaping from the labyrinth except by means of a
blind faith, which explains nothing, and in many creeds, ancient and
modern, sets Reason at defiance, and leads to the belief either in a God
without a Universe, a Universe without a God, or a Universe which is
itself a God?

We read in the Hebrew Chronicles that Schlomoh the wise King caused to
be placed in front of the entrance to the Temple two huge columns of
bronze, one of which was called YAKAYIN and the other BAHAZ; and these
words are rendered in our version _Strength_ and _Establishment_. The
Masonry of the Blue Lodges gives no explanation of these symbolic
columns; nor do the Hebrew Books advise us that they were symbolic. If
not so intended as symbols, they were subsequently understood to be
such.

But as we are certain that everything _within_ the Temple was symbolic,
and that the whole structure was intended to represent the Universe, we
may reasonably conclude that the columns of the portico also had a
symbolic signification. It would be tedious to repeat all the
interpretations which fancy or dullness has found for them.

The key to their true meaning is not undiscoverable. The perfect and
eternal distinction of the two primitive terms of the creative
syllogism, in order to attain to the demonstration of their harmony by
the analogy of contraries, is the second grand principle of that occult
philosophy veiled under the name "_Kabalah_," and indicated by all the
sacred hieroglyphs of the Ancient Sanctuaries, and of the rites, so
little understood by the mass of the Initiates, of the Ancient and
Modern Free-Masonry.

The Sohar declares that everything in the Universe proceeds by the
mystery of "the Balance," that is, of Equilibrium. Of the Sephiroth, or
Divine Emanations, Wisdom and Understanding, Severity and Benignity, or
Justice and Mercy, and Victory and Glory, constitute pairs.

Wisdom, or the Intellectual Generative _Energy_, and Understanding, or
the _Capacity_ to be impregnated by the Active Energy and produce
intellection or thought, are represented symbolically in the Kabalah as
male and female. So also are Justice and Mercy. Strength is the
intellectual Energy or Activity; Establishment or Stability is the
intellectual Capacity to produce, a passivity. They are the POWER of
_generation_ and the CAPACITY of _production_. By WISDOM, it is said,
God creates, and by UNDERSTANDING establishes. These are the two Columns
of the Temple, contraries like the Man and Woman, like Reason and Faith,
Omnipotence and Liberty, Infinite Justice and Infinite. Mercy, Absolute
Power or Strength to do even what is most unjust and unwise, and
Absolute Wisdom that makes it impossible to do it; Right and Duty. They
were the columns of the intellectual and moral world, the monumental
hieroglyph of the antinomy necessary to the grand law of creation.

There must be for every Force a Resistance to support it, to every light
a shadow, for every Royalty a Realm to govern, for every affirmative a
negative.

For the Kabalists, Light represents the Active Principle, and Darkness
or Shadow is analogous to the Passive Principle. Therefore it was that
they made of the Sun and Moon emblems of the two Divine Sexes and the
two creative forces; therefore, that they ascribed to woman the
Temptation and the first sin, and then the first labor, the maternal
labor of the redemption, because it is from the bosom of the darkness
itself that we see the Light born again. The Void attracts the Full; and
so it is that the abyss of poverty and misery, the Seeming Evil, the
seeming empty nothingness of life, the temporary rebellion of the
creatures, eternally attracts the overflowing ocean of being, of riches,
of pity, and of love. Christ completed the Atonement on the Cross by
descending into Hell.

Justice and Mercy are contraries. If each be infinite, their
co-existence seems impossible, and being equal, one cannot even
annihilate the other and reign alone. The mysteries of the Divine Nature
are beyond our finite comprehension; but so indeed are the mysteries of
our own finite nature; and it is certain that in all nature harmony and
movement are the result of the equilibrium of opposing or contrary
forces.

The analogy of contraries gives the solution of the most interesting and
most difficult problem of modern philosophy,--the definite and permanent
accord of Reason and Faith, of Authority and Liberty of examination, of
Science and Belief, of Perfection in God and Imperfection in Man. If
science or knowledge is the Sun, Belief is the Man; it is a reflection
of the day in the night. Faith is the veiled Isis, the Supplement of
Reason, in the shadows which precede or follow Reason. It emanates from
the Reason, but can never confound it nor be confounded with it. The
encroachments of Reason upon Faith, or of Faith on Reason, are eclipses
of the Sun or Moon; when they occur, they make useless both the Source
of Light and its reflection, at once.

Science perishes by systems that are nothing but beliefs; and Faith
succumbs to reasoning. For the two Columns of the Temple to uphold the
edifice, they must remain separated and be parallel to each other. As
soon as it is attempted by violence to bring them together, as Samson
did, they are overturned, and the whole edifice falls upon the head of
the rash blind man or the revolutionist whose personal or national
resentments have in advance devoted to death.

Harmony is the result of an alternating preponderance of forces.
Whenever this is wanting in government, government is a failure, because
it is either Despotism or Anarchy. All theoretical governments, however
plausible the theory, end in one or the other. Governments that are to
endure are not made in the closet of Locke or Shaftesbury, or in a
Congress or a Convention. In a Republic, forces that seem contraries,
that indeed are contraries, alone give movement and life. The Spheres
are held in their orbits and made to revolve harmoniously and
unerringly, by the concurrence, which seems to be the opposition, of two
contrary forces. If the centripetal force should overcome the
centrifugal and the equilibrium of forces cease, the rush of the
Spheres to the Central Sun would annihilate the system. Instead of
consolidation the whole would be shattered into fragments.

Man is a free agent, though Omnipotence is above and all around him. To
be free to do good, he must be free to do evil. The Light necessitates
the Shadow. A State is free like an individual in any government worthy
of the name. The State is less potent than the Deity, and therefore the
freedom of the individual citizen is consistent with its Sovereignty.
These are opposites, but not antagonistic. So, in a union of States, the
freedom of the States is consistent with the Supremacy of the Nation.
When either obtains the permanent mastery over the other, and they cease
to be _in equilibrio_, the encroachment continues with a velocity that
is accelerated like that of a falling body, until the feebler is
annihilated, and then, there being no resistance to support the
stronger, it rushes into ruin.

So, when the equipoise of Reason and Faith, in the individual or the
Nation, and the alternating preponderance cease, the result is,
according as one or the other is permanent victor, Atheism or
Superstition, disbelief or blind credulity; and the Priests either of
Unfaith or of Faith become despotic.

"_Whomsoever God loveth, him he chasteneth_," is an expression that
formulates a whole dogma. The trials of life are the blessings of life,
to the individual or the Nation, if either has a Soul that is truly
worthy of salvation. "_Light and darkness_," said ZOROASTER, "_are the
world's eternal ways_." The Light and the Shadow are everywhere and
always in proportion; the Light being the reason of being of the Shadow.
It is by trials only, by the agonies of sorrow and the sharp discipline
of adversities, that men and Nations attain initiation. The agonies of
the garden of Gethsemane and those of the Cross on Calvary preceded the
Resurrection and were the means of Redemption. It is with prosperity
that God afflicts Humanity.

The Degree of Rose is devoted to and symbolizes the final triumph of
truth over falsehood, of liberty over slavery, of light over darkness,
of life over death, and of good over evil. The great truth it inculcates
is, that notwithstanding the existence of Evil, God is infinitely wise,
just, and good: that though the affairs of the world proceed by no rule
of right and wrong known to us the narrowness of our views, yet all _is_
right, for it is the work of God; and all evils, all miseries, all
misfortunes, are but as drops in the vast current that is sweeping
onward, guided by Him, to a great and magnificent result: that, at the
appointed time, He will redeem and regenerate the world, and the
Principle, the Power and the existence of Evil will then cease; that
this will be brought about by such means and instruments as He chooses
to employ; whether by the merits of a Redeemer that has already appeared
or a Messiah that is yet waited for, by an incarnation of Himself or by
an inspired prophet, it does not belong to us as Masons to decide. Let
each judge and believe for himself.

In the mean time, we labor to hasten the coming of that day. The morals
of antiquity, of the law of Moses and of Christianity, are ours. We
recognize every teacher of Morality, every Reformer, as a brother in
this great work. The Eagle is to us the symbol of Liberty, the Compasses
of Equality, the Pelican of Humanity, and our order of Fraternity.
Laboring for these, with Faith, Hope, and Charity as our armor, we will
wait with patience for the final triumph of Good and the complete
manifestation of the Word of God.

No one Mason has the right to measure for another, within the walls of a
Masonic Temple, the degree of veneration which he shall feel for any
Reformer, or the Founder of any Religion. We teach a belief in no
particular creed, as we teach unbelief in none. Whatever higher
attributes the Founder of the Christian Faith may, in our belief, have
had or not have had, none can deny that He taught and practised a pure
and elevated morality, even at the risk and to the ultimate loss of His
life. He was not only the benefactor of a disinherited people, but a
model for mankind. Devotedly He loved the children of Israel. To them He
came, and to them alone He preached that Gospel which His disciples
afterward carried among foreigners. He would fain have freed the chosen
People from their spiritual bondage of ignorance and degradation. As a
lover of all mankind, laying down His life for the emancipation of His
Brethren, He should be to all, to Christian, to Jew, and to Mahometan,
an object of gratitude and veneration.

The Roman world felt the pangs of approaching dissolution. Paganism, its
Temples shattered by Socrates and Cicero, had spoken its last word. The
God of the Hebrews was unknown beyond the limits of Palestine. The old
religions had failed to give happiness and peace to the world. The
babbling and wrangling philosophers had confounded all men's ideas,
until they doubted of everything and had faith in nothing: neither in
God nor in his goodness and mercy, nor in the virtue of man, nor in
themselves. Mankind was divided into two great classes,--the master and
the slave; the powerful and the abject, the high and the low, the
tyrants and the mob; and even the former were satiated with the
servility of the latter, sunken by lassitude and despair to the lowest
depths of degradation.

When, lo, a voice, in the inconsiderable Roman Province of Judea
proclaims a new Gospel--a new "God's Word," to crushed, suffering,
bleeding humanity. Liberty of Thought, Equality of all men in the eye of
God, universal Fraternity! a new doctrine, a new religion; the old
Primitive Truth uttered once again!

Man is once more taught to look upward to his God. No longer to a God
hid in impenetrable mystery, and infinitely remote from human sympathy,
emerging only at intervals from the darkness to smite and crush
humanity: but a God, good, kind, beneficent, and merciful: a Father,
loving the creatures He has made, with a love immeasureable and
exhaustless; Who feels for us, and sympathizes with us, and sends us
pain and want and disaster only that they may serve to develop in us the
virtues and excellences that befit us to live with Him hereafter.

Jesus of Nazareth, the "Son of man," is the expounder of the new Law of
Love. He calls to Him the humble, the poor, the Pariahs of the world.
The first sentence that He pronounces blesses the world, and announces
the new gospel: "Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be
comforted." He pours the oil of consolation and peace upon every crushed
and bleeding heart. Every sufferer is His proselyte. He shares their
sorrows, and sympathizes with all their afflictions.

He raises up the sinner and the Samaritan woman, and teaches them to
hope for forgiveness. He pardons the woman taken in adultery. He selects
his disciples not among the Pharisees or the Philosophers, but among the
low and humble, even of the fishermen of Galilee. He heals the sick and
feeds the poor. He lives among the destitute and the friendless. "Suffer
little children," He said, "to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom
of Heaven! Blessed are the humble-minded, for theirs is the kingdom of
Heaven; the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth; the merciful, for
they shall obtain mercy; the pure in heart, for they shall see God; the
peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of God! First be
reconciled to they brother, and _then_ come and offer thy gift at the
altar. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of
thee turn not away! Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do
good to them that hate you; and pray for them which despitefully use you
and persecute you! All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to
you, do ye also unto them; for this is the law and the Prophets! He that
taketh not his cross, and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me. A new
commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another: as I have loved
you, that ye also love one another: by this shall all know that ye are
My disciples. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down
his life for his friend."

The Gospel of Love He sealed with His life. The cruelty of the Jewish
Priesthood, the ignorant ferocity of the mob, and the Roman indifference
to barbarian blood, nailed Him to the cross, and He expired uttering
blessings upon humanity.

Dying thus, He bequeathed His teachings to man as an inestimable
inheritance. Perverted and corrupted, they have served as a basis for
many creeds, and been even made the warrant for intolerance and
persecution. We here teach them in their purity. They are our Masonry;
for to them good men of all creeds can subscribe.

That God is good and merciful, and loves and sympathizes with the
creatures He has made; that His finger is visible in all the movements
of the moral, intellectual, and material universe; that we are His
children, the objects of His paternal care and regard; that all men are
our brothers, whose wants we are to supply, their errors to pardon,
their opinions to tolerate, their injuries to forgive; that man has an
immortal soul, a free will, a right to freedom of thought and action;
that all men are equal in God's sight; that we best serve God by
humility, meekness, gentleness, kindness, and the other virtues which
the lowly can practise as well as the lofty; this is "the new Law," the
"WORD," for which the world had waited and pined so long; and every true
Knight of the Rose will revere the memory of Him who taught it, and
look indulgently even on those who assign to Him a character far above
his own conceptions or belief, even to the extent of deeming Him Divine.

Hear Philo, the Greek Jew. "The contemplative soul, unequally guided,
sometimes toward abundance and sometimes toward barrenness, though ever
advancing, is illuminated by the primitive ideas, the rays that emanate
from the Divine Intelligence, whenever it ascends toward the Sublime
Treasures. When, on the contrary, it descends, and is barren, it falls
within the domain of those Intelligences that are termed Angels ... for,
when the soul is deprived of the light of God, which leads it to the
knowledge of things, it no longer enjoys more than a feeble and
secondary light, which gives it, not the understanding of things, but
that of words only, as in this baser world...."

"... Let the narrow-souled withdraw, having their ears sealed up! We
communicate the divine mysteries to those only who have received the
sacred initiation, to those who practise true piety, and who are not
enslaved by the empty pomp of words, or the doctrines of the pagans...."

"... O, ye Initiates, ye whose ears are purified, receive this in your
souls, as a mystery never to be lost! Reveal it to no Profane! Keep and
contain it within yourselves, as an incorruptible treasure, not like
gold or silver, but more precious than everything besides; for it is the
knowledge of the Great Cause, of Nature, and of that which is born of
both. And if you meet an Initiate, besiege him with your prayers, that
he conceal from you no new mysteries that he may know, and rest not
until you have obtained them! For me, although I was initiated in the
Great Mysteries by Moses, the Friend of God, yet, having seen Jeremiah,
I recognized him not only as an Initiate, but as a Hierophant; and I
follow his school."

We, like him, recognize all Initiates as our Brothers. We belong to no
one creed or school. In all religions there is a basis of Truth; in all
there is pure Morality. All that teach the cardinal tenets of Masonry we
respect; all teachers and reformers of mankind we admire and revere.

Masonry also has her mission to perform. With her traditions reaching
back to the earliest times, and her symbols dating further back than
even the monumental history of Egypt extends, she invites all men of all
religions to enlist under her banners and to war against evil,
ignorance, and wrong. You are now her knight, and to her service your
sword is consecrated. May you prove a worthy soldier in a worthy
cause!




MORALS AND DOGMA.


COUNCIL OF KADOSH.




XIX.

GRAND PONTIFF.


The true Mason labors for the benefit of those who are to come after
him, and for the advancement and improvement of his race. That is a poor
ambition which contents itself within the limits of a single life. All
men who deserve to live, desire to survive their funerals, and to live
afterward in the good that they have done mankind, rather than in the
fading characters written in men's memories. Most men desire to leave
some work behind them that may outlast their own day and brief
generation. That is an instinctive impulse, given by God, and often
found in the rudest human heart; the surest proof of the soul's
immortality, and of the fundamental difference between man and the
wisest brutes. To plant the trees that, after we are dead, shall shelter
our children, is as natural as to love the shade of those our fathers
planted. The rudest unlettered husbandman, painfully conscious of his
own inferiority, the poorest widowed mother, giving her life-blood to
those who pay only for the work of her needle, will toil and stint
themselves to educate their child, that he may take a higher station in
the world than they;--and of such are the world's greatest benefactors.

In his influences that survive him, man becomes immortal, before the
general resurrection. The Spartan mother, who, giving her son his
shield, said, "WITH IT, OR UPON IT!" afterward shared the government of
Lacedæmon with the legislation of Lycurgus; for she too made a law, that
lived after her; and she inspired the Spartan soldiery that afterward
demolished the walls of Athens, and aided Alexander to conquer the
Orient. The widow who gave Marion the fiery arrows to burn her own
house, that it might no longer shelter the enemies of her infant
country, the house where she had lain upon her husband's bosom, and
where her children had been born, legislated more effectually for her
State than Locke or Shaftesbury, or than many a Legislature has done,
since that State won its freedom.

It was of slight importance to the Kings of Egypt and the Monarchs of
Assyria and Phœnicia, that the son of a Jewish woman, a foundling,
adopted by the daughter of Sesostris Ramses, slew an Egyptian that
oppressed a Hebrew slave, and fled into the desert, to remain there
forty years. But Moses, who might otherwise have become Regent of Lower
Egypt, known to us only by a tablet on a tomb or monument, became the
deliverer of the Jews, and led them forth from Egypt to the frontiers of
Palestine, and made for them a law, out of which grew the Christian
faith; and so has shaped the destinies of the world. He and the old
Roman lawyers, with Alfred of England, the Saxon Thanes and Norman
Barons, the old judges and chancellors, and the makers of the canons,
lost in the mists and shadows of the Past,--these are our legislators;
and we obey the laws that they enacted.

Napoleon died upon the barren rock of his exile. His bones, borne to
France by the son of a King, rest in the Hôpital des Invalides, in the
great city on the Seine. His Thoughts still govern France. He, and not
the People, dethroned the Bourbon, and drove the last King of the House
of Orleans into exile. He, in his coffin, and not the People, voted the
crown to the Third Napoleon; and he, and not the Generals of France and
England, led their united forces against the grim Northern Despotism.

Mahomet announced to the Arabian idolaters the new creed, "_There is but
one God, and Mahomet, like Moses and Christ, is His Apostle_." For many
years unaided, then with the help of his family and a few friends, then
with many disciples, and last of all with an army, he taught and
preached the Koran. The religion of the wild Arabian enthusiast
converting the fiery Tribes of the Great Desert, spread over Asia, built
up the Saracenic dynasties, conquered Persia and India, the Greek
Empire, Northern Africa, and Spain, and dashed the surges of its fierce
soldiery against the battlements of Northern Christendom. The law of
Mahomet still governs a fourth of the human race; and Turk and Arab,
Moor and Persian and Hindu, still obey the Prophet, and pray with their
faces turned toward Mecca; and he, and not the living, rules and reigns
in the fairest portions of the Orient.

Confucius still enacts the law for China; and the thoughts and ideas of
Peter the Great govern Russia. Plato and the other great Sages of
Antiquity still reign as the Kings of Philosophy, and have dominion over
the human intellect. The great Statesmen of the Past still preside in
the Councils of Nations. Burke still lingers in the House of Commons;
and Berryer's sonorous tones will long ring in the Legislative Chambers
of France. The influences of Webster and Calhoun, conflicting, rent
asunder the American States, and the doctrine of each is the law and the
oracle speaking from the Holy of Holies for his own State and all
consociated with it: a faith preached and proclaimed by each at the
cannon's mouth and consecrated by rivers of blood.

It has been well said, that when Tamerlane had builded his pyramid of
fifty thousand human skulls, and wheeled away with his vast armies from
the gates of Damascus, to find new conquests, and build other pyramids,
a little boy was playing in the streets of Mentz, son of a poor artisan,
whose apparent importance in the scale of beings was, compared with that
of Tamerlane, as that of a grain of sand to the giant bulk of the earth;
but Tamerlane and all his shaggy legions, that swept over the East like
a hurricane, have passed away, and become shadows; while printing, the
wonderful invention of John Faust, the boy of Mentz, has exerted a
greater influence on man's destinies and overturned more thrones and
dynasties than all the victories of all the blood-stained conquerors
from Nimrod to Napoleon.

Long ages ago, the Temple built by Solomon and our Ancient Brethren sank
into ruin, when the Assyrian Armies sacked Jerusalem. The Holy City is a
mass of hovels cowering under the dominion of the Crescent; and the Holy
Land is a desert. The Kings of Egypt and Assyria, who were
contemporaries of Solomon, are forgotten, and their histories mere
fables. The Ancient Orient is a shattered wreck, bleaching on the shores
of Time. The Wolf and the Jackal howl among the ruins of Thebes and of
Tyre, and the sculptured images of the Temples and Palaces of Babylon
and Nineveh are dug from their ruins and carried into strange lands. But
the quiet and peaceful Order, of which the Son of a poor Phœnician Widow
was one of the Grand Masters, with the Kings of Israel and Tyre, has
continued to increase in stature and influence, defying the angry waves
of time and the storms of persecution. Age has not weakened its wide
foundations nor shattered its columns, nor marred the beauty of its
harmonious proportions. Where rude barbarians, in the time of Solomon,
peopled inhospitable howling wildernesses, in France and Britain, and in
that New World, not known to Jew or Gentile, until the glories of the
Orient had faded, that Order has builded new Temples, and teaches to
its millions of Initiates those lessons of peace, good-will, and
toleration, of reliance on God and confidence in man, which it learned
when Hebrew and Giblemite worked side by side on the slopes of Lebanon,
and the Servant of Jehovah and the Phœnician Worshipper of Bel sat with
the humble artisan in Council at Jerusalem.

It is the Dead that govern. The Living only obey. And if the Soul sees,
after death, what passes on this earth, and watches over the welfare of
those it loves, then must its greatest happiness consist in seeing the
current of its beneficent influences widening out from age to age, as
rivulets widen into rivers, and aiding to shape the destinies of
individuals, families, States, the World; and its bitterest punishment,
in seeing its evil influences causing mischief and misery, and cursing
and afflicting men, long after the frame it dwelt in has become dust,
and when both name and memory are forgotten.

We know not who among the Dead control our destinies. The universal
human race is linked and bound together by those influences and
sympathies, which in the truest sense do make men's fates. Humanity is
the unit, of which the man is but a fraction. What other men in the Past
have done, said, thought, makes the great iron network of circumstance
that environs and controls us all. We take our faith on trust. We think
and believe as the Old Lords of Thought command us; and Reason is
powerless before Authority.

We would make or annul a particular contract; but the Thoughts of the
dead Judges of England, living when their ashes have been cold for
centuries, stand between us and that which we would do, and utterly
forbid it. We would settle our estate in a particular way; but the
prohibition of the English Parliament, its uttered Thought when the
first or second Edward reigned, comes echoing down the long avenues of
time, and tells us we shall not exercise the power of disposition as we
wish. We would gain a particular advantage of another; and the thought
of the old Roman lawyer who died before Justinian, or that of Rome's
great orator Cicero, annihilates the act, or makes the intention
ineffectual. This act, Moses forbids; that, Alfred. We would sell our
land; but certain marks on a perishable paper tell us that our father or
remote ancestor ordered otherwise; and the arm of the dead, emerging
from the grave, with peremptory gesture prohibits the alienation. About
to sin or err, the thought or wish of our dead mother, told us when we
were children, by words that died upon the air in the utterance, and
many a long year were forgotten, flashes on our memory, and holds us
back with a power that is resistless.

Thus we obey the dead; and thus shall the living, when we are dead, for
weal or woe, obey _us_. The Thoughts of the Past are the Laws of the
Present and the Future. That which we say and do if its effects last not
beyond our lives, is unimportant. That which shall live when we are
dead, as part of the great body of law enacted by the dead, is the only
act worth doing, the only Thought worth speaking. The desire to do
something that shall benefit the world, when neither praise nor obloquy
will reach us where we sleep soundly in the grave, is the noblest
ambition entertained by man.

It is the ambition of a true and genuine Mason. Knowing the slow
processes by which the Deity brings about great results, he does not
expect to reap as well as sow, in a single lifetime. It is the
inflexible fate and noblest destiny, with rare exceptions, of the great
and good, to work, and let others reap the harvest of their labors. He
who does good, only to be repaid in kind, or in thanks and gratitude, or
in reputation and the world's praise, is like him who loans his money,
that he may, after certain months, receive it back with interest. To be
repaid for eminent services with slander, obloquy, or ridicule, or at
best with stupid indifference or cold ingratitude, as it is common, so
it is no misfortune, except to those who lack the wit to see or sense to
appreciate the service, or the nobility of soul to thank and reward with
eulogy, the benefactor of his kind. His influences live, and the great
Future will obey; whether it recognize or disown the lawgiver.

Miltiades was fortunate that he was exiled; and Aristides that he was
ostracized, because men wearied of hearing him called "The Just." Not
the Redeemer was unfortunate; but those only who repaid Him for the
inestimable gift He offered them, and for a life passed in toiling for
their good, by nailing Him upon the cross, as though He had been a slave
or malefactor. The persecutor dies and rots, and Posterity utters his
name with execration, but his victim's memory he has unintentionally
made glorious and immortal.

If not for slander and persecution, the Mason who would benefit his
race must look for apathy and cold indifference in those whose good he
seeks, in those who ought to seek the good of others. Except when the
sluggish depths of the Human Mind are broken up and tossed as with a
storm, when at the appointed time a great Reformer comes, and a new
Faith springs up and grows with supernatural energy, the progress of
Truth is slower than the growth of oaks; and he who plants need not
expect to gather. The Redeemer, at His death, had twelve disciples, and
one betrayed and one deserted and denied Him. It is enough for us to
know that the fruit will come in its due season. When, or who shall
gather it, it does not in the least concern us to know. It is our
business to plant the seed. It is God's right to give the fruit to whom
He pleases; and if not to us, then is our action by so much the more
noble.

To sow, that others may reap; to work and plant for those who are to
occupy the earth when we are dead; to project our influences far into
the future, and live beyond our time; to rule as the Kings of Thought,
over men who are yet unborn; to bless with the glorious gifts of Truth
and Light and Liberty those who will neither know the name of the giver,
nor care in what grave his unregarded ashes repose, is the true office
of a Mason and the proudest destiny of a man.

All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow
and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation
only is violent and rapid. The Volcano and the Earthquake, the Tornado
and the Avalanche, leap suddenly into full life and fearful energy, and
smite with an unexpected blow. Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum
in a night; and Lisbon fell prostrate before God in a breath, when the
earth rocked and shuddered; the Alpine village vanishes and is erased at
one bound of the avalanche; and the ancient forests fall like grass
before the mower, when the tornado leaps upon them. Pestilence slays its
thousands in a day; and the storm in a night strews the sand with
shattered navies.

The Gourd of the Prophet Jonah grew up, and was withered, in a night.
But many years ago, before the Norman Conqueror stamped his mailed foot
on the neck of prostrate Saxon England, some wandering barbarian, of the
continent then unknown to the world, in mere idleness, with hand or
foot, covered an acorn with a little earth, and passed on regardless, on
his journey to the dim Past. He died and was forgotten; but the acorn
lay there still, the mighty force within it acting in the darkness. A
tender shoot stole gently up; and fed by the light and air and frequent
dews put forth its little leaves, and lived, because the elk or buffalo
chanced not to place his foot upon and crush it. The years marched
onward, and the shoot became a sapling, and its green leaves went and
came with Spring and Autumn. And still the years came and passed away
again, and William, the Norman Bastard, parcelled England out among his
Barons, and still the sapling grew, and the dews fed its leaves, and the
birds builded their nests among its small limbs for many generations.
And still the years came and went, and the Indian hunter slept in the
shade of the sapling, and Richard Lion-Heart fought at Acre and Ascalon,
and John's bold Barons wrested from him the Great Charter; and lo! the
sapling had become a tree; and still it grew, and thrust its great arms
wider abroad, and lifted its head still higher toward the Heavens;
strong-rooted, and defiant of the storms that roared and eddied through
its branches; and when Columbus ploughed with his keels the unknown
Western Atlantic, and Cortez and Pizarro bathed the cross in blood; and
the Puritan, the Huguenot, the Cavalier, and the follower of Penn sought
a refuge and a resting-place beyond the ocean, the Great Oak still
stood, firm-rooted, vigorous, stately, haughtily domineering over all
the forest, heedless of all the centuries that had hurried past since
the wild Indian planted the little acorn in the forest;--a stout and
hale old tree, with wide circumference shading many a rood of ground;
and fit to furnish timbers for a ship, to carry the thunders of the
Great Republic's guns around the world. And yet, if one had sat and
watched it every instant, from the moment when the feeble shoot first
pushed its way to the light until the eagles built among its branches,
he would never have seen the tree or sapling _grow_.

Many long centuries ago, before the Chaldæan Shepherds watched the
Stars, or Shufu built the Pyramids, one could have sailed in a
seventy-four where now a thousand islands gem the surface of the Indian
Ocean; and the deep-sea lead would nowhere have found any bottom. But
below these waves were myriads upon myriads, beyond the power of
Arithmetic to number, of minute existences, each a perfect living
creature, made by the Almighty Creator, and fashioned by Him for the
work it had to do. There they toiled beneath the waters, each doing its
allotted work, and wholly ignorant of the result which God intended.
They lived and died, incalculable in numbers and almost infinite in the
succession of their generations, each adding his mite to the gigantic
work that went on there under God's direction. Thus hath He chosen to
create great Continents and Islands; and still the coral-insects live
and work, as when they made the rocks that underlie the valley of the
Ohio.

Thus God hath chosen to create. Where now is firm land, once chafed and
thundered the great primeval ocean. For ages upon ages the minute
shields of infinite myriads of infusoria, and the stony stems of
encrinites sunk into its depths, and there, under the vast pressure of
its waters, hardened into limestone. Raised slowly from the Profound by
His hand, its quarries underlie the soil of all the continents, hundreds
of feet in thickness; and we, of these remains of the countless dead,
build tombs and palaces, as the Egyptians, whom we call ancient, built
their pyramids.

On all the broad lakes and oceans the Great Sun looks earnestly and
lovingly, and the invisible vapors rise ever up to meet him. No eye but
God's beholds them as they rise. There, in the upper atmosphere, they
are condensed to mist, and gather into clouds, and float and swim around
in the ambient air. They sail with its currents, and hover over the
ocean, and roll in huge masses round the stony shoulders of great
mountains. Condensed still more by change of temperature, they drop upon
the thirsty earth in gentle showers, or pour upon it in heavy rains, or
storm against its bosom at the angry Equinoctial. The shower, the rain,
and the storm pass away, the clouds vanish, and the bright stars again
shine clearly upon the glad earth. The rain-drops sink into the ground,
and gather in subterranean reservoirs, and run in subterranean channels,
and bubble up in springs and fountains; and from the mountain-sides and
heads of valleys the silver threads of water begin their long journey to
the ocean. Uniting, they widen into brooks and rivulets, then into
streams and rivers; and, at last, a Nile, a Ganges, a Danube, an Amazon,
or a Mississippi rolls between its banks, mighty, majestic, and
resistless, creating vast alluvial valleys to be the granaries of the
world, ploughed by the thousand keels of commerce and serving as great
highways, and as the impassable boundaries of rival nations; ever
returning to the ocean the drops that rose from it in vapor, and
descended in rain and snow and hail upon the level plains and lofty
mountains; and causing him to recoil for many a mile before the
headlong rush of their great tide.

So it is with the aggregate of Human endeavor. As the invisible
particles of vapor combine and coalesce to form the mists and clouds
that fall in rain on thirsty continents, and bless the great green
forests and wide grassy prairies, the waving meadows and the fields by
which men live; as the infinite myriads of drops that the glad earth
drinks are gathered into springs and rivulets and rivers, to aid in
levelling the mountains and elevating the plains and to feed the large
lakes and restless oceans; so all Human Thought, and Speech and Action,
all that is done and said and thought and suffered upon the Earth
combine together, and flow onward in one broad resistless current toward
those great results to which they are determined by the will of God.

We build slowly and destroy swiftly. Our Ancient Brethren who built the
Temples at Jerusalem, with many myriad blows felled, hewed, and squared
the cedars, and quarried the stones, and carved the intricate ornaments,
which were to be the Temples. Stone after stone, by the combined effort
and long toil of Apprentice, Fellow-Craft, and Master, the walls arose;
slowly the roof was framed and fashioned; and many years elapsed before,
at length, the Houses stood finished, all fit and ready for the Worship
of God, gorgeous in the sunny splendors of the atmosphere of Palestine.
So they were built. A single motion of the arm of a rude, barbarous
Assyrian Spearman, or drunken Roman or Gothic Legionary of Titus, moved
by a senseless impulse of the brutal will, flung in the blazing brand;
and, with no further human agency, a few short hours sufficed to consume
and melt each Temple to a smoking mass of black unsightly ruin.

Be patient, therefore, my Brother, and wait!

_The issues are with God: To do,
Of right belongs to us._

Therefore faint not, nor be weary in well-doing! Be not discouraged at
men's apathy, nor disgusted with their follies, nor tired of their
indifference! Care not for returns and results; but see only what there
is to do, and do it, leaving the results to God! Soldier of the Cross!
Sworn Knight of Justice, Truth, and Toleration! Good Knight and True! be
patient and work!

The Apocalypse, that sublime Kabalistic and prophetic Summary of all
the occult figures, divides its images into three Septenaries, after
each of which there is silence in Heaven. There are Seven Seals to be
opened, that is to say, Seven mysteries to know, and Seven difficulties
to overcome, Seven trumpets to sound, and Seven cups to empty.

The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth Degree, the
Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and
despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer. LUCIFER, the
_Light-bearer!_ Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of
Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it _he_ who bears the
_Light_, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or
selfish Souls? Doubt it not! for traditions are full of Divine
Revelations and Inspirations: and Inspiration is not of one Age nor of
one Creed. Plato and Philo, also, were inspired.

The Apocalypse, indeed, is a book as obscure as the Sohar.

It is written hieroglyphically with numbers and images; and the Apostle
often appeals to the intelligence of the Initiated. "Let him who hath
knowledge, understand! let him who understands, calculate!" he often
says, after an allegory or the mention of a number. Saint John, the
favorite Apostle, and the Depositary of all the Secrets of the Saviour,
therefore did not write to be understood by the multitude.

The Sephar Yezirah, the Sohar, and the Apocalypse are the completest
embodiments of Occultism. They contain more meanings than words; their
expressions are figurative as poetry and exact as numbers. The
Apocalypse sums up, completes, and surpasses all the Science of Abraham
and of Solomon. The visions of Ezekiel, by the river Chebar, and of the
new Symbolic Temple, are equally mysterious expressions, veiled by
figures of the enigmatic dogmas of the Kabalah, and their symbols are as
little understood by the Commentators, as those of Free Masonry.

The Septenary is the Crown of the Numbers, because it unites the
Triangle of the Idea to the Square of the Form.

The more the great Hierophants were at pains to conceal their absolute
Science, the more they sought to add grandeur to and multiply its
symbols. The huge pyramids, with their triangular sides of elevation and
square bases, represented their Metaphysics, founded upon the knowledge
of Nature. That knowledge of Nature had for its symbolic key the
gigantic form of that huge Sphinx, which has hollowed its deep bed in
the sand, while keeping watch at the feet of the Pyramids. The Seven
grand monuments called the Wonders of the World, were the magnificent
Commentaries on the Seven lines that composed the Pyramids, and on the
Seven mystic gates of Thebes.

The Septenary philosophy of Initiation among the Ancients may be summed
up thus:

Three Absolute Principles which are but One Principle: four elementary
forms which are but one; all forming a Single Whole, compounded of the
Idea and the Form.

The three Principles were these:

1º. BEING IS BEING.

In Philosophy, identity of the Idea and of Being or Verity; in Religion,
the first Principle, THE FATHER.

2º. BEING IS REAL.

In Philosophy, identity of Knowing and of Being or Reality; in Religion,
the LOCOS of Plato, the _Demiourgos_, the WORD.

3º. BEING IS LOGIC.

In Philosophy, identity of the Reason and Reality; in Religion,
Providence, the Divine Action that makes real the Good, that which in
Christianity we call THE HOLY SPIRIT.

The _union_ of all the Seven colors is the _White_, the analogous symbol
of the GOOD: the _absence_ of all is the _Black_, the analogous symbol
of the EVIL. There are three primary colors, _Red_, _Yellow_, and
_Blue_; and four secondary, _Orange_, _Green_, _Indigo_, and _Violet_;
and all these God displays to man in the rainbow; and they have their
analogies also in the moral and intellectual world. The same number,
_Seven_, continually reappears in the Apocalypse, compounded of _three_
and _four_; and these numbers relate to the last Seven of the Sephiroth,
three answering to BENIGNITY or MERCY, SEVERITY or JUSTICE, and BEAUTY
or HARMONY; and four to _Netzach_, _Hōd_, _Yesōd_, and _Malakoth_,
VICTORY, GLORY, STABILITY, and DOMINATION. The same numbers also
represent the _first_ three Sephiroth, KETHER, KHOKMAH, and BAINAH, or
_Will_, _Wisdom_, and _Understanding_, which, with DAATH or
_Intellection_ or _Thought_, are also four, DAATH not being regarded as
a Sephirah, not as the Deity acting, or as a potency, energy, or
attribute, but as the Divine Action.

The Sephiroth are commonly figured in the Kabalah as constituting a
human form, the ADAM KADMON or MACROCOSM. Thus arranged, the universal
law of Equipoise is three times exemplified. From that of the Divine
Intellectual, Active, Masculine ENERGY, and the Passive CAPACITY to
produce Thought, the action of THINKING results. From that of BENIGNITY
and SEVERITY, HARMONY flows; and from that of VICTORY or an Infinite
overcoming, and GLORY, which, being Infinite, would seem to forbid the
existence of obstacles or opposition, results STABILITY or PERMANENCE,
which is the perfect DOMINION of the Infinite WILL.

The last nine Sephiroth are included in, at the same time that they have
flowed forth from, the first of all, KETHER, or the CROWN. Each also, in
succession flowed from, and yet still remains included in, the one
preceding it. The Will of God _includes_ His Wisdom, and His Wisdom _is_
His Will specially developed and acting. This Wisdom is the LOGOS that
creates, mistaken and personified by Simon Magus and the succeeding
Gnostics. By means of its utterance, the letter YŌD, it creates the
worlds, first in the Divine Intellect as an Idea, which invested with
form became the fabricated World, the Universe of material reality. YŌD
and HE, two letters of the Ineffable Name of the Manifested Deity,
represent the Male and the Female, the Active and the Passive in
Equilibrium, and the VAV completes the Trinity and the Triliteral Name
[Hebrew: יהו], the Divine Triangle, which with the repetition of the
_He_ becomes the Tetragrammaton.

Thus the ten Sephiroth contain all the Sacred Numbers, _three_, _five_,
_seven_, and _nine_, and the perfect Number _Ten_, and correspond with
the Tetractys of Pythagoras.

BEING IS BEING, [Hebrew: אהיה אשר אהיה], _Ahayah Asar Ahayah_. This is
the Principle, the "BEGINNING."

In the Beginning was, that is to say, IS, WAS, and WILL BE, the WORD,
that is to say, the REASON that _Speaks_.

Εν αρχη ην Ό Λογος!

The Word is the reason of belief, and in it also is the expression of
the Faith which makes Science a living thing. The Word, Λογος, is the
Source of Logic. Jesus is the Word Incarnate. The accord of the Reason
with Faith, of Knowledge with Belief, of Authority with Liberty, has
become in modern times the veritable enigma of the Sphinx.

It is WISDOM that, in the Kabalistic Books of the Proverbs and
Ecclesiasticus, is the Creative Agent of God. Elsewhere in the Hebrew
writings it is [Hebrew: דבר יהוה], _Debar Iahavah_, the Word of God. It
is by His uttered Word that God reveals Himself to us; not alone in the
visible and invisible but intellectual creation, but also in our
convictions, consciousness, and instincts. Hence it is that certain
beliefs are universal. The conviction of all men that God is good led to
a belief in a Devil, the fallen _Lucifer_ or _Light-bearer_, Shaitan the
Adversary, Ahriman and Tuphōn, as an attempt to explain the existence of
Evil, and make it consistent with the Infinite Power, Wisdom, and
Benevolence of God.

Nothing surpasses and nothing equals, as a Summary of all the doctrines
of the Old World, those brief words engraven by HERMES on a Stone, and
known under the name of "_The Tablet of Emerald_:" the Unity of Being
and the Unity of the Harmonies, ascending and descending, the
progressive and proportional scale of the Word; the immutable law of the
Equilibrium, and the proportioned progress of the universal analogies;
the relation of the Idea to the Word, giving the measure of the relation
between the Creator and the Created, the necessary mathematics of the
Infinite, proved by the measures of a single corner of the Finite;--all
this is expressed by this single proposition of the Great Egyptian
Hierophant:

_"What is Superior is as that which is Inferior, and what is Below is as
that which is Above, to form the Marvels of the Unity."_




XX.

GRAND MASTER OF ALL SYMBOLIC LODGES.


The true Mason is a practical Philosopher, who, under religious emblems,
in all ages adopted by wisdom, builds upon plans traced by nature and
reason the moral edifice of knowledge. He ought to find, in the
symmetrical relation of all the parts of this rational edifice, the
principle and rule of all his duties, the source of all his pleasures.
He improves his moral nature, becomes a better man, and finds in the
reunion of virtuous men, assembled with pure views, the means of
multiplying his acts of beneficence. Masonry and Philosophy, without
being one and the same thing, have the same object, and propose to
themselves the same end, the worship of the Grand Architect of the
Universe, acquaintance and familiarity with the wonders of nature, and
the happiness of humanity attained by the constant practice of all the
virtues.

As Grand Master of all Symbolic Lodges, it is your especial duty to aid
in restoring Masonry to its primitive purity. You have become an
instructor. Masonry long wandered in error. Instead of improving, it
degenerated from its primitive simplicity, and retrograded toward a
system, distorted by stupidity and ignorance, which, unable to construct
a beautiful machine, made a complicated one. Less than two hundred years
ago, its organization was simple, and altogether moral, its emblems,
allegories, and ceremonies easy to be understood, and their purpose and
object readily to be seen. It was then confined to a very small number
of Degrees. Its constitutions were like those of a Society of Essenes,
written in the first century of our era. There could be seen the
primitive Christianity, organized into Masonry, the school of Pythagoras
without incongruities or absurdities; a Masonry simple and significant,
in which it was not necessary to torture the mind to discover reasonable
interpretations; a Masonry at once religious and philosophical, worthy
of a good citizen and an enlightened philanthropist.

Innovators and inventors overturned that primitive simplicity.
Ignorance engaged in the work of making Degrees, and trifles and gewgaws
and pretended mysteries, absurd or hideous, usurped the place of Masonic
Truth. The picture of a horrid vengeance, the poniard and the bloody
head, appeared in the peaceful Temple of Masonry, without sufficient
explanation of their symbolic meaning. Oaths out of all proportion with
their object, shocked the candidate, and then became ridiculous, and
were wholly disregarded. Acolytes were exposed to tests, and compelled
to perform acts, which, if real, would have been abominable; but being
mere chimeras, were preposterous, and excited contempt and laughter
only. Eight hundred Degrees of one kind and another were invented:
Infidelity and even Jesuitry were taught under the mask of Masonry. The
rituals even of the respectable Degrees, copied and mutilated by
ignorant men, became nonsensical and trivial; and the words so corrupted
that it has hitherto been found impossible to recover many of them at
all. Candidates were made to degrade themselves, and to submit to
insults not tolerable to a man of spirit and honor.

Hence it was that, practically, the largest portion of the Degrees
claimed by the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, and before it by the
Rite of Perfection, fell into disuse, were merely communicated, and
their rituals became jejune and insignificant. These Rites resembled
those old palaces and baronial castles, the different parts of which,
built at different periods remote from one another, upon plans and
according to tastes that greatly varied, formed a discordant and
incongruous whole. Judaism and chivalry, superstition and philosophy,
philanthropy and insane hatred and longing for vengeance, a pure
morality and unjust and illegal revenge, were found strangely mated and
standing hand in hand within the Temples of Peace and Concord; and the
whole system was one grotesque commingling of incongruous things, of
contrasts and contradictions, of shocking and fantastic extravagances,
of parts repugnant to good taste, and fine conceptions overlaid and
disfigured by absurdities engendered by ignorance, fanaticism, and a
senseless mysticism.

An empty and sterile pomp, impossible indeed to be carried out, and to
which no meaning whatever was attached, with far-fetched explanations
that were either so many stupid platitudes or themselves needed an
interpreter; lofty titles, arbitrarily assumed, and to which the
inventors had not condescended to attach any explanation that should
acquit them of the folly of assuming temporal rank, power, and titles of
nobility, made the world laugh, and the Initiate feel ashamed.

Some of these titles we retain; but they have with us meanings entirely
consistent with that Spirit of Equality which is the foundation and
peremptory law of its being of all Masonry. The _Knight_, with us, is he
who devotes his hand, his heart, his brain, to the Science of Masonry,
and professes himself the Sworn Soldier of Truth: the Prince is he who
aims to be _Chief [Princeps]_, _first_, _leader_, among his equals, in
virtue and good deeds: the _Sovereign_ is he who, one of an order whose
members are all Sovereigns, is Supreme only because the law and
constitutions are so, which he administers, and by which he, like every
other brother, is governed. The titles, _Puissant_, _Potent_, _Wise_,
and _Venerable_, indicate that power of Virtue, Intelligence, and
Wisdom, which those ought to strive to attain who are placed in high
office by the suffrages of their brethren: and all our other titles and
designations have an esoteric meaning, consistent with modesty and
equality, and which those who receive them should fully understand. As
Master of a Lodge it is your duty to instruct your Brethren that they
are all so many constant lessons, teaching the lofty qualifications
which are required of those who claim them, and not merely idle gewgaws
worn in ridiculous imitation of the times when the Nobles and Priests
were masters and the people slaves: and that, in all true Masonry, the
Knight, the Pontiff, the Prince, and the Sovereign are but the first
among their equals: and the cordon, the clothing, and the jewel but
symbols and emblems of the virtues required of all good Masons.

The Mason kneels, no longer to present his petition for admittance or to
receive the answer, no longer to a man as his superior, who is but his
brother, but to his God; to whom he appeals for the rectitude of his
intentions, and whose aid he asks to enable him to keep his vows. No one
is degraded by bending his knee to God at the altar, or to receive the
honor of Knighthood as Bayard and Du Guesclin knelt. To kneel for other
purposes, Masonry does not require. God gave to man a head to be borne
erect, a port upright and majestic. We assemble in our Temples to
cherish and inculcate sentiments that conform to that loftiness of
bearing which the just and upright man is entitled to maintain, and we
do not require those who desire to be admitted among us, ignominiously
to bow the head. We respect man, because we respect ourselves that he
may conceive a lofty idea of his dignity as a human being free and
independent. If modesty is a virtue, humility and obsequiousness to man
are base: for there is a noble pride which is the most real and solid
basis of virtue. Man should humble himself before the Infinite God; but
not before his erring and imperfect brother.

As Master of a Lodge, you will therefore be exceedingly careful that no
Candidate, in any Degree, be required to submit to any degradation
whatever; as has been too much the custom in some of the Degrees: and
take it as a certain and inflexible rule, to which there is _no_
exception, that real Masonry requires of no man anything to which a
Knight and Gentleman cannot honorably, and without feeling outraged or
humiliated submit.

The Supreme Council for the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States
at length undertook the indispensable and long-delayed task of revising
and reforming the work and rituals of the thirty Degrees under its
jurisdiction. Retaining the essentials of the Degrees and all the means
by which the members recognize one another, it has sought out and
developed the leading idea of each Degree, rejected the puerilities and
absurdities with which many of them were disfigured, and made of them a
connected system of moral, religious, and philosophical instruction.
Sectarian of no creed, it has yet thought it not improper to use the old
allegories, based on occurrences detailed in the Hebrew and Christian
books, and drawn from the Ancient Mysteries of Egypt, Persia, Greece,
India, the Druids and the Essenes, as vehicles to communicate the Great
Masonic Truths; as it has used the legends of the Crusades, and the
ceremonies of the orders of Knighthood.

It no longer inculcates a criminal and wicked vengeance. It has not
allowed Masonry to play the assassin: to avenge the death either of
Hiram, of Charles the 1st, or of Jacques De Molay and the Templars. The
Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Masonry has now become, what
Masonry at first was meant to be, a Teacher of Great Truths, inspired by
an upright and enlightened reason, a firm and constant wisdom, and an
affectionate and liberal philanthropy.

It is no longer a system, over the composition and arrangement of the
different parts of which, want of reflection, chance, ignorance, and
perhaps motives still more ignoble presided; a system unsuited to our
habits, our manners, our ideas, or the world-wide philanthropy and
universal toleration of Masonry; or to bodies small in number, whose
revenues should be devoted to the relief of the unfortunate, and not to
empty show; no longer a heterogeneous aggregate of Degrees, shocking by
its anachronisms and contradictions, powerless to disseminate light,
information, and moral and philosophical ideas.

As Master, you will teach those who are under you, and to whom you will
owe your office, that the decorations of many of the Degrees are to be
dispensed with, whenever the expense would interfere with the duties of
charity, relief, and benevolence; and to be indulged in only by wealthy
bodies that will thereby do no wrong to those entitled to their
assistance. The essentials of all the Degrees may be procured at slight
expense; and it is at the option of every Brother to procure or not to
procure, as he pleases, the dress, decorations, and jewels of any Degree
other than the 14th, 18th, 30th, and 32d.

We teach the truth of none of the legends we recite. They are to us but
parables and allegories, involving and enveloping Masonic instruction;
and vehicles of useful and interesting information. They represent the
different phases of the human mind, its efforts and struggles to
comprehend nature, God, the government of the Universe, the permitted
existence of sorrow and evil. To teach us wisdom, and the folly of
endeavoring to explain to ourselves that which we are not capable of
understanding, we reproduce the speculations of the Philosophers, the
Kabalists, the Mystagogues and the Gnostics. Every one being at liberty
to apply our symbols and emblems as he thinks most consistent with truth
and reason and with his own faith, we give them such an interpretation
only as may be accepted by all. Our Degrees may be conferred in France
or Turkey, at Pekin, Ispahàn, Rome, or Geneva, in the city of Penn or in
Catholic Louisiana, upon the subject of an absolute government or the
citizen of a Free State, upon Sectarian or Theist. To honor the Deity,
to regard all men as our Brethren, as children, equally dear to Him, of
the Supreme Creator of the Universe, and to make himself useful to
society and himself by his labor, are its teachings to its Initiates in
all the Degrees.

Preacher of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, it desires them to be
attained by making men fit to receive them, and by the moral power of an
intelligent and enlightened People. It lays no plots and conspiracies.
It hatches no premature revolutions; it encourages no people to revolt
against the constituted authorities; but recognizing the great truth
that freedom follows fitness for freedom as the corollary follows the
axiom, it strives to _prepare_ men to govern themselves.

Where domestic slavery exists, it teaches the master humanity and the
alleviation of the condition of his slave, and moderate correction and
gentle discipline; as it teaches them to the master of the apprentice:
and as it teaches to the employers of other men, in mines,
manufactories, and workshops, consideration and humanity for those who
depend upon their labor for their bread, and to whom want of employment
is starvation, and overwork is fever, consumption, and death.

As Master of a Lodge, you are to inculcate these duties on your
brethren. Teach the employed to be honest, punctual, and faithful as
well as respectful and obedient to all proper orders: but also teach the
employer that every man or woman who desires to work, has a right to
have work to do; and that they, and those who from sickness or
feebleness, loss of limb or of bodily vigor, old age or infancy, are not
able to work, have a right to be fed, clothed, and sheltered from the
inclement elements: that he commits an awful sin against Masonry and in
the sight of God, if he closes his workshops or factories, or ceases to
work his mines, when they do not yield him what he regards as sufficient
profit, and so dismisses his workmen and workwomen to starve; or when he
reduces the wages of man or woman to so low a standard that they and
their families cannot be clothed and fed and comfortably housed; or by
overwork must give him their blood and life in exchange for the pittance
of their wages: and that his duty as a Mason and Brother peremptorily
requires him to continue to employ those who else will be pinched with
hunger and cold, or resort to theft and vice: and to pay them fair
wages, though it may reduce or annul his profits or even eat into his
capital; for God hath but loaned him his wealth, and made him His
almoner and agent to invest it.

Except, as mere symbols of the moral virtues and intellectual qualities,
the tools and implements of Masonry belong exclusively to the first
three Degrees. They also, however, serve to remind the Mason who has
advanced further, that his new rank is based upon the humble labors of
the symbolic Degrees, as they are improperly termed, inasmuch as all the
Degrees are symbolic.

Thus the Initiates are inspired with a just idea of Masonry, to wit,
that it is essentially WORK; both teaching and practising LABOR; and
that it is altogether emblematic. Three kinds of work are necessary to
the preservation and protection of man and society: manual labor,
specially belonging to the three blue Degrees; labor in arms, symbolized
by the Knightly or chivalric Degrees; and intellectual labor, belonging
particularly to the Philosophical Degrees.

We have preserved and multiplied such emblems as have a true and
profound meaning. We reject many of the old and senseless explanations.
We have not reduced Masonry to a cold metaphysics that exiles everything
belonging to the domain of the imagination. The ignorant, and those
_half_-wise, in reality, but _over_-wise in their own conceit, may
assail our symbols with sarcasms; but they are nevertheless ingenious
veils that cover the Truth, respected by all who know the means by which
the heart of man is reached and his feelings enlisted. The Great
Moralists often had recourse to allegories, in order to instruct men
without repelling them. But we have been careful not to allow our
emblems to be too obscure, so as to require far-fetched and forced
interpretations. In our days, and in the enlightened land in which we
live, we do not need to wrap ourselves in veils so strange and
impenetrable, as to prevent or hinder instruction instead of furthering
it; or to induce the suspicion that we have concealed meanings which we
communicate only to the most reliable adepts, because they are contrary
to good order or the well-being of society.

The Duties of the Class of _Instructors_, that is, the Masons of the
Degrees from the 4th to the 8th, inclusive, are, particularly, to
perfect the younger Masons in the words, signs and tokens and other work
of the Degrees they have received; to explain to them the meaning of the
different emblems, and to expound the moral instruction which they
convey. And upon their report of proficiency alone can their pupils be
allowed to advance and receive an increase of wages.

_The Directors of the Work_, or those of the 9th, 10th, and 11th Degrees
are to report to the Chapters upon the regularity, activity and proper
direction of the work of bodies in the lower Degrees, and what is needed
to be enacted for their prosperity and usefulness. In the Symbolic
Lodges, they are particularly charged to stimulate the zeal of the
workmen, to induce them to engage in new labors and enterprises for the
good of Masonry, their country and mankind, and to give them fraternal
advice when they fall short of their duty; or, in cases that require it,
to invoke against them the rigor of Masonic law.

_The Architects_, or those of the 12th, 13th, and 14th, should be
selected from none but Brothers well instructed in the preceding
Degrees; zealous, and capable of discoursing upon that Masonry;
illustrating it, and discussing the simple questions of moral
philosophy. And one of them, at every communication, should be prepared
with a lecture, communicating useful knowledge or giving good advice to
the Brethren.

_The Knights_, of the 15th and 16th Degrees, wear the sword. They are
bound to prevent and repair, as far as may be in their power, all
injustice, both in the world and in Masonry; to protect the weak and to
bring oppressors to justice. Their works and lectures must be in this
spirit. They should inquire whether Masonry fulfills, as far as it ought
and can, its principal purpose, which is to succor the unfortunate. That
it may do so, they should prepare propositions to be offered in the Blue
Lodges calculated to attain that end, to put an end to abuses, and to
prevent or correct negligence. Those in the Lodges who have attained the
rank of Knights, are most fit to be appointed Almoners, and charged to
ascertain and make known who need and are entitled to the charity of the
Order.

In the higher Degrees those only should be received who have sufficient
reading and information to discuss the great questions of philosophy.
From them the Orators of the Lodges should be selected, as well as those
of the Councils and Chapters. They are charged to suggest such measures
as are necessary to make Masonry entirely faithful to the spirit of its
institution, both as to its charitable purposes, and the diffusion of
light and knowledge; such as are needed to correct abuses that have
crept in, and offences against the rules and general spirit of the
Order; and such as will tend to make it, as it was meant to be, the
great Teacher of Mankind.

As Master of a Lodge, Council, or Chapter, it will be your duty to
impress upon the minds of your Brethren these views of the general plan
and separate parts of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite; of its
spirit and design; its harmony and regularity; of the duties of the
officers and members; and of the particular lessons intended to be
taught by each Degree.

Especially you are not to allow any assembly of the body over which you
may preside, to close, without recalling to the minds of the Brethren
the Masonic virtues and duties which are represented upon the Tracing
Board of this Degree. That is an imperative duty. Forget not that, more
than three thousand years ago, ZOROASTER said: "_Be good, be kind, be
humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon
those who have done you wrong._" Nor that more than two thousand three
hundred years ago CONFUCIUS repeated, also quoting the language of those
who had lived before himself: "_Love thy neighbor as thyself: Do not to
others what thou wouldst not wish should be done to thyself: Forgive
injuries. Forgive your enemy, be reconciled to him, give him assistance,
invoke God in his behalf!_"

Let not the morality of your Lodge be inferior to that of the Persian or
the Chinese Philosopher.

Urge upon your Brethren the teaching and the unostentatious practice of
the morality of the Lodge, without regard to times, places, religions,
or peoples.

Urge them to love one another, to be devoted to one another, to be
faithful to the country, the government, and the laws: for to serve the
country is to pay a dear and sacred debt:

To respect all forms of worship, to tolerate all political and religious
opinions; not to blame, and still less to condemn the religion of
others: not to seek to make converts; but to be content if they have the
religion of Socrates; a veneration for the Creator, the religion of good
works, and grateful acknowledgment of God's blessings:

To fraternize with all men; to assist all who are unfortunate; and to
cheerfully postpone their own interests to that of the Order:

To make it the constant rule of their lives, to think well, to speak
well, and to act well:

To place the sage above the soldier, the noble, or the prince: and take
the wise and good as their models:

To see that their professions and practice, their teachings and conduct,
do always agree:

To make this also their motto: Do that which thou oughtest to do; let
the result be what it will.

Such, my Brother, are some of the duties of that office which you have
sought to be qualified to exercise. May you perform them well; and in so
doing gain honor for yourself, and advance the great cause of Masonry,
Humanity, and Progress.




XXI.

NOACHITE, OR PRUSSIAN KNIGHT.


You are especially charged in this Degree to be modest and humble, and
not vain-glorious nor filled with self-conceit. Be not wiser in your own
opinion than the Deity, nor find fault with His works, nor endeavor to
improve upon what He has done. Be modest also in your intercourse with
your fellows, and slow to entertain evil thoughts of them, and reluctant
to ascribe to them evil intentions. A thousand presses, flooding the
country with their evanescent leaves, are busily and incessantly engaged
in maligning the motives and conduct of men and parties, and in making
one man think worse of another; while, alas, scarcely one is found that
ever, even accidentally, labors to make man think better of his fellow.

Slander and calumny were never so insolently licentious in any country
as they are this day in ours. The most retiring disposition, the most
unobtrusive demeanor, is no shield against their poisoned arrows. The
most eminent public service only makes their vituperation and invective
more eager and more unscrupulous, when he who has done such service
presents himself as a candidate for the people's suffrages.

The evil is wide-spread and universal. No man, no woman, no household,
is sacred or safe from this new Inquisition. No act is so pure or so
praiseworthy, that the unscrupulous vender of lies who lives by
pandering to a corrupt and morbid public appetite will not proclaim it
as a crime. No motive is so innocent or so laudable, that he will not
hold it up as villainy. Journalism pries into the interior of private
houses, gloats over the details of domestic tragedies of sin and shame,
and deliberately invents and industriously circulates the most
unmitigated and baseless falsehoods, to coin money for those who pursue
it as a trade, or to effect a temporary result in the wars of faction.

We need not enlarge upon these evils. They are apparent to all and
lamented over by all, and it is the duty of a Mason to do all in his
power to lessen, if not to remove them. With the errors and even sins of
other men, that do not personally affect us or ours, and need not our
condemnation to be odious, we have nothing to do; and the journalist has
no patent that makes him the Censor of Morals. There is no obligation
resting on us to trumpet forth our disapproval of every wrongful or
injudicious or improper act that every other man commits. One would be
ashamed to stand on the street corners and retail them orally for
pennies.

One ought, in truth, to write or speak against no other one in this
world. Each man in it has enough to do, to watch and keep guard over
himself. Each of us is sick enough in this great Lazaretto: and
journalism and polemical writing constantly remind us of a scene once
witnessed in a little hospital; where it was horrible to hear how the
patients mockingly reproached each other with their disorders and
infirmities: how one, who was wasted by consumption, jeered at another
who was bloated by dropsy: how one laughed at another's cancer of the
face; and this one again at his neighbor's lock-jaw or squint; until at
last the delirious fever-patient sprang out of his bed, and tore away
the coverings from the wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was
to be seen but hideous misery and mutilation. Such is the revolting work
in which journalism and political partisanship, and half the world
outside of Masonry, are engaged.

Very generally, the censure bestowed upon men's acts, by those who have
appointed and commissioned themselves Keepers of the Public Morals, is
undeserved. Often it is not only undeserved, but praise is deserved
instead of censure, and, when the latter is not undeserved, it is always
extravagant, and therefore unjust.

A Mason will wonder what spirit they are endowed withal, that can basely
libel at a man, even, that is fallen. If they had any nobility of soul,
they would with him condole his disasters, and drop some tears in pity
of his folly and wretchedness: and if they were merely human and not
brutal, Nature did grievous wrong to human bodies, to curse them with
souls so cruel as to strive to add to a wretchedness already
intolerable. When a Mason hears of any man that hath fallen into public
disgrace, he should have a mind to commiserate his mishap, and not to
make him more disconsolate. To envenom a name by libels, that already is
openly tainted, is to add stripes with an iron rod to one that is flayed
with whipping; and to every well-tempered mind will seem most inhuman
and unmanly.

Even the man who does wrong and commits errors often has a quiet home, a
fireside of his own, a gentle, loving wife and innocent children, who
perhaps do not know of his past errors and lapses--past and long
repented of; or if they do, they love him the better, because, being
mortal, he hath erred, and being in the image of God, he hath repented.
That every blow at this husband and father lacerates the pure and tender
bosoms of that wife and those daughters, is a consideration that doth
not stay the hand of the brutal journalist and partisan: but he strikes
home at these shrinking, quivering, innocent, tender bosoms; and then
goes out upon the great arteries of cities, where the current of life
pulsates, and holds his head erect, and calls on his fellows to laud him
and admire him, for the chivalric act he hath done, in striking his
dagger through one heart into another tender and trusting one.

If you seek for high and strained carriages, you shall, for the most
part, meet with them in low men. Arrogance is a weed that ever grows on
a dunghill. It is from the rankness of that soil that she hath her
height and spreadings. To be modest and unaffected with our superiors is
duty; with our equals, courtesy; with our inferiors, nobleness. There is
no arrogance so great as the proclaiming of other men's errors and
faults, by those who understand nothing but the dregs of actions, and
who make it their business to besmear deserving fames. Public reproof is
like striking a deer in the herd: it not only wounds him, to the loss of
blood, but betrays him to the hound, his enemy.

The occupation of the spy hath ever been held dishonorable, and it is
none the less so, now that with rare exceptions editors and partisans
have become perpetual spies upon the actions of other men. Their malice
makes them nimble-eyed, apt to note a fault and publish it, and, with a
strained construction, to deprave even those things in which the doer's
intents were honest. Like the crocodile, they slime the way of others,
to make them fall; and when that has happened, they feed their insulting
envy on the life-blood of the prostrate. They set the vices of other men
on high, for the gaze of the world, and place their virtues underground,
that none may note them. If they cannot wound upon proofs, they will do
it upon likelihoods: and if not upon them, they manufacture lies, as
God created the world, out of nothing; and so corrupt the fair tempter
of men's reputations; knowing that the multitude will believe them,
because affirmations are apter to win belief, than negatives to uncredit
them; and that a lie travels faster than an eagle flies, while the
contradiction limps after it at a snail's pace, and, halting, never
overtakes it. Nay, it is contrary to the morality of journalism, to
allow a lie to be contradicted in the place that spawned it. And even if
that great favor is conceded, a slander once raised will scarce ever
die, or fail of finding many that will allow it both a harbor and trust.

This is, beyond any other, the age of falsehood. Once, to be suspected
of equivocation was enough to soil a gentleman's escutcheon; but now it
has become a strange merit in a partisan or statesman, always and
scrupulously to tell the truth. Lies are part of the regular ammunition
of all campaigns and controversies, valued according as they are
profitable and effective; and are stored up and have a market price,
like saltpetre and sulphur; being even more deadly than they.

If men weighed the imperfections of humanity, they would breathe less
condemnation. Ignorance gives disparagement a louder tongue than
knowledge does. Wise men had rather know, than tell. Frequent dispraises
are but the faults of uncharitable wit: and it is from where there is no
judgment, that the heaviest judgment comes; for self-examination would
make all judgments charitable. If we even do know vices in men, we can
scarce show ourselves in a nobler virtue than in the charity of
concealing them: if that be not a flattery persuading to continuance.
And it is the basest office man can fall into, to make his tongue the
defamer of the worthy man.

There is but one rule for the Mason in this matter. If there be virtues,
and he is called upon to speak of him who owns them, let him tell them
forth impartially. And if there be vices mixed with them, let him be
content the world shall know them by some other tongue than his. For if
the evil-doer deserve no pity, his wife, his parents, or his children,
or other innocent persons who love him Way; and the bravo's trade,
practised by him who stabs the defenceless for a price paid by
individual or party, is really no more respectable now than it was a
hundred years ago, in Venice. Where we want experience, Charity bids us
think the best, and leave what we know not to the Searcher of Hearts;
for mistakes, suspicions, and envy often injure a clear fame; and there
is least danger in a charitable construction.

And, finally, the Mason should be humble and modest toward the Grand
Architect of the Universe, and not impugn His Wisdom, nor set up his own
imperfect sense of Right against His Providence and dispensations, nor
attempt too rashly to explore the Mysteries of God's Infinite Essence
and inscrutable plans, and of that Great Nature which we are not made
capable to understand.

Let him steer far away from all those vain philosophies, which endeavor
to account for all that is, without admitting that there is a God,
separate and apart from the Universe which is his work: which erect
Universal Nature into a God, and worship it alone: which annihilate
Spirit, and believe no testimony except that of the bodily senses:
which, by logical formulas and dextrous collocation of words, make the
actual, living, guiding, and protecting God fade into the dim mistiness
of a mere abstraction and unreality, itself a mere logical formula.

Nor let him have any alliance with those theorists who chide the delays
of Providence and busy themselves to hasten the slow march which it has
imposed upon events: who neglect the practical, to struggle after
impossibilities: who are wiser than Heaven; know the aims and purposes
of the Deity, and can see a short and more direct means of attaining
them, than it pleases Him to employ: who would have no discords in the
great harmony of the Universe of things; but equal distribution of
property, no subjection of one man to the will of another, no compulsory
labor, and still no starvation, nor destitution, nor pauperism.

Let him not spend his life, as they do, in building a new Tower of
Babel; in attempting to change that which is fixed by an inflexible law
of God's enactment: but let him, yielding to the Superior Wisdom of
Providence, content to believe that the march of events is rightly
ordered by an Infinite Wisdom, and leads, though we cannot see it, to a
great and perfect result,--let him be satisfied to follow the path
pointed out by that Providence, and to labor for the good of the human
race in that mode in which God has chosen to enact that good shall be
effected: and above all, let him build no Tower of Babel, under the
belief that by ascending he will mount so high that God will disappear
or be superseded by a great monstrous aggregate of material forces, or
mere glittering, logical formula; but, evermore, standing humbly and
reverently upon the earth and looking with awe and confidence toward
Heaven, let him be satisfied that there is a _real_ God; a _person_, and
not a formula; a Father and a protector, who loves, and sympathizes, and
compassionates; and that the eternal ways by which He rules the world
are infinitely wise, no matter how far they may be above the feeble
comprehension and limited vision of man.

[Illustration: Lyre]




XXII.

KNIGHT OF THE ROYAL AXE
OR
PRINCE OF LIBANUS.


Sympathy with the great laboring classes, respect for labor itself, and
resolution to do some good _work_ in our day and generation, these are
the lessons of this Degree, and they are purely Masonic. Masonry has
made a working-man and his associates the Heroes of her principal
legend, and himself the companion of Kings. The idea is as simple and
true as it is sublime. From first to last, Masonry is _work_. It
venerates the Grand _Architect_ of the Universe. It commemorates the
_building_ of a Temple. Its principal emblems are _the working tools_ of
Masons and Artisans. It preserves the name of the first _worker_ in
_brass_ and _iron_ as one of its pass-words. When the Brethren meet
together, they are at _labor_. The Master is the _overseer_ who sets the
craft to _work_ and gives them proper instruction. Masonry is the
apotheosis of WORK.

It is the hands of brave, forgotten men that have made this great,
populous, cultivated world a world for _us_. It is _all_ work, and
_forgotten_ work. The _real_ conquerors, creators, and eternal
proprietors of every great and civilized land are all the heroic souls
that ever were in it, each in his degree: all the men that ever felled a
forest-tree or drained a marsh, or contrived a wise scheme, or did or
said a true or valiant thing therein. Genuine work alone, done
faithfully, is eternal, even as the Almighty Founder and World-builder
Himself. All work is noble: a life of ease is not for any man, nor for
any God. The Almighty Maker is not like one who, in old immemorial ages,
having made his machine of a Universe, sits ever since, and sees it
_go_. Out of that belief comes Atheism. The faith in an Invisible,
Unnameable, Directing Deity, present everywhere in all that we see, and
work, and suffer, is the essence of all faith whatsoever.

The life of all Gods figures itself to us as a Sublime Earnestness,--of
Infinite battle against Infinite labor Our highest religion is named the
Worship of Sorrow. For the Son of Man there is no noble crown,
well-worn, or even ill-worn, but is a crown of thorns. Man's highest
destiny is not to be happy, to love pleasant things and find them. His
only true _un_happiness should be that he cannot work, and get his
destiny as a man fulfilled. The day passes swiftly over, our life passes
swiftly over, and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. That night
once come, our happiness and unhappiness are vanished, and become as
things that never were. But our work is not abolished, and has not
vanished. It remains, or the want of it remains, for endless Times and
Eternities.

Whatsoever of morality and intelligence; what of patience, perseverance,
faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word,
whatsoever of STRENGTH a man has in him, will lie written in the WORK he
does. To work is to try himself against Nature and her unerring,
everlasting laws: and they will return true verdict as to him. The
noblest Epic is a mighty Empire slowly built together, a mighty series
of heroic deeds, a mighty conquest over chaos. Deeds are greater than
words. They have a life, mute, but undeniable; and grow. They people the
vacuity of Time, and make it green and worthy.

Labor is the truest emblem of God, the Architect and Eternal Maker;
noble Labor, which is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the
highest Throne. Men without duties to do, are like trees planted on
precipices; from the roots of which all the earth has crumbled. Nature
owns no man who is not also a Martyr. She scorns the man who sits
screened from all work, from want, danger, hardship, the victory over
which is work; and has all his work and battling done by other men; and
yet there are men who pride themselves that they and theirs have done no
work time out of mind. So neither have the swine.

The chief of men is he who stands in the van of men, fronting the peril
which frightens back all others, and if not vanquished would devour
them. Hercules was worshipped for twelve labors. The Czar of Russia
became a toiling shipwright, and worked with his axe in the docks of
Saardam; and something came of that. Cromwell worked, and Napoleon; and
effected somewhat.

There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work. Be he never
so benighted and forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in
a man who actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there
perpetual Despair. Man perfects himself by working. Jungles are cleared
away. Fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal, the
man himself first ceases to be a foul unwholesome jungle and desert
thereby. Even in the meanest sort of labor, the whole soul of man is
composed into a kind of real harmony, the moment he begins to work.
Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, and even Despair shrink
murmuring far off into their caves, whenever the man bends himself
resolutely against his task. Labor is life. From the inmost heart of the
worker rises his God-given Force, the Sacred Celestial Life-essence,
breathed into him by Almighty God; and awakens him to all nobleness, as
soon as work fitly begins. By it man learns Patience, Courage,
Perseverance, Openness to light, readiness to own himself mistaken,
resolution to do better and improve. Only by labor will man continually
learn the virtues. There is no Religion in stagnation and inaction; but
only in activity and exertion. There was the deepest truth in that
saying of the old monks, "_laborare est orare_." "He prayeth best who
loveth best all things both great and small;" and can man love except by
working earnestly to benefit that being whom he loves?

"Work; and therein have well-being," is the oldest of Gospels;
unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, and enduring forever. To
make Disorder, wherever found, an eternal enemy; to attack and subdue
him, and make order of him, the subject not of Chaos, but of
Intelligence and Divinity, and of ourselves; to attack ignorance,
stupidity and brute-mindedness, wherever found, to smite it wisely and
unweariedly, to rest not while we live and it lives, in the name of God,
this is our duty as Masons; commanded us by the Highest God. Even He,
with his unspoken voice, more awful than the thunders of Sinai, or the
syllabled speech of the Hurricane, speaks to us. The Unborn Ages; the
old Graves, with their long-moldering dust speak to us. The deep
Death-Kingdoms, the Stars in their never-resting course, all Space and
all Time, silently and continually admonish us that we too must work
while it is called to-day. Labor, wide as the Earth, has its summit in
Heaven. To toil, whether with the sweat of the brow, or of the brain or
heart, is worship,--the noblest thing yet discovered beneath the Stars.
Let the weary cease to think that labor is a curse an doom pronounced by
Deity. Without it there could be no true excellence in human nature.
Without it, and pain, and sorrow, where would be the human virtues?
Where Patience, Perseverance, Submission, Energy, Endurance, Fortitude,
Bravery, Disinterestedness, Self-Sacrifice, the noblest excellencies of
the Soul?

Let him who toils complain not, nor feel humiliated! Let him look up,
and see his fellow-workmen there, in God's Eternity; they alone
surviving there. Even in the weak human memory, they long survive, as
Saints, as Heroes, and as Gods: they _alone_ survive, and people the
unmeasured solitudes of Time.

To the primeval man, whatsoever good came, descended on him (as in mere
fact, it ever does) direct from God; whatsoever duty lay visible for
him, this a Supreme God had prescribed. For the primeval man, in whom
dwelt Thought, this Universe was all a Temple, life everywhere a
Worship.

Duty is with us ever; and evermore forbids us to be idle. To work with
the hands or brain, according to our requirements and our capacities, to
do that which lies before us to do, is more honorable than rank and
title. Ploughers, spinners and builders, inventors, and men of science,
poets, advocates, and writers, all stand upon one common level, and form
one grand, innumerable host, marching ever onward since the beginning of
the world: each entitled to our sympathy and respect, each a man and our
brother.

It was well to give the earth to man as a dark mass, whereon to labor.
It was well to provide rude and unsightly materials in the ore-bed and
the forest, for him to fashion into splendor and beauty. It was well,
not because of that splendor and beauty; but because the act creating
them is better than the things themselves; because exertion is nobler
than enjoyment; because the laborer is greater and more worthy of honor
than the idler. Masonry stands up for the nobility of labor. It is
Heaven's great ordinance for human improvement. It has been broken down
for ages; and Masonry desires to build it up again. It has been broken
down, because men toil only because they must, submitting to it as, in
some sort, a degrading necessity; and desiring nothing so much on earth
as to escape from it. They fulfill the great law of labor in the letter,
but break it in the spirit: they fulfill it with the muscles, but break
it with the mind.

Masonry teaches that every idler ought to hasten to some field of labor,
manual or mental, as a chosen and coveted theatre of improvement; but he
is not impelled to do so, under the teachings of an imperfect
civilization. On the contrary, he sits down, folds his hands, and
blesses and glorifies himself in his idleness. It is time that this
opprobrium of toil were done away. To be ashamed of toil; of the dingy
workshop and dusty labor-field; of the hard hand, stained with service
more honorable than that of war; of the soiled and weather-stained
garments, on which Mother Nature has stamped, midst sun and rain, midst
fire and steam, her own heraldic honors; to be ashamed of these tokens
and titles, and envious of the flaunting robes of imbecile idleness and
vanity, is treason to Nature, impiety to Heaven, a breach of Heaven's
great Ordinance. TOIL, of brain, heart, or hand, is the only true
manhood and genuine nobility.

Labor is a more beneficent ministration than man's ignorance
comprehends, or his complainings will admit. Even when its end is hidden
from him, it is not mere blind drudgery. It is all a training, a
discipline, a development of energies, a nurse of virtues, a school of
improvement. From the poor boy who gathers a few sticks for his mother's
hearth, to the strong man who fells the oak or guides the ship or the
steam-car, every human toiler, with every weary step and every urgent
task, is obeying a wisdom far above his own wisdom, and fulfilling a
design far beyond his own design.

The great law of human industry is this: that industry, working either
with the hand or the mind, the application of our powers to some task,
to the achievement of some result, lies at the foundation of all human
improvement. We are not sent into the world like animals, to crop the
spontaneous herbage of the field, and then to lie down in indolent
repose: but we are sent to dig the soil and plough the sea; to do the
business of cities and the work of manufactories. The world is the great
and appointed school of industry. In an artificial state of society,
mankind is divided into the idle and the laboring classes; but such was
not the design of Providence.

Labor is man's great function, his peculiar distinction and his
privilege. From being an animal, that eats and drinks and sleeps only,
to become a worker, and with the hand of ingenuity to pour his own
thoughts into the moulds of Nature, fashioning them into forms of grace
and fabrics of convenience, and converting them to purposes of
improvement and happiness, is the greatest possible step in privilege.

The Earth and the Atmosphere are man's laboratory. With spade and
plough, with mining-shafts and furnaces and forges, with fire and steam;
midst the noise and whirl of swift and bright machinery, and abroad in
the silent fields, man was made to be ever working, ever experimenting.
And while he and all his dwellings of care and toil are borne onward
with the circling skies, and the splendors of Heaven are around him, and
their infinite depths image and invite his thought, still in all the
worlds of philosophy, in the universe of intellect, man must be a
worker. He is nothing, he can be nothing, can achieve nothing, fulfill
nothing, without working. Without it, he can gain neither lofty
improvement nor tolerable happiness. The idle must hunt down the hours
as their prey. To them Time is an enemy, clothed with armor; and they
must kill him, or themselves die. It never yet did answer, and it never
will answer, for any man to do nothing, to be exempt from all care and
effort, to lounge, to walk, to ride, and to feast alone. No man can live
in that way. God made a law against it: which no human power can annul,
no human ingenuity evade.

The idea that a property is to be acquired in the course of ten or
twenty years, which shall suffice for the rest of life; that by some
prosperous traffic or grand speculation, all the labor of a whole life
is to be accomplished in a brief portion of it; that by dexterous
management, a large part of the term of human existence is to be
exonerated from the cares of industry and self-denial, is founded upon a
grave mistake, upon a misconception of the true nature and design of
business, and of the conditions of human well-being. The desire of
accumulation for the sake of securing a life of ease and gratification,
of escaping from exertion and self-denial, is wholly wrong, though very
common.

It is better for the Mason to live while he lives, and enjoy life as it
passes: to live richer and die poorer. It is best of all for him to
banish from the mind that empty dream of future indolence and
indulgence; to address himself to the business of life, as the school of
his earthly education; to settle it with himself now that independence,
if he gains it, is not to give him exemption from employment. It is best
for him to know, that, in order to be a happy man, he must always be a
laborer, with the mind or the body, or with both: and that the
reasonable exertion of his powers, bodily and mental, is not to be
regarded as mere drudgery, but as a good discipline, a wise ordination,
a training in this primary school of our being, for nobler endeavors,
and spheres of higher activity hereafter.

There are reasons why a Mason may lawfully and even earnestly desire a
fortune. If he can fill some fine palace, itself a work of art, with the
productions of lofty genius; if he can be the friend and helper of
humble worth; if he can seek it out, where failing health or adverse
fortune presses it hard, and soften or stay the bitter hours that are
hastening it to madness or to the grave; if he can stand between the
oppressor and his prey, and bid the fetter and the dungeon give up their
victim; if he can build up great institutions of learning, and academies
of art; if he can open fountains of knowledge for the people, and
conduct its streams in the right channels; if he can do better for the
poor than to bestow alms upon them--even to think of them, and devise
plans for their elevation in knowledge and virtue, instead of forever
opening the old reservoirs and resources for their improvidence; if he
has sufficient heart and soul to do all this, or part of it; if wealth
would be to him the handmaid of exertion, facilitating effort, and
giving success to endeavor; then may he lawfully, and yet warily and
modestly, desire it. But if it is to do nothing for him, but to minister
ease and indulgence, and to place his children in the same bad school,
then there is no reason why he should desire it.

What is there glorious in the world, that is not the product of labor,
either of the body or of the mind? What is history, but its record? What
are the treasures of genius and art, but its work? What are cultivated
fields, but its toil? The busy marts, the rising cities, the enriched
empires of the world are but the great treasure-houses of labor. The
pyramids of Egypt, the castles and towers and temples of Europe, the
buried cities of Italy and Mexico, the canals and railroads of
Christendom, are but tracks, all round the world, of the mighty
footsteps of labor. Without it antiquity would not have been. Without
it, there would be no memory of the past, and no hope for the future.

Even utter indolence reposes on treasures that labor at some time gained
and gathered. He that does nothing, and yet does not starve, has still
his significance; for he is a standing proof that somebody has at some
time worked. But not to such does Masonry do honor. It honors the
Worker, the Toiler; him who produces and not alone consumes; him who
puts forth his hand to add to the treasury of human comforts, and not
alone to take away. It honors him who goes forth amid the struggling
elements to fight his battle, and who shrinks not, with cowardly
effeminacy, behind pillows of ease. It honors the strong muscle, and
the manly nerve, and the resolute and brave heart, the sweating brow,
and the toiling brain. It honors the great and beautiful offices of
humanity, manhood's toil and woman's task; paternal industry and
maternal watching and weariness; wisdom teaching and patience learning;
the brow of care that presides over the State, and many-handed labor
that toils in workshop, field, and study, beneath its mild and
beneficent sway.

God has not made a world of rich men; but rather a world of poor men; or
of men, at least, who must toil for a subsistence. That is, then, the
best condition for man, and the grand sphere of human improvement. If
the whole world could acquire wealth, (and one man is as much entitled
to it as another, when he is born); if the present generation could lay
up a complete provision for the next, as some men desire to do for their
children; the world would be destroyed at a single blow. All industry
would cease with the necessity for it; all improvement would stop with
the demand for exertion; the dissipation of fortunes, the mischiefs of
which are now countervailed by the healthful tone of society, would
breed universal disease, and break out into universal license; and the
world would sink, rotten as Herod, into the grave of its own loathsome
vices.

Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have
been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor
artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius. A
certain staidness and sobriety, a certain moderation and restraint, a
certain pressure of circumstances, are good for man. His body was not
made for luxuries. It sickens, sinks, and dies under them. His mind was
not made for indulgence. It grows weak, effeminate, and dwarfish, under
that condition. And he who pampers his body with luxuries and his mind
with indulgence, bequeaths the consequences to the minds and bodies of
his descendants, without the wealth which was their cause. For wealth,
without a law of entail to help it, has always lacked the energy even to
_keep_ its own treasures. They drop from its imbecile hand. The third
generation almost inevitably goes down the rolling wheel of fortune, and
there learns the energy necessary to rise again, if it rises at all;
heir, as it is, to the bodily diseases, and mental weaknesses, and the
soul's vices of its ancestors, and _not_ heir to their wealth. And yet
we are, almost all of us, anxious to put our children, or to insure
that our grandchildren shall be put, on this road to indulgence, luxury,
vice, degradation, and ruin; this heirship of hereditary disease, soul
malady, and mental leprosy.

If wealth were employed in promoting mental culture at home and works of
philanthropy abroad; if it were multiplying studies of art, and building
up institutions of learning around us; if it were in every way raising
the intellectual character of the world, there could scarcely be too
much of it. But if the utmost aim, effort, and ambition of wealth be, to
procure rich furniture, and provide costly entertainments, and build
luxurious houses, and minister to vanity, extravagance, and ostentation,
there could scarcely be too little of it. To a certain extent it may
laudably be the minister of elegancies and luxuries, and the servitor of
hospitality and physical enjoyment: but just in proportion as its
tendencies, divested of all higher aims and tastes, are running that
way, they are running to peril and evil.

Nor does that peril attach to individuals and families alone. It stands,
a fearful beacon, in the experience of Cities, Republics, and Empires.
The lessons of past times, on this subject, are emphatic and solemn. The
history of wealth has always been a history of corruption and downfall.
The people never existed that could stand the trial. Boundless profusion
is too little likely to spread for any people the theatre of manly
energy, rigid self-denial, and lofty virtue. You do not look for the
bone and sinew and strength of a country, its loftiest talents and
virtues, its martyrs to patriotism or religion, its men to meet the days
of peril and disaster, among the children of ease, indulgence, and
luxury.

In the great march of the races of men over the earth, we have always
seen opulence and luxury sinking before poverty and toil and hardy
nurture. That is the law which has presided over the great processions
of empire. Sidon and Tyre, whose merchants possessed the wealth of
princes; Babylon and Palmyra, the seats of Asiatic luxury; Rome, laden
with the spoils of a world, overwhelmed by her own vices more than by
the hosts of her enemies; all these, and many more, are examples of the
destructive tendencies of immense and unnatural accumulation: and men
must become more generous and benevolent, not more selfish and
effeminate, as they become more rich, or the history of modern wealth
will follow in the sad train of all past examples.

All men desire distinction, and feel the need of some ennobling object
in life. Those persons are usually most happy and satisfied in their
pursuits, who have the loftiest ends in view. Artists, mechanicians, and
inventors, all who seek to find principles or develop beauty in their
work, seem most to enjoy it. The farmer who labors for the beautifying
and scientific cultivation of his estate, is more happy in his labors
than one who tills his own land for a mere subsistence. This is one of
the signal testimonies which all human employments give to the high
demands of our nature. To gather wealth never gives such satisfaction as
to bring the humblest piece of machinery to perfection: at least, when
wealth is sought for display and ostentation, or mere luxury, and ease,
and pleasure; and not for ends of philanthropy, the relief of kindred,
or the payment of just debts, or as a means to attain some other great
and noble object.

With the pursuits of multitudes is connected a painful conviction that
they neither supply a sufficient object, nor confer any satisfactory
honor. Why work, if the world is soon not to know that such a being ever
existed; and when one can perpetuate his name neither on canvas nor on
marble, nor in books, nor by lofty eloquence, nor statesmanship?

The answer is, that every man has a work to do in himself, greater and
sublimer than any work of genius; and works upon a nobler material than
wood or marble--upon his own soul and intellect, and may so attain the
highest nobleness and grandeur known on earth or in Heaven; may so be
the greatest of artists, and of authors, and his life, which is far more
than speech, may be eloquent.

The great author or artist only portrays what every man should _be_. He
_conceives_, what we should _do_. He conceives, and represents moral
beauty, magnanimity, fortitude, love, devotion, forgiveness, the soul's
greatness. He portrays virtues, commended to our admiration and
imitation. To embody these portraitures in our lives is the practical
realization of those great ideals of art. The magnanimity of Heroes,
celebrated on the historic or poetic page; the constancy and faith of
Truth's martyrs; the beauty of love and piety glowing on the canvas; the
delineations of Truth and Right, that flash from the lips of the
Eloquent, are, in their essence only that which every man may feel and
practise in the daily walks of life. The work of virtue is nobler than
any work of genius; for it is a nobler thing to _be_ a hero than to
_describe_ one, to _endure_ martyrdom than to _paint_ it, to _do_ right
than to _plead_ for it. Action is greater than writing. A good man is a
nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two
things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to
write what is worthy of being read; and the greater of these is _the
doing_.

Every man has to do the noblest thing that any man can do or describe.
There is a wide field for the courage, cheerfulness, energy, and dignity
of human existence. Let therefore no Mason deem his life doomed to
mediocrity or meanness, to vanity or unprofitable toil, or to any ends
less than immortal. No one can truly say that the grand prizes of life
are for others, and he can do nothing. No matter how magnificent and
noble an act the author can describe or the artist paint, it will be
still nobler for you to go and _do_ that which one describes, or _be_
the model which the other draws.

The loftiest action that ever was described is not more magnanimous than
that which we may find occasion to do, in the daily walks of life; in
temptation, in distress, in bereavement, in the solemn approach to
death. In the great Providence of God, in the great ordinances of our
being, there is opened to every man a sphere for the noblest action. It
is not even in extraordinary situations, where all eyes are upon us,
where all our energy is aroused, and all our vigilance is awake, that
the highest efforts of virtue are usually demanded of us; but rather in
silence and seclusion, amidst our occupations and our homes; in wearing
sickness, that makes no complaint; in sorely-tried honesty, that asks no
praise; in simple disinterestedness, hiding the hand that resigns its
advantage to another.

Masonry seeks to ennoble common life. Its work is to go down into the
obscure and unsearched records of daily conduct and feeling; and to
portray, not the ordinary virtue of an extraordinary life; but the more
extraordinary virtue of ordinary life. What is done and borne in the
shades of privacy, in the hard and beaten path of daily care and toil,
full of uncelebrated sacrifices; in the suffering, and sometimes
insulted suffering, that wears to the world a cheerful brow; in the long
strife of the spirit, resisting pain, penury, and neglect, carried on in
the inmost depths of the heart;--what is done, and borne, and wrought,
and won there, is a higher glory, and shall inherit a brighter crown.

On the volume of Masonic life one bright word is written, from which on
every side blazes an ineffable splendor. That word is DUTY.

To aid in securing to all labor permanent employment and its just
reward: to help to hasten the coming of that time when no one shall
suffer from hunger or destitution, because, though willing and able to
work, he can find no employment, or because he has been overtaken by
sickness in the midst of his labor, are part of your duties as a Knight
of the Royal Axe. And if we can succeed in making some small nook of
God's creation a little more fruitful and cheerful, a little better and
more worthy of Him,--or in making some one or two human hearts a little
wiser, and more manful and hopeful and happy, we shall have done work,
worthy of Masons, and acceptable to our Father in Heaven.




XXIII.

CHIEF OF THE TABERNACLE.


Among most of the Ancient Nations there was, in addition to their public
worship, a private one styled the Mysteries; to which those only were
admitted who had been prepared by certain ceremonies called initiations.

The most widely disseminated of the ancient worships were those of Isis,
Orpheus, Dionusos, Ceres and Mithras. Many barbarous nations received
the knowledge of the Mysteries in honor of these divinities from the
Egyptians, before they arrived in Greece; and even in the British Isles
the Druids celebrated those of Dionusos, learned by them from the
Egyptians.

The Mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated at Athens in honor of Ceres,
swallowed up, as it were, all the others. All the neighboring nations
neglected their own, to celebrate those of Eleusis; and in a little
while all Greece and Asia Minor were filled with the Initiates. They
spread into the Roman Empire, and even beyond its limits, "those holy
and august Eleusinian Mysteries," said Cicero, "in which the people of
the remotest lands are initiated." Zosimus says that they embraced the
whole human race; and Aristides termed them the common temple of the
whole world.

There were, in the Eleusinian feasts, two sorts of Mysteries, the great,
and the little. The latter were a kind of preparation for the former;
and everybody was admitted to them. Ordinarily there was a novitiate of
three, and sometimes of four years.

Clemens of Alexandria says that what was taught in the great Mysteries
concerned the Universe, and was the completion and perfection of all
instruction; wherein things were seen as they were, and nature and her
works were made known.

The ancients said that the Initiates would be more happy after death
than other mortals; and that, while the souls of the Profane on leaving
their bodies, would be plunged in the mire, and remain buried in
darkness, those of the Initiates would fly to the Fortunate Isles, the
abode of the Gods.

Plato said that the object of the Mysteries was to re-establish the soul
in its primitive purity, and in that state of perfection which it had
lost. Epictetus said, "whatever is met with therein has been instituted
by our Masters, for the instruction of man and the correction of
morals."

Proclus held that initiation elevated the soul, from a material,
sensual, and purely human life, to a communion and celestial intercourse
with the Gods; and that a variety of things, forms, and species were
shown Initiates, representing the first generation of the Gods.

Purity of morals and elevation of soul were required of the Initiates.
Candidates were required to be of spotless reputation and irreproachable
virtue. Nero, after murdering his mother, did not dare to be present at
the celebration of the Mysteries: and Antony presented himself to be
initiated, as the most infallible mode of proving his innocence of the
death of Avidius Cassius.

The Initiates were regarded as the only fortunate men. "It is upon us
alone," says Aristophanes, "shineth the beneficent day-star. We alone
receive pleasure from the influence of his rays; we, who are initiated,
and who practise toward citizen and stranger every possible act of
justice and piety." And it is therefore not surprising that, in time,
initiation came to be considered as necessary as baptism afterward was
to the Christians; and that not to have been admitted to the Mysteries
was held a dishonor.

"It seems to me," says the great orator, philosopher, and moralist,
Cicero, "that Athens, among many excellent inventions, divine and very
useful to the human family, has produced none comparable to the
Mysteries, which for a wild and ferocious life have substituted humanity
and urbanity of manners. It is with good reason they use the term
_initiation_; for it is through them that we in reality have learned the
first principles of life; and they not only teach us to live in a manner
more consoling and agreeable, but they soften the pains of death by the
hope of a better life hereafter."

Where the Mysteries originated is not known. It is supposed they came
from India, by the way of Chaldæa, into Egypt, and thence were carried
into Greece. Wherever they arose, they were practised among all the
ancient nations; and, as was usual, the Thracians, Cretans, and
Athenians each claimed the honor of invention, and each insisted that
they had borrowed nothing from any other people.

In Egypt and the East, all religion, even in its most poetical forms,
was more or less a mystery; and the chief reason why, in Greece, a
distinct name and office were assigned to the Mysteries, was because the
superficial popular theology left a want unsatisfied, which religion in
a wider sense alone could supply. They were practical acknowledgments of
the insufficiency of the popular religion to satisfy the deeper thoughts
and aspirations of the mind. The vagueness of symbolism might perhaps
reach what a more palpable and conventional creed could not. The former,
by its indefiniteness, acknowledged the abstruseness of its subject; it
treated a mysterious subject mystically; it endeavored to illustrate
what it could not explain; to excite an appropriate feeling, if it could
not develop an adequate idea; and made the image a mere subordinate
conveyance for the conception, which itself never became too obvious or
familiar.

The instruction now conveyed by books and letters was of old conveyed by
symbols; and the priest had to invent or to perpetuate a display of
rites and exhibitions, which were not only more attractive to the eye
than words, but often to the mind more suggestive and pregnant with
meaning.

Afterward, the institution became rather moral and political, than
religious. The civil magistrates shaped the ceremonies to political ends
in Egypt; the sages who carried them from that country to Asia, Greece,
and the North of Europe, were all kings or legislators. The chief
magistrate presided at those of Eleusis, represented by an officer
styled _King_: and the Priest played but a subordinate part.

The Powers revered in the Mysteries were all in reality Nature-Gods;
none of whom could be consistently addressed as mere heroes, because
their nature was confessedly super-heroic. The Mysteries, only in fact a
more solemn expression of the religion of the ancient poetry, taught
that doctrine of the Theocracia or Divine Oneness, which even poetry
does not entirely conceal. They were not in any open hostility with the
popular religion, but only a more solemn exhibition of its symbols; or
rather a part of itself in a more impressive form. The essence of all
Mysteries, as of all polytheism, consists in this, that the conception
of an unapproachable Being, single, eternal, and unchanging, and that
of a God of Nature, whose manifold power is immediately revealed to the
senses in the incessant round of movement, life, and death, fell asunder
in the treatment, and were separately symbolized. They offered a
perpetual problem to excite curiosity, and contributed to satisfy the
all-pervading religious sentiment, which if it obtain no nourishment
among the simple and intelligible, finds compensating excitement in a
reverential contemplation of the obscure.

Nature is as free from dogmatism as from tyranny; and the earliest
instructors of mankind not only adopted her lessons, but as far as
possible adhered to her method of imparting them. They attempted to
reach the understanding through the eye; and the greater part of all
religious teaching was conveyed through this ancient and most impressive
mode of "exhibition" or demonstration. The Mysteries were a sacred
drama, exhibiting some legend significant of Nature's change, of the
visible Universe in which the divinity is revealed, and whose import was
in many respects as open to the Pagan, as to the Christian. Beyond the
current traditions or sacred recitals of the temple, few explanations
were given to the spectators, who were left, as in the school of nature,
to make inferences for themselves.

The method of indirect suggestion, by allegory or symbol, is a more
efficacious instrument of instruction than plain didactic language;
since we are habitually indifferent to that which is acquired without
effort: "The initiated are few, though many bear the thyrsus." And it
would have been impossible to provide a lesson suited to every degree of
cultivation and capacity, unless it were one framed after Nature's
example, or rather a representation of Nature herself, employing her
universal symbolism instead of technicalities of language, inviting
endless research, yet rewarding the humblest inquirer, and disclosing
its secrets to every one in Proportion to his preparatory training and
power to comprehend them.

Even if destitute of any formal or official enunciation of those
important truths, which even in a cultivated age it was often found
inexpedient to assert except under a veil of allegory, and which
moreover lose their dignity and value in proportion as they are learned
mechanically as dogmas, the shows of the Mysteries certainly contained
suggestions if not lessons, which in the opinion not of one competent
witness only, but of many, were adapted to elevate the character of the
spectators, enabling them to augur something of the purposes of
existence, as well as of the means of improving it, to live better and
to die happier.

Unlike the religion of books or creeds, these mystic shows and
performances were not the reading of a lecture, but the opening of a
problem, implying neither exemption from research, nor hostility to
philosophy: for, on the contrary, philosophy is the great Mystagogue or
Arch-Expounder of symbolism: though the interpretations by the Grecian
Philosophy of the old myths and symbols were in many instances as
ill-founded, as in others they are correct.

No better means could be devised to rouse a dormant intellect, than
those impressive exhibitions, which addressed it through the
imagination: which, instead of condemning it to a prescribed routine of
creed, invited it to seek, compare, and judge. The alteration from
symbol to dogma is as fatal to beauty of expression, as that from faith
to dogma is to truth and wholesomeness of thought.

The first philosophy often reverted to the natural mode of teaching; and
Socrates, in particular, is said to have eschewed dogmas, endeavoring,
like the Mysteries, rather to awaken and develop in the minds of his
hearers the ideas with which they were already endowed or pregnant, than
to fill them with ready-made adventitious opinions.

So Masonry still follows the ancient manner of teaching. Her symbols are
the instruction she gives; and the lectures are but often partial and
insufficient one-sided endeavors to interpret those symbols. He who
would become an accomplished Mason, must not be content merely to hear
or even to understand the lectures, but must, aided by them, and they
having as it were marked out the way for him, study, interpret, and
develop the symbols for himself.

The earliest speculation endeavored to express far more than it could
distinctly comprehend; and the vague impressions of the mind found in
the mysterious analogies of phenomena their most apt and energetic
representations. The Mysteries, like the symbols of Masonry, were but an
image of the eloquent analogies of Nature; both those and these
revealing no new secret to such as were or are unprepared, or incapable
of interpreting their significance.

Everywhere in the old Mysteries, and in all the symbolisms and
ceremonial of the Hierophant was found the same mythical personage, who,
like Hermes, or Zoroaster, unites Human Attributes with Divine, and is
himself the God whose worship he introduced, teaching rude men the
commencements of civilization through the influence of song, and
connecting with the symbol of his death, emblematic of that of Nature,
the most essential consolations of religion.

The Mysteries embraced the three great doctrines of Ancient Theosophy.
They treated of God, Man, and Nature. Dionusos, whose Mysteries Orpheus
is said to have founded, was the God of Nature, or of the moisture which
is the life of Nature, who prepares in darkness the return of life and
vegetation, or who is himself the Light and Change evolving their
varieties. He was theologically one with Hermes, Prometheus, and
Poseidon. In the Egean Islands he is Butes, Dardanus, Himeros, or
Imbros. In Crete he appears as Iasius or Zeus, whose worship remaining
unveiled by the usual forms of mystery, betrayed to profane curiosity
the symbols, which, if irreverently contemplated, were sure to be
misunderstood. In Asia he is the long-stoled Bassareus coalescing with
the Sabazius of the Phrygian Corybantes: the same with the mystic
Iacchus, nursling or son of Ceres, and with the dismembered Zagreus, son
of Persephoné.

In symbolical forms the Mysteries exhibited THE ONE, of which THE
MANIFOLD is an infinite illustration, containing a moral lesson,
calculated to guide the soul through life, and to cheer it in death. The
story of Dionusos was profoundly significant. He was not only creator of
the world, but guardian, liberator, and Savior of the soul. God of the
many-colored mantle, he was the resulting manifestation personified, the
all in the many, the varied year, life passing into innumerable forms.

The spiritual regeneration of man was typified in the Mysteries by the
second birth of Dionusos as offspring of the Highest; and the agents and
symbols of that regeneration were the elements that affected Nature's
periodical purification--the air, indicated by the mystic fan or winnow;
the fire, signified by the torch; and the baptismal water, for water is
not only cleanser of all things, but the genesis or source of all.

These notions, clothed in ritual, suggested the soul's reformation and
training, the moral purity formally proclaimed at Eleusis. He only was
invited to approach, who was "of clean hands and ingenuous speech, free
from all pollution, and with a clear conscience." "Happy the man," say
the initiated in Euripides and Aristophanes, "who purifies his life,
and who reverently consecrates his soul in the thiăsos of the God. Let
him take heed to his lips that he utter no profane word; let him be just
and kind to the stranger, and to his neighbor; let him give way to no
vicious excess, lest he make dull and heavy the organs of the spirit.
Far from the mystic dance of the thiăsos be the impure the evil speaker,
the seditious citizen, the selfish hunter after gain, the traitor; all
those, in short, whose practices are more akin to the riot of Titans
than to the regulated life of the Orphici, or the Curetan order of the
Priests of Idæan Zeus."

The votary, elevated beyond the sphere of his ordinary faculties, and
unable to account for the agitation which overpowered him, seemed to
become divine in proportion as he ceased to be human; to be a dæmon or
god. Already, in imagination, the initiated were numbered among the
beatified. They alone enjoyed the true life, the Sun's true lustre,
while they hymned their God beneath the mystic groves of a mimic
Elysium, and were really renovated or regenerated under the genial
influence of their dances.

"They whom Proserpina guides in her mysteries," it was said, "who
imbibed her instruction and spiritual nourishment, rest from their
labors and know strife no more. Happy they who witness and comprehend
these sacred ceremonies! They are made to know the meaning of the riddle
of existence by observing its aim and termination as appointed by Zeus;
they partake a benefit more valuable and enduring than the grain
bestowed by Ceres; for they are exalted in the scale of intellectual
existence, and obtain sweet hopes to console them at their death."

No doubt the ceremonies of initiation were originally few and simple. As
the great truths of the primitive revelation faded out of the memories
of the masses of the People, and wickedness became rife upon the earth,
it became necessary to discriminate, to require longer probation and
satisfactory tests of the candidates, and by spreading around what at
first were rather schools of instruction than mysteries, the veil of
secrecy, and the pomp of ceremony, to heighten the opinion of their
value and importance.

Whatever pictures later and especially Christian writers may draw of the
Mysteries, they must, not only originally, but for many ages, have
continued pure; and the doctrines of natural religion and morals there
taught, have been of the highest importance; because both the most
virtuous as well as the most learned and philosophic of the ancients
speak of them in the loftiest terms. That they ultimately became
degraded from their high estate, and corrupted, we know.

The rites of initiation became progressively more complicated. Signs and
tokens were invented by which the Children of Light could with facility
make themselves known to each other. Different Degrees were invented, as
the number of Initiates enlarged, in order that there might be in the
inner apartment of the Temple a favored few, to whom alone the more
valuable secrets were entrusted, and who could wield effectually the
influence and power of the Order.

Originally the Mysteries were meant to be the beginning of a new life of
reason and virtue. The initiated or esoteric companions were taught the
doctrine of the One Supreme God, the theory of death and eternity, the
hidden mysteries of Nature, the prospect of the ultimate restoration of
the soul to that state of perfection from which it had fallen, its
immortality, and the states of reward and punishment after death. The
uninitiated were deemed Profane, unworthy of public employment or
private confidence, sometimes proscribed as Atheists, and certain of
ever-lasting punishment beyond the grave.

All persons were initiated into the lesser Mysteries; but few attained
the greater, in which the true spirit of them, and most of their secret
doctrines were hidden. The veil of secrecy was impenetrable, sealed by
oaths and penalties the most tremendous and appalling. It was by
initiation only, that a knowledge of the Hieroglyphics could be
obtained, with which the walls, columns, and ceilings of the Temples
were decorated, and which, believed to have been communicated to the
Priests by revelation from the celestial deities, the youth of all ranks
were laudably ambitious of deciphering.

The ceremonies were performed at dead of night, generally in apartments
under-ground, but sometimes in the centre of a vast Pyramid, with every
appliance that could alarm and excite the candidate. Innumerable
ceremonies, wild and romantic, dreadful and appalling, had by degrees
been added to the few expressive symbols of primitive observances, under
which there were instances in which the terrified aspirant actually
expired with fear.

The pyramids were probably used for the purposes of initiation, as were
caverns, pagodas, and labyrinths; for the ceremonies required many
apartments and cells, long passages and wells. In Egypt a principal
place for the Mysteries was the island of Philæ on the Nile, where a
magnificent Temple of Osiris stood, and his relics were said to be
preserved.

With their natural proclivities, the Priesthood, that select and
exclusive class, in Egypt, India, Phœnicia, Judea and Greece as well as
in Britain and Rome, and wherever else the Mysteries were known, made
use of them to build wider and higher the fabric of their own power. The
purity of no religion continues long. Rank and dignities succeed to the
primitive simplicity. Unprincipled, vain, insolent, corrupt, and venal
men put on God's livery to serve the Devil withal; and luxury, vice,
intolerance, and pride depose frugality, virtue, gentleness, and
humility, and change the altar where they should be servants, to a
throne on which they reign.

But the Kings, Philosophers, and Statesmen, the wise and great and good
who were admitted to the Mysteries, long postponed their ultimate
self-destruction, and restrained the natural tendencies of the
Priesthood. And accordingly Zosimus thought that the neglect of the
Mysteries after Diocletian abdicated, was the chief cause of the decline
of the Roman Empire; and in the year 364, the Proconsul of Greece would
not close the Mysteries, notwithstanding a law of the Emperor
Valentinian, lest the people should be driven to desperation, if
prevented from performing them; upon which, as they believed, the
welfare of mankind wholly depended. They were practised in Athens until
the 8th century, in Greece and Rome for several centuries after Christ;
and in Wales and Scotland down to the 12th century.

The inhabitants of India originally practised the Patriarchal religion.
Even the later worship of Vishnu was cheerful and social; accompanied
with the festive song, the sprightly dance, and the resounding cymbal,
with libations of milk and honey, garlands, and perfumes from aromatic
woods and gums.

There perhaps the Mysteries commenced; and in them, under allegories,
were taught the primitive truths. We cannot, within the limits of this
lecture, detail the ceremonies of initiation; and shall use general
language, except where something from those old Mysteries still remains
in Masonry.

The Initiate was invested with a cord of three threads, so twined as to
make three times three, and called _zennar_. Hence comes our cable-tow.
It was an emblem of their triune Deity, the remembrance of whom we also
preserve in the three chief officers of our Lodges, presiding in the
three quarters of that Universe which our Lodges represent; in our three
greater and three lesser lights, our three movable and three immovable
jewels, and the three pillars that support our Lodges.

The Indian Mysteries were celebrated in subterranean caverns and grottos
hewn in the solid rock; and the Initiates adored the Deity, symbolized
by the solar fire. The candidate, long wandering in darkness, truly
wanted Light, and the worship taught him was the worship of God, the
Source of Light. The vast Temple of Elephanta, perhaps the oldest in the
world, hewn out of the rock, and 135 feet square, was used for
initiations; as were the still vaster caverns of Salsette, with their
300 apartments.

The periods of initiation were regulated by the increase and decrease of
the moon. The Mysteries were divided into four steps or Degrees. The
candidate might receive the first at eight years of age, when he was
invested with the zennar. Each Degree dispensed something of perfection.
"Let the wretched man," says the Hitopadesa, "practise virtue, whenever
he enjoys one of the three or four religious Degrees; let him be
even-minded with all created things, and that disposition will be the
source of virtue."

After various ceremonies, chiefly relating to the unity and trinity of
the Godhead, the candidate was clothed in a linen garment without a
seam, and remained under the care of a Brahmin until he was twenty years
of age, constantly studying and practising the most rigid virtue. Then
he underwent the severest probation for the second Degree, in which he
was sanctified by the sign of the cross, which, pointing to the four
quarters of the compass, was honored as a striking symbol of the
Universe by many nations of antiquity, and was imitated by the Indians
in the shape of their temples.

Then he was admitted to the Holy Cavern, blazing with light, where, in
costly robes, sat, in the East, West, and South, the three chief
Hierophants, representing the Indian tri-une Deity. The ceremonies there
commenced with an anthem to the Great God of Nature; and then followed
this apostrophe: "O mighty Being! greater than Brahma! we bow down
before Thee as the primal Creator! Eternal God of Gods! The World's
Mansion! Thou art the Incorruptible Being, distinct from all things
transient! Thou art before all Gods, the Ancient Absolute Existence, and
the Supreme Supporter of the Universe! Thou art the Supreme Mansion; and
by Thee, O Infinite Form, the Universe was spread abroad."

The candidate, thus taught the first great primitive truth was called
upon to make a formal declaration, that he would be tractable and
obedient to his superiors; that he would keep his body pure; govern his
tongue, and observe a passive obedience in receiving the doctrines and
traditions of the Order; and the firmest secrecy in maintaining
inviolable its hidden and abstruse mysteries. Then he was sprinkled with
water (whence our _baptism_); certain words, now unknown, were whispered
in his ear; and he was divested of his shoes, and made to go three times
around the cavern. Hence our three circuits; hence we were neither
barefoot nor shod: and the words were the Pass-words of that Indian
Degree.

The Gymnosophist Priests came from the banks of the Euphrates into
Ethiopia, and brought with them their sciences and their doctrines.
Their principal College was at Meroe, and their Mysteries were
celebrated in the Temple of Amun, renowned for his oracle. Ethiopia was
then a powerful State, which preceded Egypt in civilization, and had a
theocratic government. Above the King was the Priest, who could put him
to death in the name of the Deity. Egypt was then composed of the
Thebaid only. Middle Egypt and the Delta were a gulf of the
Mediterranean. The Nile by degrees formed an immense marsh, which,
afterward drained by the labor of man, formed Lower Egypt; and was for
many centuries governed by the Ethiopian Sacerdotal Caste, of Arabic
origin; afterward displaced by a dynasty of warriors. The magnificent
ruins of Axoum, with its obelisks and hieroglyphics, temples, vast tombs
and pyramids, around ancient Meroe, are far older than the pyramids near
Memphis.

The Priests, taught by Hermes, embodied in books the occult and hermetic
sciences, with their own discoveries and the revelations of the Sibyls.
They studied particularly the most abstract sciences, discovered the
famous geometrical theorems which Pythagoras afterward learned from
them, calculated eclipses, and regulated, nineteen centuries before
Cæsar, the Julian year. They descended to practical investigations as
to the necessities of life, and made known their discoveries to the
people; they cultivated the fine arts, and inspired the people with that
enthusiasm which produced the avenues of Thebes, the Labyrinth, the
Temples of Karnac, Denderah, Edfou, and Philæ, the monolithic obelisks,
and the great Lake Moeris, the fertilizer of the country.

The wisdom of the Egyptian Initiates, the high sciences and lofty
morality which they taught, and their immense knowledge, excited the
emulation of the most eminent men, whatever their rank and fortune; and
led them, despite the complicated and terrible trials to be undergone,
to seek admission into the Mysteries of Osiris and Isis.

From Egypt, the Mysteries went to Phoenicia, and were celebrated at
Tyre. Osiris changed his name, and become Adoni or Dionusos, still the
representative of the Sun; and afterward these Mysteries were introduced
successively into Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Sicily, and Italy.
In Greece and Sicily, Osiris took the name of Bacchus, and Isis that of
Ceres, Cybele, Rhea and Venus.

Bar Hebraeus says: "Enoch was the first who invented books and different
sorts of writing. The ancient Greeks declare that Enoch is the same as
Mercury Trismegistus [Hermes], and that he taught the sons of men the
art of building cities, and enacted some admirable laws.... He
discovered the knowledge of the Zodiac, and the course of the Planets;
and he pointed out to the sons of men, that they should worship God,
that they should fast, that they should pray, that they should give
alms, votive offerings, and tenths. He reprobated abominable foods and
drunkenness, and appointed festivals for sacrifices to the Sun, at each
of the Zodiacal Signs."

Manetho extracted his history from certain pillars which he discovered
in Egypt, whereon inscriptions had been made by Thoth, or the first
Mercury [or Hermes], in the sacred letters and dialect: but which were
after the flood translated from that dialect into the Greek tongue, and
laid up in the private recesses of the Egyptian Temples. These pillars
were found in subterranean caverns, near Thebes and beyond the Nile, not
far from the sounding statue of Memnon, in a place called Syringes;
which are described to be certain winding apartments underground; made,
it is said, by those who were skilled in ancient rites; who, foreseeing
the coming of the Deluge, and fearing lest the memory of their
ceremonies should be obliterated, built and contrived vaults, dug with
vast labor, in several places.

From the bosom of Egypt sprang a man of consummate wisdom, initiated in
the secret knowledge of India, of Persia, and of Ethiopia, named Thoth
or Phtha by his compatriots, Taaut by the Phoenicians, Hermes
Trismegistus by the Greeks, and Adris by the Rabbins. Nature seemed to
have chosen him for her favorite and to have lavished on him all the
qualities necessary to enable him to study her and to know her
thoroughly. The Deity had, so to say, infused into him the sciences and
the arts, in order that he might instruct the whole world.

He invented many things necessary for the uses of life, and gave them
suitable names; he taught men how to write down their thoughts and
arrange their speech; he instituted the ceremonies to be observed in the
worship of each of the Gods; he observed the course of the stars; he
invented music, the different bodily exercises, arithmetic, medicine,
the art of working in metals, the lyre with three strings; he regulated
the three tones of the voice, the _sharp_, taken from autumn, the
_grave_ from winter, and the _middle_ from spring, there being then but
three seasons. It was he who taught the Greeks the mode of interpreting
terms and things, whence they gave him the name of [Greek: Hermes]
[_Hermes_], which signifies _Interpreter_.

In Egypt he instituted hieroglyphics: he selected a certain number of
persons whom he judged fitted to be the depositaries of his secrets, of
such only as were capable of attaining the throne and the first offices
in the Mysteries; he united them in a body, created them _Priests of the
Living God_, instructed them in the sciences and arts, and explained to
them the symbols by which they were veiled. Egypt, 1500 years before the
time of Moses, revered in the Mysteries ONE SUPREME GOD, called the ONLY
UNCREATED. Under Him it paid homage to seven principal deities. It is to
Hermes, who lived at that period, that we must attribute the concealment
or _veiling_ [_velation_] of the Indian worship, which Moses _unveiled_
or _revealed_, changing nothing of the laws of Hermes, except the
plurality of his mystic Gods.

The Egyptian Priests related that Hermes, dying, said: "Hitherto I have
lived an exile from my true country: now I return thither. Do not weep
for me: I return to that celestial country whither each goes in his
turn. There is God. This life is but a death." This is precisely the
creed of the old Buddhists of Samaneans, who believed that from time to
time God sent Buddhas on earth, to reform men, to wean them from their
vices, and lead them back into the paths of virtue.

Among the sciences taught by Hermes, there were secrets which he
communicated to the Initiates only upon condition that they should bind
themselves, by a terrible oath, never to divulge them, except to those
who, after long trial, should be found worthy to succeed them. The Kings
even prohibited the revelation of them on pain of death. This secret was
styled the Sacerdotal Art, and included alchemy, astrology, magism
[magic], the science of spirits, etc. He gave them the key to the
Hieroglyphics of all these secret sciences, which were regarded as
sacred, and kept concealed in the most secret places of the Temple.

The great secrecy observed by the initiated Priests, for many years, and
the lofty sciences which they professed, caused them to be honored and
respected throughout all Egypt, which was regarded by other nations as
the college, the sanctuary, of the sciences and arts. The mystery which
surrounded them strongly excited curiosity. Orpheus metamorphosed
himself, so to say, into an Egyptian. He was initiated into Theology and
Physics. And he so completely made the ideas and reasonings of his
teachers his own, that his Hymns rather bespeak an Egyptian Priest than
a Grecian Poet: and he was the first who carried into Greece the
Egyptian fables.

Pythagoras, ever thirsty for learning, consented even to be circumcised,
in order to become one of the Initiates: and the occult sciences were
revealed to him in the innermost part of the sanctuary.

The Initiates in a particular science, having been instructed by fables,
enigmas, allegories, and hieroglyphics, wrote mysteriously whenever in
their works they touched the subject of the Mysteries, and continued to
conceal science under a veil of fictions.

When the destruction by Cambyses of many cities, and the ruin of nearly
all Egypt, in the year 528 before our era, dispersed most of the Priests
into Greece and elsewhere, they bore with them their sciences, which
they continued to teach enigmatically, that is to say, ever enveloped in
the obscurities of fables and hieroglyphics; to the end that the vulgar
herd, seeing, might see nothing, and hearing, might comprehend nothing.
All the writers drew from this source: but these Mysteries, concealed
under so many unexplained envelopes, ended in giving birth to a swarm of
absurdities, which, from Greece, spread over the whole earth.

In the Grecian Mysteries, as established by Pythagoras, there were three
Degrees. A preparation of five years' abstinence and silence was
required. If the candidate was found to be passionate or intemperate,
contentious, or ambitious of worldly honors and distinctions, he was
rejected.

In his lectures, Pythagoras taught the mathematics, as a medium whereby
to prove the existence of God from observation and by means of reason;
grammar, rhetoric, and logic, to cultivate and improve that reason,
arithmetic, because he conceived that the ultimate benefit of man
consisted in the science of numbers, and geometry, music, and astronomy,
because he conceived that man is indebted to them for a knowledge of
what is really good and useful.

He taught the true method of obtaining a knowledge of the Divine laws of
purifying the soul from its imperfections, of searching for truth, and
of practising virtue; thus imitating the perfections of God. He thought
his system vain, if it did not contribute to expel vice and introduce
virtue into the mind. He taught that the two most excellent things were,
to speak the truth, and to render benefits to one another. Particularly
he inculcated Silence, Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, and Justice. He
taught the immortality of the soul, the Omnipotence of God, and the
necessity of personal holiness to qualify a man for admission into the
Society of the Gods.

Thus we owe the particular mode of instruction in the Degree of
Fellow-Craft to Pythagoras; and that Degree is but an imperfect
reproduction of his lectures. From him, too, we have many of our
explanations of the symbols. He arranged his assemblies due East and
West, because he held that Motion began in the East and proceeded to the
West. Our Lodges are said to be due East and West, because the Master
represents the rising Sun, and of course must be in the East. The
pyramids, too, were built precisely by the four cardinal points. And our
expression, that our Lodges extend upward to the Heavens, comes from the
Persian and Druidic custom of having to their Temples no roofs but the
sky.

Plato developed and spiritualized the philosophy of Pythagoras. Even
Eusebius the Christian admits, that he reached to the vestibule of
Truth, and stood upon its threshold.

The Druidical ceremonies undoubtedly came from India; and the Druids
were originally Buddhists. The word _Druidh_, like the word _Magi_,
signifies wise or learned men; and they were at once philosophers,
magistrates, and divines.

There was a surprising uniformity in the Temples, Priests, doctrines,
and worship of the Persian Magi and British Druids. The Gods of Britain
were the same as the Cabiri of Samothrace. Osiris and Isis appeared in
their Mysteries, under the names of Hu and Ceridwen; and like those of
the primitive Persians, their Temples were enclosures of huge unhewn
stones, some of which still remain, and are regarded by the common
people with fear and veneration. They were generally either circular or
oval. Some were in the shape of a circle to which a vast serpent was
attached. The circle was an Eastern symbol of the Universe, governed by
an Omnipotent Deity whose centre is everywhere, and his circumference
nowhere: and the egg was an universal symbol of the world. Some of the
Temples were winged, and some in the shape of a cross; the winged ones
referring to Kneph, the winged Serpent-Deity of Egypt; whence the name
of _Navestock_, where one of them stood. Temples in the shape of a cross
were also found in Ireland and Scotland. The length of one of these vast
structures, in the shape of a serpent, was nearly three miles.

The grand periods for initiation into the Druidical Mysteries, were
quarterly; at the equinoxes and solstices. In the remote times when they
originated, these were the times corresponding with the 13th of
February, 1st of May, 19th of August, and 1st of November. The time of
annual celebration was May-Eve, and the ceremonial preparations
commenced at midnight, on the 29th of April. When the initiations were
over, on May-Eve, fires were kindled on all the cairns and cromlechs in
the island, which burned all night to introduce the sports of May-day.
The festival was in honor of the Sun. The initiations were performed at
midnight; and there were three Degrees.

The Gothic Mysteries were carried Northward from the East, by Odin; who,
being a great warrior, modelled and varied them to suit his purposes and
the genius of his people. He placed over their celebration twelve
Hierophants, who were alike Priests, Counsellors of State, and Judges
from whose decision there was no appeal.

He held the numbers three and nine in peculiar veneration and was
probably himself the Indian Buddha. Every thrice-three months,
thrice-three victims were sacrificed to the tri-une God.

The Goths had three great festivals; the most magnificent of which
commenced at the winter solstice, and was celebrated in honor of Thor,
the Prince of the Power of the Air. That being the longest night in the
year, and the one after which the Sun comes Northward, it was
commemorative of the Creation; and they termed it mother-night, as the
one in which the creation of the world and light from the primitive
darkness took place. This was the _Yule, Juul,_ or _Yeol_ feast, which
afterward became Christmas. At this feast the initiations were
celebrated. Thor was the Sun, the Egyptian Osiris and Kneph, the
Phœnician Bel or Baal. The initiations were had in huge intricate
caverns, terminating, as all the Mithriac caverns did, in a spacious
vault, where the candidate _was brought to light_.

Joseph was undoubtedly initiated. After he had interpreted Pharaoh's
dream, that Monarch made him his Prime Minister, let him ride in his
second chariot, while they proclaimed before him, ABRECH![1] and set him
over the land of Egypt. In addition to this, the King gave him a new
name, Tsapanat-Paänakh, and married him to Asanat, daughter of Potai
Parang, a Priest of An or Hieropolis, where was the Temple of Athom-Re,
the Great God of Egypt; thus completely naturalizing him. He could not
have contracted this marriage, nor have exercised that high dignity,
without being first initiated in the Mysteries. When his Brethren came
to Egypt the second time, the Egyptians of his court could not eat with
them, as that would have been abomination, though they ate with Joseph;
who was therefore regarded not as a foreigner, but as one of themselves:
and when he sent and brought his brethren back, and charged them with
taking his cup, he said, "Know ye not that a man like me practises
divination?" thus assuming the Egyptian of high rank initiated into the
Mysteries, and as such conversant with the occult sciences.

[Footnote 1: An Egyptian word, meaning, _"Bow down."_]

So also must Moses have been initiated: for he was not only brought up
in the court of the King, as the adopted son of the King's daughter,
until he was forty years of age; but he was instructed in all the
learning of the Egyptians, and married afterward the daughter of
Yethrū, a Priest of An likewise. Strabo and Diodorus both assert that he
was himself a Priest of Heliopolis. Before he went into the Desert,
there were intimate relations between him and the Priesthood; and he had
successfully commanded, Josephus informs us, an army sent by the King
against the Ethiopians. Simglicius asserts that Moses received from the
Egyptians, in the Mysteries, the doctrines which he taught to the
Hebrews: and Clemens of Alexandria and Philo say that he was a
Theologian and Prophet, and interpreter of the Sacred Laws. Manetho,
cited by Josephus, says he was a Priest of Heliopolis, and that his true
and original (Egyptian) name was Asersaph or Osarsiph.

And in the institution of the Hebrew Priesthood, in the powers and
privileges, as well as the immunities and sanctity which he conferred
upon them, he closely imitated the Egyptian institutions; making
_public_ the worship of that Deity whom the Egyptian Initiates
worshipped in private; and strenuously endeavoring to keep the people
from relapsing into their old mixture of Chaldaic and Egyptian
superstition and idol-worship, as they were ever ready and inclined to
do; even Aharūn, upon their first clamorous discontent, restoring the
worship of Apis; as an image of which Egyptian God he made the golden
calf.

The Egyptian Priests taught in their great Mysteries, that there was one
God, Supreme and Unapproachable, who had _conceived_ the Universe by His
Intelligence, before He _created_ it by His Power and Will. They were no
Materialists nor Pantheists; but taught that Matter was not eternal or
co-existent with the great First Cause, but created by Him.

The early Christians, taught by the founder of their Religion, but in
greater perfection, those primitive truths that from the Egyptians had
passed to the Jews, and been preserved among the latter by the Essenes,
received also the institution of the Mysteries; adopting as their object
the building of the symbolic Temple, preserving the old Scriptures of
the Jews as their sacred book, and as the fundamental law, which
furnished the new veil of initiation with the Hebraic words and
formulas, that, corrupted and disfigured by time and ignorance, appear
in many of our Degrees.

Such, my Brother, is the doctrine of the first Degree of the Mysteries,
or that of Chief of the Tabernacle, to which you have now been
admitted, and the moral lesson of which is, devotion to the service of
God, and disinterested zeal and constant endeavor for the welfare of
men. You have here received only hints of the true objects and purposes
of the Mysteries. Hereafter, if you are permitted to advance, you will
arrive at a more complete understanding of them and of the sublime
doctrines which they teach. Be content, therefore, with that which you
have seen and heard and await patiently the advent of the greater light.

[Illustration]




XXIV.

PRINCE OF THE TABERNACLE.


Symbols were the almost universal language of ancient theology. They
were the most obvious method of instruction; for, like nature herself,
they addressed the understanding through the eye; and the most ancient
expressions denoting communication of religious knowledge, signify
ocular exhibition. The first teachers of mankind borrowed this method of
instruction; and it comprised an endless store of pregnant
hieroglyphics. These lessons of the olden time were the riddles of the
Sphynx, tempting the curious by their quaintness, but involving the
personal risk of the adventurous interpreter. "The Gods themselves," it
was said, "disclose their intentions to the wise, but to fools their
teaching is unintelligible;" and the King of the Delphic Oracle was said
not to _declare_, nor on the other hand to _conceal_; but emphatically
to "_intimate_ or _signify_."

The Ancient Sages, both barbarian and Greek, involved their meaning in
similar indirections and enigmas; their lessons were conveyed either in
visible symbols, or in those "parables and dark sayings of old," which
the Israelites considered it a sacred duty to hand down unchanged to
successive generations. The explanatory tokens employed by man, whether
emblematical objects or actions, symbols or mystic ceremonies, were like
the mystic signs and portents either in dreams or by the wayside,
supposed to be significant of the intentions of the Gods; both required
the aid of anxious thought and skillful interpretation. It was only by a
correct appreciation of analogous problems of nature, that the will of
Heaven could be understood by the Diviner, or the lessons of Wisdom
become manifest to the Sage.

The Mysteries were a series of symbols; and what was _spoken_ there
consisted wholly of accessory explanations of the act or image; sacred
commentaries, explanatory of established symbols; with little of those
independent traditions embodying physical or moral speculation, in which
the elements or planets were the actors, and the creation and
revolutions of the world were intermingled with recollections of ancient
events: and yet with so much of that also, that nature became her own
expositor through the medium of an arbitrary symbolical instruction; and
the ancient views of the relation between the human and divine received
dramatic forms.

There has ever been an intimate alliance between the two systems, the
symbolic and the philosophical, in the allegories of the monuments of
all ages, in the symbolic writings of the priests of all nations, in the
rituals of all secret and mysterious societies; there has been a
constant series, an invariable uniformity of principles, which come from
an aggregate, vast, imposing, and true, composed of parts that fit
harmoniously only there.

Symbolical instruction is recommended by the constant and uniform usage
of antiquity; and it has retained its influence throughout all ages, as
a system of mysterious communication. The Deity, in his revelations to
man, adopted the use of material images for the purpose of enforcing
sublime truths; and Christ taught by symbols and parables. The
mysterious knowledge of the Druids was embodied in signs and symbols.
Taliesin, describing his initiation, says: "The secrets were imparted to
me by the old Giantess (_Ceridwen_, or _Isis_), without the use of
audible language." And again he says, "I am a _silent_ proficient."

Initiation was a school, in which were taught the truths of primitive
revelation, the existence and attributes of one God, the immortality of
the Soul, rewards and punishments in a future life, the phenomena of
Nature, the arts, the sciences, morality, legislation, philosophy, and
philanthropy, and what we now style psychology and metaphysics, with
animal magnetism, and the other occult sciences.

All the ideas of the Priests of Hindostan, Persia, Syria, Arabia,
Chaldæa, Phœnicia, were known to the Egyptian Priests. The rational
Indian philosophy, after penetrating Persia and Chaldæa, gave birth to
the Egyptian Mysteries. We find that the use of Hieroglyphics was
preceded in Egypt by that of the easily understood symbols and figures,
from the mineral, animal, and vegetable kingdoms, used by the Indians,
Persians, and Chaldæans to express their thoughts; and this primitive
philosophy was the basis of the modern philosophy of Pythagoras and
Plato.

All the philosophers and legislators that made Antiquity illustrious,
were pupils of the initiation; and all the beneficent modifications in
the religions of the different people instructed by them were owing to
their institution and extension of the Mysteries. In the chaos of
popular superstitions, those Mysteries alone kept man from lapsing into
absolute brutishness. Zoroaster and Confucius drew their doctrines from
the Mysteries. Clemens of Alexandria, speaking of the Great Mysteries,
says: "Here ends all instruction. Nature and all things are seen and
known." Had moral truths alone been taught the Initiate, the Mysteries
could never have deserved nor received the magnificent eulogiums of the
most enlightened men of Antiquity,--of Pindar, Plutarch, Isocrates,
Diodorus, Plato, Euripides, Socrates, Aristophanes, Cicero, Epictetus,
Marcus Aurelius, and others;--philosophers hostile to the Sacerdotal
Spirit, or historians devoted to the investigation of Truth. No: all the
sciences were taught there; and those oral or written traditions briefly
communicated, which reached back to the first age of the world.

Socrates said, in the Phædo of Plato: "It well appears that those who
established the Mysteries, or secret assemblies of the initiated, were
no contemptible personages, but men of great genius, who in the early
ages strove to teach us, under enigmas, that he who shall go to the
invisible regions without being purified, will be precipitated into the
abyss; while he who arrives there, purged of the stains of this world,
and accomplished in virtue, will be admitted to the dwelling-place of
the Deity.... The initiated are certain to attain the company of the
Gods."

Pretextatus, Proconsul of Achaia, a man endowed with all the virtues,
said, in the 4th century, that to deprive the Greeks of those Sacred
Mysteries which bound together the whole human face, would make life
insupportable.

Initiation was considered to be a mystical death; a descent into the
infernal regions, where every pollution, and the stains and
imperfections of a corrupt and evil life were purged away by fire and
water; and the perfect _Epopt_ was then said to be _regenerated_,
_new-born_, restored to a _renovated_ existence of _life_, _light_, and
_purity_; and placed under the Divine Protection.

A new language was adapted to these celebrations, and also a language of
hieroglyphics, unknown to any but those who had received the highest
Degree. And to them ultimately were confined the learning, the morality,
and the political power of every people among which the Mysteries were
practised. So effectually was the knowledge of the hieroglyphics of the
highest Degree hidden from all but a favored few, that in process of
time their meaning Was entirely lost, and none could interpret them. If
the same hieroglyphics were employed in the higher as in the lower
Degrees, they had a different and more abstruse and figurative meaning.
It was pretended, in later times, that the sacred hieroglyphics and
language were the same that were used by the Celestial Deities.
Everything that could heighten the mystery of initiation was added,
until the very name of the ceremony possessed a strange charm, and yet
conjured up the wildest fears. The greatest rapture came to be expressed
by the word that signified to pass through the Mysteries.

The Priesthood possessed one third of Egypt. They gained much of their
influence by means of the Mysteries, and spared no means to impress the
people with a full sense of their importance. They represented them as
the beginning of a new life of reason and virtue: the initiated, or
esoteric companions were said to entertain the most agreeable
anticipations respecting death and eternity, to comprehend all the
hidden mysteries of Nature, to have their souls restored to the original
perfection from which man had fallen; and at their death to be borne to
the celestial mansions of the Gods. The doctrines of a future state of
rewards and punishments formed a prominent feature in the Mysteries; and
they were also believed to assure much temporal happiness and
good-fortune, and afford absolute security against the most imminent
dangers by land and sea. Public odium was cast on those who refused to
be initiated. They were considered profane, unworthy of public
employment or private confidence; and held to be doomed to eternal
punishment as impious. To betray the secrets of the Mysteries, to wear
on the stage the dress of an Initiate, or to hold the Mysteries up to
derision, was to incur death at the hands of public vengeance.

It is certain that up to the time of Cicero, the Mysteries still
retained much of their original character of sanctity and purity. And at
a later day, as we know, Nero, after committing a horrible crime, did
not dare, even in Greece, to aid in the celebration of the Mysteries;
nor at a still later day was Constantine, the Christian Emperor, allowed
to do so, after his murder of his relatives.

Everywhere, and in all their forms, the Mysteries were funereal; and
celebrated the mystical death and restoration to life of some divine or
heroic personage: and the details of the legend and the mode of the
death varied in the different Countries where the Mysteries were
practised.

Their explanation belongs both to astronomy and mythology; and the
Legend of the Master's Degree is but another form of that of the
Mysteries, reaching back, in one shape or other, to the remotest
antiquity.

Whether Egypt originated the legend, or borrowed it from India or
Chaldæa, it is now impossible to know. But the Hebrews received the
Mysteries from the Egyptians; and of course were familiar with _their
legend_,--known as it was to those Egyptian Initiates, Joseph and Moses.
It was the fable (or rather the _truth_ clothed in allegory and figures)
of OSIRIS, the Sun, Source of Light and Principle of Good, and TYPHON,
the Principle of Darkness and Evil. In all the histories of the Gods and
Heroes lay couched and hidden astronomical details and the history of
the operations of visible Nature; and those in their turn were also
symbols of higher and profounder truths. None but rude uncultivated
intellects could long consider the Sun and Stars and the Powers of
Nature as Divine, or as fit objects of Human Worship; and _they_ will
consider them so while the world lasts; and ever remain ignorant of the
great Spiritual Truths of which these are the hieroglyphics and
expressions.

A brief summary of the Egyptian legend will serve to show the leading
idea on which the Mysteries among the Hebrews were based.

Osiris, said to have been an ancient King of Egypt, was the Sun; and
Isis, his wife, the Moon: and his history recounts, in poetical and
figurative style, the annual journey of the Great Luminary of Heaven
through the different Signs of the Zodiac.

In the absence of Osiris, Typhon, his brother, filled with envy and
malice, sought to usurp his throne; but his plans were frustrated by
Isis. Then he resolved to kill Osiris. This he did, by persuading him to
enter a coffin or sarcophagus, which he then flung into the Nile. After
a long search, Isis found the body, and concealed it in the depths of a
forest; but Typhon, finding it there, cut it into fourteen pieces, and
scattered them hither and thither. After tedious search, Isis found
thirteen pieces, the fishes having eaten the other (the privates), which
she replaced of wood, and buried the body at Philæ; where a temple of
surpassing magnificence was erected in honor of Osiris.

Isis, aided by her son Orus, Horus or Har-oeri, warred against Typhon,
slew him, reigned gloriously, and at her death was reunited to her
husband, in the same tomb.

Typhon was represented as born of the earth; the upper part of his body
covered with feathers, in stature reaching the clouds, his arms and legs
covered with scales, serpents darting from him on every side, and fire
flashing from his mouth. Horus, who aided in slaying him, became the God
of the Sun, answering to the Grecian Apollo; and Typhon is but the
anagram of Python, the great serpent slain by Apollo.

The word Typhon, like Eve, signifies _a serpent_, and _life_.[2] By its
form the serpent symbolizes life, which circulates through all nature.
When, toward the end of autumn, the Woman (Virgo), in the constellations
seems (upon the Chaldæan sphere) to crush with her heel the head of the
serpent, this figure foretells the coming of winter, during which life
seems to retire from all beings, and no longer to circulate through
nature. This is why Typhon signifies also a serpent, the symbol of
winter, which, in the Catholic Temples, is represented surrounding the
Terrestrial Globe, which surmounts the heavenly cross, emblem of
redemption. If the word Typhon is derived from _Tupoul_, it signifies a
tree which produces apples (_mala_, evils), the Jewish origin of the
fall of man. Typhon means also one who supplants, and signifies the
human passions, which expel from our hearts the lessons of wisdom. In
the Egyptian Fable, Isis wrote the sacred word for the instruction of
men, and Typhon effaced it as fast as she wrote it. In morals, his name
signifies _Pride_, _Ignorance_, and _Falsehood_.

[Footnote 2: [Hebrew:] Tsapanai, in Hebrew, means a serpent.]

When Isis first found the body, where it had floated ashore near Byblos,
a shrub of _erica_ or tamarisk near it had, by the virtue of the body,
shot up into a tree around it, and protected it; and hence our sprig of
acacia. Isis was also aided in her search by Anubis, in the shape of a
dog. He was Sirius or the Dog-Star, the friend and counsellor of Osiris,
and the inventor of language, grammar, astronomy, surveying, arithmetic,
music, and medical science; the first maker of laws; and who taught the
worship of the Gods, and the building of Temples.

In the Mysteries, the nailing up of the body of Osiris in the chest or
ark was termed the _aphanism_, or disappearance [of the Sun at the
Winter Solstice, below the Tropic of Capricorn], and the recovery of the
different parts of his body by Isis, the _Euresis_, finding. The
candidate went through a ceremony representing this, in all the
Mysteries everywhere. The main facts in the fable were the same in all
countries; and the prominent Deities were everywhere a male and a
female.

In Egypt they were Osiris and Isis: in India, Mahadeva and Bhavani: in
Phœnicia, Thammuz (or Adonis) and Astarte: in Phrygia, Atys and Cybele:
in Persia, Mithras and Asis: in Samothrace and Greece, Dionusos or
Sabazeus and Rhea: in Britain, Hu and Ceridwen: and in Scandinavia,
Woden and Frea: and in every instance these Divinities represented the
Sun and the Moon.

The mysteries of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, seem to have been the model of
all other ceremonies of initiation subsequently established among the
different peoples of the world. Those of Atys and Cybele, celebrated in
Phrygia; those of Ceres and Proserpine, at Eleusis and many other places
in Greece, were but copies of them. This we learn from Plutarch,
Diodorus Siculus, Lactantius, and other writers; and in the absence of
direct testimony should necessarily infer it from the similarity of the
adventures of these Deities; for the ancients held that the Ceres of the
Greeks was the same as the Isis of the Egyptians; and Dionusos or
Bacchus as Osiris.

In the legend of Osiris and Isis, as given by Plutarch, are many details
and circumstances other than those that we have briefly mentioned; and
all of which we need not repeat here. Osiris married his sister Isis;
and labored publicly with her to ameliorate the lot of men. He taught
them agriculture, while Isis invented laws. He built temples to the
Gods, and established their worship. Both were the patrons of artists
and their useful inventions; and introduced the use of iron for
defensive weapons and implements of agriculture, and of gold to adorn
the temples of the Gods. He went forth with an army to conquer men to
civilization, teaching the people whom he overcame to plant the vine and
sow grain for food.

Typhon, his brother, slew him when the sun was in the sign of the
Scorpion, that is to say, at the Autumnal Equinox. They had been rival
claimants, says Synesius, for the throne of Egypt, as Light and Darkness
contend ever for the empire of the world. Plutarch adds, that at the
time when Osiris was slain, the moon was at its full; and therefore it
was in the sign opposite the Scorpion, that is, the Bull, the sign of
the Vernal Equinox.

Plutarch assures us that it was to represent these events and details
that Isis established the Mysteries, in which they were reproduced by
images, symbols, and a religious ceremonial, whereby they were imitated:
and in which lessons of piety were given, and consolations under the
misfortunes that afflict us here below. Those who instituted these
Mysteries meant to strengthen religion and console men in their sorrows
by the lofty hopes found in a religious faith, whose principles were
represented to them covered by a pompous ceremonial, and under the
sacred veil of allegory.

Diodorus speaks of the famous columns erected near Nysa, in Arabia,
where, it was said, were two of the tombs of Osiris and Isis. On one was
this inscription: "I am Isis, Queen of this country. I was instructed by
Mercury. No one can destroy the laws which I have established. I am the
eldest daughter of Saturn, most ancient of the Gods. I am the wife and
sister of Osiris the King. I first made known to mortals the use of
wheat. I am the mother of Orus the King. In my honor was the city of
Bubaste built. Rejoice, O Egypt, rejoice, land that gave me birth!" ...
And on the other was this: "I am Osiris the King, who led my armies into
all parts of the world, to the most thickly inhabited countries of
India, the North, the Danube, and the Ocean. I am the eldest son of
Saturn: I was born of the brilliant and magnificent egg, and my
substance is of the same nature as that which composes light. There is
no place in the Universe where I have not appeared, to bestow my
benefits and make known my discoveries." The rest was illegible.

To aid her in the search for the body of Osiris, and to nurse her infant
child Horus, Isis sought out and took with her Anubis, son of Osiris,
and his sister Nephte. He, as we have said, was Sirius, the brightest
star in the Heavens. After finding him, she went to Byblos, and seated
herself near a fountain, where she had learned that the sacred chest had
stopped which contained the body of Osiris. There she sat, sad and
silent, shedding a torrent of tears. Thither came the women of the Court
of Queen Astarte, and she spoke to them, and dressed their hair, pouring
upon it deliciously perfumed ambrosia. This known to the Queen, Isis
was engaged as nurse for her child, in the palace, one of the columns of
which was made of the erica or tamarisk, that had grown up over the
chest containing Osiris, cut down by the King, and unknown to him, still
enclosing the chest: which column Isis afterward demanded, and from it
extracted the chest and the body, which, the latter wrapped in thin
drapery and perfumed, she carried away with her.

Blue Masonry, ignorant of its import, still retains among its emblems
one of a woman weeping over a broken column, holding in her hand a
branch of acacia, myrtle, or tamarisk, while Time, we are told, stands
behind her combing out the ringlets of her hair. We need not repeat the
vapid and trivial explanation there given, of this representation of
_Isis_, weeping at Byblos, over the column torn from the palace of the
King, that contained the body of Osiris, while Horus, the God of Time,
pours ambrosia on her hair.

Nothing of this recital was historical; but the whole was an allegory or
sacred fable, containing a meaning known only to those who were
initiated into the Mysteries. All the incidents were astronomical, with
a meaning still deeper lying behind _that_ explanation, and so hidden by
a double veil. The Mysteries, in which these incidents were represented
and explained, were like those of Eleusis in their object, of which
Pausanias, who was initiated, says that the Greeks, from the remotest
antiquity, regarded them as the best calculated of all things to lead
men to piety: and Aristotle says they were the most valuable of all
religious institutions, and thus were called mysteries par excellence;
and the Temple of Eleusis was regarded as, in some sort, the common
sanctuary of the whole earth, where religion had brought together all
that was most imposing and most august.

The object of all the Mysteries was to inspire men with piety, and to
console them in the miseries of life. That consolation, so afforded, was
the hope of a happier future, and of passing, after death, to a state of
eternal felicity.

Cicero says that the Initiates not only received lessons which made life
more agreeable, but drew from the ceremonies happy hopes for the moment
of death. Socrates says that those who were so fortunate as to be
admitted to the Mysteries, possessed, when dying, the most glorious
hopes for eternity. Aristides says that they not only procure the
Initiates consolations in the present life, and means of deliverance
from the great weight of their evils, but also the precious advantage of
passing after death to a happier state.

Isis was the Goddess of Sais; and the famous Feast of Lights was
celebrated there in her honor. There were celebrated the Mysteries, in
which were represented the death and subsequent restoration to life of
the God Osiris, in a secret ceremony and scenic representation of his
sufferings, called the Mysteries of Night.

The Kings of Egypt often exercised the functions of the Priesthood; and
they were initiated into the sacred science as soon as they attained the
throne. So at Athens, the First Magistrate, or Archon-King,
superintended the Mysteries. This was an image of the union that existed
between the Priesthood and Royalty, in those early times when
legislators and kings sought in religion a potent political instrument.

Herodotus says, speaking of the reasons why animals were deified in
Egypt: "If I were to explain these reasons, I should be led to the
disclosure of those holy matters which I particularly wish to avoid, and
which, but from necessity, I should not have discussed at all." So he
says, "The Egyptians have at Sais the tomb of a certain personage, whom
I do not think myself permitted to specify. It is behind the Temple of
Minerva." [The latter, so called by the Greeks, was really Isis, whose
was the often-cited enigmatical inscription, "I am what was and is and
is to come. No mortal hath yet unveiled me."] So again he says: "Upon
this lake are represented by night the accidents which happened to him
whom I dare not name. The Egyptians call them their Mysteries.
Concerning these, at the same time that I confess myself sufficiently
informed, I feel myself compelled to be silent. Of the ceremonies also
in honor of Ceres, I may not venture to speak, further than the
obligations of religion will allow me."

It is easy to see what was the great object of initiation and the
Mysteries; whose first and greatest fruit was, as all the ancients
testify, to civilize savage hordes, to soften their ferocious manners,
to introduce among them social intercourse, and lead them into a way of
life more worthy of men. Cicero considers the establishment of the
Eleusinian Mysteries to be the greatest of all the benefits conferred by
Athens on other commonwealths; their effects having been, he says, to
civilize men, soften their savage and ferocious manners, and teach them
the true principles of morals, which _initiate_ man into the only kind
of life worthy of him. The same philosophic orator, in a passage where
he apostrophizes Ceres and Proserpine, says that mankind owes these
Goddesses the first elements of moral life, as well as the first means
of sustenance of physical life; knowledge of the laws, regulation of
morals, and those examples of civilization which have improved the
manners of men and cities.

Bacchus in Euripides says to Pentheus, that his new institution (the
Dionysiac Mysteries) deserved to be known, and that one of its great
advantages was, that it proscribed all impurity: that these were the
Mysteries of Wisdom, of which it would be imprudent to speak to persons
not initiated: that they were established among the Barbarians, who in
that showed greater wisdom than the Greeks, who had not yet received
them.

This double object, political and religious,--one teaching our duty to
men, and the other what we owe to the Gods; or rather, respect for the
Gods calculated to maintain that which we owe the laws, is found in that
well-known verse of Virgil, borrowed by him from the ceremonies of
initiation: "Teach me to respect Justice and the Gods." This great
lesson, which the Hierophant impressed on the Initiates, after they had
witnessed a representation of the Infernal regions, the Poet places
after his description of the different punishments suffered by the
wicked in Tartarus, and immediately after the description of that of
Sisyphus.

Pausanias, likewise, at the close of the representation of the
punishments of Sisyphus and the daughters of Danaus, in the Temple at
Delphi, makes this reflection; that the crime or impiety which in them
had chiefly merited this punishment, was the contempt which they had
shown for the Mysteries of Eleusis. From this reflection of Pausanias,
who was an Initiate, it is easy to see that the Priests of Eleusis, who
taught the dogma of punishment in Tartarus, included among the great
crimes deserving these punishments, contempt for and disregard of the
Holy Mysteries; whose object was to lead men to piety, and thereby to
respect for justice and the laws, chief object of their institution, if
not the only one, and to which the needs and interest of religion itself
were subordinate; since the latter was but a means to lead more surely
to the former; for the whole force of religious opinions being in the
hands of the legislators to be wielded, they were sure of being better
obeyed.

The Mysteries were not merely simple lustrations and the observation of
some arbitrary formulas and ceremonies; nor a means of reminding men of
the ancient condition of the race prior to civilization: but they led
men to piety by instruction in morals and as to a future life; which at
a very early day, if not originally, formed the chief portion of the
ceremonial.

Symbols were used in the ceremonies, which referred to agriculture, as
Masonry has preserved the ear of wheat in a symbol and in one of her
words; but their principal reference was to astronomical phenomena. Much
was no doubt said as to the condition of brutality and degradation in
which man was sunk before the institution of the Mysteries; but the
allusion was rather metaphysical, to the ignorance of the uninitiated,
than to the wild life of the earliest men.

The great object of the Mysteries of Isis, and in general of all the
Mysteries, was a great and truly politic one. It was to ameliorate our
race, to perfect its manners and morals, and to restrain society by
stronger bonds than those that human laws impose. They were the
invention of that ancient science and wisdom which exhausted all its
resources to make legislation perfect; and of that philosophy which has
ever sought to secure the happiness of man, by purifying his soul from
the passions which can trouble it, and as a necessary consequence
introduce social disorder. And that they were the work of genius is
evident from their employment of all the sciences, a profound knowledge
of the human heart, and the means of subduing it.

It is a still greater mistake to imagine that they were the inventions
of charlatanism, and means of deception. They may in the lapse of time
have degenerated into imposture and schools of false ideas; but they
were not so at the beginning; or else the wisest and best men of
antiquity have uttered the most willful falsehoods. In process of time
the very allegories of the Mysteries themselves, Tartarus and its
punishments, Minos and the other judges of the dead, came to be
misunderstood, and to be false because they were so; while at first they
were true, because they were recognized as merely the arbitrary forms in
which truths were enveloped.

The object of the Mysteries was to procure for man a real felicity on
earth by the means of virtue; and to that end he was taught that his
soul was immortal; and that error, sin, and vice must needs, by an
inflexible law, produce their consequences. The rude representation of
physical torture in Tartarus was but an image of the certain,
unavoidable, eternal consequences that flow by the law of God's
enactment from the sin committed and the vice indulged in. The poets and
mystagogues labored to propagate these doctrines of the soul's
immortality and the certain punishment of sin and vice, and to accredit
them with the people, by teaching them the former in their poems, and
the latter in the sanctuaries; and they clothed them with the charms,
the one of poetry, and the other of spectacles and magic illusions.

They painted, aided by all the resources of art, the virtuous man's
happy life after death, and the horrors of the frightful prisons
destined to punish the vicious. In the shades of the sanctuaries, these
delights and horrors were exhibited as spectacles, and the Initiates
witnessed religious dramas, under the name of _initiation_ and
_mysteries_. Curiosity was excited by secrecy, by the difficulty
experienced in obtaining admission, and by the tests to be undergone.
The candidate was amused by the variety of the scenery, the pomp of the
decorations, the appliances of machinery. Respect was inspired by the
gravity and dignity of the actors and the majesty of the ceremonial; and
fear and hope, sadness and delight, were in turns excited.

The Hierophants, men of intellect, and well understanding the
disposition of the people and the art of controlling them, used every
appliance to attain that object, and give importance and impressiveness
to their ceremonies. As they covered those ceremonies with the veil of
Secrecy, so they preferred that Night should cover them with its wings.
Obscurity adds to impressiveness, and assists illusion; and they used it
to produce an effect upon the astonished Initiate. The ceremonies were
conducted in caverns dimly lighted: thick groves were planted around the
Temples, to produce that gloom that impresses the mind with a religious
awe.

The very word _mystery_, according to Demetrius Phalereus, was a
metaphorical expression that denoted the secret awe which darkness and
gloom inspired. The night was almost always the time fixed for their
celebration; and they were ordinarily termed _nocturnal_ ceremonies.
Initiations into the Mysteries of Samothrace took place at night; as did
those of Isis, of which Apuleius speaks. Euripides makes Bacchus say,
that _his_ Mysteries were celebrated at night, because there is in night
something august and imposing.

Nothing excites men's curiosity so much as Mystery, concealing things
which they desire to know: and nothing so much increases curiosity as
obstacles that interpose to prevent them from indulging in the
gratification of their desires. Of this the Legislators and Hierophants
took advantage, to attract the people to their sanctuaries, and to
induce them to seek to obtain lessons from which they would perhaps have
turned away with indifference, if they had been pressed upon them. In
this spirit of mystery they professed to imitate the Deity, who hides
Himself from our senses, and conceals from us the springs by which He
moves the Universe. They admitted that they concealed the highest truths
under the veil of allegory, the more to excite the curiosity of men, and
to urge them to investigation. The secrecy in which they buried their
Mysteries, had that end. Those to whom they were confided, bound
themselves, by the most fearful oaths, never to reveal them. They were
not allowed even to speak of these important secrets with any others
than the initiated; and the penalty of death was pronounced against any
one indiscreet enough to reveal them, or found in the Temple without
being an Initiate; and any one who had betrayed those secrets, was
avoided by all, as excommunicated.

Aristotle was accused of impiety, by the Hierophant Eurymedon, for
having sacrificed to the manés of his wife, according to the rite used
in the worship of Ceres. He was compelled to flee to Chalcis; and to
purge his memory from this stain, he directed, by his will, the erection
of a Statue to that Goddess. Socrates, dying, sacrificed to Esculapius,
to exculpate himself from the suspicion of Atheism. A price was set on
the head of Diagoras, because he had divulged the Secret of the
Mysteries. Andocides was accused of the same crime, as was Alcibiades,
and both were cited to answer the charge before the inquisition at
Athens, where the People were the Judges. Æschylus the Tragedian was
accused of having represented the Mysteries on the stage; and was
acquitted only on proving that he had never been initiated.

Seneca, comparing Philosophy to initiation, says that the most sacred
ceremonies could be known to the adepts alone: but that many of their
precepts were known even to the Profane. Such was the case with the
doctrine of a future life, and a state of rewards and punishments beyond
the grave. The ancient legislators clothed this doctrine in the pomp of
a mysterious ceremony, in mystic words and magical representations, to
impress upon the mind the truths they taught, by the strong influence of
such scenic displays upon the senses and imagination.

In the same way they taught the origin of the soul, its fall to the
earth past the spheres and through the elements, and its final return to
the place of its origin, when, during the continuance of its union with
earthly matter, the sacred fire, which formed its essence, had
contracted no stains, and its brightness had not been marred by foreign
particles, which, denaturalizing it, weighed it down and delayed its
return. These metaphysical ideas, with difficulty comprehended by the
mass of the Initiates, were represented by figures, by symbols, and by
allegorical analogies; no idea being so abstract that men do not seek to
give it expression by, and translate it into, sensible images.

The attraction of Secrecy was enhanced by the difficulty of obtaining
admission. Obstacles and suspense redoubled curiosity. Those who aspired
to the initiation of the Sun and in the Mysteries of Mithras in Persia,
underwent many trials. They commenced by easy tests and arrived by
degrees at those that were most cruel, in which the life of the
candidate was often endangered. Gregory Nazianzen terms them _tortures_
and mystic _punishments_. No one can be initiated, says Suidas, until
after he has proven, by the most terrible trials, that he possesses a
virtuous soul, exempt from the sway of every passion, and at it were
impassible. There were twelve principal tests; and some make the number
larger.

The trials of the Eleusinian initiations were not so terrible; but they
were severe; and the suspense, above all, in which the aspirant was kept
for several years [the memory of which is retained in Masonry by the
_ages_ of those of the different Degrees], or the interval between
admission to the _inferior_ and initiation in the _great_ Mysteries, was
a species of torture to the curiosity which it was desired to excite.
Thus the Egyptian Priests tried Pythagoras before admitting him to know
the secrets of the sacred science. He succeeded, by his incredible
patience and the courage with which he surmounted all obstacles, in
obtaining admission to their society and receiving their lessons. Among
the Jews, the Essenes admitted none among them, until they had passed
the tests or several Degrees.

By initiation, those who before were _fellow-citizens_ only, became
_brothers_, connected by a closer bond than before, by mean of a
religious fraternity, which, bringing men nearer together united them
more strongly: and the weak and the poor could more readily appeal for
assistance to the powerful and the wealthy, with whom religious
association gave them a closer fellowship.

The Initiate was regarded as the favorite of the Gods. For him alone
Heaven opened its treasures. Fortunate during life, he could, by virtue
and the favor of Heaven, promise himself after death an eternal
felicity.

The Priests of the Island of Samothrace promised favorable winds and
prosperous voyages to those who were initiated. It was promised them
that the CABIRI, and Castor and Pollux, the DIOSCURI, should appear to
them when the storm raged, and give them calms and smooth seas: and the
Scholiast of Aristophanes says that those initiated in the Mysteries
there were just men, who were privileged to escape from great evils and
tempests.

The Initiate in the Mysteries of Orpheus, after he was purified, was
considered as released from the empire of evil, and transferred to a
condition of life which gave him the happiest hopes. "I have emerged
from evil," he was made to say, "and have attained good." Those
initiated in the Mysteries of Eleusis believed that the Sun blazed with
a pure splendor for them alone. And, as we see in the case of Pericles,
they flattered themselves that Ceres and Proserpine inspired them and
gave them wisdom and counsel.

Initiation dissipated errors and banished misfortune: and after having
filled the heart of man with joy during life, it gave him the most
blissful hopes at the moment of death. We owe it to the Goddesses of
Eleusis, says Socrates, that we do not lead the wild life of the
earliest men: and to them are due the flattering hopes which initiation
gives us for the moment of death and for all eternity. The benefit which
we reap from these august ceremonies, says Aristides, is not only
present joy, a deliverance and enfranchisement from the old ills; but
also the sweet hope which we have in death of passing to a more
fortunate state. And Theon says that participation of the Mysteries is
the finest of all things, and the source of the greatest blessings. The
happiness promised there was not limited to this mortal life; but it
extended beyond the grave. There a new life was to commence, during
which the Initiate was to enjoy a bliss without alloy and without limit.
The Corybantes promised eternal life to the Initiates of the Mysteries
of Cybele and Atys.

Apuleius represents Lucius, while still in the form of an ass, as
addressing his prayers to Isis, whom he speaks of as the same as Ceres,
Venus, Diana, and Proserpine, and as illuminating the walls of many
cities simultaneously with her feminine lustre, and substituting her
quivering light for the bright rays of the Sun. She appears to him in
his vision as a beautiful female, "over whose divine neck her long thick
hair hung in graceful ringlets." Addressing him, she says, "The parent
of Universal nature attends thy call. The mistress of the Elements,
initiative germ of generations, Supreme of Deities, Queen of departed
spirits, first inhabitant of Heaven, and uniform type of all the Gods
and Goddesses, propitiated by thy prayers, is with thee. She governs
with her nod the luminous heights of the firmament, the salubrious
breezes of the ocean; the silent deplorable depths of the shades below;
one Sole Divinity under many forms, worshipped by the different nations
of the Earth under many titles, and with various religious rites."

Directing him how to proceed, at her festival, to re-obtain his human
shape, she says: "Throughout the entire course of the remainder of thy
life, until the very last breath has vanished from thy lips, thou art
devoted to my service.... Under my protection will thy life be happy and
glorious: and when, thy days being spent, thou shalt descend to the
shades below, and inhabit the Elysian fields, there also, even in the
subterranean hemisphere, shalt thou pay frequent worship to me, thy
propitious patron: and yet further: if through sedulous obedience,
religious devotion to my ministry, and inviolable chastity, thou shalt
prove thyself a worthy object of divine favor, then shalt thou feel the
influence of the power that I alone possess. The number of thy days
shall be prolonged beyond the Ordinary decrees of fate."

In the procession of the festival, Lucius saw the image of the Goddess,
on either side of which were female attendants, that, "with ivory combs
in their hands, made believe, by the motion of their arms and the
twisting of their fingers, to comb and ornament the Goddess' royal
hair." Afterward, clad in linen robes, came the initiated. "The hair of
the women was moistened by perfume, and enveloped in a transparent
covering; but the men, terrestrial stars, as it were, of the great
religion, were thoroughly shaven, and their bald heads shone
exceedingly."

Afterward came the Priests, in robes of white linen. The first bore a
lamp in the form of a boat, emitting flame from an orifice in the
middle: the second, a small altar: the third, a golden palm-tree: and
the fourth displayed the figure of a left hand, the palm open and
expanded, "representing thereby a symbol of equity and fair-dealing, of
which the left hand, as slower than the right hand, and more void of
skill and craft, is therefore an appropriate emblem."

After Lucius had, by the grace of Isis, recovered his human form, the
Priest said to him, "Calamity hath no hold on those whom our Goddess
hath chosen for her service, and whom her majesty hath vindicated." And
the people declared that he was fortunate to be "thus after a manner
born again, and at once betrothed to the service of the Holy Ministry."

When he urged the Chief Priest to initiate him, he was answered that
there was not a single one among the initiated, of a mind so depraved,
or so bent on his own destruction, as, without receiving a special
command from Isis, to dare to undertake her ministry rashly and
sacrilegiously, and thereby commit an act certain to bring upon himself
a dreadful injury. "For", continued the Chief Priest, "the gates of the
shades below, and the care of our life being in the hands of the
Goddess,--_the ceremony of initiation into the Mysteries is_, as it
were, _to suffer death_, with the precarious chance of resuscitation.
Wherefore the Goddess, in the wisdom of her Divinity, hath been
accustomed to select as persons to whom the secrets of her religion can
with propriety be entrusted, those who, standing as it were on the
utmost limit of the course of life they have completed, _may through her
Providence be in a manner born again_, and commence the career of a new
existence".

When he was finally to be initiated, he was conducted to the nearest
baths, and after having bathed, the Priest first solicited forgiveness
of the Gods, and then sprinkled him all over with the clearest and
purest water, and conducted him back to the Temple, "where," says
Apuleius, "after giving me some instruction, that mortal tongue is not
permitted to reveal, he bade me for the succeeding ten days restrain my
appetite, eat no animal food, and drink no wine."

These ten days elapsed, the Priest led him into the inmost recesses of
the Sanctuary. "And here, studious reader," he continues, "peradventure
thou wilt be sufficiently anxious to know all that was said and done,
which, were it lawful to divulge, I would tell thee; and, wert thou
permitted to hear, thou shouldst know. Nevertheless, although the
disclosure would affix the penalty of rash curiosity to my tongue as
well as thy ears, yet will I, for fear thou shouldst be too long
tormented with religious longing, and suffer the pain of protracted
suspense, tell the truth notwithstanding. Listen then to what I shall
relate. _I approached the abode of death; with my foot I pressed the
threshold of Proserpine's Palace. I was transported through the
elements, and conducted back again. At midnight I saw the bright light
of the sun shining. I stood in the presence of the Gods, the Gods of
Heaven and of the Shades below; ay, stood near and worshipped._ And now
have I told thee such things that, hearing, thou necessarily canst not
understand; and being beyond the comprehension of the Profane, I can
enunciate without committing a crime."

After night had passed, and the morning had dawned, the usual ceremonies
were at an end. Then he was consecrated by twelve stoles being put upon
him, clothed, crowned with palm-leaves, and exhibited to the people. The
remainder of that day was celebrated as his birthday and passed in
festivities; and on the third day afterward, the same religious
ceremonies were repeated, including a religious breakfast, _"followed by
a final consummation of ceremonies_."

A year afterward, he was warned to prepare for initiation into the
Mysteries of "the Great God, Supreme Parent of all the other Gods, the
invincible OSIRIS." "For," says Apuleius, "although there is a strict
connexion between the religions of both Deities, AND EVEN THE ESSENCE OF
BOTH DIVINITIES IS IDENTICAL, the ceremonies of the respective
initiations are considerably different."

Compare with this hint the following language of the prayer of Lucius,
addressed to Isis; and we may judge what doctrines were taught in the
Mysteries, in regard to the Deity: "O Holy and Perpetual Preserver of
the Human Race! ever ready to cherish Mortals by Thy munificence, and to
afford Thy sweet maternal affection to the wretched under misfortune;
Whose bounty is never at rest, neither by day nor by night, nor
throughout the very minutest particle of duration; Thou who stretchest
forth Thy health-bearing right hand over the land and over the sea for
the protection of mankind, to disperse the storms of life, to unravel
the inextricable entanglement of the web of fate, to mitigate the
tempests of fortune, and restrain the malignant influences of the
stars,--_the Gods in Heaven adore Thee, the Gods in the shades below do
Thee homage, the stars obey Thee, the Divinities rejoice in Thee, the
elements and the revolving seasons serve Thee!_ At Thy nod the winds
breathe, clouds gather, seeds grow, buds germinate; _in obedience to
Thee the Earth revolves_ AND THE SUN GIVES US LIGHT. IT IS THOU WHO
GOVERNEST THE UNIVERSE AND TREADEST TARTARUS UNDER THY FEET."

Then he was initiated into the nocturnal Mysteries of Osiris and
Serapis: and afterward into those of Ceres at Rome: but of the
ceremonies in these initiations, Apuleius says nothing.

Under the Archonship of Euclid, bastards and slaves were excluded from
initiation; and the same exclusion obtained against the Materialists or
Epicureans who denied Providence and consequently the utility of
initiation. By a natural progress, it came at length to be considered
that the gates of Elysium would open only for the Initiates, whose souls
had been purified and regenerated in the sanctuaries. But it was never
held, on the other hand, that initiation alone sufficed. We learn from
Plato, that it was also necessary for the soul to be purified from every
stain: and that the purification necessary was such as gave virtue,
truth, wisdom, strength, justice, and temperance.

Entrance to the Temples was forbidden to all who had committed homicide,
even if it were involuntary. So it is stated by both Isocrates and
Theon. Magicians and Charlatans who made trickery a trade, and impostors
pretending to be possessed by evil spirits, were excluded from the
sanctuaries. Every impious person and criminal was rejected; and
Lampridius states that before the celebration of the Mysteries, public
notice was given, that none need apply to enter but those against whom
their consciences uttered no reproach, and who were certain of their own
innocence.

It was required of the Initiate that his heart and hands should be free
from any stain. Porphyry says that man's soul, at death, should be
enfranchised from all the passions, from hate, envy, and the others;
and, in a word, _be as pure as it is required to be in the Mysteries_.
Of course it is not surprising that parricides and perjurers, and
others who had committed crimes against God or man, could not be
admitted.

In the Mysteries of Mithras, a lecture was repeated to the Initiate on
the subject of Justice. And the great moral lesson of the Mysteries, to
which all their mystic ceremonial tended, expressed in a single line by
Virgil, was _to practise Justice and revere the Deity_;--thus recalling
men to justice, by connecting it with the justice of the Gods, who
require it and punish its infraction. The Initiate could aspire to the
favors of the Gods, only because and while he respected the rights of
society and those of humanity. "The sun," says the chorus of Initiates
in Aristophanes, "burns with a pure light for us alone, who, admitted to
the Mysteries, observe the laws of piety in our intercourse with
strangers and our fellow-citizens." The rewards of initiation were
attached to the practice of the social virtues. It was not enough to be
initiated merely. It was necessary to be faithful to the _laws_ of
initiation, which imposed on men duties in regard to their kind. Bacchus
allowed none to participate in his Mysteries, but men who conformed to
the rules of piety and justice. Sensibility, above all, and compassion
for the misfortunes of others, were precious virtues, which initiation
strove to encourage. "Nature," says Juvenal, "has created us
compassionate, since it has endowed us with tears. Sensibility is the
most admirable of our senses. What man is truly worthy of the torch of
the Mysteries; who such as the Priest of Ceres requires him to be, if he
regards the misfortunes of others as wholly foreign to himself?"

All who had not used their endeavors to defeat a conspiracy; and those
who had on the contrary fomented one; those citizens who had betrayed
their country, who had surrendered an advantageous post or place, or the
vessels of the State, to the enemy; all who had supplied the enemy with
money; and in general, all who had come short of their duties as honest
men and good citizens, were excluded from the Mysteries of Eleusis. To
be admitted there, one must have lived equitably, and with sufficient
good fortune not to be regarded as hated by the Gods.

Thus the Society of the Initiates was, in its principle, and according
to the true purpose of its institution, a society of virtuous men, who
labored to free their souls from the tyranny of the passions, and to
develop the germ of all the social virtues. And this was the meaning of
the idea, afterward misunderstood, that entry into Elysium was only
allowed to the Initiates: because entrance to the sanctuaries was
allowed to the virtuous only, and Elysium was created for virtuous souls
alone.

The precise nature and details of the doctrines as to a future life, and
rewards and punishments there, developed in the Mysteries, is in a
measure uncertain. Little direct information in regard to it has come
down to us. No doubt, in the ceremonies there was a scenic
representation of Tartarus and the judgment of the dead, resembling that
which we find in Virgil: but there is as little doubt that these
representations were explained to be allegorical. It is not our purpose
here to repeat the descriptions given of Elysium and Tartarus. That
would be aside from our object. We are only concerned with the great
fact that the Mysteries taught the doctrine of the soul's immortality,
and that, in some shape, suffering, pain, remorse, and agony, ever
follow sin as its consequences.

Human ceremonies are indeed but imperfect symbols; and the alternate
baptisms in fire and water intended to purify us into immortality, are
ever in this world interrupted at the moment of their anticipated
completion. Life is a mirror which reflects only to deceive, a tissue
perpetually interrupted and broken, an urn forever fed, yet never full.

All initiation is but introductory to the great change of death Baptism,
anointing, embalming, obsequies by burial or fire, are preparatory
symbols, like the initiation of Hercules before descending to the
Shades, pointing out the mental change which ought to precede the
renewal of existence. Death is the true initiation, to which sleep is
the introductory or minor mystery. It is the final rite which united the
Egyptian with his God, and which opens the same promise to all who are
duly prepared for it.

The body was deemed a prison for the soul; but the latter was not
condemned to eternal banishment and imprisonment. The Father of the
Worlds permits its chains to be broken, and has provided in the course
of Nature the means of its escape. It was a doctrine of immemorial
antiquity, shared alike by Egyptians, Pythagoreans, the Orphici, and by
that characteristic Bacchic Sage, "the Preceptor of the Soul," Silenus,
that death is far better than life; that the real death belongs to those
who on earth are immersed in the Lethe of its passions and fascinations,
and that the true life commences only when the soul is emancipated for
its return.

And in this sense, as presiding over life and death, Dionusos is in the
highest sense _the_ LIBERATOR: since, like Osiris, he frees the soul,
and guides it in its migrations beyond the grave, preserving it from the
risk of again falling under the slavery of matter or of some inferior
animal form, the purgatory of Metempsychosis; and exalting and
perfecting its nature through the purifying discipline of his Mysteries.
"The great consummation of all philosophy," said Socrates, professedly
quoting from traditional and mystic sources, "is _Death_: He who pursues
philosophy aright, _is studying how to die_."

All soul is part of the Universal Soul, whose totality is Dionusos; and
it is therefore he who, as Spirit of Spirits, leads back the vagrant
spirit to its home, and accompanies it through the purifying processes,
both real and symbolical, of its earthly transit. He is therefore
emphatically the _Mystes_ or Hierophant, the great Spiritual Mediator of
Greek religion.

The human soul is itself [Greek: δαιμονιος] a God _within_ the mind,
capable through its own power of rivalling the canonization of the Hero,
of making itself immortal by the practice of the good, and the
contemplation of the beautiful and true. The removal to the Happy
Islands could only be understood mythically; everything earthly must
die; Man, like Œdipus, is wounded from his birth, his real elysium can
exist only beyond the grave. Dionusos died and descended to the shades.
His passion was the great Secret of the Mysteries; as Death is the Grand
Mystery of existence. His death, typical of Nature's Death, or of her
periodical decay and restoration, was one of the many symbols of the
_palingenesia_ or second birth of man.

Man descended from the elemental Forces or Titans [Elohim], who fed on
the body of the Pantheistic Deity creating the Universe by
self-sacrifice, commemorates in sacramental observance this mysterious
passion; and while partaking of the raw flesh of the victim, seems to be
invigorated by a fresh draught from the fountain of universal life, to
receive a new pledge of regenerated existence. Death is the inseparable
antecedent of life; the seed dies in order to produce the plant, and
earth itself is rent asunder and dies at the birth of Dionusos. Hence
the significancy of the _phallus_, or of its inoffensive substitute, the
obelisk, rising as an emblem of resurrection by the tomb of buried Deity
at Lerna or at Sais.

Dionusos-Orpheus descended to the Shades to recover the lost Virgin of
the Zodiac, to bring back his mother to the sky as Thyone; or what has
the same meaning, to consummate his eventful marriage with Persephone,
thereby securing, like the nuptials of his father with Semele or Danaë,
the perpetuity of Nature. His under-earth office is the depression of
the year, the wintry aspect in the alternations of bull and serpent,
whose united series makes up the continuity of Time, and in which,
physically speaking, the stern and dark are ever the parents of the
beautiful and bright.

It was this aspect, sombre for the moment, but bright by anticipation,
which was contemplated in the Mysteries: the human sufferer was consoled
by witnessing the severer trials of the Gods; and the vicissitudes of
life and death, expressed by apposite symbols, such as the sacrifice or
submersion of the Bull, the extinction and re-illumination of the torch,
excited corresponding emotions of alternate grief and joy, that play of
passion which was present at the origin of Nature, and which accompanies
all her changes.

The greater Eleusiniæ; were celebrated in the month Boëdromion, when the
seed was buried in the ground, and when the year, verging to its
decline, disposes the mind to serious reflection. The first days of the
ceremonial were passed in sorrow and anxious silence, in fasting and
expiatory or lustral offices. On a sudden, the scene was changed: sorrow
and lamentation were discarded, the glad name of Iacchus passed from
mouth to mouth, the image of the God, crowned with myrtle and bearing a
lighted torch, was borne in joyful procession from the Ceramicus to
Eleusis, where, during the ensuing night, the initiation was completed
by an imposing revelation. The first scene was in the [Greek: προναος],
or outer court of the sacred enclosure, where amidst utter darkness, or
while the meditating God, the star illuminating the Nocturnal Mystery,
alone carried an unextinguished torch, the candidates were overawed with
terrific sounds and noises, while they painfully groped their way, as in
the gloomy cavern of the soul's sublunar migration; a scene justly
compared to the passage of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. For by the
immutable law exemplified in the trials of Psyche, man must pass through
the terrors of the under-world, before he can reach the height of
Heaven. At length the gates of the _adytum_ were thrown open, a
supernatural light streamed from the illuminated statue of the Goddess,
and enchanting sights and sounds, mingled with songs and dances, exalted
the communicant to a rapture of supreme felicity, realizing, as far as
sensuous imagery could depict, the anticipated reunion with the Gods.

In the dearth of direct evidence as to the detail of the ceremonies
enacted, or of the meanings connected with them, their tendency must be
inferred from the characteristics of the contemplated deities with their
accessory symbols and mythi, or from direct testimony as to the value of
the Mysteries generally.

The ordinary phenomena of vegetation, the death of the seed in giving
birth to the plant, connecting the sublimest hopes with the plainest
occurrences, was the simple yet beautiful formula assumed by the great
mystery in almost all religions, from the Zend-Avesta to the Gospel. As
Proserpina, the divine power is as the seed decaying and destroyed; as
Artemis, she is the principle of its destruction; but Artemis Proserpina
is also Cotē Soteria, the Saviour, who leads the Spirits of Hercules and
Hyacinthus to Heaven.

Many other emblems were employed in the Mysteries,--as the dove, the
myrtle-wreath, and others, all significant of life rising out of death,
and of the equivocal condition of dying yet immortal man.

The horrors and punishments of Tartarus, as described in the Phædo and
the Æneid, with all the ceremonies of the judgments of Minos, Eacus, and
Rhadamanthus, were represented, sometimes more and sometimes less fully,
in the Mysteries; in order to impress upon the minds of the Initiates
this great lesson,--that we should be ever prepared to appear before the
Supreme Judge, with a heart pure and spotless; as Socrates teaches in
the Gorgias. For the soul stained with crimes, he says, to descend to
the Shades, is the bitterest ill. To adhere to Justice and Wisdom, Plato
holds, is our duty, that we may some day take that lofty road that leads
toward the heavens, and avoid most of the evils to which the soul is
exposed in its subterranean journey of a thousand years. And so in the
Phædo, Socrates teaches that we should seek here below to free our soul
of its passions, in order to be ready to enter our appearance, whenever
Destiny summons us to the Shades.

Thus the Mysteries inculcated a great moral truth, veiled with a fable
of huge proportions and the appliances of an impressive spectacle, to
which, exhibited in the sanctuaries, art and natural magic lent all
they had that was imposing. They sought to strengthen men against the
horrors of death and the fearful idea of utter annihilation. Death, says
the author of the dialogue, entitled _Axiochus_, included in the works
of Plato, is but a passage to a happier state; but one must have lived
well, to attain that most fortunate result. So that the doctrine of the
immortality of the soul was consoling to the virtuous and religious man
alone; while to all others it came with menaces and despair, surrounding
them with terrors and alarms that disturbed their repose during all
their life.

For the material horrors of Tartarus, allegorical to the Initiate, were
real to the mass of the Profane; nor in latter times, did, perhaps many
Initiates read rightly the allegory. The triple-walled prison, which the
condemned soul first met, round which swelled and surged the fiery waves
of Phlegethon, wherein rolled roaring, huge, blazing rocks; the great
gate with columns of adamant, which none save the Gods could crush;
Tisiphone, their warder, with her bloody robes; the lash resounding on
the mangled bodies of the miserable unfortunates, their plaintive
groans, mingled in horrid harmony with the clashings of their chains;
the Furies, lashing the guilty with their snakes; the awful abyss where
Hydra howls with its hundred heads, greedy to devour; Tityus, prostrate,
and his entrails fed upon by the cruel vulture: Sisyphus, ever rolling
his rock; Ixion on his wheel; Tantalus tortured by eternal thirst and
hunger, in the midst of water and with declicious fruits touching his
head; the daughters of Danaus at their eternal, fruitless task; beasts
biting and venomous reptiles stinging; and devouring flame eternally
consuming bodies ever renewed in endless agony; all these sternly
impressed upon the people the terrible consequences of sin and vice, and
urged them to pursue the paths of honesty and virtue.

And if, in the ceremonies of the Mysteries, these material horrors were
explained to the Initiates as mere symbols of the unimaginable torture,
remorse, and agony that would rend the immaterial soul and rack the
immortal spirit, they were feeble and insufficient in the same mode and
measure only, as all material images and symbols fall short of that
which is beyond the cognizance of our senses: and the grave Hierophant,
the imagery, the paintings, the dramatic horrors, the funeral
sacrifices, the august mysteries, the solemn silence of the sanctuaries,
were none the less impressive, because they were known to be but
symbols, that with material shows and images made the imagination to be
the teacher of the intellect.

So, too, it was represented, that except for the gravest sins there was
an opportunity for expiation; and the tests of _water_, _air_, and
_fire_ were represented; by means of which, during the march of many
years, the soul could be purified, and rise toward the ethereal regions;
that ascent being more or less tedious and laborious, according as each
soul was more or less clogged by the gross impediments of its sins and
vices. Herein was shadowed forth, (how distinctly taught the Initiates
we know not), the doctrine that pain and sorrow, misfortune and remorse,
are the inevitable _consequences_ that flow from sin and vice, as effect
flows from cause; that by each sin and every act of vice the soul drops
back and loses ground in its advance toward perfection: and that the
ground so lost is and will be in reality never so recovered as that the
sin shall be as if it never had been committed; but that throughout all
the eternity of its existence, each soul shall be conscious that every
act of vice or baseness it did on earth has made the distance greater
between itself and ultimate perfection.

We see this truth glimmering in the doctrine, taught in the Mysteries,
that though slight and ordinary offences could be expiated by penances,
repentance, acts of beneficence, and prayers, grave crimes were mortal
sins, beyond the reach of all such remedies. Eleusis closed her gates
against Nero: and the Pagan Priests told Constantine that among all
their modes of expiation there was none so potent as could wash from
_his_ soul the dark spots left by the murder of his wife, and his
multiplied perjuries and assassinations.

The object of the ancient initiations being to ameliorate mankind and to
perfect the intellectual part of man, the nature of the human soul, its
origin, its destination, its relations to the body and to universal
nature, all formed part of the mystic science; and to them in part the
lessons given to the Initiate were directed. For it was believed that
initiation tended to his perfection, and to preventing the divine part
within him, overloaded with matter gross and earthy, from being plunged
into gloom, and impeded in its return to the Deity. The soul, with them,
was not a mere conception or abstraction; but a reality including in
itself life and thought; or, rather, of whose essence it was to live and
think.

It was material; but not brute, inert, inactive, lifeless, motionless,
formless, lightless matter. It was held to be active, reasoning,
thinking; its natural home in the highest regions of the Universe,
whence it descended to illuminate, give form and movement to, vivify,
animate, and carry with itself the baser matter; and whither it
unceasingly tends to reascend, when and as soon as it can free itself
from its connection with that matter. From that substance, divine,
infinitely delicate and active, essentially luminous, the souls of men
were formed, and by it alone, uniting with and organizing their bodies,
men _lived_.

This was the doctrine of Pythagoras, who learned it when he received the
Egyptian Mysteries: and it was the doctrine of all who, by means of the
ceremonial of initiation, thought to purify the soul. Virgil makes the
spirit of Anchises teach it to Æneas: and all the expiations and
lustrations used in the Mysteries were but symbols of those intellectual
ones by which the soul was to be purged of its vice-spots and stains,
and freed of the incumbrance of its earthly prison, so that it might
rise unimpeded to the source from which it came.

Hence sprung the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; which
Pythagoras taught as an allegory, and those who came after him received
literally. Plato, like him, drew his doctrines from the East and the
Mysteries, and undertook to translate the language of the symbols used
there, into that of Philosophy; and to prove by argument and
philosophical deduction, what, _felt_ by the consciousness, the
Mysteries taught by symbols as an indisputable fact,--the immortality of
the soul. Cicero did the same; and followed the Mysteries in teaching
that the Gods were but mortal men, who for their great virtues and
signal services had deserved that their souls should, after death, be
raised to that lofty rank.

It being taught in the Mysteries, either by way of allegory, the meaning
of which was not made known except to a select few, or, perhaps only at
a later day, as an actual reality, that the souls of the vicious dead
passed into the bodies of those animals to whose nature their vices had
most affinity, it was also taught that the soul could avoid these
transmigrations, often successive and numerous, by the practice of
virtue, which would acquit it of them, free it from the circle of
successive generations, and restore it at once to its source. Hence
nothing was so ardently prayed for by the Initiates, says Proclus, as
this happy fortune, which, delivering them from the empire of Evil,
would restore them to their true life, and conduct them to the place of
final rest. To this doctrine probably referred those figures of animals
and monsters which were exhibited to the Initiate, before allowing him
to see the sacred light for which he sighed.

Plato says, that souls will not reach the term of their ills, until the
revolutions of the world have restored them to their primitive
condition, and purified them from the stains which they have contracted
by the contagion of fire, earth, and air. And he held that they could
not be allowed to enter Heaven, until they had distinguished themselves
by the practice of virtue in some one of three several bodies. The
Manicheans allowed five: Pindar, the same number as Plato; as did the
Jews.

And Cicero says, that the ancient soothsayers, and the interpreters of
the will of the Gods, in their religious ceremonies and initiations,
taught that we expiate here below the crimes committed in a prior life;
and for that are born. It was taught in these Mysteries, that the soul
passes through several states, and that the pains and sorrows of this
life are an expiation of prior faults.

This doctrine of transmigration of souls obtained, as Porphyry informs
us, among the Persians and Magi. It was held in the East and the West,
and that from the remotest antiquity. Herodotus found it among the
Egyptians, who made the term of the circle of migrations from one human
body, through animals, fishes, and birds, to another human body, three
thousand years. Empedocles even held that souls went into plants. Of
these, the laurel was the noblest, as of animals the lion; both being
consecrated to the Sun, to which, it was held in the Orient, virtuous
souls were to return. The Curds, the Chinese, the Kabbalists, all held
the same doctrine. So Origen held, and the Bishop Synesius, the latter
of whom had been initiated, and who thus prayed to God: "O Father, grant
that my soul, reunited to the light, may not be plunged again into the
defilements of earth!" So the Gnostics held; and even the Disciples of
Christ inquired if the man who was born blind, was not so punished for
some sin that he had committed before his birth.

Virgil, in the celebrated allegory in which he develops the doctrines
taught in the Mysteries, enunciated the doctrine, held by most of the
ancient philosophers, of the pre-existence of souls, in the eternal fire
from which they emanate; that fire which animates the Stars, and
circulates in every part of Nature: and the purifications of the soul,
by fire, water, and air, of which he speaks, and which three modes were
employed in the Mysteries of Bacchus, were symbols of the passage of the
soul into different bodies.

The relations of the human soul with the rest of nature were a chief
object of the science of the Mysteries. The man was there brought face
to face with entire nature. The world, and the spherical envelope that
surrounds it, were represented by a mystic egg, by the side of the image
of the Sun-God whose Mysteries were celebrated. The famous Orphic egg
was consecrated to Bacchus in his Mysteries. It was, says Plutarch, an
image of the Universe, which engenders everything, and contains
everything in its bosom. "Consult," says Macrobius, "the Initiates of
the Mysteries of Bacchus, who honor with special veneration the sacred
egg." The rounded and almost spherical form of its shell, he says, which
encloses it on every side, and confines within itself the principles of
life, is a symbolic image of the world; and the world is the universal
principle of all things.

This symbol was borrowed from the Egyptians, who also consecrated the
egg to Osiris, germ of Light, himself born, says Diodorus, from that
famous egg. In Thebes, in Upper Egypt, he was represented as emitting it
from his mouth, and causing to issue from it the first principle of heat
and light, or the Fire-God, Vulcan, or Phtha. We find this egg even in
Japan, between the horns of the famous Mithriac Bull, whose attributes
Osiris, Apis, and Bacchus all borrowed.

Orpheus, author of the Grecian Mysteries, which he carried from Egypt to
Greece, consecrated this symbol: and taught that matter, uncreated and
informous, existed from all eternity, unorganized, as chaos; containing
in itself the Principles of all Existences confused and intermingled,
light with darkness, the dry with the humid, heat with cold; from which,
it after long ages taking the shape of an immense egg, issued the purest
matter, or first substance, and the residue was divided into the four
elements, from which proceeded heaven and earth and all things else.
This grand Cosmogonic idea he taught in the Mysteries; and thus the
Hierophant explained the meaning of the mystic egg, seen by the
Initiates in the Sanctuary.

Thus entire Nature, in her primitive organization, was presented to him
whom it was wished to instruct in her secrets and initiate in her
mysteries; and Clemens of Alexandria might well say that initiation was
a real physiology.

So Phanes, the Light-God, in the Mysteries of the New Orphics, emerged
from the egg of chaos: and the Persians had the great egg of Ormuzd. And
Sanchoniathon tells us that in the Phœnician theology, the matter of
chaos took the form of an egg; and he adds: "Such are the lessons which
the Son of Thabion, first Hierophant of the Phœnicians, turned into
allegories, in which physics and astronomy intermingled, and which he
taught to the other Hierophants, whose duty it was to preside at orgies
and initiations; and who, seeking to excite the astonishment and
admiration of mortals, faithfully transmitted these things to their
successors and the Initiates."

In the Mysteries was also taught the division of the Universal Cause
into an Active and a Passive cause; of which two, Osiris and Isis,--the
heavens and the earth were symbols. These two First Causes, into which
it was held that the great Universal First Cause at the beginning of
things divided itself, were the two great Divinities, whose worship was,
according to Varro, inculcated upon the Initiates at Samothrace. "As is
taught," he says, "in the initiation into the Mysteries at Samothrace,
Heaven and Earth are regarded as the two first Divinities. They are the
potent Gods worshipped in that Island, and whose names are consecrated
in the books of our Augurs. One of them is male and the other female;
and they bear the same relation to each other as the soul does to the
body, humidity to dryness." The Curetes, in Crete, had builded an altar
to Heaven and to Earth; whose Mysteries they celebrated at Gnossus, in a
cypress grove.

These two Divinities, the Active and Passive Principles of the Universe,
were commonly symbolized by the generative parts of man and woman; to
which, in remote ages, no idea of indecency was attached; the _Phallus_
and _Cteis_, emblems of generation and production, and which, as such,
appeared in the Mysteries. The Indian Lingam was the union of both, as
were the boat and mast and the point within a circle: all of which
expressed the same philosophical idea as to the Union of the two great
Causes of Nature, which concur, one actively and the other passively, in
the generation of all beings: which were symbolized by what we now term
_Gemini_, the Twins, at that remote period when the Sun was in that
Sign at the Vernal Equinox, and when they were Male and Female; and of
which the Phallus was perhaps taken from the generative organ of the
Bull, when about twenty-five hundred years before our era he opened that
equinox, and became to the Ancient World the symbol of the creative and
generative Power.

The Initiates at Eleusis commenced, Proclus says, by invoking the two
great causes of nature, the Heavens and the Earth, on which in
succession they fixed their eyes, addressing to each a prayer. And they
deemed it their duty to do so, he adds, because they saw in them the
Father and Mother of all generations. The concourse of these two agents
of the Universe was termed in theological language a _marriage_.
Tertullian, accusing the Valentinians of having borrowed these symbols
from the Mysteries of Eleusis, yet admits that in those Mysteries they
were explained in a manner consistent with decency, as representing the
powers of nature. He was too little of a philosopher to comprehend the
sublime esoteric meaning of these emblems, which will, if you advance,
in other Degrees be unfolded to you.

The Christian Fathers contented themselves with reviling and ridiculing
the use of these emblems. But as they in the earlier times created no
indecent ideas, and were worn alike by the most innocent youths and
virtuous women, it will be far wiser for us to seek to penetrate their
meaning. Not only the Egyptians, says Diodorus Siculus, but every other
people that consecrate this symbol (the Phallus), deem that they thereby
do honor to the Active Force of the universal generation of all living
things. For the same reason, as we learn from the geographer Ptolemy, it
was revered among the Assyrians and Persians. Proclus remarks that in
the distribution of the Zodiac among the twelve great Divinities, by
ancient astrology, six signs were assigned to the male and six to the
female principle.

There is another division of nature, which has in all ages struck all
men, and which was not forgotten in the Mysteries; that of Light and
Darkness, Day and Night, Good and Evil; which mingle with, and clash
against, and pursue or are pursued by each other throughout the
Universe. The Great Symbolic Egg distinctly reminded the Initiates of
this great division of the world. Plutarch, treating of the dogma of a
Providence, and of that of the two principles of Light and Darkness,
which he regarded as the basis of the Ancient Theology, of the Orgies
and the Mysteries, as well among the Greeks as the Barbarians,--a
doctrine whose origin, according to him, is lost in the night of
time,--cites, in support of his opinion, the famous Mystic Egg of the
disciples of Zoroaster and the Initiates in the Mysteries of Mithras.

To the Initiates in the Mysteries of Eleusis was exhibited the spectacle
of these two principles, in the successive scenes of Darkness and Light
which passed before their eyes. To the profoundest darkness, accompanied
with illusions and horrid phantoms, succeeded the most brilliant light,
whose splendor blazed round the statue of the Goddess. The candidate,
says Dion Chrysostomus, passed into a mysterious temple, of astonishing
magnitude and beauty, where were exhibited to him many mystic scenes;
where his ears were stunned with many voices; and where Darkness and
Light successively passed before him. And Themistius in like manner
describes the Initiate, when about to enter into that part of the
sanctuary tenanted by the Goddess, as filled with fear and religious
awe, wavering, uncertain in what direction to advance through the
profound darkness that envelopes him. But when the Hierophant has opened
the entrance to the inmost sanctuary, and removed the robe that hides
the Goddess, he exhibits her to the Initiate, resplendent with divine
light. The thick shadow and gloomy atmosphere which had environed the
candidate vanish; he is filled with a vivid and glowing enthusiasm, that
lifts his soul out of the profound dejection in which it was plunged;
and the purest light succeeds to the thickest darkness.

In a fragment of the same writer, preserved by Stobæus, we learn that
the Initiate, up to the moment when his initiation is to be consummated,
is alarmed by every kind of sight: that astonishment and terror take his
soul captive; he trembles; cold sweat flows from his body; until the
moment when the Light is shown him,--a most astounding Light,--the
brilliant scene of Elysium, where he sees charming meadows overarched by
a clear sky, and festivals celebrated by dances; where he hears
harmonious voices, and the majestic chants of the Hierophants; and views
the sacred spectacles. Then, absolutely free, and enfranchised from the
dominion of all ills, he mingles with the crowd of Initiates, and,
crowned with flowers, celebrates with them the holy orgies, in the
brilliant realms of ether, and the dwelling-place of Ormuzd.

In the Mysteries of Isis, the candidate first passed through the dark
valley of the shadow of death; then into a place representing the
elements or sublunary world, where the two principles clash and contend;
and was finally admitted to a luminous region where the sun, with his
most brilliant light, put to rout the shades of night. Then he himself
put on the costume of the Sun-God or the Visible Source of Ethereal
Light, in whose Mysteries he was initiated; and passed from the empire
of darkness to that of light. After having set his feet on the threshold
of the palace of Pluto he ascended to the Empyrean, to the bosom of the
Eternal Principle of Light of the Universe, from which all souls and
intelligences emanate.

Plutarch admits that this theory of two Principles was the basis of all
the Mysteries, and consecrated in the religious ceremonies and Mysteries
of Greece. Osiris and Typhon, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Bacchus and the Titans
and Giants, all represented these principles. Phanes, the luminous God
that issued from the Sacred Egg, and Night, bore the sceptres in the
Mysteries of the New Bacchus. Night and Day were two of the eight Gods
adored in the Mysteries of Osiris. The sojourn of Proserpine and also of
Adonis, during six months of each year in the upper world, abode of
light, and six months in the lower or abode of darkness, allegorically
represented the same division of the Universe.

The connection of the different initiations with the Equinoxes which
separate the Empire of the Nights from that of the Days, and fix the
moment when one of these principles begins to prevail over the other,
shows that the Mysteries referred to the continual contest between the
two principles of light and darkness, each alternately victor and
vanquished. The very object proposed by them shows that their basis was
the theory of the two principles and their relations with the soul. "We
celebrate the august Mysteries of Ceres and Proserpine," says the
Emperor Julian, "at the Autumnal Equinox, to obtain of the Gods that the
soul may not experience the malignant action of the Power of Darkness
that is then about to have sway and rule in Nature." Sallust the
Philosopher makes almost the same remark as to the relations of the soul
with the periodical march of light and darkness, during an annual
revolution; and assures us that the mysterious festivals of Greece
related to the same. And in all the explanations given by Macrobius of
the Sacred Fables in regard to the Sun, adored under the names of
Osiris, Horus, Adonis, Atys, Bacchus, etc., we invariably see that they
refer to the theory of the two Principles, Light and Darkness, and the
triumphs gained by one over the other. In April was celebrated the first
triumph obtained by the light of day over the length of the nights; and
the ceremonies of mourning and rejoicing had, Macrobius says, as their
object, the vicissitudes of the annual administration of the world.

This brings us naturally to the tragic portion of these religious
scenes, and to the allegorical history of the different adventures of
the Principle, Light, victor and vanquished by turns, in the combats
waged with Darkness during each annual period. Here we reach the most
mysterious part of the ancient initiations, and that most interesting to
the Mason who laments the death of his Grand Master Khir-Om. Over it
Herodotus throws the august veil of mystery and silence. Speaking of the
Temple of Minerva, or of that Isis who was styled the Mother of the
Sun-God, and whose Mysteries were termed _Isiac_, at Sais, he speaks of
a Tomb in the Temple, in the rear of the Chapel and against the wall;
and says, "It is the tomb of a man, whose name respect requires me to
conceal. Within the Temple were great obelisks of stone [_phalli_], and
a circular lake paved with stones and revetted with a parapet. It seemed
to me as large as that at Delos" [where the Mysteries of Apollo were
celebrated]. "In this lake the Egyptians celebrate, during the night,
what they style the Mysteries, in which are represented the sufferings
of the God of whom I have spoken above." This God was Osiris, put to
death by Typhon, and who descended to the Shades and was restored to
life; of which he had spoken before.

We are reminded, by this passage, of the Tomb of Khir-Om, his death, and
his rising from the grave, symbolical of restoration of life; and also
of the brazen Sea in the Temple at Jerusalem. Herodotus adds: "I impose
upon myself a profound silence in regard to these Mysteries, with most
of which I am acquainted. As little will I speak of the initiations of
Ceres, known among the Greeks as Thesmophoria. What I shall say will not
violate the respect which I owe to religion."

Athenagoras quotes this passage to show that not only the Statue but the
Tomb of Osiris was exhibited in Egypt, and a tragic representation of
his sufferings; and remarks that the Egyptians had mourning ceremonies
in honor of their Gods, whose deaths they lamented; and to whom they
afterward sacrificed as having passed to a state of immortality.

It is, however, not difficult, combining the different rays of light
that emanate from the different Sanctuaries, to learn the genius and the
object of these secret ceremonies. We have hints, and not details.

We know that the Egyptians worshipped the Sun, under the name of Osiris.
The misfortunes and tragical death of this God were an allegory relating
to the Sun. Typhon, like Ahriman, represented Darkness. The sufferings
and death of Osiris in the Mysteries of the Night were a mystic image of
the phenomena of Nature, and the conflict of the two great Principles
which share the empire of Nature, and most influenced our souls. The Sun
is neither born, dies, nor is raised to life: and the recital of these
events was but an allegory, veiling a higher truth.

Horus, son of Isis, and the same as Apollo or the Sun, also died and was
restored again to life and to his mother; and the priests of Isis
celebrated these great events by mourning and joyous festival succeeding
each other.

In the Mysteries of Phoenicia, established in honor of Thammuz or Adoni,
also the Sun, the spectacle of his death and resurrection was exhibited
to the Initiates. As we learn from Meursius and Plutarch, a figure was
exhibited representing the corpse of a young man. Flowers were strewed
upon his body, the women mourned for him; a tomb was erected to him. And
these feasts, as we learn from Plutarch and Ovid, passed into Greece.

In the Mysteries of Mithras, the Sun-God, in Asia Minor, Armenia and
Persia, the death of that God was lamented, and his resurrection was
celebrated with the most enthusiastic expressions of joy. A corpse, we
learn from Julian Firmicus, was shown the Initiates, representing
Mithras dead; and afterward his resurrection was announced; and they
were then invited to rejoice that the dead God was restored to life, and
had by means of his sufferings secured their salvation. Three months
before, his birth had been celebrated, under the emblem of an infant,
born on the 25th of December, or the eighth day before the Kalends of
January.

In Greece, in the Mysteries of the same God, honored under the name of
Bakchos, a representation was given of his death, slain by the Titans;
of his descent into hell, his subsequent resurrection, and his return
toward his Principle or the pure abode whence he had descended to unite
himself with matter. In the islands of Chios and Tenedos, his death was
represented by the sacrifice of a man, actually immolated.

The mutilation and sufferings of the same Sun-God, honored in Phrygia
under the name of Atys, caused the tragic scenes that were, as we learn
from Diodorus Siculus, represented annually in the Mysteries of Cybele,
mother of the Gods. An image was borne there, representing the corpse of
a young man, over whose tomb tears were shed, and to whom funeral honors
were paid.

At Samothrace, in the Mysteries of the Cabiri or great Gods, a
representation was given of the death of one of them. This name was
given to the Sun, because the Ancient Astronomers gave the name of Gods
Cabiri and of Samothrace to the two Gods in the Constellation Gemini;
whom others term Apollo and Hercules, two names of the Sun. Athenion
says that the young Cabirus so slain was the same as the Dionusos or
Bakchos of the Greeks. The Pelasgi, ancient inhabitants of Greece, and
who settled Samothrace, celebrated these Mysteries, whose origin is
unknown: and they worshipped Castor and Pollux as patrons of navigation.

The tomb of Apollo was at Delphi, where his body was laid, after Python,
the Polar Serpent that annually heralds the coming of autumn, cold,
darkness, and winter, had slain him, and over whom the God triumphs, on
the 25th of March, on his return to the lamb of the Vernal Equinox.

In Crete, Jupiter Ammon, or the Sun in Aries, painted with the
attributes of that equinoctial sign, the Ram or Lamb;--that Ammon who,
Martianus Copella says, is the same as Osiris, Adoni, Adonis, Atys, and
the other Sun-Gods,--had also a tomb, and a religious initiation; one of
the principal ceremonies of which consisted in clothing the Initiate
with the skin of a white lamb. And in this we see the origin of the
apron of white sheep-skin, used in Masonry.

All these deaths and resurrections, these funeral emblems, these
anniversaries of mourning and joy, these cenotaphs raised in different
places to the Sun-God, honored under different names, had but a single
object, the allegorical narration of the events which happened here
below to the Light of Nature, that sacred fire from which our souls were
deemed to emanate, warring with Matter and the dark Principle resident
therein, ever at variance with the Principle of Good and Light poured
upon itself by the Supreme Divinity. All these Mysteries, says Clemens
of Alexandria, displaying to us murders and tombs alone, all these
religious tragedies, had a common basis, variously ornamented: and that
basis was the fictitious death and resurrection of the Sun, Soul of the
World, principle of life and movement in the Sublunary World, and source
of our intelligences, which are but a portion of the Eternal Light
blazing in that Star, their chief centre.

It was in the Sun that Souls, it was said, were purified: and to it they
repaired. It was one of the gates of the soul, through which the
theologians, says Porphyry, say that it re-ascends toward the home of
Light and the Good. Wherefore, in the Mysteries of Eleusis, the Dadoukos
(the first officer after the Hierophant, who represented the Grand
Demiourgos or Maker of the Universe), who was posted in the interior of
the Temple, and there received the candidates, represented the Sun.

It was also held that the vicissitudes experienced by the Father of
Light had an influence on the destiny of souls; which, of the same
substance as he, shared his fortunes. This we learn from the Emperor
Julian and Sallust the Philosopher. They are afflicted when he suffers:
they rejoice when he triumphs over the Power of Darkness which opposes
his sway and hinders the happiness of Souls, to whom nothing is so
terrible as darkness. The fruit of the sufferings of the God, father of
light and Souls, slain by the Chief of the Powers of Darkness, and again
restored to life, was received in the Mysteries. "His death works your
Salvation;" said the High Priest of Mithras. That was the great secret
of this religious tragedy, and its expected fruit;--the resurrection of
a God, who, repossessing Himself of His dominion over Darkness, should
associate with Him in His triumph those virtuous Souls that by their
purity were worthy to share His glory; and that strove not against the
divine force that drew them to Him, when He had thus conquered.

To the Initiate were also displayed the spectacles of the chief agents
of the Universal Cause, and of the distribution of the world, in the
detail of its parts arranged in most regular order. The Universe itself
supplied man with the model of the first Temple reared to the Divinity.
The arrangement of the Temple of Solomon, the symbolic ornaments which
formed its chief decorations, and the dress of the High Priest,--all, as
Clemens of Alexandria, Josephus and Philo state, had reference to the
order of the world. Clemens informs us that the Temple contained many
emblems of the Seasons, the Sun, the Moon, the planets, the
constellations Ursa Major and Minor, the zodiac, the elements, and the
other parts of the world.

Josephus, in his description of the High Priest's Vestments, protesting
against the charge of impiety brought against the Hebrews by other
nations, for contemning the Heathen Divinities, declares it false,
because, in the construction of the Tabernacle, in the vestments of the
Sacrificers, and in the Sacred vessels, the whole World was in some sort
represented. Of the three parts, he says, into which the Temple was
divided, two represent Earth and Sea, open to all men, and the third,
Heaven, God's dwelling-place, reserved for Him alone. The twelve loaves
of Shew-bread signify the twelve months of the year. The Candlestick
represented the twelve signs through which the Seven Planets run their
courses; and the seven lights, those planets; the veils, of four colors,
the four elements; the tunic of the High Priest, the earth; the
Hyacinth, nearly blue, the Heavens; the ephod, of four colors, the whole
of nature; the gold, Light; the breast-plate, in the middle, this earth
in the centre of the world; the two Sardonyxes, used as clasps, the Sun
and Moon; and the twelve precious stones of the breast-plate arranged by
threes, like the Seasons, the twelve months, and the twelve signs of the
zodiac. Even the loaves were arranged in two groups of six, like the
zodiacal signs above and below the Equator. Clemens, the learned Bishop
of Alexandria, and Philo, adopt all these explanations.

Hermes calls the Zodiac, the Grent Tent,--Tabernaculum. In the Royal
Arch Degree of the American Rite, the Tabernacle has four veils, of
different colors, to each of which belongs a banner. The colors of the
four are White, Blue, Crimson, and Purple, and the banners bear the
images of the Bull, the Lion, the Man, and the Eagle, the Constellations
answering 2500 years before our era to the Equinoctial and Solstitial
points: to which belong four stars, Aldebaran, Regulus, Fomalhaut, and
Antares. At each of these veils there are three words: and to each
division of the Zodiac, belonging to each of these Stars, are three
Signs. The four signs, Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius, were termed
the _fixed_ signs, and are appropriately assigned to the four veils.

So the Cherubim, according to Clemens and Philo, represented the two
hemispheres: their wings, the rapid course of the firmament, and of time
which revolves in the Zodiac. "For the Heavens fly;" says Philo,
speaking of the wings of the Cherubim: which were winged representations
of the Lion, the Bull, the Eagle, and the Man; of two of which, the
human-headed, winged bulls and lions, so many have been found at
Nimroud; adopted as beneficent symbols, when the Sun entered Taurus at
the Vernal Equinox and Leo at the Summer Solstice: and when, also, he
entered Scorpio for which, on account of its malignant influences,
Aquila, the eagle was substituted, at the autumnal equinox; and Aquarius
(the water-bearer) at the Winter Solstice.

So, Clemens says, the candlestick with seven branches represented the
seven planets, like which the seven branches were arranged and
regulated, preserving that musical proportion and system of harmony of
which the sun was the centre and connection. They were arranged, says
Philo, by threes, like the planets above and those below the sun;
between which two groups was the branch that represented him, the
mediator or moderator of the celestial harmony. He is, in fact, the
fourth in the musical scale, as Philo remarks, and Martianus Capella in
his hymn to the Sun.

Near the candlestick were other emblems representing the heavens, earth,
and the vegetative matter out of whose bosom the vapors arise. The whole
temple was an abridged image of the world. There were candlesticks with
four branches, symbols of the elements and the seasons; with twelve,
symbols of the signs; and even with three hundred and sixty, the number
of days in the year, without the supplementary days. Imitating the
famous Temple of Tyre, where were the great columns consecrated to the
winds and fire, the Tyrian artist placed two columns of bronze at the
entrance of the porch of the temple. The hemispherical brazen sea,
supported by four groups of bulls, of three each, looking to the four
cardinal points of the compass, represented the bull of the Vernal
Equinox, and at Tyre were consecrated to Astarte; to whom Hiram,
Josephus says, had builded a temple, and who wore on her head a helmet
bearing the image of a bull. And the throne of Solomon, with bulls
adorning its arms, and supported on lions, like those of Horus in Egypt
and of the Sun at Tyre; likewise referred to the Vernal Equinox and
Summer Solstice.

Those who in Thrace adored the sun, under the name of Saba-Zeus, the
Grecian Bakchos, builded to him, says Macrobius, a temple on Mount
Zelmisso, its round form representing the world and the sun. A circular
aperture in the roof admitted the light, and introduced the image of
the sun into the body of the sanctuary, where he seemed to blaze as in
the heights of Heaven, and to dissipate the darkness within that temple
which was a representative symbol of the world. There the passion,
death, and resurrection of Bakchos were represented.

So the Temple of Eleusis was lighted by a window in the roof. The
sanctuary so lighted, Dion compares to the Universe, from which he says
it differed in size alone; and in it the great lights of nature played a
great part and were mystically represented. The images of the Sun, Moon,
and Mercury were represented there, (the latter the same as Anubis who
accompanied Isis); and they are still the three lights of a Masonic
Lodge; except that for Mercury, the Master of the Lodge has been
absurdly substituted.

Eusebius names as the principal Ministers in the Mysteries of Eleusis,
first, the _Hierophant_, clothed with the attributes of the Grand
Architect (Demiourgos) of the Universe. After him came the _Dadoukos_,
or torch-bearer, representative of the Sun: then the altar-bearer,
representing the Moon: and last, the _Hieroceryx_, bearing the caduceus,
and representing Mercury. It was not permissible to reveal the different
emblems and the mysterious pageantry of initiation to the Profane; and
therefore we do not know the attributes, emblems, and ornaments of these
and other officers; of which Apuleius and Pausanias dared not speak.

We know only that everything recounted there was marvellous; everything
done there tended to astonish the Initiate: and that eyes and ears were
equally astounded. The Hierophant, of lofty height, and noble features,
with long hair, of a great age, grave and dignified, with a voice sweet
and sonorous, sat upon a throne, clad in a long trailing robe; as the
Motive-God of Nature was held to be enveloped in His work and hidden
under a veil which no mortal can raise. Even His name was concealed,
like that of the Demiourgos, whose name was ineffable.

The Dadoukos also wore a long robe, his hair long, and a bandeau on his
forehead. Callias, when holding that office, fighting on the great day
of Marathon, clothed with the insignia of his office, was taken by the
Barbarians to be a King. The Dadoukos led the procession of the
Initiates, and was charged with the Purifications.

We do not know the functions of the _Epibomos_ or assistant at the
altar, who represented the moon. That planet was one of the two homes
of souls, and one of the two great gates by which they descended and
reascended. Mercury was charged with the conducting of souls through the
two great gates; and in going from the sun to the moon they passed
immediately by him. He admitted or rejected them as they were more or
less pure, and therefore the Hieroceryx or Sacred Herald, who
represented Mercury was charged with the duty of excluding the Profane
from the Mysteries.

The same officers are found in the procession of Initiates of Isis,
described by Apuleius. All clad in robes of white linen, drawn tight
across the breast, and close-fitting down to the very feet, came, first,
one bearing a lamp in the shape of a boat; second, one carrying an
altar; and third, one carrying a golden palm-tree and the caduceus.
These are the same as the three officers at Eleusis, after the
Hierophant. Then one carrying an open hand, and pouring milk on the
ground from a golden vessel in the shape of a woman's breast. The hand
was that of justice: and the milk alluded to the Galaxy or Milky Way,
along which souls descended and remounted. Two others followed, one
bearing a winnowing fan, and the other a water-vase; symbols of the
purification of souls by air and water; and the third purification, by
earth, was represented by an image of the animal that cultivates it, the
cow or ox, borne by another officer.

Then followed a chest or ark, magnificently ornamented, containing an
image of the organs of generation of Osiris, or perhaps of both sexes;
emblems of the original generating and producing Powers. When Typhon,
said the Egyptian fable, cut up the body of Osiris into pieces, he flung
his genitals into the Nile, where a fish devoured them. Atys mutilated
himself, as his Priests afterward did in imitation of him; and Adonis
was in that part of his body wounded by the boar: all of which
represented the loss by the Sun of his vivifying and generative power,
when he reached the Autumnal Equinox (the Scorpion that on old monuments
bites those parts of the Vernal Bull), and descended toward the region
of darkness and Winter.

Then, says Apuleius, came "one who carried in his bosom an object that
rejoiced the heart of the bearer, a venerable effigy of the Supreme
Deity, neither bearing resemblance to man, cattle, bird, beast, or any
living creature: an exquisite invention, venerable from the novel
originality of the fashioning; a wonderful, ineffable symbol of
religious mysteries, to be looked upon in profound silence. Such as it
was, its figure was that of a small urn of burnished gold, hollowed very
artistically, rounded at the bottom, and covered all over the outside
with the wonderful hieroglyphics of the Egyptians. The spout was not
elevated, but extended laterally, projecting like a long rivulet; while
on the opposite side was the handle, which, with similar lateral
extension, bore on its summit an asp, curling its body into folds, and
stretching upward, its wrinkled, scaly, swollen throat."

The salient basilisk, or royal ensign of the Pharaohs, often occurs on
the monuments--a serpent in folds, with his head raised erect above the
folds. The basilisk was the Phoenix of the serpent-tribe; and the vase
or urn was probably the vessel, shaped like a cucumber, with a
projecting spout, out of which, on the monuments of Egypt, the priests
are represented pouring streams of the _cruz ansata_ or Tau Cross, and
of _sceptres_, over the kings.

In the Mysteries of Mithras, a sacred cave, representing the whole
arrangement of the world, was used for the reception of the Initiates.
Zoroaster, says Eubulus, first introduced this custom of consecrating
caves. They were also consecrated, in Crete, to Jupiter; in Arcadia, to
the Moon and Pan; and in the Island of Naxos, to Bacchus. The Persians,
in the cave where the Mysteries of Mithras were celebrated, fixed the
seat of that God, Father of Generation, or Demiourgos, near the
equinoctial point of Spring, with the Northern portion of the world on
his right, and the Southern on his left.

Mithras, says Porphyry, presided over the Equinoxes, seated on a Bull,
the symbolical animal of the Demiourgos, and bearing a sword. The
equinoxes were the gates through which souls passed to and fro, between
the hemisphere of light and that or darkness. The milky way was also
represented, passing near each of these gates: and it was, in the old
theology, termed the pathway of souls. It is, according to Pythagoras,
vast troops of souls that form that luminous belt.

The route followed by souls, according to Porphyry, or rather their
progressive march in the world, lying through the fixed stars and
planets, the Mithriac cave not only displayed the zodiacal and other
constellations, and marked gates at the four equinoctial and solstitial
points of the zodiac, whereat souls enter into and escape from the world
of generations; and through which they pass to and fro between the
realms of light and darkness; but it represented the seven planetary
spheres which they needs must traverse, in descending from the heaven of
the fixed stars to the elements that envelop the earth; and seven gates
were marked, one for each planet, through which they pass, in descending
or returning.

We learn this from Celsus, in Origen; who says that the symbolical image
of this passage among the Stars, used in the Mithriac Mysteries, was a
ladder, reaching from earth to Heaven, divided into seven steps or
stages, to each of which was a gate, and at the summit an eighth, that
of the fixed stars. The first gate says Celsus, was that of Saturn, and
of lead, by the heavy nature whereof his dull slow progress was
symbolized. The second, of tin, was that of Venus, symbolizing her soft
splendor and easy flexibility. The third, of brass, was that of Jupiter,
emblem of his solidity and dry nature. The fourth, of iron, was that of
Mercury, expressing his indefatigable activity and sagacity. The fifth,
of copper, was that of Mars, expressive of his inequalities and variable
nature. The sixth, of silver, was that of the Moon: and the seventh, of
gold, that of the Sun. This order is not the real order of these
Planets; but a mysterious one, like that of the days of the Week
consecrated to them, commencing with Saturday, and _retrograding_ to
Sunday. It was dictated, Celsus says, by certain harmonic relations,
those of the fourth.

Thus there was an intimate connection between the Sacred Science of the
Mysteries, and ancient astronomy and physics; and the grand spectacle of
the Sanctuaries was that of the order of the Known Universe, or the
spectacle of Nature itself, surrounding the soul of the Initiate, as it
surrounded it when it first descended through the planetary gates, and
by the equinoctal and solstitial doors, along the Milky Way, to be for
the first time immured in its prison-house of matter. But the Mysteries
also represented to the candidate, by sensible symbols, the invisible
forces which move this visible Universe, and the virtues, qualities, and
powers attached to matter, and which maintain the marvellous order
observed therein. Of this Porphyry informs us.

The world, according to the philosophers of antiquity, was not a purely
material and mechanical machine. A great Soul, diffused everywhere,
vivified all the members of the immense body of the Universe; and an
Intelligence, equally great, directed all its movements, and maintained
the eternal harmony that resulted therefrom. Thus the Unity of the
Universe, represented by the symbolic egg, contained in itself two
units, the Soul and the Intelligence, which pervaded all its parts: and
they were to the Universe, considered as an animated and intelligent
being, what intelligence and the soul of life are to the individuality
of man.

The doctrine of the Unity of God, in this sense, was taught by Orpheus.
Of this his hymn or palinode is a proof; fragments of which are quoted
by many of the Fathers, as Justin, Tatian, Clemens of Alexandria, Cyril,
and Theodoret, and the whole by Eusebius, quoting from Aristobulus. The
doctrine of the LOGOS (word) or the Noos (intellect), his incarnation,
death, resurrection or transfiguration; of his union with matter, his
division in the visible world, which he pervades, his return to the
original Unity, and the whole theory relative to the origin of the soul
and its destiny, were taught in the Mysteries, of which they were the
great object.

The Emperor Julian, explains the Mysteries of Atys and Cybele by the
same metaphysical principles, respecting the demiurgical Intelligence,
its descent into matter, and its return to its origin: and extends this
explanation to those of Ceres. And so likewise does Sallust the
Philosopher, who admits in God a secondary intelligent Force, which
descends into the generative matter to organize it. These mystical ideas
naturally formed a part of the sacred doctrine and of the ceremonies of
initiation, the object of which, Sallust remarks, was to unite man with
the World and the Deity; and the final term of perfection whereof was,
according to Clemens, the contemplation of nature, of real beings, and
of causes. The definition of Sallust is correct. The Mysteries were
practised as a means of perfecting the soul, of making it to know its
own dignity, of reminding it of its noble origin and immortality, and
consequently of its relations with the Universe and the Deity, what was
meant by _real_ beings, was _invisible_ beings, _genii_, the _faculties_
or _powers_ of nature; everything not a part of the _visible_ world,
which was called, by way of opposition, _apparent_ existence. The theory
of Genii, or Powers of Nature, and its Forces, personified, made part of
the Sacred Science of initiation, and of that religious spectacle of
different beings exhibited in the Sanctuary. It resulted from that
belief in the providence and superintendence of the Gods, which was one
of the primary bases of initiation. The administration of the Universe
by Subaltern Genii, to whom it is confided, and by whom good and evil
are dispensed in the world, was a consequence of this dogma, taught in
the Mysteries of Mithras, where was shown that famous egg, shared
between Ormuzd and Ahriman, each of whom commissioned twenty-four Genii
to dispense the good and evil found therein; they being under twelve
Superior Gods, six on the side of Light and Good and six on that of
Darkness and Evil.

This doctrine of the Genii, depositaries of the Universal Providence,
was intimately connected with the Ancient Mysteries, and adopted in the
sacrifices and initiations both of Greeks and Barbarians. Plutarch says
that the Gods, by means of Genii, who are intermediates between them and
men, draw near to mortals in the ceremonies of initiation, at which the
Gods charge them to assist, and to distribute punishment and blessing.
Thus not the Deity, but His ministers, or a Principle and Power of Evil,
were deemed the authors of vice and sin and suffering: and thus the
Genii or angels differed in character like men, some being good and some
evil; some Celestial Gods, Archangels, Angels, and some Infernal Gods,
Demons and fallen Angels.

At the head of the latter was their Chief, Typhon, Ahriman, or Shaitan,
the Evil Principle; who, having wrought disorder in nature, brought
troubles on men by land and sea, and caused the greatest ills, is at
last punished for his crimes. It was these events and incidents, says
Plutarch, which Isis desired to represent in the ceremonial of the
Mysteries, established by her in memory of her sorrows and wanderings,
whereof she exhibited an image and representation in her Sanctuaries,
where also were afforded encouragements to piety and consolation in
misfortune. The dogma of a Providence, he says, administering the
Universe by means of intermediary Powers, who maintain the connection of
man with the Divinity, was consecrated in the Mysteries of the
Egyptians, Phrygians, and Thracians, of the Magi and the Disciples of
Zoroaster; as is plain by their initiations, in which mournful and
funereal ceremonies mingled. It was an essential part of the lessons
given the Initiates, to teach them the relations of their own souls with
Universal Nature, the greatest lessons of all, meant to dignify man in
his own eyes, and teach him his place in the Universe of things.

Thus the whole system of the Universe was displayed in all its parts to
the eyes of the Initiate; and the symbolic cave which represented it was
adorned and clothed with all the attributes of that Universe. To this
world so organized, endowed with a double force, active and passive,
divided between light and darkness, moved by a living and intelligent
Force, governed by Genii or Angels who preside over its different parts,
and whose nature and character are more lofty or low in proportion as
they possess a greater or less portion of dark matter,--to this world
descends the soul, emanation of the ethereal fire, and exiled from the
luminous region above the world. It enters into this dark matter,
wherein the hostile Principles, each seconded by his troops of Genii,
are ever in conflict, there to submit to one or more organizations in
the body which is its prison, until it shall at last return to its place
of origin, its true native country, from which during this life it is an
exile.

But one thing remained,--to represent its return, through the
constellations and planetary spheres, to its original home. The
celestial fire, the philosophers said, soul of the world and of fire, an
universal principle, circulating above the Heavens, in a region
infinitely pure and wholly luminous, itself pure, simple, and unmixed,
is above the world by its specific lightness. If any part of it (say a
human soul) descends, it acts against its nature in doing so, urged by
an inconsiderate desire of the intelligence, a perfidious love for
matter which causes it to descend, to know what passes here below, where
good and evil are in conflict. The Soul, a simple substance, when
unconnected with matter, a ray or particle of the Divine Fire, whose
home is in Heaven, ever turns toward that home, while united with the
body, and struggles to return thither.

Teaching this, the Mysteries strove to recall man to his divine origin,
and point out to him the means of returning thither. The great science
acquired in the Mysteries was knowledge of man's self, of the nobleness
of his origin, the grandeur of his destiny, and his superiority over the
animals, which can never acquire this knowledge, and whom he resembles
so long as he does not reflect upon his existence and sound the depths
of his own nature.

By doing and suffering, by virtue and piety and good deeds, the soul was
enabled at length to free itself from the body, and ascend along the
path of the Milky Way, by the gate of Capricorn and by the seven
spheres, to the place whence by many gradations and successive lapses
and enthralments it had descended. And thus the theory of the spheres,
and of the signs and intelligences which preside there, and the whole
system of astronomy, were connected with that of the soul and its
destiny; and so were taught in the Mysteries, in which were developed
the great principles of physics and metaphysics as to the origin of the
soul, its condition here below, its destination, and its future fate.

The Greeks fix the date of the establishment of the Mysteries of Eleusis
at the year 1423 B.C., during the reign of Erechtheus at Athens.
According to some authors, they were instituted by Ceres herself; and
according to others, by that Monarch, who brought them from Egypt,
where, according to Diodorus of Sicily, he was born. Another tradition
was, that Orpheus introduced them into Greece, together with the
Dionisiac ceremonies, copying the latter from the Mysteries of Osiris,
and the former from those of Isis.

Nor was it at Athens only, that the worship and Mysteries of Isis,
metamorphosed into Ceres, were established. The Bœotians worshipped the
Great or Cabiric Ceres, in the recesses of a sacred grove, into which
none but Initiates could enter; and the ceremonies there observed, and
the sacred traditions of their Mysteries, were connected with those of
the Cabiri in Samothrace.

So in Argos, Phocis, Arcadia, Achaia, Messenia, Corinth, and many other
parts of Greece, the Mysteries were practised, revealing everywhere
their Egyptian origin and everywhere having the same general features;
but those of Eleusis, in Attica, Pausanius informs us, had been regarded
by the Greeks, from the earliest times, as being as far superior to all
the others, as the Gods are to mere Heroes.

Similar to these were the Mysteries of Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, whose
name, say Cicero and Plutarch, it was not permitted to any man to know,
celebrated at Rome from the earliest times of that city. It was these
Mysteries, practised by women alone, the secrecy of which was impiously
violated by Clodius. They were held at the Kalends of May; and,
according to Plutarch, much of the ceremonial greatly resembled that of
the Mysteries of Bakchos.

The Mysteries of Venus and Adonis belonged principally to Syria and
Phœnicia, whence they passed into Greece and Sicily. Venus or Astarte
was the Great Female Deity of the Phœnicians, as Hercules, Melkarth or
Adoni was their Chief God. Adoni, called by the Greeks Adonis, was the
lover of Venus. Slain by a wound in the thigh inflicted by a wild boar
in the chase, the flower called anemone sprang from his blood. Venus
received the corpse and obtained from Jupiter the boon that her lover
should thereafter pass six months of each year with her, and the other
six in the Shades with Proserpine; an allegorical description of the
alternate residence of the Sun in the two hemispheres. In these
Mysteries his death was represented and mourned, and after this
maceration and mourning were concluded, his resurrection and ascent to
Heaven were announced.

Ezekiel speaks of the festivals of Adonis under the name of those of
Thammuz, an Assyrian Deity, whom every year the women mourned, seated at
the doors of their dwellings. These Mysteries, like the others, were
celebrated in the Spring, at the Vernal Equinox, when he was restored to
life; at which time, when they were instituted, the Sun (ADON, Lord, or
Master) was in the Sign Taurus, the domicile of Venus. He was
represented with horns, and the hymn of Orpheus in his honor styles him
"the two-horned God;" as in Argos Bakchos was represented with the feet
of a bull.

Plutarch says that Adonis and Bakchos were regarded as one and the same
Deity; and that this opinion was founded on the great similarity in very
many respects between the Mysteries of these two Gods.

The Mysteries of Bakchos were known as the Sabazian, Orphic, and
Dionysiac Festivals. They went back to the remotest antiquity among the
Greeks, and were attributed by some to Bakchos himself, and by others to
Orpheus. The resemblance in ceremonial between the observances
established in honor of Osiris in Egypt, and those in honor of Bakchos
in Greece, the mythological traditions of the two Gods, and the symbols
used in the festivals of each, amply prove their identity. Neither the
name of Bakchos, nor the word _orgies_ applied to his feasts, nor the
sacred words Used in his Mysteries, are Greek, but of foreign origin.
Bakchos was an Oriental Deity, worshipped in the East, and his orgies
celebrated there, long before the Greeks adopted them. In the earliest
times he was worshipped in India, Arabia, and Bactria.

He was honored in Greece with public festivals, and in simple or
complicated Mysteries, varying in ceremonial in various places, as was
natural, because his worship had come thither from different countries
and at different periods. The people who celebrated the complicated
Mysteries were ignorant of the meaning of many words which they used,
and of many emblems which they revered. In the Sabazian Feasts, for
example [from Saba-Zeus an oriental name of this Deity], the words EVOI,
SABOI, were used, which are in nowise Greek; and a serpent of gold was
thrown into the bosom of the Initiate, in allusion to the fable that
Jupiter had, in the form of a serpent, had connection with Proserpina,
and begotten Bakchos, the bull; whence the enigmatical saying, repeated
to the Initiates, that a bull engendered a dragon or serpent, and the
serpent in turn engendered the bull, who became Bakchos: the meaning of
which was, that the bull [Taurus, which then opened the Vernal Equinox,
and the Sun in which Sign, figuratively represented by the Sign itself,
was Bakchos, Dionusos, Saba-Zeus, Osiris, etc.], and the Serpent,
another constellation, occupied such relative positions in the Heavens,
that when one rose the other set, and _vice versa_.

The serpent was a familiar symbol in the Mysteries of Bakchos. The
Initiates grasped them with their hands, as Orphiucus does on the
celestial globe, and the Orpheo-telestes, or purifier of candidates did
the same, crying, as Demosthenes taunted Æschines with doing in public
at the head of the women whom his mother was to imitate, EVOI, SABOI,
HYES ATTÊ, ATTÊ, HYES!

The Initiates in these Mysteries had preserved the ritual and ceremonies
that accorded with the simplicity of the earliest ages, and the manners
of the first men. The rules of Pythagoras were followed there. Like the
Egyptians, who held wool unclean, they buried no Initiate in woolen
garments. They abstained from bloody sacrifices; and lived on fruits or
vegetables or inanimate things. They imitated the life of the
contemplative Sects of the Orient; thus approximating to the tranquility
of the first men, who lived exempt from trouble and crimes in the bosom
of a profound peace. One of the most precious advantages promised by
their initiation was, to put a man in communion with the Gods, by
purifying his soul of all the passions that interfere with that
enjoyment, and dim the rays of divine light that are communicated to
every soul capable of receiving them, and that imitate their purity. One
of the degrees of initiation was the state of inspiration to which the
adepts were claimed to attain. The Initiates in the Mysteries of the
Lamb, at Pepuza, in Phrygia, professed to be inspired, and prophesied;
and it was claimed that the soul, by means of these religious
ceremonies, purified of all stain, could see the Gods in this life, and
certainly, in all cases, after death.

The sacred gates of the Temple, where the ceremonies of initiation were
performed, were opened but once in each year, and no stranger was ever
allowed to enter it. Night threw her veil over these august Mysteries,
which could be revealed to no one. There the sufferings of Bakchos were
represented, who, like Osiris, died, descended to hell and rose to life
again; and raw flesh was distributed to the Initiates, which each ate,
in memory of the death of the Deity, torn in pieces by the Titans.

These Mysteries also were celebrated at the Vernal Equinox; and the
emblem of generation, to express the active energy and generative power
of the Divinity, was a principal symbol. The Initiates wore garlands and
crowns of myrtle and laurel.

In these Mysteries, the aspirant was kept in terror and darkness to
perform the three days and nights; and was then made [Greek: Aϕα
υισμος], or ceremony representing the death of Bakchos, the same
mythological personage with Osiris. This was effected by confining him
in a close cell, that he might seriously reflect, in solitude and
darkness, on the business he was engaged in: and his mind be prepared
for the reception of the sublime and mysterious truths of primitive
revelation and philosophy. This was a symbolic death; the deliverance
from it, regeneration; after which he was called [Greek: διϕυης] or
twin-born. While confined in the cell, the pursuit of Typhon after the
mangled body of Osiris, and the search of Rhea or Isis for the same,
were enacted in his hearing; the initiated crying aloud the names of
that Deity derived from the Sanscrit. Then it was announced that the
body was found; and the aspirant was liberated amid shouts of joy and
exultation.

Then he passed through a representation of Hell and Elysium. "Then,"
said an ancient writer, "they are entertained with hymns and dances,
with the sublime doctrines of sacred knowledge, and with wonderful and
holy visions. And now become perfect and initiated, they are FREE, and
no longer under restraint; but, crowned and triumphant, they walk up and
down the regions of the blessed, converse with pure and holy men, and
celebrate the sacred Mysteries at pleasure." They were taught the nature
and objects of the Mysteries, and the means of making themselves known,
and received the name of Epopts; were fully instructed in the nature and
attributes of the Divinity, and the doctrine of a future state; and
made acquainted with the unity and attributes of the Grand Architect of
the Universe, and the true meaning of the fables in regard to the Gods
of Paganism: the great Truth being often proclaimed, that "Zeus is the
primitive Source of all things; there is ONE God; ONE power, and ONE
rule over all." And after full explanation of the many symbols and
emblems that surrounded them, they were dismissed with the barbarous
words [Greek: Κογξ] and [Greek: Ομπαξ], corruptions of the Sanscrit
words, Kanska Aom Pakscha; meaning, _object of our wishes, God,
Silence_, or _Worship the Deity in Silence_.

Among the emblems used was the rod of Bakchos; which once, it was said,
he cast on the ground, and it became a serpent; and at another time he
struck the rivers Orontes and Hydaspes with it, and the waters receded
and he passed over dry-shod. Water was obtained, during the ceremonies,
by striking a rock with it. The Bakchæ crowned their heads with
serpents, carried them in vases and baskets, and at the [Greek:
Ευρησιϛ], or finding, of the body of Osiris, cast one, alive, into the
aspirant's bosom.

The Mysteries of Atys in Phrygia, and those of Cybele his mistress, like
their worship, much resembled those of Adonis and Bakchos, Osiris and
Isis. Their Asiatic origin is universally admitted, and was with great
plausibility claimed by Phrygia, which contested the palm of antiquity
with Egypt. They, more than any other people, mingled allegory with
their religious worship, and were great inventors of fables; and their
sacred traditions as to Cybele and Atys, whom all admit to be Phrygian
Gods, were very various. In all, as we learn from Julius Firmicus, they
represented by allegory the phenomena of nature, and the succession of
physical facts, under the veil of a marvellous history.

Their feasts occurred at the equinoxes, commencing with lamentation,
mourning, groans, and pitiful cries for the death of Atys; and ending
with rejoicings at his restoration to life.

We shall not recite the different versions of the legend of Atys and
Cybele, given by Julius Firmicus, Diodorus, Arnobius, Lactantius,
Servius, Saint Augustine, and Pausanias. It is enough to say that it is
in substance this: that Cybele, a Phrygian Princess, who invented
musical instruments and dances, was enamored of Atys, a youth; that
either he in a fit of frenzy mutilated himself or was mutilated by her
in a paroxysm of jealousy; that he died, and afterward, like Adonis,
was restored to life. It is the Phœnician fiction as to the Sun-God,
expressed in other terms, under other forms, and with other names.

Cybele was worshipped in Syria, under the name of Rhea. Lucian says that
the Lydian Atys there established her worship and built her temple. The
name of Rhea is also found in the ancient cosmogony of the Phœnicians by
Sanchoniathon. It was Atys the Lydian, says Lucian, who, having been
mutilated, first established the Mysteries of Rhea, and taught the
Phrygians, the Lydians, and the people of Samothrace to celebrate them.
Rhea, like Cybele, was represented drawn by lions, bearing a drum, and
crowned with flowers. According to Varro, Cybele represented the earth.
She partook of the characteristics of Minerva, Venus, the Moon, Diana,
Nemesis, and the Furies; was clad in precious stones; and her High
Priest wore a robe of purple and a tiara of gold.

The Grand Feast of the Syrian Goddess, like that of the Mother of the
Gods at Rome, was celebrated at the Vernal Equinox. Precisely at that
equinox the Mysteries of Atys were celebrated, in which the Initiates
were taught to expect the rewards of a future life, and the flight of
Atys from the jealous fury of Cybele was described, his concealment in
the mountains and in a cave, and his self-mutilation in a fit of
delirium; in which act his priests imitated him. The feast of the
passion of Atys continued three days; the first of which was passed in
mourning and tears; to which afterward clamorous rejoicings succeeded;
by which, Macrobius says, the Sun was adored under the name of Atys. The
ceremonies were all allegorical, some of which, according to the Emperor
Julian, could be explained, but more remained covered with the veil of
mystery. Thus it is that symbols, outlast their explanations, as many
have done in Masonry, and ignorance and rashness substitute new ones.

In another legend, given by Pausanias, Atys dies, wounded like Adonis by
a wild boar in the organs of generation; a mutilation with which all the
legends ended. The pine-tree under which he was said to have died, was
sacred to him; and was found upon many monuments, with a bull and a ram
near it; one the sign of exaltation of the Sun, and the other of that of
the Moon.

The worship of the Sun under the name of Mithras belonged to Persia,
whence that name came, as did the erudite symbols of that worship. The
Persians, adorers of Fire, regarded the Sun as the most brilliant abode
of the fecundating energy of that element, which gives life to the
earth, and circulates in every part of the Universe, of which it is, as
it were, the soul. This worship passed from Persia into Armenia,
Cappadocia, and Cilicia, long before it was known at Rome. The Mysteries
of Mithras flourished more than any others in the imperial city. The
worship of Mithras commenced to prevail there under Trajan. Hadrian
prohibited these Mysteries, on account of the cruel scenes represented
in their ceremonial: for human victims were immolated therein, and the
events of futurity looked for in their palpitating entrails. They
reappeared in greater splendor than ever under Commodus, who with his
own hand sacrificed a victim to Mithras: and they were still more
practised under Constantine and his successors, when the Priests of
Mithras were found everywhere in the Roman Empire, and the monuments of
his worship appeared even in Britain.

Caves were consecrated to Mithras, in which were collected a multitude
of astronomical emblems; and cruel tests were required of the Initiates.

The Persians built no temples; but worshipped upon the summits of hills,
in enclosures of unhewn stones. They abominated images, and made the Sun
and Fire emblems of the Deity. The Jews borrowed this from them, and
represented God as appearing to Abraham in a flame of fire, and to Moses
as a fire at Horeb and on Sinai.

With the Persians, Mithras, typified in the Sun, was the invisible
Deity, the Parent of the Universe, the Mediator. In Zoroaster's cave of
initiation, the Sun and Planets were represented over-head, in gems and
gold, as also was the Zodiac. The Sun appeared emerging from the back of
Taurus. Three great pillars, Eternity, Fecundity, and Authority,
supported the roof; and the whole was an emblem of the Universe.

Zoroaster, like Moses, claimed to have conversed face to face, as man
with man, with the Deity; and to have received from Him a system of pure
worship, to be communicated only to the virtuous, and those who would
devote themselves to the study of Philosophy. His fame spread over the
world, and pupils came to him from every country. Even Pythagoras was
his scholar.

After his novitiate, the candidate entered the cavern of initiation, and
was received on the point of a sword presented to his naked left
breast, by which he was slightly wounded. Being crowned with olive,
anointed with balsam of benzoin, and otherwise prepared, he was purified
with fire and water, and went through seven stages of initiation. The
symbol of these stages was a high ladder with seven rounds or steps. In
them, he went through many fearful trials, in which darkness displayed a
principal part. He saw a representation of the wicked in Hades; and
finally emerged from darkness into light. Received in a place
representing Elysium, in the brilliant assembly of the initiated, where
the Archimagus presided, robed in blue, he assumed the obligations of
secrecy, and was entrusted with the Sacred Words, of which the Ineffable
Name of God was the chief.

Then all the incidents of his initiation were explained to him: he was
taught that these ceremonies brought him nearer the Deity; and that he
should adore the consecrated Fire, the gift of that Deity and His
visible residence. He was taught the sacred characters known only to the
initiated; and instructed in regard to the creation of the world, and
the true philosophical meaning of the vulgar mythology; and especially
of the legend of Ormuzd and Ahriman, and the symbolic meaning of the six
Amshaspands created by the former: _Bahman_, the Lord of Light;
_Ardibehest_, the Genius of Fire; _Shariver_, the Lord of Splendor and
Metals; _Stapandomad_, the Source of Fruitfulness; _Khordad_, the Genius
of Water and Time; and _Amerdad_, the protector of the Vegetable World,
and the prime cause of growth. And finally he was taught the true nature
of the Supreme Being, Creator of Ormuzd and Ahriman, the Absolute First
Cause, styled ZERUANE AKHERENE.

In the Mithriac initiation were several Degrees. The first, Tertullian
says, was that of Soldier of Mithras. The ceremony of reception
consisted in presenting the candidate a crown, supported by a sword. It
was placed near his head, and he repelled it, saying, "Mithras is my
crown." Then he was declared the soldier of Mithras, and had the right
to call the other Initiates fellow-soldiers or companions in arms. Hence
the title _Companions_ in the Royal Arch Degree of the American Rite.

Then he passed, Porphyry says, through the Degree of the Lion,--the
constellation Leo, domicile of the Sun and symbol of Mithras, found on
his monuments. These ceremonies were termed at Rome Leontic and Heliac;
and _Coratia_ or _Hiero-Coracia_, of the Raven, a bird consecrated to
the Sun, and a sign placed in the Heavens below the Lion, with the
Hydra, and also appearing on the Mithriac monuments.

Thence he passed to a higher Degree, where the Initiates were called
_Perses_ and children of the Sun. Above them were the _Fathers_, whose
chief or Patriarch was styled Father of Fathers or _Pater Patratus_. The
Initiates also bore the title of _Eagles_ and _Hawks_, birds consecrated
to the Sun in Egypt, the former sacred to the God Mendes, and the latter
the emblem of the Sun and Royalty.

The little island of Samothrace was long the depositary of certain
august Mysteries, and many went thither from all parts of Greece to be
initiated. It was said to have been settled by the ancient Pelasgi,
early Asiatic colonists in Greece. The Gods adored in the Mysteries of
this island were termed CABIRI, an oriental word, from _Cabar_, great.
Varro calls the Gods of Samothrace, _Potent Gods_. In Arabic, Venus is
called _Cabar_. Varro says that the Great Deities whose Mysteries were
practised there, were Heaven and Earth. These were but symbols of the
Active and Passive Powers or Principles of universal generation. The two
Twins, Castor and Pollux, or the Dioscuri, were also called the Gods of
Samothrace; and the Scholiast of Apollonius, citing Mnaseas, gives the
names of Ceres, Proserpine, Pluto, and Mercury, as the four Cabiric
Divinities worshipped at Samothrace, as Axieros, Axiocersa, Axiocersus,
and Casmillus. Mercury was, there as everywhere, the minister and
messenger of the Gods; and the young servitors of the altars and the
children employed in the Temples were called Mercuries or Casmilli, as
they were in Tuscany, by the Etrusci and Pelasgi, who worshipped the
Great Gods.

Tarquin the Etruscan was an Initiate of the Mysteries of Samothrace; and
Etruria had its Cabiri as Samothrace had. For the worship of the Cabiri
spread from that island into Etruria, Phrygia, and Asia Minor: and it
probably came from Phœnicia into Samothrace: for the Cabiri are
mentioned by Sanchoniathon; and the word _Cabar_ belongs to the Hebrew,
Phœnician, and Arabic languages.

The Dioscuri, tutelary Deities of Navigation, with Venus, were invoked
in the Mysteries of Samothrace. The constellation Auriga, or Phaëton,
was also honored there with imposing ceremonies. Upon the Argonautic
expedition, Orpheus, an Initiate of these Mysteries, a storm arising,
counselled his companions to put into Samothrace. They did so, the storm
ceased, and they were initiated into the Mysteries there, and sailed
again with the assurance of a fortunate voyage, under the auspices of
the Dioscuri, patrons of sailors and navigation.

But much more than that was promised the Initiates. The Hierophants of
Samothrace made something infinitely greater to be the object of their
initiations; to wit, the consecration of men to the Deity, by pledging
them to virtue; and the assurance of those rewards which the justice of
the Gods reserves for Initiates after death. This, above all else, made
these ceremonies august, and inspired everywhere so great a respect for
them, and so great a desire to be admitted to them. That originally
caused the island to be styled _Sacred_. It was respected by all
nations. The Romans, when masters of the world, left it its liberty and
laws. It was an asylum for the unfortunate, and a sanctuary inviolable.
There men were absolved of the crime of homicide, if not committed in a
temple.

Children of tender age were initiated there, and invested with the
sacred robe, the purple cincture, and the crown of olive, and seated
upon a throne, like other Initiates. In the ceremonies was represented
the death of the youngest of the Cabiri, slain by his brothers, who fled
into Etruria, carrying with them the chest or ark that contained his
genitals: and there the Phallus and the sacred ark were adored.
Herodotus says that the Samothracian Initiates understood the object and
origin of this reverence paid the Phallus, and why it was exhibited in
the Mysteries. Clemens of Alexandria says that the Cabiri taught the
Tuscans to revere it. It was consecrated at Heliopolis in Syria, where
the Mysteries of a Divinity having many points of resemblance with Atys
and Cybele were represented. The Pelasgi connected it with Mercury; and
it appears on the monuments of Mithras; always and everywhere a symbol
of the life-giving power of the Sun at the Vernal Equinox.

In the Indian Mysteries, as the candidate made his three circuits, he
paused each time he reached the South, and said, "I copy the example of
the Sun, and follow his beneficent course." Blue Masonry has retained
the Circuits, but has utterly lost the explanation; which is, that in
the Mysteries the candidate invariably represented the Sun, descending
Southward toward the reign of the Evil Principle, Ahriman, Siba, or
Typhon (darkness and winter); there figuratively to be slain, and after
a few days to rise again from the dead, and commence to ascend to the
Northward.

Then the death of Sita was bewailed; or that of Cama, slain by Iswara,
and committed to the waves on a chest, like Osiris and Bacchus; during
which the candidate was terrified by phantoms and horrid noises.

Then he was made to personify Vishnu, and perform his avatars, or
labors. In the first two he was taught in allegories the legend of the
Deluge: in the first he took three steps at right angles, representing
the three huge steps taken by Vishnu in that avatar; and hence the three
steps in the Master's Degree ending at right angles.

The nine avatars finished, he was taught the necessity of faith, as
superior to sacrifices, acts of charity, or mortifications of the flesh.
Then he was admonished against five crimes, and took a solemn obligation
never to commit them. He was then introduced into a representation of
Paradise; the Company of the Members of the Order, magnificently
arrayed, and the Altar with a fire blazing upon it, as an emblem of the
Deity.

Then a new name was given him, and he was invested in a white robe and
tiara, and received the signs, tokens, and lectures. A cross was marked
on his forehead, and an inverted level, or the Tau Cross, on his breast.
He received the sacred cord, and divers amulets or talismans; and was
then invested with the sacred Word or Sublime Name, known only to the
initiated, the Triliteral A.U.M.

Then the multitude of emblems was explained to the candidate; the arcana
of science hidden under them, and the different virtues of which the
mythological figures were mere personifications. And he thus learned the
meaning of those symbols, which, to the uninitiated, were but a maze of
unintelligible figures.

The third Degree was a life of seclusion, after the Initiate's children
were capable of providing for themselves; passed in the forest, in the
practice of prayers and ablutions, and living only on vegetables. He was
then said to be born again.

The fourth was absolute renunciation of the world, self-contemplation
and self-torture; by which Perfection was thought to be attained, and
the soul merged in the Deity.

In the second Degree, the Initiate was taught the Unity of the Godhead,
the happiness of the patriarchs, the destruction by the Deluge, the
depravity of the heart, and the necessity of a mediator, the instability
of life, the final destruction of all created things, and the
restoration of the world in a more perfect form. They inculcated the
Eternity of the Soul, explained the meaning of the doctrine of the
Metempsychosis, and held the doctrine of a state of future rewards and
punishments: and they also earnestly urged that sins could only be
atoned for by repentance, reformation, and voluntary penance; and not by
mere ceremonies and sacrifices.

The Mysteries among the Chinese and Japanese came from India, and were
founded on the same principles and with similar rites. The word given to
the new Initiate was O-MI-TO Fo, in which we recognize the original name
A.U.M., coupled at a much later time with that of Fo, the Indian Buddha,
to show that he was the Great Deity Himself.

The equilateral triangle was one of their symbols; and so was the
mystical Y; both alluding to the Triune God, and the latter being the
ineffable name of the Deity. A ring supported by two serpents was
emblematical of the world, protected by the power and wisdom of the
Creator; and that is the origin of the two parallel lines (into which
time has changed the two serpents), that support the circle in our
Lodges.

Among the Japanese, the term of probation for the highest Degree was
twenty years.

The main features of the Druidical Mysteries resembled those of the
Orient.

The ceremonies commenced with a hymn to the sun. The candidates were
arranged in ranks of _threes_, _fives_, and _sevens_, according to their
qualifications; and conducted nine times around the Sanctuary, from East
to West. The candidate underwent many trials, one of which had direct
reference to the legend of Osiris. He was placed in a boat, and sent out
to sea alone, having to rely on his own skill and presence of mind to
reach the opposite shore safety. The death of Hu was represented in his
hearing, with external mark of sorrow, while he was in utter darkness.
He met with many obstacles, had to prove his courage, and expose his
life against armed enemies; represented various animals, and at last,
attaining the permanent light, he was instructed by the Arch-Druid in
regard to the Mysteries, and in the morality of the Order, incited to
act bravely in war, taught the great truths of the immortality of the
soul and a future state, solemnly enjoined not to neglect the worship of
the Deity, nor the practice of rigid morality; and to avoid sloth,
contention, and folly.

The aspirant attained only the exoteric knowledge in the first two
Degrees. The third was attained only by a few, and they persons of rank
and consequence, and after long purification, and study of all the arts
and sciences known to the Druids, in solitude, for nine months. This was
the symbolical death and burial of these Mysteries.

The dangerous voyage upon the actual open sea, in a small boat covered
with a skin, on the evening of the 29th of April, was the last trial,
and closing scene, of initiation. If he declined this trial, he was
dismissed with contempt. If he made it and succeeded, he was termed
thrice-born, was eligible to all the dignities of the State, and
received complete instruction in the philosophical and religious
doctrines of the Druids.

The Greeks also styled the [Greek: Εποπτηϛ, Τριγονος], thrice-born; and
in India perfection was assigned to the Yogee who had accomplished many
births.

The general features of the initiations among the Goths were the same as
in all the Mysteries. A long probation, of fasting and mortification,
circular processions, representing the march of the celestial bodies,
many fearful tests and trials, a descent into the infernal regions, the
killing of the God _Balder_ by the Evil Principle, _Lok_, the placing of
his body in a boat and sending it abroad upon the waters; and, in short,
the Eastern Legend, under different names, and with some variations.

The Egyptian Anubis appeared there, as the dog guarding the gates of
death. The candidate was immured in the representation of a tomb; and
when released, goes in search of the body of Balder, and finds him, at
length, restored to life, and seated upon a throne. He was obligated
upon a naked sword (as is still the custom in the _Rit Moderne_), and
_sealed_ his obligation by drinking mead _out of a human skull_.

Then all the ancient primitive truths were made known to him, so far as
they had survived the assaults of time: and he was informed as to the
generation of the Gods, the creation of the world, the deluge, and the
resurrection, of which that of Balder was a type.

He was marked with the sign of the cross, and a ring was given to him
as a symbol of the Divine Protection; and also as an emblem of
Perfection; from which comes the custom of giving a ring to the Aspirant
in the 14th Degree.

The point within a Circle, and the Cube, emblem of Odin, were explained
to him; and lastly, the nature of the Supreme God, "the author of
everything that existeth, the Eternal, the Ancient, the Living and Awful
Being, the Searcher into concealed things, the Being that never
changeth;" with whom Odin the Conqueror was by the vulgar confounded:
and the Triune God of the Indians was reproduced, as ODIN, the Almighty
FATHER, FREA, (_Rhea_ or _Phre_), his wife (emblem of universal
_matter_), and _Thor_ his son (the Mediator). Here we recognize _Osiris,
Isis_, and _Hor_ or _Horus_. Around the head of Thor, as if to show his
eastern origin, twelve stars were arranged in a circle.

He was also taught the ultimate destruction of the world, and the rising
of a new one, in which the brave and virtuous shall enjoy everlasting
happiness and delight: as the means of securing which happy fortune, he
was taught to practise the strictest morality and virtue.

The Initiate was prepared to receive the great lessons of all the
Mysteries, by long trials, or by abstinence and chastity. For many days
he was required to fast and be continent, and to drink liquids
calculated to diminish his passions and keep him chaste.

Ablutions were also required, symbolical of the purity necessary to
enable the soul to escape from its bondage in matter. Sacred baths and
preparatory baptisms were used, lustrations, immersions, lustral
sprinklings, and purifications of every kind. At Athens they bathed in
the Ilissus, which thence became a sacred river; and before entering the
Temple of Eleusis, all were required to wash their hands in a vase of
lustral water placed near the entrance. Clean hands and a pure heart
were required of the candidates. Apuleius bathed seven times in the sea,
symbolical of the Seven Spheres through which the Soul must reascend:
and the Hindus must bathe in the sacred river Ganges.

Clemens of Alexandria cites a passage of Menander, who speaks of a
purification by sprinkling three times with salt and water. Sulphur,
resin, and the laurel also served for purification, as did air, earth,
water, and fire. The Initiates at Heliopolis, in Syria, says Lucian,
sacrificed the sacred lamb, symbol of Aries, then the sign of the Vernal
Equinox; ate his flesh, as the Israelites did at the Passover; and then
touched his head and feet to theirs, and knelt upon the fleece. Then
they bathed in warm water, drank of the same, and slept upon the ground.

There was a distinction between the lesser and greater Mysteries. One
must have been for some years admitted to the former before he could
receive the latter, which were but a preparation for them, the Vestibule
of the Temple, of which those of Eleusis were the Sanctuary. There, in
the lesser Mysteries, they were prepared to receive the holy truths
taught in the greater. The Initiates in the lesser were called simply
_Mystes_, or Initiates; but those in the greater, _Epoptes_, or Seers.
An ancient poet says that the former were an imperfect shadow of the
latter, as sleep is of Death. After admission to the former, the
Initiate was taught lessons of morality, and the rudiments of the sacred
science, the most sublime and secret part of which was reserved for the
Epopt, who saw the Truth in its nakedness, while the Mystes only viewed
it through a veil and under emblems fitter to excite than to satisfy his
curiosity.

Before communicating the first secrets and primary dogmas of initiation,
the priests required the candidate to take a fearful oath never to
divulge the secrets. Then he made his vows, prayers, and sacrifices to
the Gods. The skins of the victims consecrated to Jupiter were spread on
the ground, and he was made to set his feet upon them. He was then
taught some enigmatic formulas, as answers to questions, by which to
make himself known. He was then enthroned, invested with a purple
cincture, and crowned with flowers, or branches of palm or olive.

We do not certainly know the time that was required to elapse between
the admission to the Lesser and Greater Mysteries of Eleusis. Most
writers fix it at five years. It was a singular mark of favor when
Demetrius was made Mystes and Epopt in one and the same ceremony. When
at length admitted to the Degree of Perfection, the Initiate was brought
face to face with entire nature, and learned that the soul was the whole
of man: that earth was but his place of exile; that Heaven was his
native country; that for the soul to be born is really to die; and that
death was for it the return to a new life. Then he entered the
sanctuary; but he did not receive the whole instruction at once. It
continued through several years. There were, as it were, many
apartments, through which he advanced by degrees, and between which
thick veils intervened. There were Statues and Paintings, says Proclus,
in the inmost sanctuary, showing the forms assumed by the Gods, finally
the last veil fell, the sacred covering dropped from the image of the
Goddess, and she stood revealed in all her splendor, surrounded by a
divine light, which, filling the whole sanctuary, dazzled the eyes and
penetrated the soul of the Initiate. Thus is symbolized the final
revelation of the true doctrine as to the nature of Deity and of the
soul, and of the relations of each to matter.

This was preceded by frightful scenes, alternations of fear and joy, of
light and darkness; by glittering lightning and the crash of thunder,
and apparitions of spectres, or magical illusions, impressing at once
the eyes and ears. This Claudian describes, in his poem on the rape of
Proserpine, where he alludes to what passed in her Mysteries. "The
temple is shaken," he cries; "fiercely gleams the lightning, by which
the Deity announces his presence. Earth trembles; and a terrible noise
is heard in the midst of these terrors. The Temple of the Son of Cecrops
resounds with long-continued roars; Eleusis uplifts her sacred torches;
the serpents of Triptolemus are heard to hiss; and fearful Hecate
appears afar."

The celebration of the Greek Mysteries continued, according to the
better opinion, for nine days.

On the first the Initiates met. It was the day of the full moon, of the
month Boëdromion; when the moon was full at the end of the sign Aries,
near the Pleiades and the place of her exaltation in Taurus.

The second day there was a procession to the sea, for purification by
bathing.

The third was occupied with offerings, expiatory sacrifices, and other
religious rites, such as fasting, mourning, continence, etc. A mullet
was immolated, and offerings of grain and living animals made.

On the fourth they carried in procession the mystic wreath of flowers,
representing that which Proserpine dropped when seized by Pluto, and the
Crown of Ariadne in the Heavens. It was borne on a triumphal car drawn
by oxen; and women followed bearing mystic chests or boxes, wrapped with
purple cloths, containing grains of sesame, pyramidal biscuits, salt,
pomegranates and the mysterious serpent, and perhaps the mystic phallus.

On the fifth was the superb procession of torches, commemorative of the
search for Proserpine by Ceres; the Initiates marching by trios, and
each bearing a torch; while at the head of the procession marched the
Dadoukos.

The sixth was consecrated to Iakchos, the young Light-God, son of Ceres,
reared in the sanctuaries and bearing the torch of the Sun-God. The
chorus in Aristophanes terms him the luminous star that lights the
nocturnal initiation. He was brought from the sanctuary, his head
crowned with myrtle, and borne from the gate of the Ceramicus to
Eleusis, along the sacred way, amid dances, sacred songs, every mark of
joy, and mystic cries of _Iakchos_.

On the seventh there were gymnastic exercises and combats, the victors
in which were crowned and rewarded.

On the eighth was the feast of Æsculapius.

On the ninth the famous libation was made for the souls of the departed.
The Priests, according to Athenæus, filled two vases, placed one in the
East and one in the West, toward the gates of day and night, and
overturned them, pronouncing a formula of mysterious prayers. Thus they
invoked Light and Darkness, the two great principles of nature.

During all these days no one could be arrested, nor any suit brought, on
pain of death, or at least a heavy fine: and no one was allowed, by the
display of unusual wealth or magnificence, to endeavor to rival this
sacred pomp. Everything was for religion.

Such were the Mysteries; and such the Old Thought, as in scattered and
widely separated fragments it has come down to us. The human mind still
speculates upon the great mysteries of nature, and still finds its ideas
anticipated by the ancients, whose profoundest thoughts are to be looked
for, not in their philosophies, but in their symbols, by which they
endeavored to express the great ideas that vainly struggled for
utterance in words, as they viewed the great circle of
phenomena,--Birth, Life, Death, or Decomposition, and New Life out of
Death and Rottenness,--to them the greatest of mysteries. Remember,
while you study their symbols, that they had a profounder sense of these
wonders than we have. To them the transformations of the worm were a
greater wonder than the stars; and hence the poor dumb scarabæus or
beetle was sacred to them. Thus their faiths are condensed into symbols
or expanded into allegories, which they understood, but were not always
able to explain in language; for there are thoughts and ideas which no
language ever spoken by man has words to express.

[Illustration]




XXV.

KNIGHT OF THE BRAZEN SERPENT.


This Degree is both philosophical and moral. While it teaches the
necessity of reformation as well as repentance, as a means of obtaining
mercy and forgiveness, it is also devoted to an explanation of the
symbols of Masonry; and especially to those which are connected with
that ancient and universal legend, of which that of Khir-Om Abi is but a
variation; that legend which, representing a murder or a death, and a
restoration to life, by a drama in which figure Osiris, Isis and Horus,
Atys and Cybele, Adonis and Venus, the Cabiri, Dionusos, and many
another representative of the active and passive Powers of Nature,
taught the Initiates in the Mysteries that the rule of Evil and Darkness
is but temporary, and that of Light and Good will be eternal.

Maimonides says: "In the days of Enos, the son of Seth, men fell into
grievous errors, and even Enos himself partook of their infatuation.
Their language was, that since God has placed on high the heavenly
bodies, and used them as His ministers, it was evidently His will that
they should receive from man the same veneration as the servants of a
great prince justly claim from the subject multitude. Impressed with
this notion, they began to build temples to the Stars, to sacrifice to
them, and to worship them, in the vain expectation that they should thus
please the Creator of all things. At first, indeed, they did not suppose
the Stars to be the only Deities, but adored in conjunction with them
the Lord God Omnipotent. In process of time, however, that great and
venerable Name was totally forgotten, and the whole human race retained
no other religion than the idolatrous worship of the Host of Heaven."

The first learning in the world consisted chiefly in symbols. The wisdom
of the Chaldæans, Phœnicians, Egyptians, Jews; of Zoroaster,
Sanchoniathon, Pherecydes, Syrus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, of all
the ancients, that is come to our hand, is symbolic. It was the mode,
says Serranus on Plato's Symposium, of the Ancient Philosophers, to
represent truth by certain symbols and hidden images.

"All that can be said concerning the Gods," says Strabo, "must be by the
exposition of old opinions and fables; it being the custom of the
ancients to wrap up in enigma and allegory their thoughts and discourses
concerning Nature; which are therefore not easily explained."

As you learned in the 24th Degree, my Brother, the ancient Philosophers
regarded the soul of man as having had its origin in Heaven. That was,
Macrobius says, a settled opinion among them all; and they held it to be
the only true wisdom, for the soul, while united with the body, to look
ever toward its source, and strive to return to the place whence it
came. Among the fixed stars it dwelt, until, seduced by the desire of
animating a body, it descended to be imprisoned in matter. Thenceforward
it has no other resource than recollection, and is ever attracted toward
its birth-place and home. The means of return are to be sought for in
itself. To re-ascend to its source, it must do and suffer in the body.

Thus the Mysteries taught the great doctrine of the divine nature and
longings after immortality of the soul, of the nobility of its origin,
the grandeur of its destiny, its superiority over the animals who have
no aspirations heavenward. If they struggled in vain to express its
_nature_, by comparing it to Fire and Light,--if they erred as to its
original place of abode, and the mode of its descent, and the path
which, descending and ascending, it pursued among the stars and spheres,
these were the accessories of the Great Truth, and mere allegories
designed to make the idea more impressive, and, as it were, tangible, to
the human mind.

Let us, in order to understand this old Thought, first follow the soul
in its descent. The sphere or Heaven of the fixed stars was that Holy
Region, and those Elysian Fields, that were the native domicile of
souls, and the place to which they re-ascended, when they had recovered
their primitive purity and simplicity. From that luminous region the
soul set forth, when it journeyed toward the body; a destination which
it did not reach until it had undergone three degradations, designated
by the name of Deaths; and until it had passed through the several
spheres and the elements. All souls remained in possession of Heaven and
of happiness, so long as they were wise enough to avoid the contagion of
the body, and to keep themselves from any contact with matter. But those
who, from that lofty abode, where they were lapped in eternal light,
have looked longingly toward the body, and toward that which we here
below call _life_, but which is to the soul a real _death_; and who have
conceived for it a secret desire,--those souls, victims of their
concupiscence, are attracted by degrees toward the inferior regions of
the world, by the mere weight of thought and of that terrestrial desire.
The soul, perfectly incorporeal, does not at once invest itself with the
gross envelope of the body, but little by little, by successive and
insensible alterations, and in proportion as it removes further and
further from the simple and perfect substance in which it dwelt at
first. It first surrounds itself with a body composed of the substance
of the stars; and afterward, as it descends through the several spheres,
with ethereal matter more and more gross, thus by degrees descending to
an earthly body; and its number of degradations or deaths being the same
as that of the spheres which it traverses.

The Galaxy, Macrobius says, crosses the Zodiac in two opposite points,
Cancer and Capricorn, the tropical points in the sun's course,
ordinarily called the Gates of the Sun. These two tropics, before his
time, corresponded with those constellations, but in his day with Gemini
and Sagittarius, in consequence of the precession of the equinoxes; but
the _signs_ of the Zodiac remained unchanged; and the Milky Way crossed
at the _signs_ Cancer and Capricorn, though not at those
_constellations_.

Through these _gates_ souls were supposed to descend to earth and
re-ascend to Heaven. One, Macrobius says, in his dream of Scipio, was
styled the Gate of Men; and the other, the Gate of the Gods. Cancer was
the former, because souls descended by it to the earth; and Capricorn
the latter, because by it they re-ascended to their seats of
immortality, and became Gods. From the Milky Way, according to
Pythagoras, diverged the route to the dominions of Pluto. Until they
left the Galaxy, they were not deemed to have commenced to descend
toward the terrestrial bodies. From that they departed, and to that they
returned. Until they reached the sign Cancer, they had not left it, and
were still Gods. When they reached Leo, they commenced their
apprenticeship for their future condition; and when they were at
Aquarius, the sign opposite Leo, they were furthest removed from human
life.

The soul, descending from the celestial limits, where the Zodiac and
Galaxy unite, loses its spherical shape, the shape of all Divine Nature,
and is lengthened into a cone, as a point is lengthened into a line; and
then, an indivisible monad before, it divides itself and becomes a
duad--that is, unity becomes division, disturbance, and conflict. Then
it begins to experience the disorder which reigns in matter, to which it
unites itself, becoming, as it were, intoxicated by draughts of grosser
matter: of which inebriation the cup of Bakchos, between Cancer and Leo,
is a symbol. It is for them the cup of forgetfulness. They assemble,
says Plato, in the fields of oblivion, to drink there the water of the
river Ameles, which causes men to forget everything. This fiction is
also found in Virgil. "If souls," says Macrobius, "carried with them
into the bodies they occupy all the knowledge which they had acquired of
divine things, during their sojourn in the Heavens, men would not differ
in opinion as to the Deity; but some of them forget more, and some less,
of that which they had learned."

We smile at these notions of the ancients; but we must learn to look
through these material images and allegories, to the ideas, struggling
for utterance, the great speechless thoughts which they envelop: and it
is well for us to consider whether we ourselves have yet found out any
_better_ way of representing to ourselves the soul's origin and its
advent into this body, so entirely foreign to it; if, indeed, we have
ever thought about it at all; or have not ceased to think, in despair.

The highest and purest portion of matter, which nourishes and
constitutes divine existences, is what the poets term _nectar_, the
beverage of the Gods. The lower, more disturbed and grosser portion, is
what intoxicates souls. The ancients symbolized it as the River Lethe,
dark stream of oblivion. How do _we_ explain the soul's forgetfulness of
its antecedents, or reconcile that utter absence of remembrance of its
former condition, with its essential immortality? In truth, we for the
most part dread and shrink from any attempt at explanation of it to
ourselves.

Dragged down by the heaviness produced by this inebriating draught, the
soul falls along the zodiac and the milky way to the lower spheres, and
in its descent not only takes, in each sphere, a new envelope of the
material composing the luminous bodies of the planets, but receives
there the different faculties which it is to exercise while it inhabits
the body.

In Saturn, it acquires the power of reasoning and intelligence, or what
is termed the logical and contemplative faculty. From Jupiter it
receives the power of action. Mars gives it valor, enterprise, and
impetuosity. From the Sun it receives the senses and imagination, which
produce sensation, perception, and thought. Venus inspires it with
desires. Mercury gives it the faculty of expressing and enunciating what
it thinks and feels. And, on entering the sphere of the Moon, it
acquires the force of generation and growth. This lunary sphere, lowest
and basest to divine bodies, is first and highest to terrestrial bodies.
And the lunary body there assumed by the soul, while, as it were, the
sediment of celestial matter, is also the first substance of animal
matter.

The celestial bodies, Heaven, the Stars, and the other Divine elements,
ever aspire to rise. The soul reaching the region which mortality
inhabits, tends toward terrestrial bodies, and is deemed to die. Let no
one, says Macrobius, be surprised that we so frequently speak of the
_death_ of this soul, which yet we call immortal. It is neither annulled
nor destroyed by such death: but merely enfeebled for a time; and does
not thereby forfeit its prerogative of immortality; for afterward, freed
from the body, when it has been purified from the vice-stains contracted
during that connection, it is re-established in all its privileges, and
returns to the luminous abode of its immortality.

On its return, it restores to each sphere through which it ascends, the
passions and earthly faculties received from them: to the Moon, the
faculty of increase and diminution of the body; to Mercury, fraud, the
architect of evils; to Venus, the seductive love of pleasure; to the
Sun, the passion for greatness and empire; to Mars, audacity and
temerity; to Jupiter, avarice; and to Saturn, falsehood and deceit: and
at last, relieved of all, it enters naked and pure into the eighth
sphere or highest Heaven.

All this agrees with the doctrine of Plato, that the soul cannot
re-enter into Heaven, until the revolutions of the Universe shall have
restored it to its primitive condition, and purified it from the effects
of its contact with the four elements.

This opinion of the pre-existence of souls, as pure and celestial
substances, before their union with our bodies, to put on and animate
which they descend from Heaven, is one of great antiquity. A modern
Rabbi, Manasseh Ben Israel, says it was always the belief of the
Hebrews. It was that of most philosophers who admitted the immortality
of the soul: and therefore it was taught in the Mysteries; for, as
Lactantius says, they could not see how it was possible that the soul
should exist _after_ the body, if it had not existed _before_ it, and if
its nature was not independent of that of the body. The same doctrine
was adopted by the most learned of the Greek Fathers, and by many of the
Latins: and it would probably prevail largely at the present day, if men
troubled themselves to think upon this subject at all, and to inquire
whether the soul's immortality involved its prior existence.

Some philosophers held that the soul was incarcerated in the body, by
way of punishment for sins committed by it in a prior state. How they
reconciled this with the same soul's unconsciousness of any such prior
state, or of sin committed there, does not appear. Others held that God,
of his mere will, sent the soul to inhabit the body. The Kabalists
united the two opinions. They held that there are four worlds, _Asiluth,
Briarth, Jezirath_, and _Aziath_; the world of _emanation_, that of
_creation_, that of _forms_, and the _material_ world; one above and
more perfect than the other, in that order, both as regards their own
nature and that of the beings who inhabit them. All souls are originally
in the world Aziluth, the Supreme Heaven, abode of God, and of pure and
immortal spirits. Those who descend from it without fault of their own,
by God's order, are gifted with a divine fire, which preserves them from
the contagion of matter, and restores them to Heaven so soon as their
mission is ended. Those who descend through their own fault, go from
world to world, insensibly losing their love of Divine things, and their
self-contemplation; until they reach the world Aziath, falling by their
own weight. This is a pure Platonism, clothed with the images and words
peculiar to the Kabalists. It was the doctrine of the Essenes, who, says
Porphyry, "believe that souls descend from the most subtile ether,
attracted to bodies by the seductions of matter." It was in substance
the doctrine of Origen; and it came from the Chaldæans, who largely
studied the theory of the Heavens, the spheres, and the influences of
the signs and constellations.

The Gnostics made souls ascend and descend through eight Heavens, in
each of which were certain Powers that opposed their return, and often
drove them back to earth, when not sufficiently purified. The last of
these Powers, nearest the luminous abode of souls, was a serpent or
dragon.

In the ancient doctrine, certain Genii were charged with the duty of
conducting souls to the bodies destined to receive them, and of
withdrawing them from those bodies. According to Plutarch, these were
the functions of Proserpine and Mercury. In Plato, a familiar Genius
accompanies man at his birth, follows and watches him all his life, and
at death conducts him to the tribunal of the Great Judge. These Genii
are the media of communication between man and the Gods; and the soul is
ever in their presence. This doctrine is taught in the oracles of
Zoroaster: and these Genii were the Intelligences that resided in the
planets.

Thus the secret science and mysterious emblems of initiation were
connected with the Heavens, the Spheres, and the Constellations: and
this connection must be studied by whomsoever would understand the
ancient mind, and be enabled to interpret the allegories, and explore
the meaning of the symbols, in which the old sages endeavored to
delineate the ideas that struggled within them for utterance, and could
be but insufficiently and inadequately expressed by language, whose
words are images of those things alone that can be grasped by and are
within the empire of the senses.

It is not possible for us thoroughly to appreciate the feelings with
which the ancients regarded the Heavenly bodies, and the ideas to which
their observation of the Heavens gave rise, because We cannot put
ourselves in their places, look at the stars with their eyes in the
world's youth, and divest ourselves of the knowledge which even the
commonest of us have, that makes us regard the Stars and Planets and all
the Universe of Suns and Worlds, as a mere inanimate machine and
aggregate of senseless orbs, no more astonishing, except in degree, than
a clock or an orrery. _We_ wonder and are amazed at the Power and Wisdom
(to most men it seems only a kind of Infinite _Ingenuity_) of the MAKER:
they wondered at the _Work_, and endowed _it_ with Life and Force and
mysterious Powers and mighty Influences.

Memphis, in Egypt, was in Latitude 29˚ 5' North, and in Longitude 30˚
18' East. Thebæ, in Upper Egypt, in Latitude 25˚ 45' North, and
Longitude 32˚ 43' East. Babylon was in Latitude 32˚ 30' North, and
Longitude 44˚ 23' East: while Saba, the ancient Sabæan capital of
Ethiopia, was about in Latitude 15˚ North.

Through Egypt ran the great River Nile, coming from beyond Ethiopia, its
source in regions wholly unknown, in the abodes of heat and fire, and
its course from South to North. Its inundations had formed the alluvial
lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, which they continued to raise higher and
higher, and to fertilize by their deposits. At first, as in all
newly-settled countries, those inundations, occurring annually and
always at the same period of the year, were calamities: until, by means
of levees and drains and artificial lakes for irrigation, they became
blessings, and were looked for with joyful anticipation, as they had
before been awaited with terror. Upon the deposit left by the Sacred
River, as it withdrew into its banks, the husbandman sowed his seed; and
the rich soil and the genial sun insured him an abundant harvest.

Babylon lay on the Euphrates, which ran from Southeast to Northwest,
blessing, as all rivers in the Orient do, the arid country through which
it flowed; but its rapid and uncertain overflows bringing terror and
disaster.

To the ancients, as yet inventors of no astronomical instruments, and
looking at the Heavens with the eyes of children, this earth was a level
plain of unknown extent. About its boundaries there was speculation, but
no knowledge. The inequalities of its surface were the irregularities of
a plane. That it was a globe, or that anything lived on its under
surface, or on what it rested, they had no idea. Every twenty-four hours
the sun came up from beyond the Eastern rim of the world, and travelled
across the sky, over the earth, always South of, but sometimes nearer
and sometimes further from the point overhead; and sunk below the
world's Western rim. With him went light, and after him followed
darkness.

And every twenty-four hours appeared in the Heavens another body,
visible chiefly at night, but sometimes even when the sun shone, which
likewise, as if following the sun at a greater or less distance,
travelled across the sky; sometimes as a thin crescent, and thence
increasing to a full orb resplendent with silver light; and sometimes
more and sometimes less to the Southward of the point overhead, within
the same limits as the Sun.

Man, enveloped by the thick darkness of profoundest night, when
everything around him has disappeared, and he seems alone with himself
and the black shades that surround him, feels his existence a blank and
nothingness, except so far as memory recalls to him the glories and
splendors of light. Everything is dead to him, and he, as it were, to
Nature. How crushing and overwhelming the thought, the fear, the dread,
that _perhaps_ that darkness may be eternal, and that day may possibly
never return; if it ever occurs to his mind, while the solid gloom
closes up against him like a wall! What then can restore him to like, to
energy, to activity, to fellowship and communion with the great world
which God has spread around him, and which perhaps in the darkness may
be passing away? LIGHT restores him to himself and to nature which
seemed lost to him. Naturally, therefore, the primitive men regarded
light as the principle of their real existence, without which life would
be but one continued weariness and despair. This necessity for light,
and its actual creative energy, were felt by all men: and nothing was
more alarming to them than its absence. It became their first Divinity,
a single ray of which, flashing into the dark tumultuous bosom of chaos,
caused man and all the Universe to emerge from it. So all the poets sung
who imagined Cosmogonies; such was the first dogma of Orpheus, Moses,
and the Theologians. Light was Ormuzd, adored by the Persians, and
Darkness Ahriman, origin of all evils. Light was the life of the
Universe, the friend of man, the substance of the Gods and of the Soul.

The sky was to them a great, solid, concave arch; a hemisphere of
unknown material, at an unknown distance above the flat level earth; and
along it journeyed in their courses the Sun, the Moon, the Planets, and
the Stars.

The Sun was to them a great globe of fire, of unknown dimensions, at an
unknown distance. The Moon was a mass of softer light; the stars and
planets lucent bodies, armed with unknown and supernatural influences.

It could not fail to be soon observed, that at regular intervals the
days and nights were equal; and that two of these intervals measured the
same space of time as elapsed between the successive inundations, and
between the returns of spring-time and harvest. Nor could it fail to be
perceived that the changes of the moon occurred regularly; the same
number of days always elapsing between the first appearance of her
silver crescent in the West at evening and that of her full orb rising
in the East at the same hour; and the same again, between that and the
new appearance of the crescent in the West.

It was also soon observed that the Sun crossed the Heavens in a
different line each day, the days being longest and the nights shortest
when the line of his passage was furthest North, and the days shortest
and nights longest when that line was furthest South: that his progress
North and South was perfectly regular, marking four periods that were
always the same,--those when the days and nights were equal, or the
Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes; that when the days were longest, or the
Summer Solstice; and that when they were shortest, or the Winter
Solstice.

With the Vernal Equinox, or about the 25th of March of our Calendar,
they found that there unerringly came soft winds, the return of warmth,
caused by the Sun turning back to the Northward from the middle ground
of his course, the vegetation of the new year, and the impulse to
amatory action on the part of the animal creation. Then the Bull and the
Ram, animals most valuable to the agriculturist, and symbols themselves
of vigorous generative power, recovered their vigor, the birds mated and
builded their nests, the seeds germinated, the grass grew, and the trees
put forth leaves. With the Summer Solstice, when the Sun reached the
extreme northern limit of his course, came great heat, and burning
winds, and lassitude and exhaustion; then vegetation withered, man
longed for the cool breezes of Spring and Autumn, and the cool water of
the wintry Nile or Euphrates, and the Lion sought for that element far
from his home in the desert.

With the Autumnal Equinox came ripe harvests, and fruits of the tree and
vine, and falling leaves, and cold evenings presaging wintry frosts; and
the Principle and Powers of Darkness, prevailing over those of Light,
drove the Sun further to the South, so that the nights grew longer than
the days. And at the Winter Solstice the earth was wrinkled with frost,
the trees were leafless, and the Sun, reaching the most Southern point
in his career, seemed to hesitate whether to continue descending, to
leave the world to darkness and despair, or to turn upon his steps and
retrace his course to the Northward, bringing back seed-time and Spring,
and green leaves and flowers, and all the delights of love.

Thus, naturally and necessarily, time was divided, first into days, and
then into moons or months, and years; and with these divisions and the
movements of the Heavenly bodies that marked them, were associated and
connected all men's physical enjoyments and privations. Wholly
agricultural, and in their frail habitations greatly at the mercy of the
elements and the changing seasons, the primitive people of the Orient
were most deeply interested in the recurrence of the periodical
phenomena presented by the two great luminaries of Heaven, on whose
regularity all their prosperity depended.

And the attentive observer soon noticed that the smaller lights of
Heaven were, apparently, even more regular than the Sun and Moon, and
foretold with unerring certainty, by their risings and settings, the
periods of recurrence of the different phenomena and seasons on which
the physical well-being of all men depended. They soon felt the
necessity of distinguishing the individual stars, or groups of stars,
and giving them names, that they might understand each other, when
referring to and designating them. Necessity produced designations at
once natural and artificial. Observing that, in the circle of the year,
the renewal and periodical appearance of the productions of the earth
were constantly associated, not only with the courses of the Sun, but
also with the rising and setting of certain Stars, and with their
position relatively to the Sun, the centre to which they referred the
whole starry host, the mind naturally connected the celestial and
terrestrial objects that were _in fact_ connected: and they commenced by
giving to particular Stars or groups of Stars the names of those
terrestrial objects which seemed connected with them; and for those
which still remained unnamed by this nomenclature, they, to complete a
system, assumed arbitrary and fanciful names.

Thus the Ethiopian of Thebes or Saba styled those Stars under which the
Nile commenced to overflow, Stars of Inundation, or that _poured out
water_ (AQUARIUS).

Those Stars among which the Sun was, when he had reached the Northern
Tropic and began to _retreat_ Southward, were termed, from his
retrograde motion, the Crab (CANCER).

As he approached, in Autumn, the middle point between the Northern and
Southern extremes of his journeying, the days and nights became equal;
and the Stars among which he was then found were called Stars of the
Balance (LIBRA).

Those stars among which the Sun was, when the Lion, driven from the
Desert by thirst, came to slake it at the Nile, were called Stars of the
Lion (LEO).

Those among which the Sun was at harvest, were called those of the
Gleaning Virgin, holding a Sheaf of Wheat (VIRGO).

Those among which he was found in February, when the Ewes brought forth
their young, were called Stars of the Lamb (ARIES).

Those in March, when it was time to plough, were called Stars of the Ox
(TAURUS).

Those under which hot and burning winds came from the desert, venomous
like poisonous reptiles, were called Stars of the Scorpion (SCORPIO).

Observing that the annual return of the rising of the Nile was always
accompanied by the appearance of a beautiful Star, which at that period
showed itself in the direction of the sources of that river, and seemed
to warn the husbandman to be careful not to be surprised by the
inundation, the Ethiopian compared this act of that Star to that of the
Animal which by barking gives warning of danger, and styled it the Dog
(SIRIUS).

Thus commencing, and as astronomy came to be more studied, imaginary
figures were traced all over the Heavens, to which the different Stars
were assigned. Chief among them were those that lay along the path which
the Sun travelled as he climbed toward the North and descended to the
South: lying within certain limits and extending to an equal distance on
each side of the line of equal nights and days. This belt, curving like
a Serpent, was termed the Zodiac, and divided into twelve Signs.

At the Vernal Equinox, 2455 years before our Era, the Sun was entering
the sign and constellation Taurus, or the Bull; having passed through,
since he commenced, at the Winter Solstice, to ascend Northward, the
Signs Aquarius, Pisces and Aries; on entering the first of which he
reached the lowest limit of his journey Southward.

From TAURUS, he passed through Gemini and Cancer, and reached LEO when
he arrived at the terminus of his journey Northward. Thence, through
Leo, Virgo, and Libra, he entered SCORPIO at the Autumnal Equinox, and
journeyed Southward through Scorpia, Sagittarius, and Capricornus to
AQUARIUS, the terminus of his journey South.

The path by which he journeyed through these signs became the
_Ecliptic_; and that which passes through the two equinoxes, the
_Equator_.

They knew nothing of the immutable laws of nature; and whenever the Sun
commenced to tend Southward, they feared lest he might continue to do
so, and by degrees disappear forever, leaving the earth to be ruled
forever by darkness, storm, and cold.

Hence they rejoiced when he commenced to re-ascend after the Winter
Solstice, struggling against the malign influences of Aquarius and
Pisces, and amicably received by the Lamb. And when at the Vernal
Equinox he entered Taurus, they still more rejoiced at the assurance
that the days would again be longer than the nights, that the season of
seed-time had come, and the Summer and harvest would follow.

And they lamented when, after the Autumnal Equinox, the malign influence
of the venomous Scorpion, and vindictive Archer, and the filthy and
ill-omened He-Goat dragged him down toward the Winter Solstice.

Arriving there, they said he had been slain, and had gone to the realm
of darkness. Remaining there three days, he rose again, and again
ascended Northward in the heavens, to redeem the earth from the gloom
and darkness of Winter, which soon became emblematical of sin, and evil,
and suffering; as the Spring, Summer, and Autumn became emblems of
happiness and immortality.

Soon they personified the Sun, and worshipped him under the name of
OSIRIS, and transmuted the legend of his descent among the Winter Signs,
into a fable of his death, his descent into the infernal regions, and
his resurrection.

The Moon became Isis, the wife of Osiris; and Winter, as well as the
desert or the ocean into which the Sun descended, became TYPHON, the
Spirit or Principle of Evil, warring against and destroying Osiris.

From the journey of the Sun through the twelve signs came the legend of
the twelve labors of Hercules, and the incarnations of Vishnu and
Buddha. Hence came the legend of the murder of Khūrũm, representative of
the Sun, by the three Fellow-crafts, symbols of the three Winter signs,
Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces, who assailed him at the three gates
of Heaven and slew him at the Winter Solstice. Hence the search for him
by the nine Fellow-crafts, the other nine signs, his finding, burial,
and resurrection.

The celestial Taurus, opening the new year, was the Creative Bull of the
Hindus and Japanese, breaking with his horn the egg out of which the
world is born, Hence the bull APIS was worshipped by the Egyptians, and
reproduced as a golden calf by Aaron in the desert. Hence the cow was
sacred to the Hindús. Hence, from the sacred and beneficent signs of
Taurus and Leo, the human-headed winged lions and bulls in the palaces
at Kouyounjik and Nimroud, like which were the Cherubim set by Solomon
in his Temple: and hence the twelve brazen or bronze oxen, on which the
laver of brass was supported.

The Celestial Vulture or Eagle, rising and setting with the Scorpion,
was substituted in its place, in many cases, on account of the malign
influences of the latter: and thus the four great periods of the year
were marked by the Bull, the Lion, the Man (Aquarius) and the Eagle;
which were upon the respective standards of Ephraim, Judah, Reuben, and
Dan; and still appear on the shield of American Royal Arch Masonry.

Afterward the Ram or Lamb became an object of adoration, when, in his
turn, he opened the equinox, to deliver the world from the wintry reign
of darkness and evil.

Around the central and simple idea of the annual death and resurrection
of the Sun a multitude of circumstantial details soon clustered. Some
were derived from other astronomical phenomena; while many were merely
poetical ornaments and inventions.

Besides the Sun and Moon, those ancients also saw a beautiful Star,
shining, with a soft, silvery light, always following the Sun at no
great distance when he set, or preceding him when he rose. Another of a
red and angry color, and still another more kingly and brilliant than
all, early attracted their attention, by their free movements among the
fixed hosts of Heaven: and the latter by his unusual brilliancy, and the
regularity with which he rose and set. These were Venus, Mars, and
Jupiter. Mercury and Saturn could scarcely have been noticed in the
world's infancy, or until astronomy began to assume the proportions of a
science.

In the projection of the celestial sphere by the astronomical priests,
the zodiac and constellations, arranged in a circle, presented their
halves in diametrical opposition; and the hemisphere of Winter was said
to be adverse, opposed, contrary, to that of Summer. Over the angels of
the latter ruled a king (OSIRIS or ORMUZD), enlightened, intelligent,
creative, and beneficent. Over the fallen angels or evil genii of the
former, the demons or Devs of the subterranean empire of darkness and
sorrow, and its stars, ruled also a chief. In Egypt the Scorpion first
ruled, the sign next the Balance, and long the chief of the Winter
signs; and then the Polar Bear or Ass, called Typhon, that is, _deluge_,
on account of the rains which inundated the earth while that
constellation domineered. In Persia, at a later day, it was the serpent,
which, personified as Ahriman, was the Evil Principle of the religion of
Zoroaster.

The Sun does not arrive at the same moment in each year at the
equinoctial point on the equator. The explanation of his anticipating
that point belongs to the science of astronomy; and to that we refer you
for it. The consequence is, what is termed the precession of the
equinoxes, by means of which the Sun is constantly changing his place in
the zodiac, at each vernal equinox; so that now, the signs retaining the
names which they had 300 years before Christ, they and the
constellations do not correspond; the Sun being now in the constellation
Pisces, when he is in the sign Aries.

The annual amount of precession is 50 seconds and a little over [50"
1.]. The period of a complete Revolution of the Equinoxes, 25,856 years.
The precession amounts to 30° or a sign, in 2155.6 years. So that, as
the sun now enters Pisces at the Vernal Equinox, he entered Aries at
that period, 300 years B.C., and Taurus 2455 B.C. And the division of
the Ecliptic, now _called_ Taurus, lies in the Constellation Aries;
while the _sign_ Gemini is in the _Constellation_ Taurus. Four thousand
six hundred and ten years before Christ, the sun entered Gemini at the
Vernal Equinox.

At the two periods, 2455 and 300 years before Christ, and now, the
entrances of the sun at the Equinoxes and Solstices into the signs, were
and are as follows:--

_B.C._ 2455.


Vern. Equinox, he entered Taurus from Aries.
Summer Solstice Leo from Cancer.
Autumnal Equinox Scorpio from Libra.
Winter Solstice Aquarius from Capricornus.

_B.C._ 300.

Vern. Eq. Aries from Pisces.
Summer Sols. Cancer from Gemini.
Autumn Eq. Libra from Virgo.
Winter Sols. Capricornus from Sagittarius.

1872.

Vern. Eq. Pisces from Aquarius.
Sum. Sols. Gemini from Taurus.
Aut. Eq. Virgo from Leo.
Winter Sols. Sagittarius from Scorpio.

From confounding _signs_ with _causes_ came the worship of the sun and
stars. "If," says Job, "I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon
progressive in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or
my mouth hath kissed my hand, this were an iniquity to be punished by
the Judge; for I should have denied the God that is above."

Perhaps we are not, on the whole, much wiser than those simple men of
the old time. For what do we know of _effect_ and _cause_, except that
one thing regularly or habitually _follows_ another?

So, because the heliacal rising of Sirius _preceded_ the rising of the
Nile, it was deemed to _cause_ it; and other stars were in like manner
held to _cause_ extreme heat, bitter cold, and watery storm.

A religious reverence for the zodiacal Bull [TAURUS] appears, from a
very early period, to have been pretty general,--perhaps it was
universal, throughout Asia; from that chain or region of Caucasus to
which it gave name; and which is still known under the appellation of
Mount Taurus, to the Southern extremities of the Indian Peninsula;
extending itself also into Europe, and through the Eastern parts of
Africa.

This evidently originated during those remote ages of the world, when
the colure of the vernal equinox passed across the stars in the head of
the sign Taurus [among which was Aldebarán]; a period when, as the most
ancient monuments of all the oriental nations attest, the light of arts
and letters first shone forth.

The Arabian word AL-DE-BARÁN, means the _foremost_, or _leading_, star:
and it could only have been so named, when it did precede, or _lead_,
all others. The year then opened with the sun in Taurus; and the
multitude of ancient sculptures, both in Assyria and Egypt, wherein the
bull appears with lunette or crescent horns, and the disk of the sun
between them, are direct allusions to the important festival of the
first new moon of the year: and there was everywhere an annual
celebration of the festival of the first new moon, when the year opened
with Sol and Luna in Taurus.

David sings: "Blow the trumpet in _the New Moon_; in the time appointed;
on our solemn feast-day: for this is a statute unto Israel, and a law of
the God of Jacob. This he ordained to Joseph, for a testimony, when he
came out of the land of Egypt."

The reverence paid to Taurus continued long after, by the precession of
the Equinoxes, the colure of the vernal equinox had come to pass through
Aries. The Chinese still have a temple, called "The Palace of the horned
Bull"; and the same symbol is worshipped in Japan and all over
Hindostan. The Cimbrians carried a brazen bull with them, as the image
of their God, when they overran Spain and Gaul; and the representation
of the Creation, by the Deity in the shape of a bull, breaking the shell
of an egg with his horns, meant Taurus, opening the year, and bursting
the symbolical shell of the annually-recurring orb of the new year.

Theophilus says that the Osiris of Egypt was supposed to be dead or
absent fifty days in each year. Landseer thinks that this was because
the Sabæan priests were accustomed to see, in the lower latitudes of
Egypt and Ethiopia, the first or chief stars of the Husbandman [BOÖTES]
sink achronically beneath the Western horizon; and then to begin their
lamentations, or hold forth the signal for others to weep: and when his
prolific virtues were supposed to be transferred to the vernal sun,
bacchanalian revelry became devotion.

Before the colure of the Vernal Equinox had passed into Aries, and after
it had left Aldebarán and the Hyades, the Pleiades were, for seven or
eight centuries, the leading stars of the Sabæan year. And thus we see,
on the monuments, the disk and crescent, symbols of the sun and moon in
conjunction, appear successively,--first on the head, and then on the
neck and back of the Zodiacal Bull, and more recently on the forehead of
the Ram.

The diagrammatical character or symbol, still in use to denote Taurus,
[Glyph], is this very crescent and disk: a symbol that has come down to
us from those remote ages when this memorable conjunction in Taurus, by
marking the commencement, at once of the Sabæan year and of the cycle of
the Chaldean Saros, so pre-eminently distinguished that sign as to
become its characteristic symbol. On a bronze bull from China, the
crescent is attached to the _back_ of the Bull, by means of a cloud, and
a curved groove is provided for the occasional introduction of the disk
of the sun, when solar and lunar time were coincident and conjunctive,
at the commencement of the year, and of the lunar cycle. When that was
made, the year did not open with the stars in the _head_ of the Bull,
but when the colure of the vernal equinox passed across the middle or
later degrees of the asterism Taurus, and the Pleiades were, in China,
as in Canaan, the leading stars of the year.

The crescent and disk combined always represent the conjunctive Sun and
Moon; and when placed on the head of the Zodiacal Bull, the commencement
of the cycle termed SAROS by the Chaldeans, and Metonic by the Greeks;
and supposed to be alluded to in Job, by the phrase, "Mazzaroth in his
season"; that is to say, when the first new Moon and new Sun of the year
were coincident, which happened once in eighteen years and a fraction.

On the sarcophagus of Alexander, the same symbol appears on the head of
a Ram, which, in the time of that monarch, was the leading sign. So too
in the sculptured temples of the Upper Nile, the crescent and disk
appear, not on the head of Taurus, but on the forehead of the Ram or the
Ram-headed God, whom the Grecian Mythologists called Jupiter Ammon,
really the Sun in Aries.

If we now look for a moment at the individual stars which composed and
were near to the respective constellations, we may find something that
will connect itself with the symbols of the Ancient Mysteries and of
Masonry.

It is to be noticed that when the Sun is _in_ a particular
constellation, no part of that constellation will be seen, except just
before sunrise and just after sunset; and then only the edge of it: but
the constellations _opposite_ to it will be visible. When the Sun is in
Taurus, for example, that is, when Taurus _sets with_ the Sun, Scorpio
rises as he sets, and continues visible throughout the night. And if
Taurus rises and sets with the Sun to-day, he will, six months hence,
rise at sunset and set at sunrise; for the stars thus gain on the Sun
two hours a month.

Going back to the time when, watched by the Chaldean shepherds, and the
husbandmen of Ethiopia and Egypt,

"The milk-white Bull with golden horns
Led on the new-born year,"

we see in the neck of TAURUS, the Pleiades, and in his face the Hyades,
"which Grecia from their showering names," and of whom the brilliant
Aldebarán is the chief; while to the southwestward is that most splendid
of all the constellations, Orion, with Betelgueux in his right shoulder,
Bellatrix in his left shoulder, Rigel on the left foot, and in his belt
the three stars known as the Three Kings, and now as the Yard and Ell.
Orion, ran the legend, persecuted the Pleiades; and to save them from
his fury, Jupiter placed them in the Heavens, where he still pursues
them, but in vain. They, with Arcturus and the Bands of Orion, are
mentioned in the Book of Job. They are usually called the Seven Stars,
and it is said there _were_ seven, before the fall of Troy; though now
only six are visible.

The Pleiades were so named from a Greek word signifying _to sail._ In
all ages they have been observed for signs and seasons. Virgil says that
the sailors gave names to "the Pleiades, Hyades, and the Northern Car:
_Pleiadas, Hyadas, Claramque Lycaonis Arcton."_ And Palinurus, he
says,--

_Arcturum, pluviasque Hyadas, Geminosque Triones,
Armatumque auro circumspicit Oriona,--_

studied Arcturus and the rainy Hyades and the Twin Triones, and Orion
cinctured with gold.

Taurus was the prince and leader of the celestial host for more than two
thousand years; and when his head set with the Sun about the last of
May, the Scorpion was seen to rise in the Southeast.

The Pleiades were sometimes called _Vergiliœ,_ or the Virgins of Spring;
because the Sun entered this cluster of stars in the season of blossoms.
Their Syrian name was _Succoth,_ or _Succothbeneth,_ derived from a
Chaldean word signifying to _speculate_ or _observe._

The _Hyades_ are five stars in the form of a V, 11° southeast of the
Pleiades. The Greeks counted them as seven. When the Vernal Equinox was
in Taurus, Aldebarán led up the starry host; and as he rose in the East,
Aries was about 27° high.

When he was close upon the meridian, the Heavens presented their most
magnificent appearance. Capella was a little further from the meridian,
to the north; and Orion still further from it to the southward. Procyon,
Sirius, Castor and Pollux had climbed about half-way from the horizon to
the meridian. Regulus had just risen upon the ecliptic. The Virgin still
lingered below the horizon. Fomalhaut was half-way to the meridian in
the Southwest; and to the Northwest were the brilliant constellations,
Perseus, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda; while the Pleiades had just
passed the meridian.

ORION is visible to all the habitable world. The equinoctial line passes
through the centre of it. When Aldebarán rose in the East, the Three
Kings in Orion followed him; and as Taurus set, the Scorpion, by whose
sting it was said Orion died, rose in the East.

Orion rises at noon about the 9th of March. His rising was accompanied
with great rains and storms, and it became very terrible to mariners.

In Boötes, called by the ancient Greeks _Lycaon_, from _lukos,_ a wolf,
and by the Hebrews, Caleb Anubach, the Barking Dog, is the Great Star
ARCTURUS, which, when Taurus opened the year, corresponded with a season
remarkable for its great heat.

Next comes GEMINI, the Twins, two human figures, in the heads of which
are the bright Stars CASTOR and POLLUX, the Dioscuri, and the Cabiri of
Samothrace, patrons of navigation; while South of Pollux are the
brilliant Stars SIRIUS and PROCYON, the greater and lesser Dog: and
still further South, Canopus, in the Ship Argo.

Sirius is apparently the largest and brightest Star in the Heavens. When
the Vernal Equinox was in Taurus, he rose heliacally, that is, just
before the Sun, when, at the Summer Solstice, the Sun entered Leo, about
the 21st of June, fifteen days previous to the swelling of the Nile. The
heliacal rising of Canopus was also a precursor of the rising of the
Nile. Procyon was the forerunner of Sirius, and rose before him.

There are no important Stars in CANCER. In the Zodiacs of Esne and
Dendera, and in most of the astrological remains of Egypt, the sign of
this constellation was a beetle (_Scarabœus_), which thence became
sacred, as an emblem of the gate through which souls descended from
Heaven. In the crest of Cancer is a cluster of Stars formerly called
_Prœsepe,_ the Manger, on each side of which is a small Star, the two of
which were called _Aselli_ little asses.

In _Leo_ are the splendid Stars, REGULUS, directly on the ecliptic, and
DENEBOLA in the Lion's tail. Southeast of Regulus is the fine Star COR
HYDRÆ.

The combat of Hercules with the Nemæan lion was his first labor. It was
the first sign into which the Sun passed, after falling below the Summer
Solstice; from which time he struggled to re-ascend.

The Nile overflowed in this sign. It stands first in the Zodiac of
Dendera, and is in all the Indian and Egyptian Zodiacs.

In the left hand of VIRGO (Isis or Ceres) is the beautiful Star SPICA
Virginis, a little South of the ecliptic. VINDEMIATRIX, of less
magnitude, is in the right arm; and Northwest of Spica, in Boötes (the
husbandman, Osiris), is the splendid star ARCTURUS.

The division of the first Decan of the Virgin, Aben Ezra says,
represents a beautiful Virgin with flowing hair, sitting in a chair,
with two ears of corn in her hand, and suckling an infant. In an Arabian
MS. in the Royal Library at Paris, is a picture of the Twelve Signs.
That of Virgo is a young girl with an infant by her side. Virgo was
Isis; and her representation, carrying a child (Horus) in her arms,
exhibited in her temple, was accompanied by this inscription: "I AM ALL
THAT IS, THAT WAS, AND THAT SHALL BE; and the fruit which I brought
forth is the Sun."

Nine months after the Sun enters Virgo, he reaches the Twins. When
Scorpio begins to rise, Orion sets: when Scorpio comes to the meridian,
Leo begins to set, Typhon reigns, Osiris is slain, and Isis (the Virgin)
his sister and wife, follows him to the tomb, weeping.

The Virgin and Boötes, setting heliacally at the Autumnal Equinox,
delivered the world to the wintry constellations, and introduced into it
the genius of Evil, represented by Ophiucus, the Serpent.

At the moment of the Winter Solstice, the Virgin rose heliacally (_with_
the Sun), having the Sun (Horus) in her bosom.

In LIBRA are four Stars of the second and third magnitude, which we
shall mention hereafter. They are Zuben-es-Chamali, Zuben-el-Gemabi,
Zuben-hak-rabi, and Zuben-el-Gubi. Near the last of these is the
brilliant and malign Star, ANTARES in Scorpio.

In SCORPIO, ANTARES, of the 1st magnitude, and remarkably red, was one
of the four great Stars, FOMALHAUT, in Cetus, ALDEBARAN in Taurus,
REGULUS in Leo, and ANTARES, that formerly answered to the Solstitial
and Equinoctial points, and were much noticed by astronomers. This sign
was sometimes represented by a Snake, and sometimes by a Crocodile, but
generally by a Scorpion, which last is found on the Mithriac Monuments,
and on the Zodiac of Dendera. It was considered a sign accursed, and the
entrance of the Sun into it commenced the reign of Typhon.

In Sagittarius, Capricornus, and Aquarius there are no Stars of
importance.

Near Pisces is the brilliant Star FOMALHAUT. No sign in the Zodiac is
considered of more malignant influence than this. It was deemed
indicative of _Violence_ and _Death._ Both the Syrians and Egyptians
abstained from eating fish, out of dread and abhorhence; and when the
latter would represent anything as odious, or express hatred by
Hieroglyphics, they painted a fish.

In Auriga is the bright Star CAPELLA, which to the Egyptians never set.

And, circling ever round the North Pole are Seven Stars, known as Ursa
Major, or the Great Bear, which have been an object of universal
observation in all ages of the world. They were venerated alike by the
Priests of Bel, the Magi of Persia, the Shepherds of Chaldea, and the
Phœnician navigators, as well as by the astronomers of Egypt. Two of
them, MERAK and DUBHE, always point to the North Pole.

The Phoenicians and Egyptians, says Eusebius, were the first who
ascribed divinity to the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and regarded them as the
sole causes of the production and destruction of all beings. From them
went abroad over all the world all known opinions as to the generation
and descent of the Gods. Only the Hebrews looked beyond the visible
world to an invisible Creator. All the rest of the world regarded as
Gods those luminous bodies that blaze in the firmament, offered them
sacrifices, bowed down before them, and raised neither their souls nor
their worship above the visible heavens.

The Chaldeans, Canaanites, and Syrians, among whom Abraham lived, did
the same. The Canaanites consecrated horses and chariots to the Sun. The
inhabitants of Emesa in Phœnicia adored him under the name of
Elagabalus; and the Sun, as Hercules, was the great Deity of the
Tyrians. The Syrians worshipped, with fear and dread, the Stars of the
Constellation Pisces, and consecrated images of them in their temples.
The Sun as Adonis was worshipped in Byblos and about Mount Libanus.
There was a magnificent Temple of the Sun at Palmyra, which was pillaged
by the soldiers of Aurelian, who rebuilt it and dedicated it anew. The
Pleiades, under the name of Succoth-Beneth, were worshipped by the
Babylonian colonists who settled in the country of the Samaritans.
Saturn, under the name of Remphan, was worshipped among the Copts. The
planet Jupiter was worshipped as Bel or Baal; Mars as Malec, Melech, or
Moloch; Venus as Ashtaroth or Astarte, and Mercury as Nebo, among the
Syrians, Assyrians, Phœnicians, and Canaanites.

Sanchoniathon says that the earliest Phœnicians adored the Sun, whom
they deemed sole Lord of the Heavens; and honored him, under the name of
BEEL-SAMIN, signifying _King of Heaven._ They raised columns to the
elements, fire, and air or wind, and worshipped them; and Sabæism, or
the worship of the Stars, flourished everywhere in Babylonia. The Arabs,
under a sky always clear and serene, adored the Sun, Moon, and Stars.
Abulfaragius so informs us, and that each of the twelve Arab Tribes
invoked a particular Star as its Patron. The Tribe Hamyar was
consecrated to the Sun, the Tribe Cennah to the Moon; the Tribe Misa was
under the protection of the beautiful Star in Taurus, Aldebarán; the
Tribe Tai under that of Canopus; the Tribe Kais, of Sirius; the Tribes
Lachamus and Idamus, of Jupiter; the Tribe Asad, of Mercury; and so on.

The Saracens, in the time of Heraclius, worshipped Venus, whom they
called CABAR, or The Great; and they swore by the Sun, Moon, and Stars.
Shahristan, an Arabic author, says that the Arabs and Indians before his
time had temples dedicated to the seven Planets. Abulfaragius says that
the seven great primitive nations, from whom all others descended, the
Persians, Chaldæans, Greeks, Egyptians, Turks, Indians, and Chinese, all
originally were Sabæists, and worshipped the Stars. They all, he says,
like the Chaldæans, prayed, turning toward the North Pole three times a
day, at Sunrise, Noon, and Sunset, bowing themselves three times before
the Sun. They invoked the Stars and the Intelligences which inhabited
them, offered them sacrifices, and called the fixed stars and planets
gods. Philo says that the Chaldæans regarded the stars as sovereign
arbiters of the order of the world, and did not look beyond the visible
causes to any invisible and intellectual being. They regarded NATURE as
the great divinity, that exercised its powers through the action of its
parts the Sun, Moon, Planets, and Fixed Stars, the successive
revolutions of the seasons, and the combined action of Heaven and Earth.
The great feast of the Sabæans was when the Sun reached the Vernal
Equinox: and they had five other feasts, at the times when the five
minor planets entered the signs in which they had their exaltation.

Diodorus Siculus informs us that the Egyptians recognized two great
Divinities, primary and eternal, the Sun and Moon, which they thought
governed the world, and from which everything receives its nourishment
and growth: that on them depended all the great work of generation, and
the perfection of all effects produced in nature. We know that the two
great Divinities of Egypt were Osiris and Isis, the greatest agents of
nature; according to some, the Sun and Moon, and according to others,
Heaven and Earth, or the active and passive principles of generation.

And we learn from Porphyry that Chæremon, a learned priest of Egypt, and
many other learned men of that nation, said that the Egyptians
recognized as gods the stars composing the zodiac, and all those that by
their rising or setting marked its divisions; the subdivisions of the
signs into decans, the horoscope and the stars that presided therein,
and which were called Potent Chiefs of Heaven: that considering the Sun
as the Great God, Architect, and Ruler of the World, they explained not
only the fable of Osiris and Isis, but generally all their sacred
legends, by the stars, by their appearance and disappearance, by their
ascension, by the phases of the moon, and the increase and diminution of
her light; by the march of the sun, the division of time and the heavens
into two parts, one assigned to darkness and the other to light; by the
Nile and, in fine, by the whole round of physical causes.

Lucian tells us that the bull Apis, sacred to the Egyptians, was the
image of the celestial Bull, or Taurus; and that Jupiter Ammon, horned
like a ram, was an image of the constellation Aries. And Clemens of
Alexandria assures us that the four principal sacred animals, carried
in their processions, were emblems of the four signs or cardinal points
which fixed the seasons at the equinoxes and solstices, and divided into
four parts the yearly march of the sun. They worshipped fire also, and
water, and the Nile, which river they styled Father, Preserver of Egypt,
sacred emanation from the Great God Osiris; and in their hymns in which
they called it the god crowned with millet (which grain, represented by
the _pschent_, was part of the head-dress of their kings), bringing with
him abundance. The other elements were also revered by them: and the
Great Gods, whose names are found inscribed on an ancient column, are
the Air, Heaven, the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, Night, and Day. And, in
fine, as Eusebius says, they regarded the Universe as a great Deity,
composed of a great number of gods, the different parts of itself.

The same worship of the Heavenly Host extended into every part of
Europe, into Asia Minor, and among the Turks, Scythians, and Tartars.
The ancient Persians adored the Sun as Mithras, and also the Moon,
Venus, Fire, Earth, Air, and Water; and, having no statues or altars,
they sacrificed on high places to the Heavens and to the Sun. On seven
ancient _pyrea_ they burned incense to the Seven Planets, and considered
the elements to be divinities. In the Zend-Avesta we find invocations
addressed to Mithras, the stars, the elements, trees, mountains, and
every part of nature. The Celestial Bull is invoked there, to which the
Moon unites herself; and the four great stars, Taschter, Satevis,
Haftorang, and Venant, the great Star Rapitan, and the other
constellations which watch over the different portions of the earth.

The Magi, like a multitude of ancient nations, worshipped fire, above
all the other elements and powers of nature. In India, the Ganges and
the Indus were worshipped, and the Sun was the Great Divinity. They
worshipped the Moon also, and kept up the sacred fire. In Ceylon, the
Sun, Moon, and other planets were worshipped: in Sumatra, the Sun,
called Iri, and the Moon, called Handa. And the Chinese built Temples to
Heaven, the Earth, and genii of the air, of the water, of the mountains,
and of the stars, to the sea-dragon, and to the planet Mars.

The celebrated Labyrinth was built in honor of the Sun; and its twelve
palaces, like the twelve superb columns of the Temple at Hieropolis,
covered with symbols relating to the twelve signs and the occult
qualities of the elements, were consecrated to the twelve gods or
tutelary genii of the signs of the Zodiac. The figure of the pyramid
and that of the obelisk, resembling the shape of a flame, caused these
monuments to be consecrated to the Sun and to Fire. And Timæus of Locria
says: "The equilateral triangle enters into the composition of the
pyramid, which has four equal faces and equal angles, and which in this
is like fire the most subtle and mobile of the elements." They and the
obelisks were erected in honor of the Sun, termed in an inscription upon
one of the latter, translated by the Egyptian Hermapion and to be found
in Ammianus Marcellinus, "Apollo the strong, Son of God, He who made the
world, true Lord of the diadems, who possesses Egypt and fills it with
His glory."

The two most famous divisions of the Heavens, by seven, which is that of
the planets, and by twelve, which is that of the signs, are found on the
religious monuments of all the people of the ancient world. The twelve
Great Gods of Egypt are met with everywhere. They were adopted by the
Greeks and Romans; and the latter assigned one of them to each sign of
the Zodiac. Their images were seen at Athens, where an altar was erected
to each; and they were painted on the porticos. The People of the North
had their twelve _Azes_, or Senate of twelve great gods, of whom Odin
was chief. The Japanese had the same number, and like the Egyptians
divided them into classes, seven, who were the most ancient, and five,
afterward added: both of which numbers are well known and consecrated in
Masonry.

There is no more striking proof of the universal adoration paid the
stars and constellations, than the arrangement of the Hebrew camp in the
Desert, and the allegory in regard to the twelve Tribes of Israel,
ascribed in the Hebrew legends to Jacob. The Hebrew camp was a
quadrilateral, in sixteen divisions, of which the central four were
occupied by images of the four elements. The four divisions at the four
angles of the quadrilateral exhibited the four signs that the
astrologers called _fixed_, and which they regard as subject to the
influence of the four great Royal Stars, Regulus in Leo, Aldebaran in
Taurus, Antares in Scorpio, and Fomalhaut in the mouth of Pisces, on
which falls the water poured out by Aquarius; of which constellations
the Scorpion was represented in the Hebrew blazonry by the Celestial
Vulture or Eagle, that rises at the same time with it and is its
paranatellon. The other signs were arranged on the four faces of the
quadilateral, and in the parallel and interior divisions.

There is an astonishing coincidence between the characteristics assigned
by Jacob to his sons, and those of the signs of the Zodiac, or the
planets that have their domicile in those signs.

_Reuben_ is compared to running water, unstable, and that cannot excel;
and he answers to Aquarius, his ensign being a man. The water poured out
by Aquarius flows toward the South Pole, and it is the first of the four
Royal Signs, ascending from the Winter Solstice.

The Lion (Leo) is the device of _Judah_; and Jacob compares him to that
animal, whose constellation in the Heavens is the domicile of the Sun;
the Lion of the Tribe of Judah; by whose grip, when that of apprentice
and that of fellow-craft,--of Aquarius at the Winter Solstice and of
Cancer at the Vernal Equinox,--had not succeeded in raising him, Khūrūm
was lifted out of the grave.

_Ephraim_, on whose ensign appears the Celestial Bull, Jacob compares to
the ox. _Dan_, bearing as his device a Scorpion, he compares to the
Cerastes or horned Serpent, synonymous in astrological language with the
vulture or pouncing eagle; and which bird was often substituted on the
flag of Dan, in place of the venomous scorpion, on account of the terror
which that reptile inspired, as the symbol of Typhon and his malign
influences; wherefore the Eagle, as its paranatellon, that is, rising
and setting at the same time with it, was naturally used in its stead.
Hence the four famous figures in the sacred pictures of the Jews and
Christians, and in Royal Arch Masonry, of the Lion, the Ox, the Man, and
the Eagle, the four creatures of the Apocalypse, copied there from
Ezekiel, in whose reveries and rhapsodies they are seen revolving around
blazing circles.

The Ram, domicile of Mars, chief of the Celestial Soldiery and of the
twelve Signs, is the device of _Gad_, whom Jacob characterizes as a
warrior, chief of his army.

Cancer, in which are the stars termed _Aselli_, or little assess, is the
device of the flag of _Issachar_, whom Jacob compares to an ass.

Capricorn, of old represented with the tail of a fish, and called by
astronomers the Son of Neptune, is the device of _Zebulon_, of whom
Jacob says that he dwells on the shore of the sea.

Sagittarius, chasing the Celestial Wolf, is the emblem of _Benjamin_,
whom Jacob compares to a hunter: and in that constellation the Romans
placed the domicile of Diana the huntress. Virgo, the domicile of
Mercury, is borne on the flag of _Naphtali_, whose eloquence and agility
Jacob magnifies, both of which are attributes of the Courier of the
Gods. And of _Simeon_ and _Levi_ he speaks as united, as are the two
fishes that make the Constellation Pisces, which is their armorial
emblem.

Plato, in his Republic, followed the divisions of the Zodiac and the
planets. So also did Lycurgus at Sparta, and Cecrops in the Athenian
Commonwealth. Chun, the Chinese legislator, divided China into twelve
Tcheou, and specially designated twelve mountains. The Etruscans divided
themselves into twelve Cantons. Romulus appointed twelve Lictors. There
were twelve tribes of Ishmael and twelve disciples of the Hebrew
Reformer. The New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse has twelve gates.

The Souciet, a Chinese book, speaks of a palace composed of four
buildings, whose gates looked toward the four corners of the world. That
on the East was dedicated to the new moons of the months of Spring; that
on the West to those of Autumn; that on the South to those of Summer;
and that on the North to those of Winter: and in this, palace the
Emperor and his grandees sacrificed a lamb, the animal that represented
the Sun at the Vernal Equinox.

Among the Greeks, the march of the Choruses in their theatres
represented the movements of the Heavens and the planets, and the
Strophe and Anti-Strophe imitated, Aristoxenes says, the movements of
the Stars. The number five was sacred among the Chinese, as that of the
planets other than the Sun and Moon. Astrology consecrated the numbers
twelve, seven, thirty, and three hundred and sixty; and everywhere
_seven_, the number of the planets, was as sacred as twelve, that of the
signs, the months, the oriental cycles, and the sections of the horizon.
We shall speak more at large hereafter, in another Degree, as to these
and other numbers, to which the ancients ascribed mysterious powers.

The Signs of the Zodiac and the Stars appeared on many of the ancient
coins and medals. On the public seal of the Locrians, Ozoles was
Hesperus, or the planet Venus. On the medals of Antioch on the Orontes
was the ram and crescent; and the Ram was the special Deity of Syria,
assigned to it in the division of the earth among the twelve signs. On
the Cretan coins was the Equinoctial Bull; and he also appeared on those
of the Mamertins and of Athens. Sagittarius appeared on those of the
Persians. In India the twelve signs appeared upon the ancient coins.
The Scorpion was engraved on the medals of the Kings of Comagena, and
Capricorn on those of Zeugma, Anazorba, and other cities. On the medals
of Antoninus are found nearly all the signs of the Zodiac.

Astrology was practised among all the ancient nations. In Egypt, the
book of Astrology was borne reverentially in the religious processions;
in which the few sacred animals were also carried, as emblems of the
equinoxes and solstices. The same science nourished among the Chaldeans,
and over the whole of Asia and Africa. When Alexander invaded India, the
astrologers of the Oxydraces came to him to disclose the secrets of
their science of Heaven and the Stars. The Brahmins whom Apollonius
consulted, taught him the secrets of Astronomy, with the ceremonies and
prayers whereby to appease the gods and learn the future from the stars.
In China, astrology taught the mode of governing the State and families.
In Arabia it was deemed the mother of the sciences; and old libraries
are full of Arabic books on this pretended science. It flourished at
Rome. Constantine had his horoscope drawn by the astrologer Valens. It
was a science in the middle ages, and even to this day is neither
forgotten nor unpractised. Catherine de Medici was fond of it. Louis