http://www.freemasonrywatch.org/moralsanddogma.html
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of
Freemasonry
Before The Secret Doctrine and Mein Kampf there was the Occult Magnum
Opus-Political Manifesto of Freemasonry: Morals and Dogma, by Albert
Pike
Preface
MORALS AND DOGMA of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of
FREEMASONRY Prepared For The Supreme Council of the Thirty-Third
Degree (Mother Council of the World) for the Southern Jurisdiction of
the United States and Published by its Authority HOUSE OF THE TEMPLE
Washington, D.C. 1966 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the
year 1871, by ALBERT PIKE New and Revised Edition; copyright 1950;
published in 1966 The Supeme Council (Mother Council of the World) of
the Inspectors General Knights Commanders of the House of the Temple
of Solomon of the Thirty-third Degree of the Ancient and Accepted
Scotish Rite of Freemasonry of the Southern Jurisdiction of the United
States of America The Roberts Publishing Company; Washington, D.C.
The following work has been prepared by authority of the Supreme
Council of the Thirty-third Degree, for the Southern Jurisdiction of
the United States, by the Grand Commander, and is now published by its
direction. It contains the Lectures of the Ancient and Accepted
Scottish Rite in that jurisdiction, and is specially intended to be
read and studied by the Brethren of that obedience, in connection with
the Rituals of the Degrees.
Morals and Dogma
by, Albert Pike 33°
Table of Contents
Chapter I - 1° Apprentice
Chapter II - 2° The Fellowcraft
Chapter III - 3° The Master
Chapter IV - 4° Secret Master
Chapter XIV - 14° Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason
Chapter XVII - 17° Knight of the East and West
Chapter XVIII - 18° Knight Rose Croix
Chapter XXXI - 31° Grand Inspector Inquisitor Commander
Chapter XXXII - 32° Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret
M & D Chapter I
Apprentice
MORALS AND DOGMA.
by Albert Pike
I. APPRENTICE
THE TWELVE-INCH RULE AND THE COMMON GAVEL.
FORCE, unregulated or ill-regulated, is not only wasted in the void,
like that of gunpowder burned in the open air, and steam unconfined by
science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows meeting only the
air, they recoil and bruise itself. It is destruction and ruin. It is
the volcano, the earthquake, the cyclone;-not growth and progress. It
is Polyphemus blinded, striking at random, and falling headlong among
the sharp rocks by the impetus of his own blows.
The blind Force of the people is a Force that must be economized, and
also managed, as the blind Force of steam, lifting the ponderous iron
arms and turning the large wheels, is made to bore and rifle the
cannon and to weave the most delicate lace. It must be regulated by
Intellect. Intellect is to the people and the people's Force, what the
slender needle of the compass is to the ship--its soul, always
counselling the huge mass of wood and iron, and always pointing to the
north. To attack the citadels built up on all sides against the human
race by superstitions, despotisms, and prejudices, the Force must have
a brain and a law. Then its deeds of daring produce permanent results,
and there is real progress. Then there are sublime conquests. Thought
is a force, and philosophy should be an energy, finding its aim and
its effects in the amelioration of mankind. The two great motors are
Truth and Love. When all these Forces are combined, and guided by the
Intellect, and regulated by the RULE of Right, and Justice, and of
combined and systematic movement and effort, the great revolution
prepared for by the ages will begin to march. The POWER of the Deity
Himself is in equilibrium with His WISDOM. Hence the only results are
HARMONY.
It is because Force is ill regulated, that revolutions prove failures.
Therefore it is that so often insurrections, coming from those high
mountains that domineer over the moral horizon, Justice, Wisdom,
Reason, Right, built of the purest snow of the ideal after a long fall
from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in their
transparency, and been swollen by a hundred affluents, in the majestic
path of triumph, suddenly lose themselves in quagmires, like a
California river in the sands.
The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it
should blaze with noble and enduring lessons of courage. Deeds of
daring dazzle history, and form one class of the guiding lights of
man. They are the stars and coruscations from that great sea of
electricity, the Force inherent in the people. To strive, to brave all
risks, to perish, to persevere, to be true to one's self, to grapple
body to body with destiny, to surprise defeat by the little terror it
inspires, now to confront unrighteous power, now to defy intoxicated
triumph--these are the examples that the nations need and the light
that electrifies them.
There are immense Forces in the great caverns of evil beneath society;
in the hideous degradation, squalor, wretchedness and destitution,
vices and crimes that reek and simmer in the darkness in that populace
below the people, of great cities. There disinterestedness vanishes,
every one howls, searches, gropes, and gnaws for himself. Ideas are
ignored, and of progress there is no thought. This populace has two
mothers, both of them stepmothers--Ignorance and Misery. Want is their
only guide--for the appetite alone they crave satisfaction. Yet even
these may be employed. The lowly sand we trample upon, cast into the
furnace, melted, purified by fire, may become resplendent crystal.
They have the brute force of the HAMMER, but their blows help on the
great cause, when struck within the lines traced by the RULE held by
wisdom and discretion.
Yet it is this very Force of the people, this Titanic power of the
giants, that builds the fortifications of tyrants, and is embodied in
their armies. Hence the possibility of such tyrannies as those of
which it has been said, that "Rome smells worse under Vitellius than
under Sulla. Under Claudius and under Domitian there is a deformity of
baseness corresponding to the ugliness-of the tyranny. The foulness of
the slaves is a direct result of the atrocious baseness of the despot.
A miasma exhales from these crouching consciences that reflect the
master; the public authorities are unclean, hearts are collapsed,
consciences shrunken, souls puny. This is so under Caracalla, it is so
under Commodus, it is so under Heliogabalus, while from the Roman
senate, under Caesar, there comes only the rank odour peculiar to the
eagle's eyrie."
It is the force of the people that sustains all these despotisms, the
basest as well as the best. That force acts through armies; and these
oftener enslave than liberate. Despotism there applies the RULE. Force
is the MACE of steel at the saddle-bow of the knight or of the bishop
in armour. Passive obedience by force supports thrones and
oligarchies, Spanish kings, and Venetian senates. Might, in an army
wielded by tyranny, is the enormous sum total of utter weakness; and
so Humanity wages war against Humanity, in despite of Humanity. So a
people willingly submits to despotism, and its workmen submit to be
despised, and its soldiers to be whipped; therefore it is that battles
lost by a nation are often progress attained. Less glory is more
liberty. When the drum is silent, reason sometimes speaks.
Tyrants use the force of the people to chain and subjugate--that is,
enyoke the people. Then they plough with them as men do with oxen
yoked. Thus the spirit of liberty and innovation is reduced by
bayonets, and principles are struck dumb by cannonshot; while the
monks mingle with the troopers, and the Church militant and jubilant,
Catholic or Puritan, sings Te Deums for victories over rebellion.
The military power, not subordinate to the civil power, again the
HAMMER or MACE of FORCE, independent of the RULE, is an armed tyranny,
born full-grown, as Athene sprung from the brain of Zeus. It spawns a
dynasty, and begins with Caesar to rot into Vitellius and Commodus. At
the present day it inclines to begin where formerly dynasties ended.
Constantly the people put forth immense strength, only to end in
immense weakness. The force of the people is exhausted in indefinitely
prolonging things long since dead; in governing mankind by embalming
old dead tyrannies of Faith; restoring dilapidated dogmas; regilding
faded, worm-eaten shrines; whitening and rouging ancient and barren
superstitions; saving society by multiplying parasites; perpetuating
superannuated institutions; enforcing the worship of symbols as the
actual means of salvation; and tying the dead corpse of the Past,
mouth to mouth, with the living Present. Therefore it is that it is
one of the fatalities of Humanity to be condemned to eternal struggles
with phantoms, with superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices,
the formulas of error, and the pleas of tyranny. Despotisms, seen in
the past, become respectable, as the mountain, bristling with volcanic
rock, rugged and horrid, seen through the haze of distance is blue and
smooth and beautiful. The sight of a single dungeon of tyranny is
worth more, to dispel illusions, and create a holy hatred of
despotism, and to direct FORCE aright, than the most eloquent volumes.
The French should have preserved the Bastile as a perpetual lesson;
Italy should not destroy the dungeons of the Inquisition. The Force of
the people maintained the Power that built its gloomy cells, and
placed the living in their granite sepulchres.
The FORCE of the people cannot, by its unrestrained and fitful action,
maintain and continue in action and existence a free Government once
created. That Force must be limited, restrained, conveyed by
distribution into different channels, and by roundabout courses, to
outlets, whence it is to issue as the law, action, and decision of the
State; as the wise old Egyptian kings conveyed in different canals, by
sub-division, the swelling waters of the Nile, and compelled them to
fertilize and not devastate the land. There must be the jus et norma,
the law and Rule, or Gauge, of constitution and law, within which the
public force must act. Make a breach in either, and the great
steam-hammer, with its swift and ponderous blows, crushes all the
machinery to atoms, and, at last, wrenching itself away, lies inert
and dead amid the ruin it has wrought.
The FORCE of the people, or the popular will, in action and exerted,
symbolized by the GAVEL, regulated and guided by and acting within the
limits of LAW and ORDER, symbolized by the TWENTY-FOUR-INCH RULE, has
for its fruit LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY,--liberty regulated by
law; equality of rights in the eye of the law; brotherhood with its
duties and obligations as well as its benefits.
You will hear shortly of the Rough ASHLAR and the Perfect ASHLAR, as
part of the jewels of the Lodge. The rough Ashlar is said to be "a
stone, as taken from the quarry, in its rude and natural state." The
perfect Ashlar is said to be "a stone made ready by the hands of the
workmen, to be adjusted by the working-tools of the Fellow-Craft." We
shall not repeat the explanations of these symbols given by the York
Rite. You may read them in its printed monitors. They are declared to
allude to the self-improvement of the individual craftsman,--a
continuation of the same superficial interpretation.
The rough Ashlar is the PEOPLE, as a mass, rude and unorganized. The
perfect Ashlar, or cubical stone, symbol of perfection, is the STATE,
the rulers deriving their powers from the consent of the governed; the
constitution and laws speaking the will of the people; the government
harmonious, symmetrical, efficient, --its powers properly distributed
and duly adjusted in equilibrium.
If we delineate a cube on a plane surface thus:
we have visible three faces, and nine external lines, drawn between
seven points. The complete cube has three more faces, making six;
three more lines, making twelve; and one more point, making eight. As
the number 12 includes the sacred numbers, 3, 5, 7, and 3 times 3, or
9, and is produced by adding the sacred number 3 to 9; while its own
two figures, 1, 2, the unit or monad, and duad, added together, make
the same sacred number 3; it was called the perfect number; and the
cube became the symbol of perfection.
Produced by FORCE, acting by RULE; hammered in accordance with lines
measured by the Gauge, out of the rough Ashlar, it is an appropriate
symbol of the Force of the people, expressed as the constitution and
law of the State; and of the State itself the three visible faces
represent the three departments,--the Executive, which executes the
laws; the Legislative, which makes the laws; the Judiciary, which
interprets the laws, applies and enforces them, between man and man,
between the State and the citizens. The three invisible faces, are
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the threefold soul of the
State--its vitality, spirit, and intellect.
Though Masonry neither usurps the place of, nor apes religion, prayer
is an essential part of our ceremonies. It is the aspiration of the
soul toward the Absolute and Infinite Intelligence, which is the One
Supreme Deity, most feebly and misunderstandingly characterized as an
"ARCHITECT." Certain faculties of man are directed toward the
Unknown--thought, meditation, prayer. The unknown is an ocean, of
which conscience is the compass. Thought, meditation, prayer, are the
great mysterious pointings of the needle. It is a spiritual magnetism
that thus connects the human soul with the Deity. These majestic
irradiations of the soul pierce through the shadow toward the light.
It is but a shallow scoff to say that prayer is absurd, because it is
not possible for us, by means of it, to persuade God to change His
plans. He produces foreknown and foreintended effects, by the
instrumentality of the forces of nature, all of which are His forces.
Our own are part of these. Our free agency and our will are forces. We
do not absurdly cease to make efforts to attain wealth or happiness,
prolong life, and continue health, because we cannot by any effort
change what is predestined. If the effort also is predestined, it is
not the less our effort, made of our free will. So, likewise, we pray.
Will is a force. Thought is a force. Prayer is a force. Why should it
not be of the law of God, that prayer, like Faith and Love, should
have its effects? Man is not to be comprehended as a starting-point,
or progress as a goal, without those two great forces, Faith and Love.
Prayer is sublime. Orisons that beg and clamour are pitiful. To deny
the efficacy of prayer, is to deny that of Faith, Love, and Effort.
Yet the effects produced, when our hand, moved by our will, launches a
pebble into the ocean, never cease; and every uttered word is
registered for eternity upon the invisible air.
Every Lodge is a Temple, and as a whole, and in its details symbolic.
The Universe itself supplied man with the model for the first temples
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 had reference to the order of the Universe, as
then understood. 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. It is the
Master of this Lodge, of the Universe, Hermes, of whom Khurum is the
representative, that is one of the lights of the Lodge.
For further instruction as to the symbolism of the heavenly bodies,
and of the sacred numbers, and of the temple and its details, you must
wait patiently until you advance in Masonry, in the mean time
exercising your intellect in studying them for yourself. To study and
seek to interpret correctly the symbols of the Universe, is the work
of the sage and philosopher. It is to decipher the writing of God, and
penetrate into His thoughts.
This is what is asked and answered in our catechism, in regard to the
Lodge.
* * * * * *
A "Lodge" is defined to be "an assemblage of Freemasons, duly
congregated, having the sacred writings, square, and compass, and a
charter, or warrant of constitution, authorizing them to work." The
room or place in which they meet, representing some part of King
Solomon's Temple, is also called the Lodge; and it is that we are now
considering.
It is said to be supported by three great columns, WISDOM, FORCE or
STRENGTH, and BEAUTY, represented by the Master, the Senior Warden,
and the Junior Warden; and these are said to be the columns that
support the Lodge, "because Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty, are the
perfections of everything, and nothing can endure without them."
"Because," the York Rite says, "it is necessary that there should be
Wisdom to conceive, Strength to support, and Beauty to adorn, all
great and important undertakings." "Know ye not," says the Apostle
Paul, "that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God
dwelleth in you? If any man desecrate the temple of God, him shall God
destroy, for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are."
The Wisdom and Power of the Deity are in equilibrium. The laws of
nature and the moral laws are not the mere despotic mandates of His
Omnipotent will; for, then they might be changed by Him, and order
become disorder, and good and right become evil and wrong; honesty and
loyalty, vices; and fraud, ingratitude, and vice, virtues. Omnipotent
power, infinite, and existing alone, would necessarily not be
constrained to consistency. Its decrees and laws could not be
immutable. The laws of God are not obligatory on us because they are
the enactments of His POWER, or the expression of His WILL; but
because they express His infinite WISDOM. They are not right because
they are His laws, but His laws because they are right. From the
equilibrium of infinite wisdom and infinite force, results perfect
harmony, in physics and in the moral universe. Wisdom, rower, and
Harmony constitute one Masonic triad. They have other and profounder
meanings, that may at some time be unveiled to you.
As to the ordinary and commonplace explanation, it may be added, that
the wisdom of the Architect is displayed in combining, as only a
skillful Architect can do, and as God has done everywhere,--for
example, in the tree, the human frame, the egg, the cells of the
honeycomb--strength, with grace, beauty, symmetry, proportion,
lightness, ornamentation. That, too, is the perfection of the orator
and poet--to combine force, strength, energy, with grace of style,
musical cadences, the beauty of figures, the play and irradiation of
imagination and fancy; and so, in a State, the warlike and industrial
force of the people, and their Titanic strength, must be combined with
the beauty of the arts, the sciences, and the intellect, if the State
would scale the heights of excellence, and the people be really free.
Harmony in this, as in all the Divine, the material, and the human, is
the result of equilibrium, of the sympathy and opposite action of
contraries; a single Wisdom above them holding the beam of the scales.
To reconcile the moral law, human responsibility, free-will, with the
absolute power of God; and the existence of evil with His absolute
wisdom, and goodness, and mercy,-- these are the great enigmas of the
Sphynx.
You entered the Lodge between two columns. They represent the two
which stood in the porch of the Temple, on each side of the great
eastern gateway. These pillars, of bronze, four fingers breadth in
thickness, were, according to the most authentic account--that in the
First and that in the Second Book of Kings, confirmed in Jeremiah--
eighteen cubits high, with a capital five cubits high. The shaft of
each was four cubits in diameter. A cubit is one foot and 707/1000.
That is, the shaft of each was a little over thirty feet eight inches
in height, the capital of each a little over eight feet six inches in
height, and the diameter of the shaft six feet ten inches. The
capitals were enriched by pomegranates of bronze, covered by bronze
net-work, and ornamented with wreaths of bronze; and appear to have
imitated the shape of the seed-vessel of the lotus or Egyptian lily, a
sacred symbol to the Hindus and Egyptians. The pillar or column on the
right, or in the south, was named, as the Hebrew word is rendered in
our translation of the Bible, JACHIN: and that on the left BOAZ. Our
translators say that the first word means, "He shall establish;" and
the second, "In it is strength."
These columns were imitations, by Khurum, the Tyrian artist, of the
great columns consecrated to the Winds and Fire, at the entrance to
the famous Temple of Malkarth, in the city of Tyre. It is customary,
in Lodges of the York Rite, to see a celestial globe on one, and a
terrestrial globe on the other; but these are not warranted, if the
object be to imitate the original two columns of the Temple. The
symbolic meaning of these columns we shall leave for the present
unexplained, only adding that Entered Apprentices keep their
working-tools in the column JACHIN; and giving you the etymology and
literal meaning of the two names.
The word JACHIN, in Hebrew, probably pronounced Ya-kayan, and meant,
as a verbal noun, He that strengthens; and thence, firm, stable,
upright.
The word Boaz is Baaz which means Strong, Strength, Power, Might,
Refuge, Source of Strength, a Fort. The prefix means "with" or "in,"
and gives the word the force of the Latin gerund,
roborando--Strengthening
The former word also means he will establish, or plant in an erect
position--from the verb Kun, he stood erect. It probably meant Active
and Vivifying Energy and Force; and Boaz, Stability, Permanence, in
the passive sense.
The Dimensions of the Lodge, our Brethren of the York Rite say, "are
unlimited, and its covering no less than the canopy of Heaven." "To
this object," they say, "the mason's mind is continually directed, and
thither he hopes at last to arrive by the aid of the theological
ladder which Jacob in his vision saw ascending from earth to Heaven;
the three principal rounds of which are denominated Faith, Hope, and
Charity; and which admonish us to have Faith in God, Hope in
Immortality, and Charity to all mankind." Accordingly a ladder,
sometimes with nine rounds, is seen on the chart, resting at the
bottom on the earth, its top in the clouds, the stars shining above
it; and this is deemed to represent that mystic ladder, which Jacob
saw in his dream, set up on the earth, and the top of it reaching to
Heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending on it. The
addition of the three principal rounds to the symbolism, is wholly
modern and incongruous.
The ancients counted seven planets, thus arranged: the Moon, Mercury,
Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. There were seven heavens
and seven spheres of these planets; on all the monuments of Mithras
are seven altars or pyres, consecrated to the seven planets, as were
the seven lamps of the golden candelabrum in the Temple. That these
represented the planets, we are assured by Clemens of Alexandria, in
his Stromata, and by Philo Judaeus.
To return to its source in the Infinite, the human soul, the ancients
held, had to ascend, as it had descended, through the seven spheres.
The Ladder by which it reascends, has, according to Marsilius Ficinus,
in his Commentary on the Ennead of Plotinus, seven degrees or steps;
and in the Mysteries of Mithras, carried to Rome under the Emperors,
the ladder, with its seven rounds, was a symbol referring to this
ascent through the spheres of the seven planets. Jacob saw the Spirits
of God ascending and descending on it; and above it the Deity Himself.
The Mithraic Mysteries were celebrated in caves, where gates were
marked at the four equinoctial and solstitial points of the Zodiac;
and the seven planetary spheres were represented, which souls 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 symbolic image
of this passage among the stars, used in the Mithraic 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 one,
that of the fixed stars. The symbol was the same as that of the seven
stages of Borsippa, the Pyramid of vitrified brick, near Babylon,
built of seven stages, and each of a different colour. In the Mithraic
ceremonies, the candidate went through seven stages of initiation,
passing through many fearful trials--and of these the high ladder with
seven rounds or steps was the symbol.
You see the Lodge, its details and ornaments, by its Lights. You have
already heard what these Lights, the greater and lesser, are said to
be, and how they are spoken of by our Brethren of the York Rite.
The Holy Bible, Square, and Compasses, are not only styled the Great
Lights in Masonry, but they are also technically called the Furniture
of the Lodge; and, as you have seen, it is held that there is no Lodge
without them. This has sometimes been made a pretext for excluding
Jews from our Lodges, because they cannot regard the New Testament as
a holy book. The Bible is an indispensable part of the furniture of a
Christian Lodge, only because it is the sacred book of the Christian
religion. The Hebrew Pentateuch in a Hebrew Lodge, and the Koran in a
Mohammedan one, belong on the Altar; and one of these, and the Square
and Compass, properly understood, are the Great Lights by which a
Mason must walk and work.
The obligation of the candidate is always to be taken on the sacred
book or books of his religion, that he may deem it more solemn and
binding; and therefore it was that you were asked of what religion you
were. We have no other concern with your religious creed.
The Square is a right angle, formed by two right lines. It is adapted
only to a plane surface, and belongs only to geometry,
earth-measurement, that trigonometry which deals only with planes, and
with the earth, which the ancients supposed to be a plane. The Compass
describes circles, and deals with spherical trigonometry, the science
of the spheres and-heavens. The former, therefore, is an emblem of
what concerns the earth and the body; the latter of what concerns the
heavens and the soul. Yet the Compass is also used in plane
trigonometry, as in erecting perpendiculars; and, therefore, you are
reminded that, although in this Degree both points of the Compass are
under the Square, and you are now dealing only with the moral and
political meaning of the symbols, and not with their philosophical and
spiritual meanings, still the divine ever mingles with the human; with
the earthly the spiritual intermixes; and there is something spiritual
in the commonest duties of life. The nations are not bodies politic
alone, but also souls-politic; and woe to that people which, seeking
the material only, forgets that it has a soul. Then we have a race,
petrified in dogma, which presupposes the absence of a soul and the
presence only of memory and instinct, or demoralized by lucre. Such a
nature can never lead civilization. Genuflexion before the idol or the
dollar atrophies the muscle which walks and the will which moves.
Hieratic or mercantile absorption diminishes the radiance of a people,
lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that
understanding of the universal aim, at the same time human and divine,
which makes the missionary nations. A free people, forgetting that it
has a soul to be cared for, devotes all its energies to its material
advancement. If it makes war, it is to subserve its commercial
interests. The citizens copy after the State, and regard wealth, pomp,
and luxury as the great goods of life. Such a nation creates wealth
rapidly, and distributes it badly. Thence the two extremes, of
monstrous opulence and monstrous misery; all the enjoyment to a few,
all the privations to the rest, that is to say, to the people;
Privilege, Exception, Monopoly, Feudality, springing up from Labour
itself: a false and dangerous situation, which, making Labour a
blinded and chained Cyclops, in the mine, at the forge, in the
workshop, at the loom, in the field, over poisonous fumes, in
miasmatic cells, in unventilated factories, founds public power upon
private misery, and plants the greatness of the State in the suffering
of the individual. It is a greatness ill constituted, in which all the
material elements are combined, and into which no moral element
enters. If a people, like a star, has the right of eclipse, the light
ought to return. The eclipse should not degenerate into night.
The three lesser, or the Sublime Lights, you have heard, are the Sun,
the Moon, and the Master of the Lodge; and you have heard what our
Brethren of the York Rite say in regard to them, and why they hold
them to be Lights of the Lodge. But the Sun and Moon do in no sense
light the Lodge, unless it be symbolically, and then the lights are
not they, but those things of which they are the symbols. Of what they
are the symbols the Mason in that Rite is not told. Nor does the Moon
in any sense rule the night with regularity.
The Sun is the ancient symbol of the life-giving and generative power
of the Deity. To the ancients, light was the cause of life; and God
was the source from which all light flowed; the essence of Light, the
Invisible Fire, developed as Flame manifested as light and splendour.
The Sun was His manifestation and visible image; and the Sabaeans
worshipping the Light--God, seemed to worship the Sun, in whom they
saw the manifestation of the Deity.
The Moon was the symbol of the passive capacity of nature to produce,
the female, of which the life-giving power and energy was the male. It
was the symbol of Isis, Astarte, and Artemis, or Diana. The "Master of
Life" was the Supreme Deity, above both, and manifested through both;
Zeus, the Son of Saturn, become King of the Gods; Horus, son of Osiris
and Isis, become the Master of Life; Dionusos or Bacchus, like
Mithras, become the author of Light and Life and Truth.
* * * * *
The Master of Light and Life, the Sun and the Moon, are symbolized in
every Lodge by the Master and Wardens: and this makes it the duty of
the Master to dispense light to the Brethren, by himself, and through
the Wardens, who are his ministers.
"Thy sun," says ISAIAH to Jerusalem, "shall no more go down, neither
shall thy moon withdraw itself; for the LORD shall be thine
everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended. Thy
people also shall be all righteous; they shall inherit the land
forever." Such is the type of a free people.
Our northern ancestors worshipped this tri-une Deity; ODIN, the
Almighty FATHER; FREA, his wife, emblem of universal matter; and THOR,
his son, the mediator. But above all these was 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." In the Temple of Eleusis (a sanctuary lighted
only by a window in the roof, and representing the Universe), the
images of the Sun, Moon, and Mercury, were represented.
"The Sun and Moon," says the learned Bro.'. DELAUNAY, "represent the
two grand principles of all generations, the active and passive, the
male and the female. The Sun represents the actual light. He pours
upon the Moon his fecundating rays; both shed their light upon their
offspring, the Blazing Star, or HORUS, and the three form the great
Equilateral Triangle, in the centre of which is the omnific letter of
the Kabalah, by which creation is said to have been effected."
The ORNAMENTS of a Lodge are said to be "the Mosaic Pavement, the
Indented Tessel, and the Blazing Star." The Mosaic Pavement, chequered
in squares or lozenges, is said to represent the ground-floor of King
Solomon's Temple; and the Indented Tessel "that beautiful tessellated
border which surrounded it." The Blazing Star in the centre is said to
be "an emblem of Divine Providence, and commemorative of the star
which appeared to guide the wise men of the East to the place of our
Saviour's nativity." But "there was no stone seen" within the Temple.
The walls were covered with planks of cedar, and the floor was covered
with planks of fir. There is no evidence that there was such a
pavement or floor in the Temple, or such a bordering. In England,
anciently, the Tracing-Board was surrounded with an indented border;
and it is only in America that such a border is put around the Mosaic
pavement. The tesserae, indeed, are the squares or lozenges of the
pavement. In England, also, "the indented or denticulated border" is
called "tessellated," because it has four "tassels," said to represent
Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, and Justice. It was termed the
Indented Trassel; but this is a misuse of words. It is a tesserated
pavement, with an indented border round it.
The pavement, alternately black and white, symbolizes, whether so
intended or not, the Good and Evil Principles of the Egyptian and
Persian creed. It is the warfare of Michael and Satan, of the Gods and
Titans, of Balder and Lok; between light and shadow, which is
darkness; Day and Night; Freedom and Despotism; Religious Liberty and
the Arbitrary Dogmas of a Church that thinks for its votaries, and
whose Pontiff claims to be infallible, and the decretals of its
Councils to constitute a gospel.
The edges of this pavement, if in lozenges, will necessarily be
indented or denticulated, toothed like a saw; and to complete and
finish it a bordering is necessary. It is completed by tassels as
ornaments at the corners. If these and the bordering have any symbolic
meaning, it is fanciful and arbitrary.
To find in the BLAZING STAR of five points an allusion to the Divine
Providence, is also fanciful; and to make it commemorative of the Star
that is said to have guided the Magi, is to give it a meaning
comparatively modern. Originally it represented SIRIUS, or the
Dog-star, the forerunner of the inundation of the Nile; the God
ANUBIS, companion of ISIS in her search for the body of OSIRIS, her
brother and husband. Then it became the image of HORUS, the son of
OSIRIS, himself symbolized also by the Sun, the author of the Seasons,
and the God of Time; Son of ISIS, who was the universal nature,
himself the primitive matter, inexhaustible source of Life, spark of
uncreated fire, universal seed of all beings. It was HERMES, also, the
Master of Learning, whose name in Greek is that of the God Mercury. It
became the sacred and potent sign or character of the Magi, the
PENTALPHA, and is the significant emblem of Liberty and Freedom,
blazing with a steady radiance amid the weltering elements of good and
evil of Revolutions, and promising serene skies and fertile seasons to
the nations, after the storms of change and tumult.
In the East of the Lodge, over the Master, inclosed in a triangle, is
the Hebrew letter YOD. In the English and American Lodges the Letter
G.'. is substituted for this, as the initial of the word GOD, with as
little reason as if the letter D., initial of DIEU, were used in
French Lodges instead of the proper letter. YOD is, in the Kabalah,
the symbol of Unity, of the Supreme Deity, the first letter of the
Holy Name; and also a symbol of the Great Kabalistic Triads. To
understand its mystic meanings, you must open the pages of the Sohar
and Siphra de Zeniutha, and other kabalistic books, and ponder deeply
on their meaning. It must suffice to say, that it is the Creative
Energy of the Deity, is represented as a point, and that point in the
centre of the Circle of immensity. It is to us in this Degree, the
symbol of that unmanifested Deity, the Absolute, who has no name.
Our French Brethren place this letter YOD in the centre of the Blazing
Star. And in the old Lectures, our ancient English Brethren said, "The
Blazing Star or Glory in the centre refers us to that grand luminary,
the Sun, which enlightens the earth, and by its genial influence
dispenses blessings to mankind." They called it also in the same
lectures, an emblem of PRUDENCE. The word Prudentia means, in its
original and fullest signification, Foresight; and, accordingly, the
Blazing Star has been regarded as an emblem of Omniscience, or the
All-seeing Eye, which to the Egyptian Initiates was the emblem of
Osiris, the Creator. With the YOD in the centre, it has the kabalistic
meaning of the Divine Energy, manifested as Light, creating the
Universe.
The Jewels of the Lodge are said to be six in number. Three are called
"Movable," and three "Immovable." The SQUARE, the LEVEL, and the PLUMB
were anciently and properly called the Movable Jewels, because they
pass from one Brother to another. It is a modern innovation to call
them immovable, because they must always be present in the Lodge. The
immovable jewels are the ROUGH ASHLAR, the PERFECT ASHLAR or CUBICAL,
STONE, or, in some Rituals, the DOUBLE CUBE, and the TRACING-BOARD, or
TRESTLE-BOARD.
Of these jewels our Brethren of the York Rite say: "The Square
inculcates Morality; the Level, Equality; and the Plumb, Rectitude of
Conduct." Their explanation of the immovable Jewels may be read in
their monitors.
Our Brethren of the York Rite say that "there is represented in every
well-governed Lodge, a certain point, within a circle; the point
representing an individual Brother; the Circle, the boundary line of
his conduct, beyond which he is never to suffer his prejudices or
passions to betray him."
This is not to interpret the symbols of Masonry. It is said by some,
with a nearer approach to interpretation, that the point within the
circle represents God in the centre of the Universe. It is a common
Egyptian sign for the Sun and Osiris, and is still used as the
astronomical sign of the great luminary. In the Kabalah the point is
YOD, the Creative Energy of God, irradiating with light the circular
space which God, the universal Light, left vacant, wherein to create
the worlds, by withdrawing His substance of Light back on all sides
from one point.
Our Brethren add that, "this circle is embordered by two perpendicular
parallel lines, representing Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the
Evangelist, and upon the top rest the Holy Scriptures" (an open book).
"In going round this circle," they say, "we necessarily touch upon
these two lines as well as upon the Holy Scriptures; and while a Mason
keeps himself circumscribed within their precepts, it is impossible
that he should materially err."
It would be a waste of time to comment upon this. Some writers have
imagined that the parallel lines represent the Tropics of Cancer and
Capricorn, which the Sun alternately touches upon at the Summer and
Winter solstices. But the tropics are not perpendicular lines, and the
idea is merely fanciful. If the parallel lines ever belonged to the
ancient symbol, they had some more recondite and more fruitful
meaning. They probably had the same meaning as the twin columns Jachin
and Boaz. That meaning is not for the Apprentice. The adept may find
it in the Kabalah. The JUSTICE and MERCY of God are in equilibrium,
and the result is HARMONY, because a Single and Perfect Wisdom
presides over both.
The Holy Scriptures are an entirely modern addition to the symbol,
like the terrestrial and celestial globes on the columns of the
portico. Thus the ancient symbol has been denaturalized by incongruous
additions, like that of Isis weeping over the broken column containing
the remains of Osiris at Byblos.
* * * * * *
Masonry has its decalogue, which is a law to its Initiates. These are
its Ten Commandments:
I. God is the Eternal, Omnipotent, Immutable WISDOM and Supreme
INTELLIGENCE and Exhaustless Love. Thou shalt adore, revere, and love
Him !
Thou shalt honour Him by practising the virtues!
II. Thy religion shall be, to do good because it is a pleasure to
thee, and not merely because it is a duty.
That thou mayest become the friend of the wise man, thou shalt obey
his precepts !
Thy soul is immortal ! Thou shalt do nothing to degrade it !
III. Thou shalt unceasingly war against vice!
Thou shalt not do unto others that which thou wouldst not wish them to
do unto thee !
Thou shalt be submissive to thy fortunes, and keep burning the light
of wisdom !
IV. Thou shalt honour thy parents !
Thou shalt pay respect and homage to the aged!
Thou shalt instruct the young!
Thou shalt protect and defend infancy and innocence !
V. Thou shalt cherish thy wife and thy children!
Thou shalt love thy country, and obey its laws!
VI. Thy friend shall be to thee a second self !
Misfortune shall not estrange thee from him !
Thou shalt do for his memory whatever thou wouldst do for him, if he
were living!
VII. Thou shalt avoid and flee from insincere friendships !
Thou shalt in everything refrain from excess.
Thou shalt fear to be the cause of a stain on thy memory!
VIII. Thou shalt allow no passions to become thy master !
Thou shalt make the passions of others profitable lessons to thyself!
Thou shalt be indulgent to error !
IX. Thou shalt hear much: Thou shalt speak little: Thou shalt act well
!
Thou shalt forget injuries!
Thou shalt render good for evil !
Thou shalt not misuse either thy strength or thy superiority !
X. Thou shalt study to know men; that thereby thou mayest learn to
know thyself !
Thou shalt ever seek after virtue !
Thou shalt be just!
Thou shalt avoid idleness !
But the great commandment of Masonry is this: "A new commandment give
I unto you: that ye love one another! He that saith he is in the
light, and hateth his brother, remaineth still in the darkness."
Such are the moral duties of a Mason. But it is also the duty of
Masonry to assist in elevating the moral and intellectual level of
society; in coining knowledge, bringing ideas into circulation, and
causing the mind of youth to grow; and in putting, gradually, by the
teachings of axioms and the promulgation of positive laws, the human
race in harmony with its destinies.
To this duty and work the Initiate is apprenticed. He must not imagine
that he can effect nothing, and, therefore, despairing, become inert.
It is in this, as in a man's daily life. Many great deeds are done in
the small struggles of life. There is, we are told, a determined
though unseen bravery, which defends itself, foot to foot, in the
darkness, against the fatal invasion of necessity and of baseness.
There are noble and mysterious triumphs, which no eye sees, which no
renown rewards, which no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life,
misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battle-fields, which
have their heroes,--heroes obscure, but sometimes greater than those
who become illustrious. The Mason should struggle in the same manner,
and with the same bravery, against those invasions of necessity and
baseness, which come to nations as well as to men. He should meet
them, too, foot to foot, even in the darkness, and protest against the
national wrongs and follies; against usurpation and the first inroads
of that hydra, Tyranny. There is no more sovereign eloquence than the
truth in indignation. It is more difficult for a people to keep than
to gain their freedom. The Protests of Truth are always needed.
Continually, the right must protest against the fact. There is, in
fact, Eternity in the Right. The Mason should be the Priest and
Soldier of that Right. If his country should be robbed of her
liberties, he should still not despair. The protest of the Right
against the Fact persists forever. The robbery of a people never
becomes prescriptive. Reclamation of its rights is barred by no length
of time. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. A
people may endure military usurpation, and subjugated States kneel to
States and wear the yoke, while under the stress of necessity; but
when the necessity disappears, if the people is fit to be free, the
submerged country will float to the surface and reappear, and Tyranny
be adjudged by History to have murdered its victims.
Whatever occurs, we should have Faith in the Justice and overruling
Wisdom of God, and Hope for the Future, and Lovingkindness for those
who are in error. God makes visible to men His will in events; an
obscure text, written in a mysterious language. Men make their
translations of it forthwith, hasty, incorrect, full of faults,
omissions, and misreadings. We see so short a way along the arc of the
great circle! Few minds comprehend the Divine tongue. The most
sagacious, the most calm, the most profound, decipher the hieroglyphs
slowly; and when they arrive with their text, perhaps the need has
long gone by; there are already twenty translations in the public
square--the most incorrect being, as of course, the most accepted and
popular. From each translation, a party is born; and from each
misreading, a faction. Each party believes or pretends that it has the
only true text, and each faction believes or pretends that it alone
possesses the light. Moreover, factions are blind men, who aim
straight, errors are excellent projectiles, striking skillfully, and
with all the violence that springs from false reasoning, wherever a
want of logic in those who defend the right, like a defect in a
cuirass, makes them vulnerable.
Therefore it is that we shall often be discomfited in combating error
before the people. Antaeus long resisted Hercules; and the heads of
the Hydra grew as fast as they were cut off. It is absurd to say that
Error, wounded, writhes in pain, and dies amid her worshippers. Truth
conquers slowly. There is a wondrous vitality in Error. Truth, indeed,
for the most part, shoots over the heads of the masses; or if an error
is prostrated for a moment, it is up again in a moment, and as
vigorous as ever. It will not die when the brains are out, and the
most stupid and irrational errors are the longest-lived.
Nevertheless, Masonry, which is Morality and Philosophy, must not
cease to do its duty. We never know at what moment success awaits our
efforts--generally when most unexpected--nor with what effect our
efforts are or are not to be attended. Succeed or fail, Masonry must
not bow to error, or succumb under discouragement. There were at Rome
a few Carthaginian soldiers, taken prisoners, who refused to bow to
Flaminius, and had a little of Hannibal's magnanimity. Masons should
possess an equal greatness of soul. Masonry should be an energy;
finding its aim and effect in the amelioration of mankind. Socrates
should enter into Adam, and produce Marcus Aurelius, in other words,
bring forth from the man of enjoyments, the man of wisdom. Masonry
should not be a mere watch-tower, built upon mystery, from which to
gaze at ease upon the world, with no other result than to be a
convenience for the curious. To hold the full cup of thought to the
thirsty lips of men; to give to all the true ideas of Deity; to
harmonize conscience and science, are the province of Philosophy.
Morality is Faith in full bloom. Contemplation should lead to action,
and the absolute be practical; the ideal be made air and food and
drink to the human mind. Wisdom is a sacred communion. It is only on
that condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of Science, and
becomes the one and supreme method by which to unite Humanity and
arouse it to concerted action. Then Philosophy becomes Religion.
And Masonry, like History and Philosophy, has eternal duties--
eternal, and, at the same time, simple--to oppose Caiaphas as Bishop,
Draco or Jefferies as Judge, Trimalcion as Legislator, and Tiberius as
Emperor. These are the symbols of the tyranny that degrades and
crushes, and the corruption that defiles and infests. In the works
published for the use of the Craft we are told that the three great
tenets of a Mason's profession, are Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth.
And it is true that a Brotherly affection and kindness should govern
us in all our intercourse and relations with our brethren; and a
generous and liberal philanthropy actuate us in regard to all men. To
relieve the distressed is peculiarly the duty of Masons--a sacred
duty, not to be omitted, neglected, or coldly or inefficiently
complied with. It is also most true, that Truth is a Divine attribute
and the foundation of every virtue. To be true, and to seek to find
and learn the Truth, are the great objects of every good Mason.
As the Ancients did, Masonry styles Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence,
and Justice, the four cardinal virtues. They are as necessary to
nations as to individuals. The people that would be Free and
Independent, must possess Sagacity, Forethought, Foresight, and
careful Circumspection, all which are included in the meaning of the
word Prudence. It must be temperate in asserting its rights, temperate
in its councils, economical in its expenses; it must be bold, brave,
courageous, patient under reverses, undismayed by disasters, hopeful
amid calamities, like Rome when she sold the field at which Hannibal
had his camp. No Cannae or Pharsalia or Pavia or Agincourt or Waterloo
must discourage her. Let her Senate sit in their seats until the Gauls
pluck them by the beard. She must, above all things, be just, not
truckling to the strong and warring on or plundering the weak; she
must act on the square with all nations, and the feeblest tribes;
always keeping her faith, honest in her legislation, upright in all
her dealings. Whenever such a Republic exists, it will be immortal:
for rashness, injustice, intemperance and luxury in prosperity, and
despair and disorder in adversity, are the causes of the decay and
dilapidation of nations.
M & D Chapter II
The Fellowcraft
MORALS AND DOGMA
by Albert Pike
II. THE FELLOW-CRAFT.
In the Ancient Orient, all religion was more or less a mystery and
there was no divorce from it of philosophy. The popular theology,
taking the multitude of allegories and symbols for realities,
degenerated into a worship of the celestial luminaries, of imaginary
Deities with human feelings, passions, appetites, and lusts, of idols,
stones, animals, reptiles. The Onion was sacred to the Egyptians,
because its different layers were a symbol of the concentric heavenly
spheres. Of course the popular religion could not satisfy the deeper
longings and thoughts, the loftier aspirations of the Spirit, or the
logic of reason. The first, therefore, was taught to the initiated in
the Mysteries. There, also, it was taught by symbols. The vagueness of
symbolism, capable of many interpretations, reached what the palpable
and conventional creed could not. Its indefiniteness acknowledged the
abstruseness of the subject: it treated that 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 to rmake the image a mere subordinate conveyance for the
conception, which itself never became obvious or familiar.
Thus the knowledge now imparted by books and letters, was of old
conveyed by symbols; and the priests invented or perpetuated a display
of rites and exhibitions, which were not only more attractive to the
eye than words, but often more suggestive and more pregnant with
meaning to the mind.
Masonry, successor of the Mysteries, still follows the ancient manner
of teaching. Her ceremonies are like the ancient mystic shows,--not
the reading of an essay, but the opening of a problem, requiring
research, and constituting philosophy the arch-expounder. Her symbols
are the instruction she gives. The lectures are endeavors, often
partial and one-sided, to interpret these symbols. He who would become
an accomplished Mason must not be content merely to hear, or even to
understand, the lectures; he must, aided by them, and they having, as
it were, marked out the way for him, study, interpret, and develop
these symbols for himself
* * * * * *
Though Masonry is identical with the ancient Mysteries, it is so only
in this qualified sense: that it presents but an imperfect image of
their brilliancy, the ruins only of their grandeur, and a system that
has experienced progressive alterations, the fruits of social events,
political circumstances, and the ambitious imbecility of its
improvers. After leaving Egypt, the Mysteries were modified by the
habits of the different nations among whom they were introduced, and
especially by the religious systems of the countries into which they
were transplanted. To maintain the established government, laws, and
religion, was the obligation of the Initiate everywhere; and
everywhere they were the heritage of the priests, who were nowhere
willing to make the common people co-proprietors with themselves of
philosophical truth.
Masonry is not the Coliseum in ruins. It is rather a Roman palace of
the middle ages, disfigured by moderll architectural improvements, yet
built on a Cyclopcean foundation laid by the Etruscans, and with many
a stone of the superstructure taken from dwellings and temples of the
age of Hadrian and Antoninus.
Christianity taught the doctrine of FRATERNITY; but repudiated that of
political EQUALITY, by continually inculcating obedience to Caesar,
and to those lawfully in authority. Masonry was the first apostle of
EQUALITY. In the Monastery there is fraternity and equality, but no
liberty. Masonry added that also, and claimed for man the three-fold
heritage, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY.
It was but a development of the original purpose of the Mysteries,
which was to teach men to know and practice their duties to themselves
and their fellows, the great practical end of all philosophy and all
knowledge.
Truths are the springs from which duties flow; and it is but a few
hundred years since a new Truth began to be distinctly seen; that MAN
IS SUPREME OVER INSTITUTIONS, AND NOT THEY OVER HIM. Man has natural
empire over all institutions. They are for him, aecording to his
development; not he for them. This seems to us a very simple
statement, one to which all men, everywhere, ought to assent. But once
it was a great new Truth,--not revealed until governments had been in
existence for at least five thousand years. Once revealed, it imposed
new duties on men. Man owed it to himself to be free. He owed it to
his country to seek to give her freedom, or maintain her in that
possession. It made Tyranny and Usurpation the enemies of the Human
Race. It created a general outlawry of Despots and Despotisms,
temporal and spiritual. The sphere of Duty was immensely enlarged.
Patriotism had, henceforth, a new and wider meaning. Free Government,
Free Thought, Free Conscience, Free Speech! All these came to be
inalienable rights, which those who had parted with them or been
robbed of them, or whose ancestors had lost them, had the right
summarily to retake. Unfortunately, as Truths always become perverted
into falsehoods, and are falsehoods when misapplied, this Truth became
the Gospel of Anarchy, soon after it was first preached.
Masonry early comprehended this Truth, and recognized its own enlarged
duties. Its symbols then came to have a wider meaning; but it also
assumed the mask of Stone-masonry, and borrowed its working-tools, and
so was supplied with new and apt symbols. It aided in bringing about
the French Revolution, disappeared with the Girondists, was born again
with the restoration of order, and sustained Napoleon, because, though
Emperor, he acknowledged the right of the people to select its rulers,
and was at the head of a nation refusing to receive back its old
kings. He pleaded, with sabre, musket, and cannon, the great cause of
the People against Royalty, the right of the French people even to
make a Corsican General their Emperor, if it pleased them.
Masonry felt that this Truth had the Omnipotence of God on its side;
and that neither Pope nor Potentate could overcome it. It was a truth
dropped into the world's wide treasury, and forming a part of the
heritage which each generation receives, enlarges, and holds in trust,
and of necessity bequeaths to mankind; the personal estate of man,
entailed of nature to the end of time. And Masonry early recognized it
as true, that to set forth and develop a truth, or any human
excellence of gift or growth, is to make greater the spiritual glory
of the race; that whosoever aids the march of a Truth, and makes the
thought a thing, writes in the same line with MOSES, and with Him who
died upon the cross; and has an intellectual sympathy with the Deity
Himself.
The best gift we can bestow on man is manhood. It is that which
Masonry is ordained of God to bestow on its votaries: not sectarianism
and religious dogma; not a rudimental morality, that may be found in
the writings of Confucius, Zoroaster, Seneca, and the Rabbis, in the
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; not a little and cheap common-school
knowledge; but manhood and science and philosophy.
Not that Philosophy or Science is in opposition to Religion. For
Philosophy is but that knowledge of God and the Soul, which is derived
from observation of the manifested action of God and the Soul, and
from a wise analogy. It is the intellectual guide which the religious
sentiment needs. The true religious philosophy of an imperfect being,
is not a system of creed, but, as SOCRATES thought, an infinite search
or approximation. Philosophy is that intellectual and moral progress,
which the religious sentiment inspires and ennobles.
As to Science, it could not walk alone, while religion was stationary.
It consists of those matured inferences from experience which all
other experience confirms. It realizes and unites all that was truly
valuable in both the old schemes of mediation,--one heroic, or the
system of action and effort; and the mystical theory of spiritual,
ccntemplative commullion. "Listen to me," says GALEN, "as to the voice
of the Eleusinian Hierophant, and believe that the study of Nature is
a mystery no less important than theirs, nor less adapted to display
the wisdom and power of the Great Creator. Their lessons and
demonstrations were obscure, but ours are clear and unmistakable."
We deem that to be the best knowledge we can obtain of the Soul of
another man, which is furnished by his actions and his life-long
conduct. Evidence to the contrary, supplied by what another man
informs us that this Soul has said to his, would weigh little against
the former. The first Scriptures for the human race were written by
God on the Earth and Heavens. The reading of these Scriptures is
Science. Familiarity with the grass and trees, the insects and the
infusoria, teaches us deeper lessons of love and faith than we can
glean from the writings of FENELON and AUGUSTINE. The great Bible of
God is ever open before mankind.
Knowledge is convertible into power, and axioms into rules of utility
and duty. But knowledge itself is not Power. Wisdom is Power; and her
Prime Minister is JUSTICE, which is the perfected law of TRUTH. The
purpose, therefore, of Education and Science is to make a man wise. If
knowledge does not make him so, it is wasted, like water poured on the
sands. To know the formulas of Masonry, is of as little value, by
itself, as to know so many words and sentences in some barbarous
African or Australasian dialect. To know even the meaning of the
symbols, is but little, unless that adds to our wisdom, and also to
our charity, which is to justice like one hemisphere of the brain to
the other.
Do not lose sight, then, of the true object of your studies in
Masonry. It is to add to your estate of wisdom, and not merely to your
knowledge. A man may spend a lifetime in studying a single specialty
of knowledge,-- botany, conchology, or entomology, for instance,--in
committing to memory names derived from the Greek, and classifying and
reclassifying; and yet be no wiser than when he began. It is the great
truths as to all that most concerns a man, as to his rights,
interests, and duties, that Masonry seeks to teach her Initiates.
The wiser a man becomes, the less will he be inclined to submit tamely
to the imposition of fetters or a yoke, on his conscience or his
person. For, by increase of wisdom he not only better knows his
rights, but the more highly values them, and is more conscious of his
worth and dignity. His pride then urges him to assert his
independence. He becomes better able to assert it also; and better
able to assist others or his country, when they or she stake all, even
existence, upon the same assertion. But mere knowledge makes no one
independent, nor fits him to be free. It often only makes him a more
useful slave. Liberty is a curse to the ignorant and brutal.
Political science has for its object to ascertain in what manner and
by means of what institutions political and personal freedom may be
secured and perpetuated: not license, or the mere right of every man
to vote, but entire and absolute freedom of thought and opinion, alike
free of the despotism of monarch and mob and prelate; freedom of
action within the limits of the general law enacted for all; the
Courts of Justice, with impartial Judges and juries, open to all
alike; weakness and poverty equally potent in those Court.s as power
and wealth; the avenues to office and honor open alike to all the
worthy; the military powers, in war oY peaee, in strict subordination
to the civil power; arbitrary arrests for acts not known to the law as
crimes, impossible; Romish Inquisitions, Star-Chambers, Military
Commissions, unknown; the means of instruction within reach of the
children of all; the right of Free Speech; and accountability of all
public omcers, civil and military.
If Masonry needed to be justified for imposing political as well as
moral duties on its Initiates, it would be enough to point to the sad
history of the world. It would not even need that she should turn back
the pages of history to the chapters written by Tacitus: that she
should recite the incredible horrors of despotism under Caligula and
Domitian, Caracalla and Commodus, Vitellius and Maximin. She need only
point to the centuries of calamity through which the gay French nation
passed; to the long oppression of the feudal ages, of the selfish
Bourbon kings; to those times when the peasants were robbed and
slaughtered by their own lords and princes, like sheep; when the lord
claimed the firstfruits of the peasant's marriage-bed; when the
captured city was given up to merciless rape and massacre; when the
State-prisons groaned with innocent victims, and the Church blessed
the banners of pitiless murderers, and sang Te Deums for the crowning
mercy of the Eve of St. Bartholomew.
We might turn over the pages, to a later chapter,--that of the reign
of the Fifteenth Louis, when young girls, hardly more than children,
were kidnapped to serve his lusts; when lettres de cachet filled the
Bastile with persons accused of no crime, with husbands who were in
the way of the pleasures of lascivious wives and of villains wearing
orders of nobility; when the people were ground between the upper and
the nether millstone of taxes, customs, and excises; and when the
Pope's Nuncio and the Cardinal de la Roche-Ayman, devoutly kneeling,
one on each side of Madame du Barry, the king's abandoned prostitute,
put the slippers on her naked feet, as she rose from the adulterous
bed. Then, indeed, suffering and toil were the two forms of man, and
the people were but beasts of burden.
The true Mason is he who labors strenuously to help his Order effect
its great purposes. Not that the Order can effect them by itself; but
that it, too, can help. It also is one of God's instruments. It is a
Force and a Power; and shame upon it, if it did not exert itself, and,
if need be, sacrihce its children in the cause of humanity, as Abraham
was ready to offer up Isaac on the altar of sacrifice. It will not
forget that noble allegory of Curtius leaping, all in armor, into the
great yawning gulf that opened to swallow Rome. It will TRY. It shall
not be its fault if the day never comes when man will no longer have
to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations
with the armed hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a
marriage-royal, or a birth in the hereditary tyrannies; a partition of
the peoples by a Congress, a dismemberment by the downfall of a
dynasty, a combat of two religions, meeting head to head, like two
goats of darkness on the bridge of the Infinite: when they will no
longer have to fear famine, spoliation, prostitution from distress,
misery from lack of work, and all the brigandages of chance in the
forest of events: when nations will gravitate about the Truth, like
stars about the light, each in its own orbit, without clashing or
collision; and everywhere Freedom, cinctured with stars, crowned with
the celestial splendors, and with wisdom and justice on either hand,
will reign supreme.
In your studies as a Fellow-Craft you must be guided by REASON, LOVE
and FAITH.
We do not now discuss the differences between Reason and Faith, and
undertake to define the domain of each. But it is necessary to say,
that even in the ordinary affairs of life we are governed far more by
what we believe than by what we know; by FAITH and ANALOGY, than by
REASON. The "Age of Reason" of the French Revolution taught, we know,
what a folly it is to enthrone Reason by itself as supreme. Reason is
at fault when it deals with the Infinite. There we must revere and
believe. Notwithstanding the calamities of the virtuous, the miseries
of the deserving, the prosperity of tyrants and the murder of martyrs,
we must believe there is a wise, just, merciful, and loving God, an
Intelligence and a Providence, supreme over all, and caring for the
minutest things and events. A Faith is a necessity to man. Woe to him
who believes nothing!
We believe that the soul of another is of a certain nature and
possesses certain qualities, that he is generous and honest, or
penurious and knavish, that she is virtuous and amiable, or vicious
and ill-tempered, from the countenance alone, from little more than a
glimpse of it, without the means of knowing. We venture our fortune on
the signature of a man on the other side of the world, whom we never
saw, upon the belief that he is honest and trustworthy. We believe
that occurrences have taken place, upon the assertion of others. We
believe that one will acts upon another, and in the reality of a
multitude of other phenomena that Reason cannot explain.
But we ought not to believe what Reason authoritatively denies, that
at which the sense of right revolts, that which is absurd or
self-contradictory, or at issue with experience or science, or that
which degrades the character of the Deity, and would make Him
revengeful, malignant, cruel, or unjust.
A man's Faith is as much his own as his Reason is. His Freedom
consists as much in his faith being free as in his will being
uncontrolled by power. All the Priests and Augurs of Rome or Greece
had not the right to require Cicero or Socrates to believe in the
absurd mythology of the vulgar. All the Imaums of Mohammedanism have
not the right to require a Pagan to believe that Gabriel dictated the
Koran to the Prophet. All the Brahmins that ever lived, if assembled
in one conclave like the Cardinals, could not gain a right to compel a
single human being to believe in the Hindu Cosmogony. No man or body
of men can be infallible, and authorized to decide what other men
shall believe, as to any tenet of faith. Except to those who first
receive it, every religion and the truth of all inspired writings
depend on human testimony and internal evidences, to be judged of by
Reason and the wise analogies of Faith. Each man must necessarily have
the right to judge of their truth for himself; because no one man can
have any higher or better right to judge than another of equal
information and intelligence.
Domitian claimed to be the Lord God; and statues and images of him, in
silver and gold, were found throughout the known world. He claimed to
be regarded as the God of all men; and, according to Suetonius, began
his letters thus: "Our Lord and God commands that it should be done so
and so;" and formally decreed that no one should address him
otherwise, either in writing or by word of mouth. Palfurius Sura, the
philosopher, who was his chief delator, accusing those who refused to
recognize his divinity, however much he may have believed in that
divinity, had not the right to demand that a single Christian in Rome
or the provinces should do the same.
Reason is far from being the only guide, in morals or in political
science. Love or loving-kindness must keep it company, to exclude
fanaticism, intolerance, and persecution, to all of which a morality
too ascetic, and extreme political principles, invariably lead. We
must also have faith in ourselves, and in our fellows and the people,
or we shall be easily discouraged by reverses, and our ardor cooled by
obstacles. We must not listen to Reason alone. Force comes more from
Faitll and Love: and it is by the aid of these that man scales the
loftiest heights of morality, or becomes the Saviour and Redeemer of a
People. Reason must hold the helm; but these supply the motive power.
They are the wings of the soul. Enthusiasm is generally unreasoning;
and without it, and Love and Faith, there would have been no RIENZI,
or TELL, or SYDNEY, or any other of the great patriots whose names are
immortal. If the Deity had been merely and only All-wise and
All-mighty, He would never have created the Universe.
* * * * * *
It is GENIUS that gets Power; and its prime lieutenants are FORCE and
WISDOM. The unruliest of men bend before the leader that has the sense
to see and the will to do. It is Genius that rules with God-like
Power; that unveils, with its counsellors, the hidden human mysteries,
cuts asunder with its word the huge knots, and builds up with its word
the crumbled ruins. At its glance fall down the senseless idols, whose
altars have been on all the high places and in all the sacred groves.
Dishonesty and imbecility stand abashed before it. Its single Yea or
Nay revokes the wrongs of ages, and is heard among the future
generations. Its power is immense, because its wisdom is immense.
Genius is the Sun of the political sphere. Force and Wisdom, its
ministers, are the orbs that carry its light into darkness, and answer
it with their solid reflecting Truth.
Development is symbolized by the use of the Mallet and Chisel; the
development of the energies and intellect, of the individual and the
people. Genius may place itself at the head of an unintellectual,
uneducated, unenergetic nation; but in a free country, to cultivate
the intellect of those who elect, is the only mode of securing
intellect and genius for rulers. The world is seldom ruled by the
great spirits, except after dissolution and new birth. In periods of
transition and convulsion, the Long Parliaments, the Robespierres and
Marats, and the semi-respectabilities of intellect, too often hold the
reins of power. The Cromwells and Napoleons come later. After Marius
and Sulla and Cicero the rhetorician, CAESAR. The great intellect is
often too sharp for the granite of this life. Legislators may be very
ordinary men; for legislation is very ordinary work; it is but the
final issue of a million minds.
The power of the purse or the sword, compared to that of the spirit,
is poor and contemptible. As to lands, you may have agrarian laws, and
equal partition. But a man's intellect is all his own, held direct
from God, an inalienable fief. It is the most potent of weapons in the
hands of a paladin. If the people comprehend Force in the physical
sense, how much more do tlley revelence the intellectual! Ask
Hildebrand, or Luther, or Loyola. They fall prostrate before it, as
before an idol. The mastery of mind over mind is the only conquest
worth having. The other injures both, and dissolves at a breath; rude
as it is, the great cable falls down and snaps at last. But this dimly
resembles the dominion of the Creator. It does not need a subject like
that of Peter the Hermit. If the stream be but bright and strong, it
will sweep like a spring-tide to the popular heart. Not in word only,
but in intellectual act lies the fascination. It is the homage to the
Invisible. This power, knotted with Love, is the golden chain let down
into the well of Truth, or the invisible chain that binds the ranks of
mankind together.
Influence of man over man is a law of nature, whether it be by a great
estate in land or in intellect. It may mean slavery, a deference to
the eminent human judgment. Society hangs spiritually together, like
the revoiving spheres above. The free country, in which intellect and
genius govern, will endure. Where they serve, and other influences
govern, the national life is short. All the nations that have tried to
govern themselves by their smallest, by the incapables, or merely
respectables, have come to nought. Constitutions and Laws, without
Genius and Intellect to govern, will not prevent decay. In that case
they have the dry-rot and the life dies out of them by degrees.
To give a nation the franchise of the Intellect is the only sure mode
of perpetuating freedom. This will compel exertion and generous care
for the people from those on the higher seats, and honorable and
intelligent allegiance from those below. Then political public life
will protect all men from self-abasement in sensual pursuits, from
vulgar acts and low greed, by giving the noble ambition of just
imperial rule. To elevate the people by teaching loving-kindness and
wisdom, with power to him who teaches best: and so to develop the free
State from the rough ashlar:-- this is the great labor in which
Masonry desires to lend a helping hand.
All of us should labor in building up the great monument of a nation,
the Holy House of the Temple. The cardinal virtues must not be
partitioned among men, becoming the exclusive property of some, like
the common crafts. ALL are apprenticed to the partners, Duty and
Honor.
Masonry is a march and a struggle toward the Light. For the individual
as well as the nation, Light is Virtue, Manliness, Intelligence,
Liberty. Tyranny over the soul or body, is darkness. The freest
people, like the freest man, is always in danger of relapsing into
servitude. Wars are almost always fatal to Republics. They create
tyrants, and consolidate their power. They spring, for the most part,
from evil counsels. When the small and the base are intrusted with
power, legislation and administration become but two parallel series
of errors and blunders, ending in war, calamity, and the necessity for
a tyrant. When the nation feels its feet sliding backward, as if it
walked on the ice, the time has come for a supreme effort. The
magnificent tyrants of the past are but the types of those of the
future. Men and nations will always sell themselves into slavery, to
gratify their passions and obtain revenge. The tyrant's plea,
necessity, is always available; and the tyrant once in power, the
necessity of providing for his safety makes him savage. Religion is a
power, and he must control that. Independent, its sanctuaries might
rebel. Then it becomes unlawful for the people to worship God in their
own way, and the old spiritual despotisms revive. Men must believe as
Power wills, or die; and even if they may believe as they will, all
they have, lands, houses, body, and soul, are stamped with the royal
brand. "I am the State," said Louis the Fourteenth to his peasants;
"the very shirts on your backs are mine, and I can take them if I
will."
And dynasties so established endure, like that of the Caesars of Rome,
of the Caesars of Constantinople, of the Caliphs, the Stuarts, the
Spaniards, the Goths, the Valois, until the race wears out, and ends
with lunatics and idiots, who still rule. There is no concord among
men, to end the horrible bondage. The State falls inwardly, as well as
by the outward blows of the incoherent elements. The furious human
passions, the sleeping human indolence, the stolid human ignorance,
the rivalry of human castes, are as good for the kirlgs as the swords
of the Paladins. The worshippers have all bowed so long to the old
idol, that they cannot go into the streets and choose another Grand
Llama. And so the effete State floats on down the puddled stream of
Time, until the tempest or the tidal sea discovers that the worm has
consumed its strength, and it crumbles into oblivion.
* * * * * *
Civil and religious Freedom must go hand in hand; and Persecution
matures them both. A people content with the thoughts made for them by
the priests of a church will be content with Royalty by Divine
Right,-- the Church and the Throne mutually sustaining each other.
They will smother schism and reap infidelity and indifference; and
while the battle for freedom goes on around them, they will only sink
the more apathetically into servitude and a deep trance, perhaps
occasionally interrupted by furious fits of frenzy, followed by
helpless exhaustion.
Despotism is not dimcult in any land that has only known one master
from its childhood; but there is no harder problem than to perfect and
perpetuate free government by the people themselves; for it is not one
king that is needed: all must be kings. It is easy to set up
Masaniello, that in a few days he may fall lower than before. But free
govermnent grows slowly, like the individual human faculties; and like
the forest-trees, from the inner heart outward. Liberty is not only
the common birth-right, but it is lost as well by non-user as by
mis-user. It depends far more on the universal effort than any other
human property. It has no single shrine or holy well of pilgrimage for
the nation; for its waters should burst out freely from the whole
soil.
The free popular power is one that is only known in its strength in
the hour of adversity: for all its trials, sacrifices and expectations
are its own. It is trained to think for itself, and also to act for
itself. When the enslaved people prostrate themselves in the dust
before the hurricane, like the alarmed beasts of the field, the free
people stand erect before it, in all the strength of unity, in
self-reliance, in mutual reliance, with effrontery against all but the
visible hand of God. It is neither cast down by calamity nor elated by
success.
This vast power of endurance, of forbearance, of patience, and of
performance, is only acquired by continual exercise of all the
functions, like the healthful physical human vigor, like the
individual moral vigor.
And the maxim is no less true than old, that eternal vigilance is the
price of liberty. It is curious to observe the universal pretext by
which the tyrants of all times take away the national liberties. It is
stated in the statutes of Edward II., that the justices and the
sheriff should no longer be elected by the people, on account of the
riots and dissensions which had arisen. The same reason was given long
before for the suppression of popular election of the bishops; and
there is a witness to this untruth in the yet older times, when Rome
lost her freedom, and her indignant citizens declared that tumultuous
liberty is better than disgraceful tranquillity.
* * * * * *
With the Compasses and Scale, we can trace all the figures used in the
mathematics of planes, or in what are called GEOMETRY and
TRIGONOMETRY, two words that are themselves deficient in meaning.
GEOMETRY, which the letter G. in most Lodges is said to signify, means
measurement of land or the earth--or Surveying; and TRIGONOMETRY, the
measurement of triangles, or figures with three sides or angles. The
latter is by far the most appropriate name for the science intended to
be expressed by the word "Geometry." Neither is of a meaning
sufficiently wide: for although the vast surveys of great spaces of
the earth's surface, and of coasts, by which shipwreck and calamity to
mariners are avoided, are effected by means of triangulation;--though
it was by the same method that the French astronomers measured a
degree of latitude and so established a scale of measures on an
immutable basis; though it is by means of the immense triangle that
has for its base a line drawn in imagination between the place of the
earth now and its place six months hence in space, and for its apex a
planet or star, that the distance of Jupiter or Sirius from the earth
is ascertained; and though there is a triangle still more vast, its
base extending either way from us, with and past the horizon into
immensity, and its apex infinitely distant above us; to which
corresponds a similar infinite triangle below--what is above equalling
what is below, immensity equalling immensity; yet the Science of
Numbers, to which Pythagoras attached so much importance, and whose
mysteries are found everywhere in the ancient religions, and most of
all in the Kabalah and in the Bib]e, is not sufficiently expressed by
either the word "Geometry" or the word "Trigonometry." For that
science includes theseJ with Arithmetic, and also with Algebra,
Logarithms, the Integral and Differential Calculus; and by means of it
are worked out the great problems of Astronomy or the Laws of the
Stars.
* * * * * *
Virtue is but heroic bravery, to do the thing thought to be true, in
spite of all enemies of flesh or spirit, in despite of all temptations
or menaces. Man is accountable for the uprightness of his doctrine,
but not for the rightness of it. Devout enthusiasm is far easier than
a good action. The end of thought is action; the sole purpose of
Religion is an Ethic. Theory, in political science, is worthless,
except for the purpose of being realized in practice.
In every credo, religious or political as in the soul of man, there
are two regions, the Dialectic and the Ethic; and it is only when the
two are harmoniously blended, that a perfect discipline is evolved.
There are men who dialectically are Christians, as there are a
multitude who dialectically are Masons, and yet who are ethically
Infidels, as these are ethically of the Profane, in the strictest
sense:--intellectual believers, but practical atheists:-- men who will
write you "Evidences," in perfect faith in their logic, but cannot
carry out the Christian or Masonic doctrine, owing to the strength, or
weakness, of the flesh. On the other hand, there are many dialectical
skeptics, but ethical believers, as there are many Masons who have
never undergone initiation; and as ethics are the end and purpose of
religion, so are ethical believers the most worthy. He who does right
is better than he who thinks right.
But you must not act upon the hypothesis that all men are hypocrites,
whose conduct does not square with their sentiments. No vice is more
rare, for no task is more difficult, than systematic hypocrisy. When
the Demagogue becomes a Usurper it does not follow that he was all the
time a hypocrite. Shallow men only so judge of others.
The truth is, that creed has, in general, very little influence on the
conduct; in religion, on that of the individual; in politics, on that
of party. As a general thing, the Mahometan, in the Orient, is far
more honest and trustworthy than the Christian. A Gospel of Love in
the mouth, is an Avatar of Persecution in the heart. Men who believe
in eternal damnation and a literal sea of fire and brimstone, incur
the certainty of it, according to their creed, on the slightest
temptation of appetite or passion. Predestination insists on the
necessity of good works. In Masonry, at the least flow of passion, one
speaks ill of another behind his back; and so far from the
"Brotherhood" of Blue Masonry being real, and the solemn pledges
contained in the use of the word "Brother" being complied with,
extraordinary pains are taken to show that.Masonry is a sort of
abstraction, which scorns to interfere in worldly matters. The rule
may be regarded as universal, that, where there is a choice to be
made, a Mason will give his vote and influence, in politics and
business, to the less qualified profane in preference to the better
qualified Mason. One will take an oath to oppose any unlawful
usurpation of power, and then become the ready and even eager
instrument of a usurper. Another will call one "Brother," and then
play toward him the part of Judas Iscariot, or strike him, as Joab did
Abner, under the fifth rib, with a lie whose authorship is not to be
traced. Masonry does not change human nature, and cannot make honest
men out of born knaves.
While you are still engaged in preparation, and in accumulating
principles for future use, do not forget the words of the Apostle
James: "For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like
unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass, for he beholdeth
himself, and goeth away, and straightway forgetteth what ma1lner of
man he was; but whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and
continueth, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work,
this man shall be blessed in his work. If any man among you seem to be
religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart,
this man's religion is vain.... Faith, if it hath not works, is dead,
being an abstraction. A man is justified by works, and not by faith
only.... The devils believe,--and tremble.... As the body without the
heart is dead, so is faith without works."
* * * * * *
In political science, also, free governments are erected and free
constitutions framed, upon some simple and intelligible theory. Upon
whatever theory they are based, no sound conclusion is to be reached
except by carrying the theory out without flinching, both in argumcnt
on constitutional qucstions and in practice. Shrink from the true
theory through timidity, or wander from it througll want of the
logical faculty, or transgress against it througll passion or on the
plea of necessity or expediency, and you have denial or invasion of
rights, laws that offend against first principles, usurpation of
illegal powers, or abnegation and abdication of legitimate authority.
Do not forget, either, that as the showy, superficial, impudent and
self-conceited will almost always be preferred, even in utmost stress
of danger and calamity of the State, to the man of solid learning,
large intellect, and catholic sympathies, because he is nearer the
common popular and legislative level, so the highest truth is not
acceptable to the mass of mankind.
When SOLON was asked if he had given his countrymen the best laws, he
answered, "The best they are capable of receiving." This is one of the
profoundest utterances on record; and yet like all great truths, so
simple as to be rarely comprehended. It contains the whole philosophy
of History. It utters a truth which, had it been recognized, would
have saved men an immensity of vain, idle disputes, and have led them
into the clearer paths of knowledge in the Past. It means this,--that
all truths are Truths of Period, and not truths for eternity; that
whatever great fact has had strength and vitality enough to make
itself real, whether of religion, morals, government, or of whatever
else, and to find place in this world, has been a truth for the time,
and as good as men were capable of receiving.
So, too, with great men. The intellect and capacity of a people has a
single measure,--that of the great men whom Providence gives it, and
whom it receives. There have always been men too great for their time
or their people. Every people makes such men only its idols, as it is
capable of comprehending.
To impose ideal truth or law upon an incapable and merely real man,
must ever be a vain and empty speculation. The laws of sympathy govern
in this as they do in regard to men who are put at the head. We do not
know, as yet, what qualifications the sheep insist on in a leader.
With men who are too high intellectually, the mass have as little
sympathy as they have with the stars. When BURKE, the wisest statesman
England ever had, rose to speak, the House of Commons was depopulated
as upon an agreed signal. There is as little sympathy between the mass
and the highest TRUTHS. The highest truth, being incomprehensible to
the man of realities, as the highest man is, and largely above his
level, will be a great unreality and falsehood to an unintellectual
man. The profoundest doctrines of Christianity and Philosophy would be
mere jargon and babble to a Potawatomie Indian. The popular
explanations of the symbols of Masonry are fitting for the multitude
that have swarmed into the Temples,--being fully up to the level of
their capacity. Catholicism was a vital truth in its earliest ages,
but it became obsolete, and Protestantism arose, flourished, and
deteriorated. The doctrines of ZOROASTER were the best which the
ancient Persians were fitted to receive; those of CONFUCIUS were
fitted for the Chinese; those of MOHAMMED for the idolatrous Arabs of
his age. Each was Truth for the time. Each was a GOSPEL, preached by a
REFORMER; and if any men are so little fortunate as to remain content
therewith, when others have attained a higher truth, it is their
misfortune and not their fault. They are to be pitied for it, and not
persecuted.
Do not expect easily to convince men of the truth, or to lead them to
think aright. The subtle human intellect can weave its mists over even
the clearest vision. Remember that it is eccentric enough to ask
unanimity from a jury; but to ask it from any large number of men on
any point of political faith is amazing. You can hardly get two men in
any Congress or Convention to agree;--nay, you can rarely get one to
agree with himself. The political church which chances to be supreme
anywhere has an indefinite number of tongues. How then can we expect
men to agree as to matters beyond the cognizance of the senses? How
can we compass the Infinitc and the Invisible with any chain of
evidence? Ask the small sea-waves what they murmur among the pebbles !
How many of those words that come from the invisible shore are lost,
like the birds, in the long passage ? How vainly do we strain the eyes
across the long Infinite ! We must be content, as the children are,
with the pebbles that have been stranded, since it is forbidden us to
explore the hidden depths.
The Fellow-Craft is especially taught by this not to become wise in
his own conceit. Pride in unsound theories is worse than ignorancc.
Humility becomes a Mason. Take some quiet, sober moment of life, and
add together the two ideas of Pride and Man; behold him, creature of a
span, stalking through infinite space in all the grandeur of
littleness ! Perched on a speck of the Universe, every wind of Heaven
strikes into his blood the coldness of death; his soul floats avvay
from his body like the melody from the string. Day and night, like
dust on the wheel, he is rolled along the heavens, through a labyrinth
of worlds, and all the creations of God are flanling on every side,
further than even his imagination can reach. Is this a creature to
make for himself a crown of glory, to deny his own flesh, to mock at
his fellow, sprung with him from that dust to which both will soon
return? Does the proud man not err? Does he not suffer? Does he not
die? When he reasons, is he never stopped short by difficulties ? When
he acts, does he never succumb to the temptations of pleasure? When he
lives, is he free from pain? Do the diseases not claim him as their
prey? When he dies, can he escape the common grave ? Pride is not the
heritage of man. Humility should dwell with frailty, and atone for
ignorance, error and imperfection.
Neither should the Mason be over-anxious for office and honor, however
certainly he rmay feel that he has the capacity to serve the State. He
should neither seek nor spurn honors. It is good to enjoy the
blessings of fortune; it is better to submit without a pang to their
loss. The greatest deeds are not done in the glare of light, and
before the eyes of the populace. He whom God has gifted with a love of
retirement possesses, as it were, an additional sense; and among the
vast and noble scenes of nature, w e find the balm for the wounds we
have received among the pitiful shifts of policy; for the attachment
to solitude is the surest preservative from the ills of life.
But Resignation is the more noble in proportion as it is the less
passive. Retirement is only a morbid selfishness, if it prohibit
exertions for others; as it is only dignified and noble, when it is
the shade whence the oracles issue that are to instruct mankind; and
retirement of this nature is the sole seclusion which a good and wise
man will covet or command. The very philosophy which makes such a man
covet the quiet, will make him eschew the inutility of the hermitage.
Very little praiseworthy would LORD BOLINGBROKE have seemed among his
haymakers and ploughmen, if among haymakers and ploughmen he had
looked with an indifferent eye upon a profligate minister and a venal
Parliament. Very little interest would have attached to his beans and
vetches, if beans and vetches had caused him to forget that if he vvas
happier on a fann he could be more useful in a Senate, and made him
forego, in the sphere of a bailiff, all care for re-entering that of a
legislator.
Remember, also, that therc is an education which quickens the
Intellect, and leaves the heart hollower or harder than before. There
are ethical lessons in the laws of the heavenly bodies, in the
properties of earthly elements, in geography, chemistry, geology, and
all the material sciences. Things are symbols of Truths. Properties
are symbols of Truths. Science, not teaching moral and spiritual
truths, is dead and dry, of little more real value than to commit to
the menlory a long row of unconnected dates, or of the names of bugs
or butterflies.
Christianity, it is said, begins from the burning of the false gods by
the people themselves. Education begins with the burning of our
intellectual and moral idols: our prejudices, notions, conceits, our
worth]ess or ignoble purposes. Especially it is necessary to shake off
the love of worldly gain. With Freedom comes the longing for worldly
advancement. In that race men are ever falling, rising, running, and
falling again. The lust for wealth and the abject dread of poverty
delve the furrows on many a noble brow. The gambler grows old as he
watches the chances. Lawful hazard drives Youth away before its time;
and this Youth draws heavy bills of exchange on Age. Men live, like
the engines, at high pressure, a hundred years in a hundred months;
the ledger becomes the Bible, and the day-book the Book of the Morning
Prayer.
Hence flow overreachings and sharp practice, heartless traffic in
which the capitalist buys profit with the lives of the laborers,
speculations that coin a nation's agonies into wealth, and all the
other devilish cnginery of Mammon. This, and greed for office, are the
two columns at the entrance to the Temple of Moloch. It is doubtful
whether the latter, blossoming in falsehood, trickery, and fraud, is
not even more pernicious than the former. At all events they are
twins, and fitly mated; and as either gains control of the unfortunate
subject, his soul withers away and decays, and at last dies out. The
souls of half the human race leave them long before they die. The two
greeds are twin plagues of the leprosy, and make the man unclean; and
whenever they break out they spread until "they cover all the skin of
him that hath the plague, from his head even to his foot." Even the
raw flesh of the heart becomes unclean with it.
Alexander of Macedon has left a saying behind him which has survived
his conquests: "Nothing is nobler than work." Work only can keep even
kings respectable. And when a king is a king indeed, it is an
honorable office to give tone to the manners and morals of a nation;
to set the example of virtuous conduct, and restore in spirit the old
schools of chivalry, in which the young manhood may be nurtured to
real greatness. Work and wages will go together in men's minds, in the
most royal institutions. We must ever come to the idea of real work.
The rest that follows labor should be sweeter than the rest which
follows rest.
Let no Fellow-Craft imagine that the work of the lowly and
uninfluential is not worth the doing. There is no legal limit to the
possible influences of a good deed or a wise word or a generous
effort. Nothing is really small. Whoever is open to the deep
penetration of nature knows this. Although, indeed, no absolute
satisfaction may be vouchsafed to philosophy, any more in
circumscribing the cause than in limiting the effect, the man of
thought and contemplation falls into unfathomable ecstacies in view of
all the decompositions of forces resulting in unity. All works for
all. Destruction is not annihilation, but regeneration.
Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the
rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is
useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the path of
the molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not
determined by the fall of grains of sand ? Who, then, understands the
reciprocal flow and ebb of the inrlnitely great and the infinitely
small; the echoing of causes in the abysses of beginning, and the
avalanches of creation? A fleshworm is of account; the small is great;
the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity. There are
marvellous relations between beings and things; in this inexhaustible
Whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn: all need each other. Light
does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without
knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence
to the sleeping plants. Every bird which flies has the thread of the
Infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor,
and the tap of a swallow's bill, breaking the egg; and it leads
forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of a Socrates. Where
the telescope ends the microscope begins. Which of them the grander
view ? A bit of mould is a Pleiad of flowers --a nebula is an ant-hill
of stars.
There is the same and a still more wonderful interpenetration between
the things of the intellect and the things of matter. Elements and
principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another
to such a degree as to bring the material world and the moral world
into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back upon
themselves. In the vast cosmical changes the universal life comes and
goes in unknown quantities, enveloping all in the invisible mystery of
the emanations, losing no dream from no single sleep, sowing an
animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and winding in
curves; making a force of Light, and an element of Thought;
disseminated and indivisible, dissolving all save that point without
length, breadth, or thickness, The MYSEF; reducing everything to the
Soul-atom ; making everything blossom into God; entangling all
activities, from the higllest to the lowest, in the obscurity of a
dizzying mechanism; hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement
of the earth; subordinating, perhaps, if only by the identity of the
law, the eccentric evolutions of the comet in the firmament, to the
whirlings of the infusoria in the drop of water. A mechanism made of
mind, the first motor of which is the gnat, and its last wheel the
zodiac.
A peasant-boy, guiding Blucher by the right one of two roads, the
other being impassable for artillery, enables him to reach Waterloo in
time to save Wellington from a defeat that would have been a rout; and
so enables the kings to imprison Napoleon on a barren rock in
mid-ocean. An unfaithful smith, by the slovenly shoeing of a horse,
causes his lameness, and, he stumbling, the career of his
world-conquering rider ends, and the destinies of empires are changed.
A generous officer permits an imprisoned monarch to end his game of
chess before leading him to the block; and meanwhile the usurper dies,
and the prisoner reascends the throne. An unskillful workman repairs
the compass, or malice or stupidity disarranges it, the ship mistakes
her course, the waves swallow a Caesar, and a new chapter is written
in the history of a world. What we call accident is but the adamantine
chain of indissoluble connection between all created things. The
locust, hatched in the Arabian sands, the small worm that destroys the
cotton-boll, one making famine in the Orient, the other closing the
mills and starving the vvorkmen and their children in the Occident,
with riots and massacres, are as much the ministers of God as the
earthquake; and the fate of nations depends more on them than on the
intellect of its kings and legislators. A civil war in America will
end in shaking the world; and that war may be caused by the vote of
some ignorant prize-fighter or crazed fanatic in a city or in a
Congress, or of some stupid boor in an obscure country parish. The
electricity of universal sympathy, of action and reaction, pervades
everything, the planets and the motes in the sunbeam. FAUST, with his
types, or LUTHER, with his sermons, worked greater results than
Alexander or Hannibal. A single thought sometimes suffices to overturn
a dynasty. A silly song did more to unseat James the Second than the
acquittal of the Bishops. Voltaire, Condorcet, and Rousseau uttered
words that will ring, in change and revolutions, throughout all the
ages.
Remember, that though life is short, Thought and the influences of
what we do or say are immortal; and that no calculus has yet pretended
to ascertain the law of proportion between cause and effect. The
hammer of an English blacksmith, smiting down an insolent official,
led to a rebellion which came near being a revolution. The word well
spoken, the deed fitly done, even by the feeblest or humblest, cannot
help but have their effect. More or less, the effect is inevitable and
eternal. The echoes of the greatest deeds may die away like the echoes
of a cry among the cliffs, and what has been done seem to the human
judgment to have been without result. The unconsidered act of the
poorest of men may fire the train that leads to the subterranean mine,
and an empire be rent by the explosion.
The power of a free people is often at the disposal of a single and
seemingly an unimportant individual;--a terrible and truthful power;
for such a people feel with one heart, and therefore can lift up their
myriad arms for a single blow. And, again, there is no graduated scale
for the measurement of the influences of different intellects upon the
popular mind. Peter the Hermit held no office, yet what a work he
wrought !
* * * * * *
From the political point of view there is but a single principle,--
the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of one's self
over one's self is called LIBERTY. Where two or several of these
sovereignties associate, the State begins. But in this association
there is no abdication. Each sovereignty parts with a certain portion
of itself to form the common right. That portion is the same for all.
There is equal contribution by all to the joint sovereignty. This
identity of concession which each makes to all, is EQUALITY. The
common right is nothing more or less than the protection of all,
pouring its rays on each. This protection of each by all, is
FRATERNITY.
Liberty is the summit, Equality the base. Equality is not all
vegetation on a level, a society of big spears of grass and stunted
oaks, a neighborhood of jealousies, emasculatillg each other. It is,
civilly, all aptitudes having equal opportunity; politically, all
votes having equal weight; religiously, all consciences having equal
rights.
Equality has an organ;--gratuitous and obligatory instruction. We must
begin with the right to the alphabet. The primary school obligatory
upon all; the higher school offered to all. Such is the law. From the
same school for all springs equal society. Instruction ! Light ! all
comes from Light, and all returns to it.
We must learn the thoughts of the common people, if we would be wise
and do any good work. We must look at men, not so much for what
Fortune has given to them with her blind old eyes, as for the gifts
Nature has brought in her lap, and for the use that has been made of
them. We profess to be equal in a Church and in the Lodge: we shall be
equal in the sight of God when He judges the earth. We may well sit on
the pavement together here, in communion and conference, for the few
brief moments that constitute life.
A Democratic Government undoubtedly has its defects, because it is
made and administered by men, and not by the Wise Gods. It cannot be
concise and sharp, like the despotic. When its ire is aroused it
develops its latent strength, and the sturdiest rebel trembles. But
its habitual domestic rule is tolerant, patient, and indecisive. Men
are brought together, first to differ, and then to agree. Affirmation,
negation, discussion, solution: these are the means of attaining
truth. Often the enemy will be at the gates before the babble of the
disturbers is drowned in the chorus of consent. In the Legislative
office deliberation will often defeat decision. Liberty can play the
fool like the Tyrants
Refined society requires greater minuteness of regulation; and the
steps of all advancing States are more and more to be picked among the
old rubbish and the new matcrials. The difficulty lies in discovering
the right path through the chaos of confusion. The adjustment of
mutual rights and wrongs is also more difficult in democracies. We do
not see and estimate the relative importance of objects so easily and
clearly from the level or the waving iand as from the elevation of a
lone peak, towering above the plain; for each looks through his own
mist.
Abject dependence on constituents, also, is too common. It is as
miserable a thing as abject dependence on a minister or the favorite
of a Tyrant. It is rare to find a man who can speak out the simple
truth that is in him, honestly and frankly, without fear, favor, or
affection, either to Emperor or People.
Moreover, in assemblies of men, faith in each other is almost always
wanting, unless a terrible pressure of calamity or danger from without
produces cohesion. Hence the constructive power of such assemblies is
generally deficient. The chief triumphs of modern days, in Europe,
have been in pulling down and obliterating; not in building up. But
Repeal is not Reform. Time must bring with him the Restorer and
Rebuilder.
Speech, also, is grossly abused in Republics; and if the use of speech
be glorious, its abuse is the most villainous of vices. Rhetoric,
Plato says, is the art of ruling the minds of men. But in democracies
it is too common to hide thought in words,to overlay it, to babble
nonsense. The gleams and glitter of intellectual soap-and-water
bubbles are mistaken for the rainbow-glories of genius. The worthless
pyrites is continually mistaken for gold. Even intellect condescends
to intellectual jugglery, balancing thoughts as a juggler balances
pipes on his chin. In all Congresses we have the inexhaustible flow of
babble, and Faction's clamorous knavery in discussion, until the
divine power of speech, that privilege of man and great gift of God,
is no better than the screech of parrots or the mimicry of monkeys.
The mere talker, however fluent, is barren of deeds in the day of
trial.
There are men voluble as women, and as well skilled in fencing with
the tongue: prodigies of speech, misers in deeds. Too much calking,
like too much thinking, destroys the power of action. In human nature,
the thought is only made perfect by deed. Silence is the mother of
both. The trumpeter is not the bravest of the brave. Steel and not
brass wins the day. The great doer of great deeds is mostly slow and
slovenly of speech. There are some men born and brcd to betray.
Patriotism is their trade, and their capital is speech. But no noble
spirit can plead like Paul and be false to itself as Judas.
Imposture too commonly rules in republics; they seem to be ever in
their minority; their guardians are self-appointed; and tlhe unjust
thrive better than the just. The Despot, like the night-lion roaring,
drowns all the clamor of tongues at once, and speech, the birthright
of the free man, becomes the bauble of the enslaved.
It is quite true that republics only occasionally, and as it were
accidentally, select their wisest, or even the less incapable among
the incapables, to govern them and legislate for them. If genius,
armed with learning and knowledge, will grasp the reins, the people
will reverence it; if it only modestly offers itself for office, it
will be smitten on the face, even when, in the straits of distress and
the agonies of calamity, it is indispensable to the salvation of the
State. Put it upon the track with the showy and superficial, the
conceited, the ignorant, and impudent, the trickster and charlatan,
and the result shall not be a moment doubtful. The verdicts of
Legislatures and the People are like the verdicts of
juries,--sometimes right by accident.
Offices, it is true, are showered, like the rains of Heaven, upon the
just and the unjust. The Roman Augurs that used to laugh in each
other's faces at the simplicity of the vulgar, were also tickled with
their own guile; but no Augur is needed to lead the people astray.
They readily deceive themselves. Let a Republic begin as it may, it
will not be out of its minority before imbecility will be promoted to
high places; and shallow pretence, getting itself puffed into notice,
will invade all the sanctuaries. The most unscrupulous partisanship
will prevail, even in respect to judicial trusts; and the most unjust
appointments constantly be made, although every improper promotion not
merely confers one undeserved favor, but may make a hundred honest
cheeks smart with injustice.
The country is stabbed in the front when those are brought into the
stalled seats who should slink into the dim gallery. Every stamp of
Honor, ill-clutched, is stolen from the Treasury of Merit.
Yet the entrance into the public service, and the promotion in it,
affect both the rights of individuals and those of the nation.
Injustice in bestowing or withholding office ought to be so
intolerable in democratic communities that the least trace of it
should be like the scent of Treason. It is not universally true that
all citizens of equal character have an equal claim to knock at the
door of every public office and demand admittance. When any man
presents himself for service he has a right to aspire to the highest
body at once, if he can show his fitness for such a beginning,--that
he is fitter than the rest who offer themselves for the same post. The
entry into it can only justly be made through the door of merit. And
whenever any one aspires to and attains such high post, especially if
by unfair and disreputable and indecent means, and is afterward found
to be a signal failure, he should at once be beheaded. He is the worst
among the public enemies.
When a man sumciently reveals himself, all others should be proud to
give him due precedence. When the power of promotion is abused in the
grand passages of life whether by People, Legislature, or Executive,
the unjust decision recoils on the judge at once. That is not only a
gross, but a willful shortness of sight, that cannot discover the
deserving. If one will look hard, long, and honestly, he will not fail
to discern merit, genius, and qualification; and the eyes and voice of
the Press and Public should condemn and denounce injustice wherever
she rears her horrid head.
"The tools to the workmen!" no other principle will save a Republic
from destruction, either by civil war or the dry-rot. They tend to
decay, do all we can to prevent it, like human bodies. If they try the
experiment of governing themselves by their smallest, they slide
downward to the unavoidable abyss with tenfold velocity; and there
never has been a Republic that has not followed that fatal course.
But however palpable and gross the inherent defects of democratic
governments, and fatal as the results finally and inevitably are, we
need only glance at the reigns of Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula, of
Heliogabalus and Caracalla, of Domitian and Commodus, to recognize
that the difference between freedom and despotism is as wide as that
between Heaven and Hell. The cruelty, baseness, and insanity of
tyrants are incredible. Let him who complains of the fickle humors and
inconstancy of a free people, read Pliny's character of Domitian. If
the great man in a Republic cannot win omce without descending to low
arts and whining beggary and the judicious use of sneaking lies, let
him remain in retirement, and use the pen. Tacitus and Juvenal held no
office. Let History and Satire punish the pretender as they crucify
the despot. The revenges of the intellect are terrible and just.
Let Masonry use the pen and the printing-press in the free State
against the Demagogue; in the Despotism against the Tyrant. History
offers examples and encouragement. All history, for four thousand
years, being filled with violated rights and the sufferings of the
people, each period of history brings with it such protest as is
possible to it. Under the Caesars there was no insurrection, but there
was a Juvenal. The arousing of indignation replaces the Gracchi. Under
the Caesars there is the exile of Syene; there is also the author of
the Annals. As the Neros reign darkly they should be pictured so. Work
with the graver only would be pale; into the grooves should be poured
a concentrated prose that bites.
Despots are an aid to thinkers. Speech enchained is speech terrible.
The writer doubles and triples his style, when silence is imposed by a
master upon the people. There springs from this silence a certain
mysterious fullness, which filters and freezes into brass in the
thoughts. Compression in the history produces conciseness in the
historian. The granitic solidity of some celebrated prose is only a
condensation produced by the Tyrant. Tyranny constrains the writer to
shortenings of diameter which are increases of strength. The
Ciceronian period, hardly sumcient upon Verres, would lose its edge
upon Caligula.
The Demagogue is the predecessor of the Despot. One springs from the
other's loins. He who will basely fawn on those who have office to
bestow, will betray like Iscariot, and prove a miserable and pitiable
failure. Let the new Junius lash such men as they deserve, and History
make them immortal in infamy; since their influences culminate in
ruin. The Republic that employs and honors the shallow, the
superficial, the base, "who crouch Unto the offal of an office
promised," at last weeps tears of blood for its fatal error. Of such
supreme folly, the sure fruit is damnation. Let the nobility of every
great heart, condensed into justice and truth, strike such creatures
like a thunderbolt ! If you can do no more, you can at least condemn
by your vote, and ostracise by denunciation.
It is true that, as the Czars are absolute, they have it in their
power to select the best for the public service. It is true that the
beginner of a dynasty generally does so; and that when monarchies are
in their prime, pretence and shallowness do not thrive and prosper and
get power, as they do in Republics. All do not gabble in the
Parliament of a Kingdom, as in the Congress of a Democracy. The
incapables do not go undetected there, all their lives.
But dynasties speedily decay and run out. At last they dwindle down
into imbecility; and the dull or flippant Members of Congresses are at
least the intellectual peers of the vast majority of kings. The great
man, the Julius Caesar, the Charlemagne, Cromwell, Napoleon, reigns of
right. He is the wisest and the strongest. The incapables and
imbeciles succeed and are usurpers; and fear makes them cruel. After
Julius came Caracalla and Galba; after Charlemagne, the lunatic
Charles the Sixth. So the Saracenic dynasty dwindled out; the Capets,
the Stuarts, the Bourbc1ns; the last of these producing Bomba, the ape
of Domitian.
Man is by nature cruel, like the tigers. The barbarian, and the tool
of the tyrant, and the civilized fanatic, enjoy the sufferings of
others, as the children enjoy the contortions of maimed flies.
Absolute Power, once in fear for the safety of its tenure, cannot but
be cruel.
As to ability, dynasties invariably cease to possess any after a few
lives. They become mere shams, governed by ministers, favorites, or
courtesans, like those old Etruscan kings, slumbering for long ages in
their golden royal robes, dissolving forever at the first breath of
day. Let him who complains of the shortcomings of democracy ask
himself if he would prefer a Du Barry or a Pompadour, governing in the
name of a Louis the Fifteenth, a Caligula making his horse a consul, a
Domitian, "that most savage monster," who sometimes drank the blood of
relatives, sometimes employing himself with slaughtering the most
distinguished citizens before whose gates fear and terror kept watch;
a tyrant of frightful aspect, pride on his forehead, fire in his eye,
constantly seeking darkness and secrecy, and only emerging from his
solitude to make solitude. After all, in a free government, the Laws
and the Constitution are above the Incapables, the Courts correct
their legislation, and posterity is the Grand Inquest that passes
judgment on them. What is the exclusion of worth and intellect and
knowledge from civil office compared with trials before Jeffries,
tortures in the dark caverns of the Inquisition, Alvabutcheries in the
Netherlands, the Eve of Saint Bartholomew, and the Sicilian Vespers?
* * * * * *
The Abbe Barruel in his Memoirs for the History of Jacobinism,
declares that Masonry in France gave, as its secret, the words
Equality and Liberty, leaving it for every honest and religious Mason
to explain them as would best suit his principles; but retained the
privilege of unveiling in the higher Degrees the meaning of those
words, as interpreted by the French Revolution. And he also excepts
English Masons from his anathemas, because in England a Mason is a
peaceable subject of the civil authorities, no matter where he
resides, engaging in no plots or conspiracies against even the worst
government. England, he says, disgusted with an Equality and a
Liberty, the consequences of which she had felt in the struggles of
her Lollards, Anabaptists, and Presbyterians, had "purged her Masonry"
from all explanations tending to overturn empires; but there still
remained adepts whom disorganizing principles bound to the Ancient
Mysteries.
Because true Masonry, unemasculated, bore the banners of Freedom and
Equal Rights, and was in rebellion against temporal and spiritual
tyranny, its Lodges were proscribed in 1735, by an edict of the States
of Holland. In 1737, Louis XV. forbade them in France. In 1738, Pope
Clement XII. issued against them his famous Bull of Excommunication,
which was renewed by Benedict XIV.; and in 1743 the Council of Berne
also proscribed them. The title of the Rull of Clement is, "The
Condemnation of the Society of Conventicles de Liberi Muratori, or of
the Freemasons, under the penalty of ipso facto excommunication, the
absolution from which is reserved to the Pope alone, except at the
point of death." And by it all bishops, ordinaries, and inquisitors
were empowered to punish Freemasons, "as vehemently suspected of
heresy," and to call in, if necessary, the help of the secular arm;
that is, to cause the civil authority to put them to death.
* * * * * *
Also, false and slavish political theories end in brutalizing the
State. For example, adopt the theory that offices and employments in
it are to be given as rewards for services rendered to party, and they
soon become the prey and spoil of faction, the booty of the victory of
faction;--and leprosy is in the flesh of the State. The body of the
commonwealth becomes a mass of corruption, like a living carcass
rotten with syphilis. All unsound theories in the end develop
themselves in one foul and loathsome disease or other of the body
politic. The State, like the man, must use constant effort to stay in
the paths of virtue and manliness. The habit of electioneering and
begging for office culminates in bribery with office, and corruption
in office.
A chosen man has a visible trust from God, as plainly as if the
commission were engrossed by the notary. A nation cannot renounce the
executorship of the Divine decrees. As little can Masonry. It must
labor to do its duty knowingly and wisely. We must remember that, in
free States, as well as in despotisms, Injustice, the spouse of
Oppression, is the fruitful parent of Deceit, Distrust, Hatred,
Conspiracy, Treason, and Unfaithfulness. Even in assailing Tyranny we
must have Truth and Reason as our chief weapons. We must march into
that fight like the old Puritans, or into the battle with the abuses
that spring up in free government, with the flaming sword in one hand,
and the Oracles of God in the other.
The citizen who cannot accomplish well the smaller purposes of public
life, cannot compass the larger. The vast power of endurance,
forbearance, patience, and performance, of a free people, is acquired
only by continual exercise of all the functions, like the healthful
physical human vigor. If the individual citizens have it not, the
State must equally be without it. It is of the essence of a free
government, that the people should not only be concerned in making the
laws, but also in their execution. No man ought to be more ready to
obey and administer the law than he who has helped to make it. The
business of government is carried on for the benefit of all, and every
co-partner should give counsel and cooperation.
Remember also, as another shoal on which States are wrecked, that free
States always tend toward the depositing of the citizens in strata,
the creation of castes, the perpetuation of the jus divinurn to office
in families. The more democratic the State, the more sure this result.
For, as free States advance in power, there is a strong tendency
toward centralization, not from deliberate evil intention, but from
the course of events and the indolence of human nature. The executive
powers swell and enlarge to inordinate dimensions; and the Executive
is always aggressive with respect to the nation. Offices of all kinds
are multiplied to reward partisans; the brute force of the sewerage
and lower strata of the mob obtains large representation, first in the
lower offices, and at last in Senates; and Bureaucracy raises its bald
head, bristling with pens, girded with spectacles, and bunched with
ribbon. The art of Government becomes like a Craft, and its guilds
tend to become exclusive, as those of the Middle Ages.
Political science may be much improved as a subject of speculation;
but it should never be divorced from the actual national necessity.
The science of governing men must always be practical, rather than
philosophical. There is not the same amount of positive or universal
truth here as in the abstract sciences; what is true in one country
may be very false in another; what is untrue to-day may become true in
another generation, and the truth of to-day be reversed by the
judgment of to-morrow. To distinguish the casual from the enduring, to
separate the unsuitable from the suitable, and to make progress even
possible, are the proper ends of policy. But without actual knowledge
and experience, and communion of labor, the dreams of the political
doctors may be no better than those of the doctors of divinity. The
reign of such a caste, with its mysteries, its myrmidons, and its
corrupting influence, may be as fatal as that of the despots. Thirty
tyrants are thirty times worse than one.
Moreover, there is a strong temptation for the governing people to
become as much slothful and sluggards as the weakest of absolute
kings. Only give them the power to get rid, when caprice prompts them,
of the great and wise men, and elect the little, and as to all the
rest they will relapse into indolence and indifference. The central
power, creation of the people, organized and cunning if not
enlightened, is the perpetual tribunal set up by them for the redress
of wrong and the rule of justice. It soon supplies itself with all the
requisite machinery, and is ready and apt for all kinds of
interference. The people may be a child all its life. The central
power may not be able to suggest the best scientific solution of a
problem; but it has the easiest means of carrying an idea into effect.
If the purpose to be attained is a large one, it requires a large
comprehension; it is proper for the action of the central power. If it
be a small one, it may be thwarted by disagreement. The central power
must step in as an arbitrator and prevent this. The people may be too
averse to change, too slothful in their own business, unjust to a
minority or a majority. The central power must take the reins when the
people drop them.
France became centralized in its government more by the apathy and
ignorance of its people than by the tyranny of its kings. When the
inmost parish-life is given up to the direct guardianship of the
State, and the repair of the belfry of a country church requires a
written order from the central power, a people is in its dotage. Men
are thus nurtured in imbecility, from the dawn of social life. When
the central government feeds part of the people it prepares all to be
slaves. When it directs parish and county affairs, they are slaves
already. The next step is to regulate labor and its wages.
Nevertheless, whatever follies the free people may commit, even to the
putting of the powers of legislation in the hands of the little
competent and less honest, despair not of the final result. The
terrible teacher, EXPERIENCE, writing his lessons on hearts desolated
with calamity and wrung by agony, will make thelll wiser in time.
Pretence and grimace and sordid beggary for votes will some day cease
to avail. Have FAITH, and struggle on, against all evil influences and
discouragements! FAITH is the Saviour and Redeemer of nations. When
Christianity had grown weak, profitless, and powerless, the Arab
Restorer and Iconoclast came, like a cleansing hurricane. When the
battle of Damascus was about to be fought, the Christian bishop, at
the early dawn, in his robes, at the head of his clergy, witll trle
Cross once so triumphant raised in the air, came down to the gates of
the city, and laid open before the army the Testament of Christ. The
Christian general, THOMAS, laid his hand on the book, and said, "Oh
God ! If our faith be true, aid us, and deliver us not into the hands
of its enemies!" But KHALED, "the Sword of God," who had marched from
victory to victory, exclaimed to his wearied soldiers, "Let no man
sleep! There will be rest enough in the bowers of Paradise; sweet will
be the repose never more to be followed by labor." The faith of the
Arab had become stronger than that of the Christian, and he conquered.
The Sword is also, in the Bible, an emblem of SPEECH, or of the
utterance of thought. Thus, in that vision or apocalypse of the
sublime exile of Patmos, a protest in the name of the ideal,
overwhelming the real world, a tremendous satire uttered in the name
of Religion and Liberty, and with its fiery reverberations smiting the
throne of the Gesars, a sharp two-edged sword comes out of the mouth
of the Semblance of the Son of Man, encircled by the seven golden
candlesticks, and holding in his right hand seven stars. "The Lord,"
says Isaiah, "hath made my mouth like a sharp sword." "I have slain
them," says Hosea, "by the words of my mouth." "The word of God," says
the writer of the apostolic letter to the Hebrews, "is quick and
powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the
dividing asunder of soul and spirit." "The sword of the Spirit, which
is the Word of God," says Paul, writing to the Christians at Ephesus.
"I will fight against them with the sword of my mouth," it is said in
the Apocalypse, to the angel of the church at Pergamos.
* * * * * *
The spoken discourse may roll on strongly as the great tidal wave;
but, like the wave, it dies at last feebly on the sands. It is heard
by few, remembered by still fewer, and fades away, like an echo in the
mountains, leaving no token of power. It is nothing to tlle living and
coming generations of men. It was the written hulllan speech, that
gave power and permanence to human thought. It is this that makes the
whole human history but one individual life.
To write on the rock is to write on a solid parchment; but it requires
a pilgrimage to see it. There is but one copy, and Time wears even
that. To write on skins or papyrus was to give, as it were, but one
tardy edition, and the rich only could procure it. The Chinese
stereotyped not only the unchanging wisdom of oid sages, but also the
passing events. The process tended to suffocate thought, and to hinder
progress; for there is continual wandering in the wisest minds, and
Truth writes her last words, not on clean tablets, but on the scrawl
that Error has made and often mended.
Printing made the movable letters prolific. Thenceforth the orator
spoke almost visibly to listening nations; and the author wrote, like
the Pope, his cecumenic decreesJ urbi et orbi, and ordered them to be
posted up in all the market-places; remaining, if he chose, impervious
to human sight. The doom of tyrannies was thenceforth sealed. Satire
and invective became potent as armies. The unseen hands of the
Juniuses could launch the thunderbolts, and make the ministers
tremble. One whisper from this giant fills the earth as easily as
Demosthenes filled the Agora. It will soon be heard at the antipodes
as easily as in the next street. It travels with the lightning under
the oceans. It makes the mass one man, speaks to it in the same
comtnon language, and elicits a sure and single response. Speech
passes into thought, and thence promptly into act. A nation becomes
truly one, with one large heart and a single throbbing pulse. Men are
invisibly present to each other, as if already spiritual beings; and
the thinker who sits in an Alpine solitude, unknown to or forgotten by
all the world, among the silent herds and hills, may flash his words
to all tlle cities and over all the seas.
Select the thinkers to be Legislators; and avoid the gabblers. Wisdom
is rarely loquacious. Weight and depth of thougbt are unfavorable to
volubility. The shallow and superficial are generally voluble and
often pass for eloquent. More words, less thought,--is the general
rule. The man who endeavors to say something worth remembering in
every sentence, becomes fastidious, and condenses like Tacitus. The
vulgar love a more diffuse stream. The ornamentation that does not
cover strength is the gewgaws of babble.
Neither is dialectic subtlety valuable to public men. The Christian
faith has it, had it formerly more than now; a subtlety that might
have entangled Plato, and which has rivalled in a fruitless fashion
the mystic lore of Jewish Rabbis and Indian Sages. It is not this
which converts the heathen. It is a vain task to balance the great
thoughts of the earth, like hollow straws, on the fingertips of
disputation. It is not this kind of warfare whicll makes the Cross
triumphant in the hearts of the unbelievers; but the actual power that
lives in the Faith.
So there is a political scholasticism that is merely useless. The
dexterities of subtle logic rarely stir the hearts of the people, or
convince them. The true apostle of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality
makes it a matter of life and death. His combats are like those of
Bossuet,-- combats to the death. The true apostolic fire is like the
lightning: it flashes conviction into the soul. The true word is
verily a two-edged sword. Matters of government and political science
can be fairly dealt with only by sound reason, and the logic of common
sense: not the common sense of the ignorant, but of the wise. The
acutest thinkers rarely succeed in becoming leaders of men. A
watchword or a catchword is more potent with the people than logic,
especially if this be the least metaphysical. When a political prophet
arises, to stir the dreaming, stagnant nation, and hold back its feet
from the irretrievable descent, to heave the land as with an
earthquake, and shake the silly-shallow idols from their seats, his
words vvill come straight from God's own nlouth, and be thundered into
the conscience. He will reason, teach, warn, and rule. The real "Sword
of the Spirit" is keener than the brightest blade of Damascus. Such
men rule a land, in the strength of justice, with wisdom and with
power. Still, the men of dialectic subtlety often rule well, because
in practice they forget their finely-spun theories, and use the
trenchant logic of common sense. But when the great heart and large
intellect are left to the rust in private life, and small attorneys,
brawlers in politics, and those who in the cities would be only the
clerks of notaries, or practitioners in the disreputable courts, are
made national Legislators, the country is in her dotage. even if the
beard has not yet grown upon her chin.
In a free country, human speech must needs be free; and the State must
listen to the maunderings of folly, and the screechings of its geese,
and the brayings of its asses, as well as to the golden oracles of its
wise and great men. Even the despotic old kings allowed their wise
fools to say what they liked. The true alchelllist will extract the
lessons of wisdom from the babblings of folly. He will hear what a man
has to say on any given subject, even if the speaker end only in
proving himself prince of fools. Even a fool will sometimes hit the
mark. There is some truth in all men who are not compelled to suppress
their souls and speak other men's thoughts. The finger even of the
idiot may point to the great highway.
A people, as well as the sages, must learn to forget. If it neither
learns the new nor forgets the old, it is fated, even if it has been
royal for thirty generations. To unlearn is to learn; and also it is
sometimes needful to learn again the forgotten. The antics of fools
make the current follies more palpable, as fashions are shown to be
absurd by caricatures, which so lead to their extirpation. The buffoon
and the zany are useful in their places. The ingenious artificer and
craftsman, like Solomon, searches the earth for his materials, and
transforms the misshapen matter into glorious workmanship. The world
is conquered by the head even more than by the hands. Nor will any
assembly talk forever. After a time, when it has listened long enough,
it quietly puts the silly, the shallow, and the superficial to one
side,--it thinks, and sets to work.
The human thought, especially in popular assemblies, runs in the most
singularly crooked channels, harder to trace and follow than the blind
currents of the ocean. No notion is so absurd that it may not find a
place there. The master-workman must train these notions and vagaries
with his two-handed hammer. They twist out of the way of the
sword-thrusts; and are invulnerable all over, even in the heel,
against logic. The martel or mace, the battle-axe, the great
double-edged two-handed sword must deal with follies; the rapier is no
better against them than a wand, unless it be the rapier of ridicule.
The SWORD is also the symbol of war and of the soldier. Wars, like
thunder-storms, are often necessary to purify the stagnant atmosphere.
War is not a demon, without remorse or reward. It restores the
brotherhood in letters of fire. When men are seated in their pleasant
places, sunken in ease and indolence, with Pretence and Incapacity and
Littleness usurping all the high places of State, war is the baptism
of blood and fire, by which alone they can be renovated. It is the
hurricane that brings the elemental equilibrium, the concord of Power
and Wisdom. So long as these continue obstinately divorced, it will
continue to chasten.
In the mutual appeal of nations to God, there is the acknowledgment of
His might. It lights the beacons of Faith and Freedom, and heats the
furnace through which the earnest and loyal pass to immortal glory.
There is in war the doom of defeat, the quenchless sense of Duty, the
stirring sense of Honor, the measureless solemn sacrifice of
devotedness, and the incense of success. Even in the flame and smoke
of battle, the Mason discovers his brother, and fulfills the sacred
obligations of Fraternity.
Two, or the Duad, is the symbol of Antagonism; of Good and Evil, Light
and Darkness. It is Cain and Abel, Eve and Lilith, Jachin and Boaz,
Ormuzd and Ahriman, Osiris and Typhon.
THREE, or the Triad, is most significantly expressed by the
equilateral and the right-angled triangles. There are three principal
colors or rays in the rainbow, which by intermixture make seven. The
three are the blue, the yelloW, and the red. The Trinity of the Deity,
in one mode or other, has been an article in all creeds. He creates,
preserves, and destroys. He is the generative power, the productive
capacity, and the result. The immaterial man, according to the
Kabalah, is composed of vitality, or life, the breath of life; of soul
or mind, and spirit. Salt, sulphur, and mercury are the great symbols
of the alchemists. To them man was body, soul, and spirit.
FOUR is expressed by the square, or four-sided right-angled figure.
Out of the symbolic Garden of Eden flowed a river, dividing into four
streams,--PISON, which flows around the land of gold, or light; GIHON,
which flows around the land of Ethiopia or Darkness; HIDDEKEL, running
eastward to Assyria; and the EUPHRATES. Zechariah saw four chariots
coming out from between two mountains of bronze, in the first of which
were red horses; in the second, black; in the third, white; and in the
fourth, grizzled: "and these were the four winds of the heavens, that
go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth." Ezekiel saw
the four living creatures, each with four faces and four wings, the
faces of a man and a lion, an ox and an eagle; and the four wheels
going upon their four sides; and Saint John beheld the four beasts,
full of eyes before and behind, the LION, the young Ox, the MAN, and
the flying EAGLE. Four was the signature of the Earth. Therefore, in
the 148th Psalm, of those who must praise the Lord on the land, there
are four times four, and four in particular of living creatures.
Visible nature is described as the four quarters of the world, and the
four corners of the earth. "There are four," says the old Jewish
saying, "which take the first place in this world: man, among the
creatures; the eagle among birds; the ox among cattle; and the lion
among wild beasts." Daniel saw four great beasts come up from the sea.
FIVE is the Duad added to the Triad. It is expressed by the
five-pointed or blazing star, the mysterious Pentalpha of Pythagoras.
It is indissolubly connected with the number seven. Christ fed His
disciples and the multitude with five loaves and two fishes, and of
the fragments there remained twelve, that is, five and seven, baskets
full. Again He fed them with seven loaves and a few little fishes, and
there remained seven baskets full. The five apparently small planets,
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, with the two greater ones,
the Sun and Moon, constituted the seven celestial spheres.
SEVEN was the peculiarly sacred number. There were seven planets and
spheres presided over by seven archangels. There were seven colors in
the rainbow; and the Phoenician Deity was called the HEPTAKIS or God
of seven rays; seven days of the week; and seven and five made the
number of months, tribes, ancl apostles. Zechariah saw a golden
candlestick, with seven lamps and seven pipes to the lamps, and an
olive-tree on each side. Since he says, "the seven eyes of the Lord
shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel."
John, in the Apocalypse, writes seven epistles to the seven churches.
In the seven epistles there are twelve promises. What is said of the
churches in praise or blame, is completed in the number three. The
refrain, "who has ears to hear," etc., has ten words, divided by three
and seven, and the seven by three and four; and the seven epistles are
also so divided. In the seals, trumpets, and vials, also, of this
symbolic vision, the seven are divided by four and three. He who sends
his message to Ephesus, "holds the seven stars in his right hand, and
walks amid the seven golden lamps."
In six days, or periods, God created the Universe, and paused on the
seventh day. Of clean beasts, Noah was directed to take by sevens into
the ark; and of fowls by sevens; because in seven days the rain was to
commence. On the seventeenth day of the month. the rain began; on the
seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ark rested on Ararat. When
the dove returned, Noah waited seven days before he sent her forth
again; and again seven, after she returned with the olive-leaf. Enoch
was the seventh patriarch, Adam included, and Lamech lived 777 years.
There were seven lamps in the great candlestick of the Tabernacle and
Temple, representing the seven planets. Seven times Moses sprinkled
the anointing oil upon the altar. The days of consecration of Aaron
and his sons were seven in number. A woman was unclean seven days
after child-birth; one infected with leprosy was shut up seven days;
seven times the leper was sprinkled with the blood of a slain bird;
and seven days afterwards he must remain abroad out of his tent. Seven
times, in purifying the leper, the priest was to sprinkle the
consecrated oil; and seven times to sprinkle with the blood of the
sacrificed bird the house to be purified. Seven times the blood of the
slain bullock was sprinkled on the mercy-seat; and seven times on the
altar. The seventh year was a Sabbath of rest; and at the end of seven
times seven years came the great year of jubilee. Seven days the
people ate unleavened bread, in the month of Abib. Seven weeks were
counted from the time of first putting the sickle to the wheat. The
Feast of the Tabernacles lasted seven days.
Israel was in the hand of Midian seven years before Gideon delivered
them. The bullock sacrificed by him was seven years old. Samson told
Delilah to bind him with seven green withes; and she wove the seven
locks of his head, and afterwards shaved them off. Balaam told Barak
to build for him seven altars. Jacob served seven years for Leah and
seven for Rachel. Job had seven sons and three daughters, making the
perfect number ten. He had also seven thousand sheep and three
thousand camels. His friends sat down with him seven days and seven
nights. His friends were ordered to sacrifice seven bullocks and seven
rams; and again, at the end, he had seven sons and three daughters,
and twice seven thousand sheep, and lived an hundred and forty, or
twice seven times ten years. Pharaoh saw in his dream seven fat and
seven lean kine, seven good ears and seven blasted ears of wheat; and
there were seven years of plenty, and seven of famine. Jericho fell,
when seven priests, with seven trumpets, made the circuit of the city
on seven successive days; once each day for six days, and seven times
on the seventh. "The seven eyes of the Lord," says Zechariah, "run to
and fro through the whole earth." Solomon was seven years in building
the Temple. Seven angels, in the Apocalypse, pour out seven plagues,
from seven vials of wrath. The scarlet-colored beast, on which the
woman sits in the wilderness, has seven heads and ten horns. So also
has the beast that rises Up out of the sea. Seven thunders uttered
their voices. Seven angels sounded seven trumpets. Seven lamps of
fire, the seven spirits of God, burned before the throne; and the Lamb
that was slain had seven horns and seven eyes.
EIGHT is the first cube, that of two. NINE is the square of three, and
represented by the triple triangle.
TEN includes all the other numbers. It is especially seven and three;
and is called the number of perfection. Pythagoras represented it by
the TETRACTYS, which had many mystic meanings. This symbol is
sometimes composed of dots or points, sometimes of commas or yods, and
in the Kabalah, of the letters of the name of Deity. It is thus
arranged:
,
, ,
, , ,
, , , ,
(HTML layout error, appears as pyramid arrangement in book )
The Patriarchs from Adam to Noah, inclusive, are ten in number, and
the same number is that of the Commandments.
TWELVE is the number of the lines of equal length that form a cube. It
is the number of the months, the tribes, and the apostles; of the oxen
under the Brazen Sea, of the stones on the breast-plate of the high
priest.
M & D Chapter III
The Master
MORALS AND DOGMA
by Albert Pike
III. THE MASTER.
* * * * * *
To understand literally the symbols and allegories of Oriental books
as to ante-historical matters, is willfully to close our eyes against
the Light. To translate the symbols into the trivial and commonplace,
is the blundering of mediocrity.
All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what
we see, and the true objects of religion are THE SEEN. The earliest
instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other
religious forms differed and still differ according to external
circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge
and mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is
applied to mental and spiritual phenomena and action. All words have,
primarily, a material sense, however they may afterward get, for the
ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. "To retract," for example, is to draw
back, and when applied to a statement, is symbolic, as much so as a
picture of an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would be. The
very word "spirit" means "breath," from the Latin verb spiro, breathe.
To present a visible symbol to the eye of another is not necessarily
to inform him of the meaning which that symbol has to you. Hence the
philosopher soon superadded to the symbols explanations addressed to
the ear, susceptible of more precision, but less effective and
impressive than the painted or sculptured forms which he endeavored to
explain. Out of these explanations grew by degrees a variety of
narrations, whose true object and meaning were gradually forgotten, or
lost in contradictions and incongruities. And when these were
abandoned, and Philosophy resorted to definitions and formulas, its
language was but a more complicated symbolism, attempting in the dark
to grapple with and picture ideas impossible to be expressed. For as
with the visible symbol, so with the word: to utter it to you does not
inform you of the exact meaning which it has to me; and thus religion
and philosophy became to a great extent disputes as to the meaning of
words. The most abstract expression for DEITY, which language can
supply, is but a sign or symbol for an object beyond our
comprehension, and not more truthful and adequate than the images of
OSIRIS and VISHNU, or their names, except as being less sensuous and
explicit. We avoid sensuousness only by resorting to simple negation.
We come at last to define spirit by saying that it is not matter.
Spirit is--spirit.
A single example of the symbolism of words will indicate to you one
branch of Masonic study. We find in the English Rite this phrase: "I
will always hail, ever conceal, and never reveal;" and in the
Catechism, these:
Q.'. "I hail."
A.'. "I conceal,"
and ignorance, misunderstanding the word "hail," has interpolated the
phrase, "From whence do you hail."
But the word is really "hele," from the Anglo-Saxon verb elan, helan,
to cover, hide, or conceal. And this word is rendered by the Latin
verb tegere, to cover or roof over. "That ye fro me no thynge woll
hele," says Gower. "They hele fro me no priuyte," says the Romaunt of
the Rose. "To heal a house," is a common phrase in Sussex; and in the
west of England, he that covers a house with slates is called a
Healer. Wherefore, to "heal" means the same thing as to
"tile,"--itself symbolic, as meaning, primarily, to cover a house with
tiles,--and means to cover, hide, or conceal. Thus language too is
symbolism, and words are as much misunderstood and misused as more
material symbols are.
Symbolism tended continually to become more complicated; and all the
powers of Heaven were reproduced on earth, until a web of fiction and
allegory was woven, partly by art and partly by the ignorance of
error, which the wit of man, with his limited means of explanation,
will never unravel. Even the Hebrew Theism became involved in
symbolism and image-worship, borrowed probably from an older creed and
remote regions of Asia,--the worship of the Great Semitic Nature-God
AL or ELS and its symbolical representations of JEHOVA Himself were
not even confined to poetical or illustrative language. The priests
were monotheists: the people idolaters.
There are dangers inseparable from symbolism, which afford an
impressive lesson in regard to the similar risks attendant on the use
of language. The imagination, called in to assist the reason, usurps
its place or leaves its ally helplessly entangled in itsweb. Names
which stand for things are confounded with them; the means are
mistaken for the end; the instrument of interpretation for the object;
and thus symbols come to usurp an independent character as truths and
persons. Though perhaps a necessary path, they were a dangerous one by
which to approach the Deity; in which many, says PLUTARCH, "mistaking
the sign for the thing signified, fell into a ridiculous superstition;
while others, in avoiding one extreme, plunged into the no less
hideous gulf of irreligion and impiety."
It is through the Mysteries, CICERO says, that we have learned the
first principles of life; wherefore the term "initiation" is used with
good reason; and they not only teach us to live more happily and
agrceably, but they soften the pains of death by the hope of a better
life hereafter.
The Mysteries were a Sacred Drama, exhibiting some legend significant
of nature's changes, 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. Nature is thc great Teacher of man; for it is the
Revelation of God. It neither dogmatizes nor attempts to tyrannize by
compelling to a particular creed or special interpretation. It
presents its symbols to us, and adds nothing by way of explanation. It
is the text without the commentary; and, as we well know, it is
chiefly the commentary and gloss that lead to error and heresesy and
persecution. The earliest instructors of mankind not only adopted the
lessons of Nature, but as far as possible adhered to her method of
imparting them. In the Mysteries, beyond the current traditions or
sacred and enigimatic recitals of the Temples, few explanations were
given to the spectators, who were left, as in the school of nature, to
make inferences for themselves. No other method could have suited
every degree of cultivation and capacity. To employ nature's universal
symbolism instead of the technicalities of language, rewards the
humblest inquirer, and discloses its secrets to every one in
proportion to his preparatory training and his power to con1prellend
them. If their philosophical meaning was above the comlirellension of
some, their moral and political meanlngs are within the reach of all.
These mystic shows and performances were not the reading of a lecture,
but the opening of a problem. Requiring research, they were calculated
to arouse the dormant intellect. They implied no hostility to
Philosophy, because Philosophy is the great expounder of symbolism;
although its ancient interpretations were often illfounded and
incorrect. The alteration from symbol to dogma is fatal to beauty of
expression, and leads to intolerance and assumed infallibility.
* * * * * *
If, in teaching the great doctrine of the divine nature of the Soul,
and in striving to explain its longings after immortality, and in
proving its superiority over the souls of the animals, which have no
aspirations Heavenward, the ancients struggled in vain to express the
nature of the soul, by comparing it to FIRE and LIGHT, it will be well
for us to consider whether, with all our boasted knowledge, we have
any better or clearer idea of its nature, and whether we have not
despairingly taken refuge in having none at all. And if they erred as
to its original place of abode, and understood literally the mode and
path of its descent, these were but the accessories of the great
Truth, and probably, to the Initiates, mere allegories, designed to
make the idea more palpable and impressive to the mind.
They are at least no more fit to be smiled at by the self-conceit of a
vain ignorance, the wealth of whose knowledge consists solely in
words, than the bosom of Abraham, as a home for the spirits of the
just dead; the gulf of actual fire, for the eternal torture of
spirits; and the City of the New Jerusalem, with its walls of jasper
and its edifices of pure gold like clear glass, its foundations of
precious stones, and its gates each of a single pearl. "I knew a man,"
says PAUL, "caught up to the third Heaven;.... that he was caught up
into Paradise, and heard ineffable words, which it is not possible for
a man to utter." And nowhere is the antagonism and conflict between
the spirit and body more frequently and forcibly insisted on than in
the writings of this apostle, nowhere the Divine nature of the soul
more strongly asserted. "With the mind," he says, "I serve the law of
God; but with the flesh the law of sin....As many as are led by the
Spirit of God, are the sons of GOD.... The earnest expectation of the
created waits for the manifestation of the sons of God.... The created
shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption, of the flesh liable
to decay, into the glorious liberty of the children of God."
* * * * * *
Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood
and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and
deceitful through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a
Democracy they are so as a means of attaining popularity and office,
and because of the greed for wealth. Experience will probably prove
that these odious and detestable vices will grow most rankly and
spread most rapidly in a Republic. When office and wealth become the
gods of a people, and the most unworthy and unfit most aspire to the
former, and fraud becomes the highway to the latter, the land will
reek with falsehood and sweat lies and chicane. When the offices are
open to all, merit and stern integrity and the dignity of unsullied
honor will attain them only rarely and by accident. To be able to
serve the country well, will cease to be a reason why the great and
wise and learned should be selected to render service. Other
qualifications, less honorable, will be more available. To adapt one's
opinions to the popular humor; to defend, apologize for, and justify
the popular follies; to advocate the expedient and the plausible; to
caress, cajole, and flatter the elector; to beg like a spaniel for his
vote, even if he be a negro three removes from barbarism; to profess
friendship for a competitor and stab him by innuendo; to set on foot
that which at third hand shall become a lie, being cousin-german to it
when uttered, and yet capable of being explained away,--who is there
that has not seen these low arts and base appliances put into
practice, and becoming general, until success cannot be surely had by
any more honorable means ?--the result being a State ruled and ruined
by ignorant and shallow mediocrity, pert self-conceit, the greenness
of unripe intellect, vain of a school-boy's smattering of knowledge.
The faithless and the false in public and in political life, will be
faithless and false in private. The jockey in politics, like the
jockey on the race-course, is rotten from skin to core. Everywhere he
will see first to his own interests, and whoso leans on him will be
pierced with a broken reed. His ambition is ignoble, like himself; and
therefore he will seek to attain omce by ignoble means, as he will
seek to attain any other coveted object,--land, money, or reputation.
At length, office and honor are divorced. The place that the small and
shallow, the knave or the trickster, is deemed competent and fit to
fill, ceases to be worthy the ambition of the great and capable; or if
not, these shrink from a contest, the weapons to be used wherein are
unfit for a gentleman to handle. Then the habits of unprincipled
advocates in law courts are naturalized in Senates, and pettifoggers
wrangle there, when the fate of the nation and the lives of millions
are at stake. States are even begotten by villainy and brought forth
by fraud, and rascalities are justified by legislators claiming to be
honorable. Then contested elections are decided by perjured votes or
party considerations; and all the practices of the worst times of
corruption are revived and exaggerated in Republics.
It is strange that reverence for truth, that manliness and genuine
loyalty, and scorn of littleness and unfair advantage, and genuine
faith and godliness and large-heartedness should diminish, among
statesmen and people, as civilization advances, and freedom becomes
more general, and universal suffrage implies universal worth and
fitness ! In the age of Elizabeth, without universal suffrage, or
Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, or popular lecturers,
or Lycaea, the statesman, the merchant, the burgher, the sailor, were
all alike heroic, fearing God only, and man not at all. Let but a
hundred or two years elapse, and in a Monarchy or Republic of the same
race, nothing is less heroic than the merchant, the shrewd speculator,
the office-seeker, fearing man only, and God not at all. Reverence for
greatness dies out, and is succeeded by base envy of greatness. Every
man is in the way of many, either in the path to popularity or wealth.
There is a general feeling of satisfaction when a great statesman is
displaced, or a general, who has been for his brief hour the popular
idol, is unfortunate and sinks from his high estate. It becomes a
misfortune, if not a crime, to be above the popular level.
We should naturally suppose that a nation in distress would take
counsel with the wisest of its sons. But, on the contrary, great men
seem never so scarce as when they are most needed, and small men never
so bold to insist on infesting place, as when mediocrity and incapable
pretence and sophomoric greenness, and showy and sprightly
incompetency are most dangerous. When France was in the extremity of
revolutionary agony, she was governed by an assembly of provincial
pettifoggers, and Robespierre, Marat, and Couthon ruled in the place
of Mirabeau, Vergniaud, and Carnot. England was governed by the Rump
Parliament, after she had beheaded her king. Cromwell extinguished one
body, and Napoleon the other.
Fraud, falsehood, trickery, and deceit in national affairs are the
signs of decadence in States and precede convulsions or paralysis. To
bully the weak and crouch to the strong, is the policy of nations
governed by small mediocrity. The tricks of the canvass for office are
re-enacted in Senates. The Executive becomes the dispenser of
patronage, chiefly to the most unworthy; and men are bribed with
offices instead of money, to the greater ruin of the Commonwealth. The
Divine in human nature disappears, and interest, grced, and
selfishness takes it place. That is a sad and true allegory which
represents the companions of Ulysses changed by the enchantments of
Circe into swine.
* * * * *
"Ye cannot," said the Great Teacher, "serve God and Mammon." When the
thirst for wealth becomes general, it will be sought for as well
dishonestly as honestly; by frauds and overreachings, by the knaveries
of trade, the heartlessness of greedy speculation, by gambling in
stocks and commodities that soon demoralizes a whole community. Men
will speculate upon the needs of their neighbors and the distresses of
their country. Bubbles that, bursting, impoverish multitudes, will be
blown up by cunning knavery, with stupid credulity as its assistants
and instrument. Huge bankruptcies, that startle a country like the
earthquakes, and are more fatal, fraudulent assignments, engulfment of
the savings of the poor, expansions and collapses of the currency, the
crash of banks, the depreciation of Government securities, prey on the
savings of self-denial, and trouble with their depredations the first
nourishment of infancy and the last sands of life, and fill with
inmates the churchyards and lunatic asylums. But the sharper and
speculator thrives and fattens. If his country is fighting by a levy
en masse for her very existence, he aids her by depreciating her
paper, so that he may accumulate fabulous amounts with little outlay.
If his neighbor is distressed, he buys his property for a song. If he
administers upon an estate, it turns out insolvent, and the orphans
are paupers. If his bank explodes, he is found to have taken care of
himself in time. Society worships its paper-and-credit kings, as the
old Hindus and Egyptians worshipped their worthless idols, and often
the most obsequiously when in actual solid wealth they are the veriest
paupers. No wonder men think there ought to be another world, in which
the injustices of this may be atoned for, when they see the friends of
ruined families begging the wealthy sharpers to give alms to prevent
the orphaned victims from starving, until they may findways of
supporting themselves.
* * * * * *
States are chiefly avaricious of commerce and of territory. The latter
leads to the violation of treaties, encroachments upon feeble
neighbors, and rapacity toward their wards whose lands are coveted.
Republics are, in this, as rapacious and unprincipled as Despots,
never learning from history that inordinate expansion by rapine and
fraud has its inevitable consequences in dismen1berment or
subjugation. When a Republic begins to plunder its neighbors, the
words of doom are already written on its walls. There is a judgment
already pronounced of God upon whatever is unrighteous in the conduct
of national affairs. When civil war tears the vitals of a Republic,
let it look back and see if it has not been guilty of injustices; and
if it has, let it humble itself in the dust !
When a nation becomes possessed with a spirit of commercial greed,
beyond those just and fair limits set by a due regard to a moderate
and reasonable degree of general and individual prosperity, it is a
nation possessed by the devil of commercial avarice, a passion as
ignoble and demoralizing as avarice in the individual; and as this
sordid passion is baser and more unscrupulous than ambition, so it is
more hateful, and at last makes the infected nation to be regarded as
the enemy of the human race. To grasp at the lion's share of commerce,
has always at last proven the ruin of States, because it invariably
leads to injustices that make a State detestable; to a selfishness and
crooked policy that forbid other nations to be the friends of a State
that cares only for itself.
Commercial avarice in India was the parent of more atrocities and
greater rapacity, and cost more human lives, than the nobler ambition
for extended empire of Consular Rome. The nation that grasps at the
commerce of the world cannot but become selfish, calculating, dead to
the noblest impulses and sympathies which ought to actuate States. It
will submit to insults that wound its honor, rather than endanger its
commercial interests by war; while, to subserve those interests, it
will wage unjust war, on false or frivolous pretexts, its free people
cheerfully allying themselves with despots to crush a commercial rival
that has dared to exile its kings and elect its own ruler.
Thus the cold calculations of a sordid self-interest, in nations
commercially avaricious, always at last displace the sentiments and
lofty impulses of Honor and Generosity by which they rose to
greatness; which made Elizabeth and Cromwell alike the protectors of
Protestants beyond the four seas of England, against crowned Tyranny
and mitred Persecution; and, if they had lasted, would have forbidden
alliances with Czars and Autocrats and Bourbons to re-enthrone the
Tyrannies of Incapacity, and arm the Inquisition anew with its
instruments of torture. The soul of the avaricious nation petrifies,
like the soul of the individual who makes gold his god. The Despot
will occasionally act upon noble and generous impulses, and help the
weak against the strong, the right against the wrong. But commercial
avarice is essentially egotistic, grasping, faithless, overreaching,
crafty, cold, ungenerous, selfish, and calculating, controlled by
considerations of self-interest alone. Heartless and merciless, it has
no sentiments of pity, sympathy, or honor, to make it pause in its
remorseless career; and it crushes down all that is of impediment in
its way, as its keels of commerce crush under them the murmuring and
unheeded waves.
A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. A war for commercial
supremacy, upon some shallow pretext, is despicable, and more than
aught else demonstrates to what immeasurable depths of baseness men
and nations can descend. Commercial greed values the lives of men no
more than it values the lives of ants. The slave-trade is as
acceptable to a people enthralled by that greed, as the trade in ivory
or spices, if the profits are as large. It will by-and-by endeavor to
compound with God and quiet its own conscience, by compelling those to
whom it sold the slaves it bought or stole, to set them free, and
slaughtering them by hecatombs if they refuse to obey the edicts of
its philanthropy.
Justice in no wise consists in meting out to another that exact
measure of reward or punishment which we think and decree his merit,
or what we call his crime, which is more often merely his error,
deserves. The justice of the father is not incompatible with
forgiveness by him of the errors and offences of his child. The
Infinite Justice of God does not consist in meting out exact measures
of punishment for human frailties and sins. We are too apt to erect
our own little and narrow notions of what is right and just into the
law of justice, and to insist that God shall adopt that as His law; to
measure off something with our own little tape-line, and call it God's
love of justice. Continually we seek to ennoble our own ignoble love
of revenge and retaliationJ by misnaming it justice.
Nor does justice consist in strictly governing our conduct toward
other men by the rigid rules of legal right. If there were a community
anywhere, in which all stood upon the strictness of this rule, there
should be written over its gates, as a warning to the unfortunates
desiring admission to that inhospitable realm, the words which DANTE
says are written over the great gate of Hell: LET THOSE WHO ENTER HERE
LEAVE HOPE BEHIND ! It is not just to pay the laborer in field or
factory or workshop his current wages and no more, the lowest
market-value of his labor, for so long only as we need that labor and
he is able to work; for when sickness or old age overtakes him, that
is to leave him and his family to starve; and God will curse with
calamity the people in which the children of the laborer out of work
eat the boiled grass of the field, and mothers strangle their
children, that they may buy food for themselves with the charitable
pittance given for burial expenses. The rules of what is ordinarily
termed "Justice," may be punctiliously observed among the fallen
spirits that are the aristocracy of Hell.
* * * * * *
Justice, divorced from sympathy, is selfish indifference, not in the
least more laudable than misanthropic isolation. There is sympathy
even among the hair-like oscillatorias, a tribe of simple plants,
armies of which may be discovered with the aid of the microscope, in
the tiniest bit of scum from a stagnant pool. For these will place
themselves, as if it were by agreement, in separate companies, on the
side of a vessel containing them, and seem marching upward in rows;
and when a swarm grows weary of its situation, and has a mind to
change its quarters, each army holds on its way without confusion or
intermixture, proceeding with great regularity and order, as if under
the directions of wise leaders. The ants and bees give each other
mutual assistance, beyond what is required by that which human
creatures are apt to regard as the strict law of justice.
Surely we need but reflect a little, to be convinced that the
individual man is but a fraction of the unit of society, and that he
is indissolubly connected with the rest of his race. Not only the
actions, but the will and thoughts of other men make or mar his
fortunes, control his destinies, are unto him life or death, dishonor
or honor. The epidemics, physical and moral, contagious and
infectious, public opinion, popular delusions, enthusiasms, and the
other great electric phenomena and currents, moral and intellectual,
prove the universal sympathy. The vote of a single and obscure n1an,
the utterance of self-will, ignorance, conceit, or spite, deciding an
election and placing Folly or Incapacity or Baseness in a Senate,
involves the country in war, sweeps away our fortunes, slaughters our
sons, renders the labors of a life unavailing, and pushes on,
helpless, with all our intellect to resist, into the grave.
These considerations ought to teach us that justice to others and to
ourselves is the same; that we cannot define our duties by
mathematical lines ruled by the square, but must fill with them the
great circle traced by the compasses; that the circle of humanity is
the limit, and we are but the point in its centre, the drops in the
great Atlantic, the atom or particle, bound by a mys terious law of
attraction which we term sympathy to every other atom in the mass;
that the physical and moral welfare of others cannot be indifferent to
us; that we have a direct and immediate interest in the public
morality and popular intelligence, in the well-being and physical
comfort of the people at large. The ignorance of the people, their
pauperism and destitution, and consequent degradation, their
brutalization and demoralization, are all diseases; and we cannot rise
high enough above the people, nor shut ourselves up from them enough,
to escape the miasmatic contagion and the great magnetic currents.
Justice is peculiarly indispensable to nations. The unjust State is
doomed of God to calamity and ruin. This is the teaching of the
Eternal Wisdom and of history. "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but
wrong is a reproach to nations." "The Throne is established by
Righteousness. Let the lips of the Ruler pronounce the sentence that
is Divine; and his mouth do no wrong in judgment !" The nation that
adds province to province by fraud and violence, that encroaches on
the weak and plunders its wards, and violates its treaties and the
obligation of its contracts, and for the law of honor and fair-dealing
substitutes the exigencies of greed and the base precepts of policy
and craft and the ignoble tenets of expediency, is predestined to
destruction; for here, as with the individual, the consequences of
wrong are inevitable and eternal.
A sentence is written against all that is unjust, written by God in
the nature of man and in the nature of the Universe, because it is in
the nature of the Infinite God. No wrong is really successful. The
gain of injustice is a loss; its pleasure, suffering. Iniquity often
seems to prosper, but its success is its defeat and shame. If its
consequences pass by the doer, they fall upon and crush his children.
It is a philosophical, physical, and moral truth, in the form of a
threat, that God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children,
to the third and fourth generation of those who violate His laws.
After a long while, the day of reckoning always comes, to nation as to
individual; and always the knave deceives himself, and proves a
failure.
Hypocrisy is the homage that vice and wrong pay to virtue and justice.
It is Satan attempting to clothe himself in the angelic vesture of
light. It is equally detestable in morals, politics, and religion; in
the man and in the nation. To do injustice under the pretence of
equity and fairness; to reprove vice in public and commit it in
private; to pretend to charitable opinion and censoriously condemn; to
profess the principles of Masonic beneficence, and close the ear to
the wail of distress and the cry of suffering; to eulogize the
intelligence of the people, and plot to deceive and betray them by
means of their ignorance and simplicity; to prate of purity, and
peculate; of honor, and basely abandon a sinking cause; of
disinterestedness, and sell one's vote for place and power, are
hypocrisies as common as they are infamous and disgraceful. To steal
the livery of the Court of God to serve the Devil withal; to pretend
to believe in a God of mercy and a Redeemer of love, and persecute
those of a different faith; to devour widows' houses, and for a
pretence make long prayers; to preach continence, and wallow in lust;
to inculcate humility, and in pride surpass Lucifer; to pay tithe, and
omit the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith; to
strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel; to make clean the outside of
the cup and platter, keeping them full within of extortion and excess;
to appear outwardly righteous unto men, but within be full of
hypocrisy and iniquity, is indeed to be like unto whited sepulchres,
which appear beautiful outward, but are within full of bones of the
dead and of all uncleanness.
The Republic cloaks its ambition with the pretence of a desire and
duty to "extend the area of freedom," and claims it as its "manifest
destiny" to annex other Republics or the States or Provinces of others
to itself, by open violence, or under obsolete, empty, and fraudulent
titles. The Empire founded by a successful soldier, claims its ancient
or natural boundaries, and makes necessity and its safety tlle plea
for open robbery. The great Merchant Nation, gaining foothold in the
Orient, finds a continual necessity for extending its dominion by
arms, and subjugates India. The great Royalties and Despotisms,
without a plea, partition among themselves a Kingdom, dismember
Poland, and prepare to wrangle over the dominions of the Crescent. To
maintain the balance of power is a plea for the obliteration of
States. Carthage, Genoa, and Venice, commercial Cities only, must
acquire territory by force or fraud, and become States. Alexander
marches to the Indus; Tamerlane seeks universal empire; the Saracens
conquer Spain and threaten Vienna.
The thirst for power is never satisfied. It is insatiable. Neither men
nor nations ever have power enough. When Rome was the mistress of the
world, the Emperors caused themselves to be worshipped as gods. The
Church of Rome claimed despotism over the soul, and over the whole
life from the cradle to the grave. It gave and sold absolutions for
past and future sins. It claimed to be infallible in matters of faith.
It decimated Europe to purge it of heretics. It decimated America to
convert the Mexicans and Peruvians. It gave and took away thrones; and
by excommunication and interdict closed the gates of Paradise against
Nations, Spain, haughty with its dominion over the Indies, endeavored
to crush out Protestantism in the Netherlands, while Philip the Second
married the Queen of England, and the pair sought to win that kingdom
back to its allegiance to the Papal throne. Afterward Spain attempted
to conquer it with her "invincible" Armada. Napoleon set his relatives
and captains on thrones, and parcelled among them half of Europe. The
Czar rules over an empire more gigantic than Rome. The history of all
is or will be the same,--acquisition, dismemberment, ruin. There is a
judgment of God against all that is unjust.
To seek to subjugate the will of others and take the soul captive,
because it is the exercise of thc highest power, seems to be the
highest object of human ambition. It is at the bottom of all
proselyting and propagandism, from that of Mesmer to that of the
Church of Rome and the French Republic. That was the apostolate alike
of Joshua and of Mahomet. Masonry alone preaches Toleration, the right
of man to abide by his own faith, the right of all States to govern
themselves. It rebukes alike the monarch who seeks to extend his
dominions by conquest, the Church that claims the right to repress
heresy by fire and steel, and the confederation of States that insist
on maintaining a union by force and restoring brotherhood by slaughter
and subjugation.
It is natural, when we are wronged, to desire revenge; and to persuade
ourselves that we desire it less for our own satisfaction than to
prevent a repetition of the wrong, to which the doer would be
encouraged by immunity coupled with the profit of the wrong. To submit
to be cheated is to encourage the cheater to continue; and we are
quite apt to regard ourselves as God's chosen instruments to inflict
His vengeance, and for Him and in His stead to discourage wrong by
making it fruitless and its punishment sure. Revenge has been said to
be "a kind of wild justice;" but it is always taken in anger, and
therefore is unworthy of a great soul, which ought not to suffer its
equanimity to be disturbed by ingratitude or villainy. The injuries
done us by the base are as much unworthy of our angry notice as those
done us by the insects and the beasts; and when we crush the adder, or
slay the wolf or hyena, we should do it without being moved to anger,
and with no more feeling of revenge than we have in rooting up a
noxious weed.
And if it be not in human nature not to take revenge by way of
punishment, let the Mason truly consider that in doing so he is God's
agent, and so let his revenge be measured by justice and tempered by
mercy. The law of God is, that the consequences of wrong and cruelty
and crime shall be their punishment; and the injured and the wronged
and the indignant are as much His instruments to enforce that law, as
the diseases and public detestation, and the verdict of history and
the execration of posterity are. No one will say that the Inquisitor
who has racked and burned the innocent; the Spaniard who hewed Indian
infants, living, into pieces with his sword, and fed the mangled limbs
to his bloodhounds; the military tyrant who has shot men without
trial, the knave who has robbed or betrayed his State, the fraudulent
banker or bankrupt who has beggared orphans, the public officer who
has violated his oath, the judge who has sold injustice, the
legislator who has enabled Incapacity to work the ruin of the State,
ought not to be punished. Let them be so; and let the injured or the
sympathizing be the instruments of God's just vengeance; but always
out of a higher feeling than mere personal revenge.
Remember that every moral characteristic of man finds its prototype
an1ong creatures of lower intelligence; that the cruel foulness of the
hyena, the savage rapacity of the wolf, the merciless rage of the
tiger, the crafty treachery of the panther, are found among mankind,
and ought to excite no other emotion, when found in the man, than when
found in the beast. Why should the true man be angry with the geese
that hiss, the peacocks that strut, the asses that bray, and the apes
that imitate and chatter, although they wear the human form? Always,
also, it remains true, that it is more noble to forgive than to take
revenge; and that, in general, we ought too much to despise those who
wrong us, to feel the emotion of anger, or to desire revenge.
At the sphere of the Sun, you are in the region of LIGHT. * * * * The
Hebrew word for gold, ZAHAB, also means Light, of which the Sun is to
the Earth the great source. So, in the great Oriental allegory of the
Hebrews, the River PISON compasses the land of Gold or Light; and the
River GIHON the land of Ethiopia or Darkness.
What light is, we no more know than the ancients did. According to the
modern hypothesis, it is not composed of luminous particles shot out
from the sun with immense velocity; but that body only impresses, on
the ether which fills all space, a powerful vibratory movement that
extends, in the form of luminous waves, beyond the most distant
planets, supplying them with light and heat. To the ancients, it was
an outflowing from the Deity. To us, as to them, it is the apt symbol
of truth and knowledge. To us, also, the upward journey of the soul
through the Spheres is symbolical; but we are as little informed as
they whence the soul comes, where it has its origin, and whither it
goes after death. They endeavored to have some belief and faith, some
creed, upon those points. At the present day, men are satisfied to
think nothing in regard to all that, and only to believe that the soul
is a something separate from the body and out-living it, but whether
existing before it, neither to inquire nor care. No one asks whether
it emanates from the Deity, or is created out of nothing, or is
generated like the body, and the issue of the souls of the father and
the mother. Let us not smile, therefore, at the ideas of the ancients,
until we have a better belief; but accept their symbols as meaning
that the soul is of a Divine nature, originating in a sphere nearer
the Deity, and returning to that when freed from the enthralhment of
the body; and that it can only return there when purified of all the
sordidness and sin which have, as it were, become part of its
substance, by its connection with the body.
It is not strange that, thousands of years ago, men worshipped the
Sun, and that to-day that worship continues among the Parsees.
Originally they looked beyond the orb to the invisible God, of whom
the Sun's light, seemingly identical with generation and life, was the
manifestation and outflowing. Long before the Chaldcean shepherds
watched it on their plains, it came up regularly, as it now does, in
the morning, like a god, and again sank, like a king retiring, in the
west, to return again in due time in the same array of majesty. We
worship Immutability. It was that steadfast, immutable character of
the Sun that the men of Baalbec worshipped. His light-giving and
life-giving powers were secondary attributes. The one grand idea that
compelled worship was the characteristic of God which they saw
reflected in his light, and fancied they saw in its originality the
changelessness of Deity. He had seen thrones crwnble, earthquakes
shake the world and hurl down mountains. Beyond Olympus, beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, he had gone daily to his abode, and had come
daily again in the morning to behold the temples they built to his
worsl1ip. They personified him as BRAHMA, AMUN, OSRIS, BEL, ADONIS,
MALKARTH, MITHRAS, and APOLLO; and the nations that did so grew old
and died. Moss grew on the capitals of the great columns of his
temples, and he shone on the moss. Grain by grain the dust of his
temples crumbled and fell, and was borne off on the wind, and still he
shone on crumbling column and architrave. The roof fell crashing on
the pavement, and he shone in on the Holy of Holies with unchanging
rays. It was not strange that men worshipped the Sun.
There is a water-plant, on whose broad leaves the drops of water roll
about without uniting, like drops of mercury. So arguments on points
of faith, in politics or religion, roll over the surface of the mind.
An argument that convinces one mind has no effect on another. Few
intellects, or souls that are the negations of intellect, have any
logical power or capacity. There is a singular obliquity in the human
mind that makes the false logic more effective than the true with
nine-tenths of those who are regarded as men of intellect. Even among
the judges, not one in ten can argue logically. Each mind sees the
truth, distorted through its own medium. Truth, to most men, is like
matter in the spheroidal state. Like a drop of cold water on the
surface of a red-hot metal plate, it dances, trembles, and spins, and
never comes into contact with it; and the mind may be plunged into
truth, as the hand moistened with sulphurous acid may into melted
metal, and be not even warmed by the immersion.
* * * * * *
The word Khairum or Khurum is a compound one. Gesenius renders Khurum
by the word noble or free-born: Khur meaning white, noble. It also
means the opening of a window, the socket of the eye. Khri also means
white, or an opening; and Khris, the orb of the Sun, in Job viii. 13
and x. 7. Krishna is the Hindu Sun-God. Khur, the Parsi word, is the
literal name of the Sun.
From Kur or Khur, the Sun, comes Khora, a name of Lower Egypt. The
Sun, Bryant says in his Mythology, was called Kur; and Plutarch says
that the Persians called the Sun Kuros. Kurios, Lord, in Greek, like
Adonai, Lord, in Phcenician and Hebrew, was applied to the Sun. Many
places were sacred to the Sun, and called Kura, Kuria, Kuropolis,
Kurene, Kureschata, Kuresta, and Corusia in Scythia.
The Egyptian Deity called by the Greeks "Horus," was Her-Ra, or
Har-oeris, Hor or Har, the Sun. Hari is a Hindu name of the Sun.
Ari-al, Ar-es, Ar, Aryaman, Areimonios, the AR meaning Fire or Flame,
are of the same kindred. Hewnes or Har-mes, (Aram, Remus, Haram,
Harameias), was Kadmos, the Divine Light or Wisdom. Mar-kuri, says
Movers, is Mar, the Sun.
In the Hebrew, AOOR, is Light, Fire, or the Sun. Cyrus, said Ctesias,
was so named from Kuros, the Sun. Kuris, Hesychius says, was Adonis.
Apollo, the Sun-god, was called Kurraios, from Kurra, a city in
Phocis. The people of Kurene, originally Ethiopians or Cuthites,
worshipped the Sun under the title of Achoor and Achor.
We know, through a precise testimony in the ancient annals of Tsur,
that the principal festivity of Mal-karth, the incarnation of the Sun
at the Winter Solstice, held at Tsur, was called his rebirth or his
awakening, and that it was celebrated by means of a pyre, on which the
god was supposed to regain, through the aid of fire, a new life. This
festival was celebrated in the month Peritius (Barith), the second day
of which corresponded to the 25th of December. KHUR-UM, King of Tyre,
Movers says, first performed this ceremony. These facts we learn from
Josephus, Servius on the AEneid, and the Dionysiacs of Nonnus; and
through a coincidence that cannot be fortuitous, the same day was at
Rome the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the festal day of the invincible
Sun. Under this title, HERCULES, HAR-acles, was worshipped at Tsur.
Thus, while the temple was being erected, the death and resurrection
of a Sun-God was annually represented at Tsur, by Solomon's ally, at
the winter solstice, by the pyre of MAL-KARIH, the Tsurian Haracles.
AROERIS or HAR-oeris, the elder HORUS, is from the same old root that
in the Hebrew has the form Aur, or, with the definite article
prefixed, Haur, Light, or the Light, splendor, flame, the Sun and his
rays. The hieroglyphic of the younger HORUS was the point in a circle;
of the Elder, a pair of eyes; and the festival of the thirtieth day of
the month Epiphi, when the sun and moon were supposed to be in the
same right line with the earth, was called "The birth-day of the eyes
of Horus."
In a papyrus published by Champollion, this god is styled "Haroeri,
Lord of the Solar Spirits, the beneficent eye of the Sun." Plutarch
calls him "Har-pocrates," but there is no trace of the latter part of
the name in the hieroglyphic legends. He is the son of OSIRIS and
Isrs; and is represented sitting on a throne supported by lions; the
same word, in Egyptian, meaning Lion and Sun. So Solomon made a great
throne of ivory, plated with gold, with six steps, at each arm of
which was a lion, and one on each side to each step, making seven on
each side.
Again, the Hebrewword Khi, means "living;" and ram, "was, or shall be,
raised or lifted up." The latter is the same as room, aroom, harum,
whence Aram, for Syria, or Aramoea, High-land. Khairum, therefore,
would mean "was raised up to life, or living."
So, in Arabic, hrm, an unused root, meant, "was high," "made great,"
"exalted;" and Hirm means an ox, the symbol of the Sun in Taurus, at
the Vernal Equinox.
KHURUM, therefore, improperly called Hiram, is KHUR-OM, the same as
Her-ra, Her-mes, and Her-acles, the "Heracles Tyrius Invictus," the
personification of Light and the Son, the Mediator, Redeemer, and
Saviour. From the Egyptian word Ra came the Coptic Ouro, and the
Hebrew Aur, Light. Har-oeri, is Hor or Har, the chief or master. Hor
is also heat; and hora, season or hour; and hence in several African
dialects, as names of the Sun, Airo, Ayero, eer, uiro, ghurrah, and
the like. The royal name rendered Pharaoh, was PHRA, that is, Pai-ra,
the Sun.
The legend of the contest between Hor-ra and Set, or Set-nu-bi, the
same as Bar or Bal, is older than that of the strife between Osiris
and Typhon; as old, at least, as the nineteenth dynasty. It is called
in the Book of the Dead, "The day of the battle between Horus and
Set." The later myth connects itself with Phoenicia and Syria. The
body of OSIRIS went ashore at Gebal or Byblos, sixty miles above Tsur.
You will not fail to notice that in the name of each murderer of
Khurum, that of the Evil God Bal is found.
* * * * *
Har-oeri was the god of TIME, as well as of Life. The Egyptian legend
was that the King of Byblos cut down the tamarisk-tree containing the
body of OSIRIS, and made of it a column for his palace. Isis, employed
in the palace, obtained possession of the column, took the body out of
it, and carried it away. Apuleius describes her as "a beautiful
female, over whose divine neck her long thick hair hung in graceful
ringlets ;" and in the procession female attendants, with ivory combs,
seemed to dress and ornament the royal hair of the goddess. The
palm-tree, and the lamp in the shape of a boat, appeared in the
procession. If the symbol we are speaking of is not a mere modern
invention, it is to these things it alludes.
The identity of the legends is also confirmed by this hieroglyphic
picture, copied from an ancient Egyptian monument, which may also
enlighten you as to the Lion's grip and the Master's gavel.
in the ancient Phcenician character, and in the Samaritan, A B, (the
two letters representing the numbers 1, 2, or Unity and Duality, means
Father, and is a primitive noun, common to all the Semitic languages.
It also means an Ancestor, Originator, Inventor, Head, Chief or Ruler,
Manager, Overseer, Master, Priest, Prophet.
is simply Father, when it is in construction, that is, when it
precedes another word, and in English the preposition "of" is
interposed, as Abi-Al, the Father of Al.
Also, the final Yod means "my"; so that by itself means "My father.
David my father, 2 Chron. ii. 3. (Vav) final is the possessive pronoun
"his"; and Abiu (which we read "Abif") means "of my father's." Its
full meaning, as connected with the name of Khurum, no doubt is,
"formerly one of my father's servants," or "slaves."
The name of the Phcenician artificer is, in Samuel and Kings, [2 Sam.
v. 11; 1 Kings v. 15; 1 Kings vii. 40]. In Chronicles it is with the
addition of [2 Chron. ii. 12]; and of [2 Chron. iv. 16].
It is merely absurd to add the word "Abif," or "Abiff," as part of the
name of the artificer. And it is almost as absurd to add the word
"Abi," which was a title and not part of the name. Joseph says [Gen.
xlv. 8], "God has constituted me 'Ab l'Paraah, as Father to Paraah,
i.e., Vizier or Prime Minister." So Haman was called the Second Father
of Artaxerxes; and when King Khurum used the phrase "Khurum Abi," he
meant that the artificer he sent Schlomoh was the principal or chief
workman in his line at Tsur.
A medal copied by Montfaucon exhibits a female nursing a child, with
ears of wheat in her hand, and the legend (Iao). She is seated on
clouds, a star at her head, and three ears of wheat rising from an
altar before her.
HORUS was the mediator, who was buried three days, was regenerated,
and triumphed over the evil principle.
The word HERI, in Sanscrit, means Shepherd, as well as Savior. CRISHNA
is called Heri, as Jesus called Himself the Good Shepherd.
Khur, means an aperture of a window, a cave, or the eye. Also it means
white.
It also means an opening, and noble, free-born, high-born.
KHURM means consecrated, devoted; in AEthiopic. It is the name of a
city, [Josh. xix. 38]; and of a man, [Ezr. ii. 32, x. 31; Neh. iii.
11].
Khirah, means nobility, a noble race.
Buddha is declared to comprehend in his own person the essence of the
Hindu Trimurti; and hence the tri-literal monosyllable Om or Aum is
applied to him as being essentially the same as Brahma-Vishnu-Siva. He
is the same as Hermes, Thoth, Taut, and Teutates. One of his names is
Heri-maya or Hermaya, which are evidently the same name as Hermes and
Khirm or Khurm. Heri, in Sanscrit, means Lord.
A learned Brother places over the two symbolic pillars, from right to
left, the two words IHU and BAL: followed by the hieroglyphic
equivalent, of the Sun-God, Amun-ra. Is it an accidental coincidence,
that in the name of each murderer are the two names of the Good and
Evil Deities of the Hebrews; for Yu-bel is but Yehu-Bal or Yeho-Bal?
and that the three final syllables of the names, a, o, um, make
A.'.U.'.M.'. the sacred word of the Hindoos, meaning the Triune God,
Life-giving, Life-preserving, Life-destroying: represented by the
mystic character ?
The genuine acacia, also, is the thorny tamarisk, the same tree which
grew up around the body of Osiris. It was a sacred tree among the
Arabs, who made of it the idol Al-Uzza, which Mohammed destroyed. It
is abundant as a bush in the Desert of Thur: and of it the "crown of
thorns" was composed, which was set on the forehead of Jesus of
Nazareth. It is a fit type of immortality on account of its tenacity
of life; for it has been known, when planted as a door-post, to take
root again and shoot out budding boughs over the threshold.
* * * * *
Every commonwealth must have its periods of trial and transition,
especially if it engages in war. It is certain at some time to be
wholly governed by agitators appealing to all the baser elements of
the popular nature; by moneyed corporations; by those enriched by the
depreciation of government securities or paper; by small attorneys,
schemers, money-jobbers, speculators and adventurers--an ignoble
oligarchy, enriched by the distresses of the State, and fattened on
the miseries of the people. Then all the deceitful visions of equality
and the rights of man end; and the wronged and plundered State can
regain a real liberty only by passing through "great varieties of
untried being," purified in its transmigration by fire and blood.
In a Republic, it soon comes to pass that parties gather round the
negative and positive poles of some opinion or notion, and that the
intolerant spirit of a triumphant majority will allow no deviation
from the standard of orthodoxy which it has set up for itself. Freedom
of opinion will be professed and pretended to, but every one will
exercise it at the peril of being banished from political communion
with those who hold the reins and prescribe the policy to be pursued.
Slavishness to party and obsequiousness to the popular whims go hand
in hand. Political independence only occurs in a fossil state; and
men's opinions grow out of the acts they have been constrained to do
or sanction. Flattery, either of individual or people, corrupts both
the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to
the people than to kings. A Ccesar, securely seated in power, cares
less for it than a free democracy; nor will his appetite for it grow
to exorbitance, as that of a people will, until it becomes insatiate.
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they
please; to a people, it is to a great extent the same. If accessible
to flattery, as this is always interested, and resorted to on low and
base motives, and for evil purposes, either individual or people is
sure, in doing what it pleases, to do what in honor and conscience
should have been left undone. One ought not even to risk
congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints; and as both
individuals and peoples are prone to make a bad use of power, to
flatter them, which is a sure way to mislead them, well deserves to be
called a crime.
The first principle in a Republic ought to be, "that no man or set of
men is entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from
the community, but in consideration of public services; which not
being descendible, neither ought the omces of magistrate, legislature,
nor judge, to be hereditary." It is a volume of Truth and Wisdom, a
lesson for the study of nations, embodied in a single sentence, and
expressed in language which every man can understand. If a deluge of
despotism were to overthrow the world, and destroy all institutions
under which freedom is protected, so that they should no longer be
remembered among men, this sentence, preserved, would be sufficient to
rekindle the fires of liberty and revive the race of freemen.
But, to preserve liberty, another must be added: "that a free State
does not confer office as a reward, especially for questionable
services, unless she seeks her own ruin; but all officers are employed
by her, in consideration solely of their will and ability to render
service in the future; and therefore that the best and most competent
are always to be preferred."
For, if there is to be any other rule, that of hereditary succession
is perhaps as good as any. By no other rule is it possible to preserve
the liberties of the State. By no other to intrust the power of making
the laws to those only who have that keen instinctive sense of
injustice and wrong which enables them to detect baseness and
corruption in their most secret hiding-places, and that moral courage
and generous manliness and gallant independence that make them
fearless in dragging out the perpetrators to the light of day, and
calling down upon them the scorn and indignation of the world. The
flatterers of the people are never such men. On the contrary, a time
always comes to a Republic, when it is not content, like Liberius,
with a single Sejanus, but must have a host; and when those most
prominent in the lead of affairs are men without reputation,
statesmanship, ability, or information, the mere hacks of party, owing
their places to trickery and want of qualification, with none of the
qualities of head or heart that make great and wise men, and, at the
same time, filled with all the narrow conceptions and bitter
intolerance of political bigotry. These die; and the world is none the
wiser for what they have said and done. Their names sink in the
bottomless pit of oblivion; but their acts of folly or knavery curse
the body politic and at last prove its ruin.
Politicians, in a free State, are generally hollow, heartless, and
selfish. Their own aggrandisement is the end of their patriotism; and
they always look with secret satisfaction on the disappointment or
fall of one whose loftier genius and superior talents overshadow their
own self-importance, or whose integrity and incorruptible honor are in
the way of their selfish ends. The influence of the small aspirants is
always against the great man. His accession to power may be almost for
a lifetime. One of themselves will be more easily displaced, and each
hopes to succeed him; and so it at length comes to pass that men
impudently aspire to and actually win the highest stations, who are
unfit for the lowest clerkships; and incapacity and mediocrity become
the surest passports to once.
The consequence is, that those who feel themselves competent and
qualified to serve the people, refuse with digust to enter into the
struggle for office, where the wicked and jesuitical doctrine that all
is fair in politics is an excuse for every species of low villainy;
and those who seek even the highest places of the State do not rely
upon the power of a magnanimous spirit, on the sympathizing impulses
of a great soul, to stir and move the people to generous, noble, and
heroic resolves, and to wise and manly action; but, like spaniels
erect on their hind legs, with fore-paws obsequiously suppliant, fawn,
flatter, and actually beg for votes. Rather than descend to this, they
stand contemptuously aloof, disdainfully refusing to court the people,
and acting on the maxim, that "mankind has no title to demand that we
shall serve them in spite of themselves."
* * * * * *
It is lamentable to see a country split into factions, each following
this or that great or brazen-fronted leader with a blind, unreasoning,
unquestioning hero-worship; it is contemptible to see it divided into
parties, whose sole end is the spoils of victory, and their chiefs the
low, the base, the venal and the snlall. Such a country is in the last
stages of decay, and near its end, no matter how prosperous it may
seem to be. It wrangles over the volcano and the earthquake. But it is
certain that no government can be conducted by the men of the people,
and for the people, without a rigid adherence to those principles
which our reason commends as fixed and sound. These must be the tests
of parties, men, and measures. Once determined, they must be
inexorable in their application, and all must either come up to the
standard or declare against it. Men may betray: principles never can.
Oppression is one invariable consequence of misplaced confidence in
treacherous man, it is never the result of the working or application
of a sound, just, well-tried principle. Compromises which bring
fundamental principles into doubt, in order to unite in one party men
of antagonistic creeds, are frauds, and end in ruin, the just and
natural consequence of fraud. Whenever you have settled upon your
theory and creed, sanction no departure from it in practice, on any
ground of expediency. It is the Master's word. Yield it up neither to
flattery nor force ! Let no defeat or persecution rob you of it!
Believe that he who once blundered in statesmanship will blunder
again; that such blunders are as fatal as crimes; and that political
near-sightedness does not improve by age. There are always more
impostors than seers among public men, more false prophets than true
ones, more prophets of Baal than of Jehovah; and Jerusalem is always
in danger from the Assyrians.
Sallust said that after a State has been corrupted by luxury and
idleness, it may by its mere greatness bear up under the burden of its
vices. But even while he wrote, Rome, of which he spoke, had played
out her masquerade of freedom Other causes than luxury and sloth
destroy Republics. If small, their larger neighbors extinguish thelll
by absorption. If of great extent, the cohesive force is too feeble to
hold them together, and they fall to pieces by their own weight. The
paltry ambition of small men disintegrates them. The want of wisdom in
their councils creates exasperating issues. Usurpation of power plays
its part, incapacity seconds corruption, the storm rises, and the
fragments of the incoherent raft strew the sandy shores, reading to
mankind another lesson for it to disregard.
The Forty-seventh Proposition is older than Pythagoras. It is this:
"In every right-angled triangle, the sum of the squares of the base
and perpendicular is equal to the square of the hypothenuse."
The square of a number is the product of that number, multiplied by
itself. Thus, 4 is the square of 2, and 9 of 3.
The first ten numbers are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;
their squares are .........1, 4, 9,16,25,36,49,64,81,100;
and ...........................3,5, 7, 9,11,13,15,17, 19
are the differences between each square and that which precedes it;
giving us the sacred numbers, 3, 5, 7, and 9
Of these numbers, the square of 3 and 4, added together, gives the
square of 5; and those of 6 and 8, the square of 10; and if a
right-angled triangle be formed, the base measuring 3 or 6 parts, and
the perpendicular 4 or 8 parts, the hypothenuse will be 5 or 10 parts;
and if a square is erected on each side, these squares being
subdivided into squares each side of which is one part in length,
there will be as many of these in the square erected on the
hypothenuse as in the other two squares together.
Now the Egyptians arranged their deities in Triads the FATHER or the
Spirit or Active Principle or Generative Power; the MOTHER, or Matter,
or the Passive Principle, or the Conceptive Power; and the SON, Issue
or Product, the Universe, proceeding from the two principles. These
were OSRIS, ISIS, and HORUS. In the same way, PLATO gives us thought
the Father; Primitive Matter the Mother; and Kosmos the World, the
Son, the Universe animated by a soul. Triads of the same kind are
found in the Kabalah.
PLUTARCH says, in his book De Iside et Osiride, "But the better and
diviner nature consists of three,--that which exists within the
Intellect only, and Matter, and that which proceeds from these, which
the Greeks call Kosmos; of which three, Plato is wont to call the
Intelligible, the 'Idea, Exemplar, and Father', Matter, 'the Mother,
the Nurse, and the place and receptacle of generation'; and the issue
of these two, 'the Offspring and Genesis,"' the KOSMOS, "a word
signifying equally Beauty and Order, or the Universe itself." You will
not fail to notice that Beauty is symbolized by the Junior Warden in
the South. Plutarch continues to say that the Egyptians compared the
universal nature to what they called the most beautiful and perfect
triangle, as Plato does, in that nuptial diagram, as it is termed,
which he has introduced into his Commonwealth. When he adds that this
triangle is right-angled, and its sides respectively as 3, 4, and 5;
and he says, "We must suppose that the perpendicular is designed by
them to represent the masculine nature, the base the feminine, and
that the hypothenuse is to be looked upon as the offspring of both;
and accordingly the first of them will aptly enough represent OSIRIS,
or the prime cause; the second, ISIS, or the receptive capacity; the
last, HORUS, or the common effect of the other two. For 3 is the first
number which is composed of even and odd; and 4 is a square whose side
is equal to the even number 2; but 5, being generated, as it were, out
of the preceding numbers, 2 and 3, may be said to have an equal
relation to both of them, as to its common parents."
* * * * * *
The clasped hands is another symbol which was used by PYTHAGORAS. It
represented the number 10, the sacred number in which all the
preceding numbers were contained; the number expressed by the
mysterious TERACTYS, a figure borrowed by him and the Hebrew priests
alike from the Egyptian sacred science, and which ought to be replaced
among the symbols of the Master's degree, where it of right belongs.
The Hebrews formed it thus, with the letters of the Divine name:
The Tetractys thus leads you, not only to the study of the Pythagorean
philosophy as to numbers, but also to the Kabalah, and will aid you in
discovering the True Word, and understanding what was meant by "The
Music of the Spheres." Modern science strikingly confirms the ideas of
Pythagoras in regard to the properties of numbers, and that they
govern in the Universe. Long before his time, nature had extracted her
cube-roots and her squares.
* * * * * *
All the FORCES at man's disposal or under man's control, or subject to
man's influence, are his working tools. The friendship and sympathy
that knit heart to heart are a force like the attraction of cohesion,
by which the sandy particles became the solid rock. If this law of
attraction or cohesion were taken away, the material worlds and suns
would dissolve in an instant into thin invisible vapor. If the ties of
friendship, affection, and love were annulled, mankind would become a
raging multitude of wild and savage beasts of prey. The sand hardens
into rock under the immense superincumbent pressure of the ocean,
aided sometimes by the irresistible energy of fire; and when the
pressure of calamity and danger is upon an order or a country, the
members or the citizens ought to be the more closely united by the
cohesion of sympathy and inter-dependence.
Morality is a force. It is the magnetic attraction of the heart toward
Truth and Virtue. The needle, imbued with this mystic property, and
pointing unerringly to the north, carries the mariner safely over the
trackless ocean, through storm and darkness, until his glad eyes
behold the beneficent beacons that welcome him to safe and hospitable
harbor. Then the hearts of those who love him are gladdened, and his
home made happy; and this gladness and happiness are due to the
silent, unostentatious, unerring monitor that was the sailor's guide
over the weltering waters. But if drifted too far northward, he finds
the needle no longer true, but pointing elsewhere than to the north,
what a feeling of helplessness falls upon the dismayed mariner, what
utter loss of energy and courage ! It is as if the great axioms of
morality were to fail and be no longer true, leaving the human soul to
drift helplessly, eyeless like Prometheus, at the mercy of the
uncertain, faithless currents of the deep.
Honor and Duty are the pole-stars of a Mason, the Dioscuri, by never
losing sight of which he may avoid disastrous shipwreck. These
Palinurus watched, until, overcome by sleep, and the vessel no longer
guided truly, he fell into and was swallowed up by the insatiable sea.
So the Mason who loses sight of these, and is no longer governed by
their beneficent and potential force, is lost, and sinking out of
sight, will disappear unhonored and unwept.
The force of electricity, analogous to that of sympathy, and by means
of which great thoughts or base suggestions, the utterances of noble
or ignoble natures, flash instantaneously over the nerves of nations;
the force of growth, fit type of immortality, Iying dormant three
thousand years in the wheat-grains buried with their mummies by the
old Egyptians; the forces of expansion and contraction, developed in
the earthquake and the tornado, and giving birth to the wonderful
achievements of steam, have their parallelisms in the moral world, in
individuals, and nations. Growth is a necessity for nations as for
men. Its cessation is the beginning of decay. In the nation as well as
the plant it is mysterious, and it is irresistible. The earthquakes
that rend nations asunder, overturn thrones, and engulf monarchies and
republics, have been long prepared for, like the volcanic eruption.
Revolutions have long roots in the past. The force exerted is in
direct proportion to the previous restraint and compression. The true
statesman ought to see in progress the causes that are in due time to
produce them; and he who does not is but a blind leader of the blind.
The great changes in nations, like the geological changes of the
earth, are slowly and continuously wrought. The waters, falling from
Heaven as rain and dews, slowly disintegrate the granite mountains;
abrade the plains, leaving hills and ridges of denudation as their
monuments; scoop out the valleys, fill up the seas, narrow the rivers,
and after the lapse of thousands on thousands of silent centuries,
prepare the great alluvia for the growth of that plant, the snowy
envelope of whose seeds is to employ the looms of the world, and the
abundance or penury of whose crops shall determine whether the weavers
and spinners of other realms shall have work to do or starve.
So Public Opinion is an immense force; and its currents are as
inconstant and incomprehensible as those of the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, in free governments, it is omnipotent; and the business
of the statesman is to find the means to shape, control, and direct
it. According as that is done, it is beneficial and conservative, or
destructive and ruinous. The Public Opinion of the civilized world is
International Law; and it is so great a force, though with no certain
and fixed boundaries, that it can even constrain the victorious despot
to be generous, and aid an oppressed people in its struggle for
independence.
Habit is a great force; it is second nature, even in trees. It is as
strong in nations as in men. So also are Prejudices, which are given
to men and nations as the passions are,--as forces, valuable, if
properly and skillfully availed of; destructive, if unskillfully
handled.
Above all, the Love of Country, State Pride, the Love of Home, are
forces of immense power. Encourage them all. Insist upon them in your
public men. Permanency of home is necessary to patriotism. A migratory
race will have little love of country. State pride is a mere theory
and chimera, where men remove from State to State with indifference,
like the Arabs, who camp here to-day and there to-morrow.
If you have Eloquence, it is a mighty force. See that you use it for
good purposes--to teach, exhort, ennoble the people, and not to
mislead and corrupt them. Corrupt and venal orators are the assassins
of the public liberties and of public morals.
The Will is a force; its limits as yet unknown. It is in the power of
the will that we chiefly see the spiritual and divine in man. There is
a seeming identity between his will that moves other men, and the
Creative Will whose action seems so incomprehensible. It is the men of
will and action, not the men of pure intellect, that govern the world.
Finally, the three greatest moral forces are FAITH, which is the only
true WISDOM, and the very foundation of all government; HOPE, which is
STRENGTH, and insures success; and CHARITY, which is BEAUTY, and alone
makes animated, united effort possible. These forces are within the
reach of all men; and an association of men, actuated by them, ought
to exercise an immense power in the world. If Masonry does not, it is
because she has ceased to possess them.
Wisdom in the man or statesman, in king or priest, largely consists in
the due appreciation of these forces; and upon the general
non-appreciation of some of them the fate of nations often depends.
What hecatombs of lives often hang upon the not weighing or not
sumciently weighing the force of an idea, such as, for example, the
reverence for a flag, or the blind attachment to a form or
constitution of government!
What errors in political economy and statesmanship are committed in
consequence of the over-estimation or under-estimation of particular
values, or the non-estimation of some among them ! Everything, it is
asserted, is the product of human labor; but the gold or the diamond
which one accidentally finds without labor is not so. What is the
value of the labor bestowed by the husbandman upon his crops, compared
with the value of the sunshine and rain, without which his labor
avails nothing? Commerce carried on by the labor of man, adds to the
value of the products of the field, the mine, or the workshop, by
their transportation to different markcts; but how much of this
increase is due to the rivers down which these products float, to the
winds that urge the keels of commerce over the ocean !
Who can estimate the value of morality and manliness in a State, of
moral worth and intellectual knowledge ? These are the sunshine and
rain of the State. The winds, with their changeable, fickle,
fluctuating currents, are apt emblems of the fickle humors of the
populace, its passions, its heroic impulses, its enthusiasms. Woe to
the statesman who does not estimate these as values !
Even music and song are sometimes found to have an incalculable value.
Every nation has some song of a proven value, more easily counted in
lives than dollars. The Marseillaise was worth to revolutionary
France, who shall say how many thousand men?
Peace also is a great element of prosperity and wealth; a value not to
be calculated. Social intercourse and association of men in beneficent
Orders have a value not to be estimated in coin. The illustrious
examples of the Past of a nation, the memories and immortal thoughts
of her great and wise thinkers, statesmen, and heroes, are the
invaluable legacy of that Past to the Present and Future. And all
these have not only the values of the loftier and more excellent and
priceless kind, but also an actual money-value, since it is only when
co-operating with or aided or enabled by these, that human labor
creates wealth. They are of the chief elements of material wealth, as
they are of national manliness, heroism., glory, prosperity, and
immortal renown.
Providence has appointed the three great disciplines of War, the
Monarchy and the Priesthood, all that the CAMP, the PALACE, and the
TEMPLE may symbolize, to train the multitudes forward to intelligent
and premeditated combinations for all the great purposes of society.
The result will at length be free governments among men, when virtue
and intelligence become qualities of the multitudes; but for ignorance
such governments are impossible. Man advances only by degrees. The
removal of one pressing calamity gives courage to attempt the removal
of the remaining evils, rendering men more sensitive to them, or
perhaps sensitive for the first time. Serfs that writhe under the whip
are not disquieted about tbeir political rights; manumitted from
personal slavery, they be come sensitive to political oppression.
Liberated from arbitrary power, and governed by the law alone, they
begin to scrutinize the law itself, and desire to be governed, not
only by law, but by what they deem the best law. And when the civil or
temporal despotism has been set aside, and the municipal law has been
moulded on the principles of an enlightened jurisprudence, they may
wake to the discovery that they are living under some priestly or
ecclesiastical despotism, and become desirous of working a reformation
there also.
It is quite true that the advance of humanity is slow, and that it
often pauses and retrogrades. In the kingdoms of the earth we do not
see despotisms retiring and yielding the ground to self-governing
communities. We do not see the churches and priesthoods of Christendom
relinquishing their old task of governing men by imaginary terrors.
Nowhere do we see a populace that could be safely manumitted from such
a government. We do not see the great religious teachers aiming to
discover truth for themselves and for others; but still ruling the
world, and contented and compelled to rule the world, by whatever
dogma is already accredited; themselves as much bound down by this
necessity to govern, as the populace by their need of government.
Poverty in all its most hideous forms still exists in the great
cities; and the cancer of pauperism has its roots in the hearts of
kingdoms. Men there take no measure of their wants and their own power
to supply them, but live and multiply like the beasts of the
field,--Providence having apparently ceased to care for them.
Intelligence never visits these, or it makes its appearance as some
new development of villainy. War has not ceased; still there are
battles and sieges. Homes are still unhappy, and tears and anger aud
spite make hells where there should be heavens. So much the more
necessity for Masonry ! So much wider the field of its labors ! So
much the more need for it to begin to be true to itself, to revive
from its asphyxia, to repent of its apostasy to its true creed !
Undoubtedly, labor and death and the sexual passion are essential and
permanent conditions of human existence, and render perfection and a
millennium on earth impossible. Always,--it is the decree of Fate
!--the vast majority of men must toil to live, and cannot find time to
cultivate the intelligence. Man, knowing he is to die, will not
sacrifice the present enjoyment for a greater one in the future. The
love of woman cannot die out; and it has a terrible and uncontrollable
fate, increased by the refinements of civilization. Woman is the
veritable syren or goddess of the young. But society can be improved;
and free government is possible for States; and freedom of thought and
conscience is no longer wholly utopian. Already we see that Emperors
prefer to be elected by universal suffrage; that States are conveyed
to Empires by vote; and that Empires are administered with something
of the spirit of a Republic, being little else than democracies with a
single head, ruling through one man, one representative, instead of an
assembly of representatives. And if Priesthoods still govern, they now
come before the laity to prove, by stress of argument, that they
ougllt to govern. They are obliged to evoke the very reason which they
are bent on supplanting.
Accordingly, men become daily more free, because the freedom of the
man lies in his reason. He can reflect upon his own future conduct,
and summon up its consequences; he can take wide views of human life,
and lay down rules for constant guidance. Thus he is relieved of the
tyranny of sense and passion, and enabled at any time to live
according to the whole light of the knowledge that is within him,
instead of being driven, like a dry leaf on the wings of the wind, by
every present impulse. Herein lies the freedom of the man as regarded
in connection with the necessity imposed by the omnipotence and
fore-knowledge of God. So much light, so much liberty. When emperor
and church appeal to reason there is naturally universal suffrage.
Therefore no one need lose courage, nor believe that labor in the
cause of Progress will be labor wasted. There is no waste in nature,
either of Matter, Force, Act, or Thought. A Thought is as much the end
of life as an Action; and a single Thought sometimes works greater
results than a Revolution, even Revolutions themselves. Still there
should not be divorce between Thought and Action. The true Thought is
that in which life culminates. But all wise and true Thought produces
Action. It is generative, like the light; and light and the deep
shadow of the passing cloud are the gifts of the prophets of the race.
Knowledge, laboriously acquired, and inducing habits of sound
Thought,--the reflective character,--must necessarily be rare. The
multitude of laborers cannot acquire it. Most men attain to a very low
standard of it. It is incompatible with the ordinary and indispensable
avocations of life. A whole world of error as well as of labor, go to
make one reflective man. In the most advanced nation of Europe there
are more ignorant than wise, more poor than rich, more autornatic
laborers, the mere creatures of habit, than reasoning and reflective
men. The proportion is at least a thousand to one. Unanimity of
opinion is so obtained. It only exists among the multitude who do not
think, and the political or spiritual priesthood who think for that
multitude, who think how to guide and govern them. When men begin to
reflect, they begin to differ. The great problem is to find guides who
will not seek to be tyrants. This is needed even more in respect to
the heart than the head. Now, every man earns his special share of the
produce of human labor, by an incessant scramble, by trickery and
deceit. Useful knowledge, honorably acquired, is too often used after
a fashion not honest or reasonable, so that the studies of youth are
far more noble than the practices of manhood. The labor of the farmer
in his fields, the generous returns of the earth, the benignant and
favoring skies, tend to make him earnest, provident, and grateful; the
education of the market-place makes him querulous, crafty, envious,
and an intolerable niggard.
Masonry seeks to be this beneficent, unambitious, disinterested guide;
and it is the very condition of all great structures that the sound of
the hammer and the clink of the trowel should be always heard in some
part of the building. With faith in man, hope for the future of
humanity, loving-kindness for our fellows, Masonry and the Mason must
always work and teach. Let each do that for which he is best fitted.
The teacher also is a workman. Praiseworthy as the active navigator
is, who comes and goes and makes one clime partake of the treasures of
the other, and one to share the treasures of all, he who keeps the
beacon-light upon the hill is also at his post.
Masonry has already helped cast down some idols from their pedestals,
and grind to impalpable dust some of the links of the chains that held
men's souls in bondage. That there has been progress needs no other
demonstration than that you may now reason with men, and urge upon
them, without danger of the rack or stake, that no doctrines can be
apprehended as truths if they contradict each other, or contradict
other truths given us by God. Long before the Reformation, a monk, who
had found his way to heresy without the help of Martin Luther, not
venturine to breathe aloud into any living ear his anti-papal and
treasonable doctrines, wrote them on parchment, and sealing up
theperilous record, hid it in the massive walls of his monastery.
There was no friend or brother to whom he could intrust his secret or
pour forth his soul. It was some consolation to imagine that in a
future age some one might find the parchment, and the seed be found
not to have been sown in vain. What if the truth should have to lie
dormant as long before germinating as the wheat in the Egyptian mummy
? Speak it, nevertheless, again and again, and let it take its chance
!
The rose of Jericho grows in the sandy deserts of Arabia and on the
Syrian housetops. Scarcely six inches high, it loses its leaves after
the flowering season, and dries up into the form of a ball. Then it is
uprooted by the winds, and carried, blown, or tossed across the
desert, into the sea. There, feeling the contact of the water, it
unfolds itself, expands its branches, and expels its seeds from their
seed-vessels. These, when saturated with water, are carried by the
tide and laid on the sea-shore. Many are lost, as many individual
lives of men are useless. But many are thrown back again from the
sea-shore into the desert, where, by the virtue of the sea-water that
they have imbibed, the roots and leaves sprout and they grow into
fruitful plants, which will, in their turns, like their ancestors, be
whirled into the sea. God will not be less careful to provide for the
germination of the truths you may boldly utter forth. "Cast," He has
said, "thy bread upon the waters, and after many days it shall return
to thee again."
Initiation does not change: we find it again and again, and always the
same, through all the ages. The last disciples of Pascalis Martinez
are still the children of Orpheus; but they adore the realizer of the
antique philosophy, the Incarnate Word of the Christians.
Pythagoras, the great divulger of the philosophy of numbers, visited
all the sanctuaries of the world. He went into Judaea, where he
procured himself to be circumcised, that he might be admitted to the
secrets of the Kabalah, which the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel, not
without some reservations, communicated to him. Then, not without some
difficulty, he succeeded in being admitted to the Egyptian initiation,
upon the recommendation of King Amasis. The power of his genius
supplied the deficiencies of the imperfect communications of the
Hierophants, and he himself became a Master and a Revealer.
Pythagoras defined God: a Living and Absolute Verity clothed with
Light.
He said that the Word was Number manifested by Form.
He made all descend from the Tetyactys, that is to say, from the
Quaternary.
God, he said again, is the Supreme Music, the nature of which is
Harmony.
Pythagoras gave the magistrates of Crotona this great religious,
political and social precept:
"There is no evil that is not preferable to Anarchy."
Pythagoras said, "Even as there are three divine notions and free
intelligible regions, so there is a triple word, for the Hierarehical
Order always manifests itself by threes. There are the word simple,
the word hieroglyphical, and the word symbolic: in other terms, there
are the word that expresses, the word that conceals, and the word that
signifies; the whole hieratic intelligence is in the perfect knowledge
of these three degrees."
Pythagoras enveloped doctrine with symbols, but carefully eschewed
personifications and images, which, he thought, sooner or later
produced idolatry.
The Holy Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth, was carried
from Chaldcea by Abraham, taught to the Egyptian priesthood by Joseph,
recovered and purified by Moses, concealed under symbols in the Bible,
revealed by the Saviour to Saint John, and contained, entire, under
hieratic figures analogous to those of all antiquity, in the
Apocalypse of that Apostle.
The Kabalists consider God as the Intelligent, Animated, Living
Infinite. He is not, for them, either the aggregate of existences, or
existence in the abstract, or a being philosophically definable. He is
in all, distinct from all, and greater than all. His name even is
ineffable; and yet this name only expresses the human ideal of His
divinity. What God is in Himself, it is not given to man to
comprehend.
God is the absolute of Faith; but the absolute of Reason is BEING, "I
am that I am," is a wretched translation.
Being, Existence, is by itself, and because it Is. The reason of
Being, is Being itself. We may inquire, "Why does something exist?"
that is, "Why does such or such a thing exist?" But we cannot, without
being absurd, ask, "Why Is Being?" That would be to suppose Being
before Being. If Being had a cause, that cause would necessarily Be;
that is, the cause and effect would be identical.
Reason and science demonstrate to us that the modes of Existence and
Being balance each other in equilibrium according to harmonious and
hierarchic laws. But a hierarchy is synthetized, in ascending, and
becomes ever more and more monarchial. Yet the reason cannot pause at
a simle chief, without being alarmed at the abysses which it seems to
leave above this Supreme Monarch. Therefore it is silent, and gives
place to the Faith it adores.
What is certain, even for science and the reason, is, that the idea of
God is the grandest, the most holy, and the most useful of all the
aspirations of man; that upon this belief morality reposes, with its
eternal sanction. This belief, then, is in humanity, the most real of
the phenomena of being; and if it were false, nature would affirm the
absurd; nothingness would give form to life, and God would at the same
time be and not be.
It is to this philosophic and incontestable reality, which is termed
The Idea of God, that the Kabalists give a name. In this name all
others are contained. Its cyphers contain all the numbers; and the
hieroglyphics of its letters express all the laws and all the things
of nature.
BEING IS BEING: the reason of Being is in Being: in the Beginning is
the Word, and the Word in logic formulated Speech, the spoken Reason;
the Word is in God, and is God Himself, manifested to the
Intelligence. Here is what is above all the philosophies. This we must
believe, under the penalty of never truly knowing anything, and
relapsing into the absurd skepticism of Pyrrho. The Priesthood,
custodian of Faith, wholly rests upon this basis of knowledge, and it
is in its teachings we must recognize the Divine Principle of the
Eternal Word.
Light is not Spirit, as the Indian Hierophants believed it to be; but
only the instrument of the Spirit. It is not the body of the
Protoplastes, as the Theurgists of the school of Alexandria taught,
but the first physical manifestation of the Divine afflatus. God
eternally creates it, and man, in the image of God, modifies and seems
to multiply it.
The high magic is styled "The Sacerdotal Art," and "The Royal Art." In
Egypt, Greece, and Rome, it could not but share the greatnesses and
decadences of the Priesthood and of Royalty. Every philosophy hostile
to the national worship and to its mysteries, was of necessity hostile
to the great political powers, whichlose their grandeur, if they
cease, in the eyes of the multitudes, to be the images of the Divine
Power. Every Crown is shattered, when it clashes against the Tiara.
Plato, writing to Dionysius the Younger, in regard to the nature of
the First Principle, says: "I must write to you in enigmas, so that if
my letter be intercepted by land or sea, he who shall read it may in
no degree comprehend it." And then he says, "All things surround their
King; they are, on account of Him, and He alone is the cause of good
things, Second for the Seconds and Third for the Thirds."
There is in these few words a complete summary of the Theology of the
Sephiroth. "The King" is AINSOPH, Being Supreme and Absolute. From
this centre, which is everywhere, all things ray forth; but we
especially conceive of it in three manners and in three different
spheres. In the Divine world (AZILUTH), which is that of the First
Cause, and wherein the whole Eternity of Things in the beginning
existed as Unity, to be afterward, during Eternity uttered forth,
clothed with form, and the attributes that constitute them matter, the
First Principle is Single and First, and yet not the VERY Illimitable
Deity, incomprehensible, undefinable; but Himself in so far as
manifested by the Creative Thought. To compare littleness with
infinity,--Arkwright, as inventor of the spinning-jenny, and not the
man Arkwright otherwise and beyond that. All we can know of the Very
God is, compared to His Wholeness, only as an infinitesimal fraction
of a unit, compared with an infinity of Units.
In the World of Creation, which is that of Second Causes [the
Kabalistic World BRIAH], the Autocracy of the First Principle is
complete, but we conceive of it only as the Cause of the Second
Causes. Here it is manifested by the Binary, and is the Creative
Principle passive. Finally: in the third world, YEZIRAH, or of
Formation, it is revealed in the perfect Form, the Form of Forms, the
World, the Supreme Beauty and Excellence, the Created Perfection. Thus
the Principle is at once the First, the Second, and the Third, since
it is All in All, the Centre and Cause of all. It is not the genius of
Plato that we here admire. We recognize only the exact knowledge of
the Initiate.
The great Apostle Saint John did not borrow from the philosophy of
Plato the opening of his Gospel. Plato, on the contrary, drank at the
same springs with Saint John and Philo; and John in the opening verses
of his paraphrase, states the first principles of a dogma common to
many schools, but in language especially belonging to Bhilo, whom it
is evident he had read. The philosophy of Plato, the greatest of human
Revealers, could yearn toward the Word made man; the Gospel alone
could give him to the world.
Doubt, in presence of Being and its harmonies; skepticism, in the face
of the eternal mathematics and the immutable laws of Life which make
the Divinity present and visible everywhere, as the Human is known and
visible by its utterances of word and act,--is this not the most
foolish of superstitions, and the most inexcusable as well as the most
dangerous of all credulities ? Thought, we know, is not a result or
consequence of the organization of matter, of the chemical or other
action or reaction of its particles, like effervescence and gaseous
explosions. On the contrary, the fact that Thought is manifested and
realized in act human or act divine, proves the existence of an
Entity, or Unity, that thinks. And the Universe is the Infinite
Utterance of one of an infinite number of Infinite Thoughts, which
cannot but emanate from an Infinite and Thinking Source. The cause is
always equal, at least, to the effect; and matter cannot think, nor
could it cause itself, or exist without cause, nor could nothing
produce either forces or things; for in void nothingness no Forces can
inhere. Admit a self-existent Force, and its Intelligence, or an
Intelligent cause of it is admitted, and at once GOD Is.
The Hebrew allegory of the Fall of Man, which is but a special
variation of a universal legend, symbolizes one of the grandest and
most universal allegories of science.
Moral Evil is Falsehood in actions, as Falsehood is Crime in words.
Injustice is the essence of Falsehood; and every false word is an
injustice.
Injustice is the death of the Moral Being, as Falsehood is the poison
of the Intelligence.
The perception of the Light is the dawn of the Eternal Life, in Being.
The Word of God, which creates the Light, seems to be uttered by every
Intelligence that can take cognizance of Forms and will look. "Let the
Light BE! The Light, in fact, exists, in its condition of splendor,
for those eyes alone that gaze at it; and the Soul, amorous of the
spectacle of the beauties of the Universe, and applying its attention
to that luminous writing of the Infinite Book, which is called "The
Visible," seems to utter, as God did on the dawn of the first day,
that sublime and creative word, "BE! LIGHT !"
It is not beyond the tomb, but in life itself, that we are to seek for
the mysteries of death. Salvation or reprobation begins here below,
and the terrestrial world too has its Heaven and its Hell. Always,
even here below, virtue is rewarded; always, even here below, vice is
pwlished; and that which makes us sometimes believe in the impunity of
evil-doers is that riches, those instruments of good and of evil, seem
sometimes to be given them at hazard. But woe to unjust men, when they
possess the key of gold ! It opens, for them, only the gate of the
tomb and of Hell.
All the true Initiates have recognized the usefulness of toil and
sorrow. "Sorrow," says a German poet, "is the dog of that unknown
shepherd who guides the flock of men." To learn to suffer, to learn to
die, is the discipline of Eternity, the immortal Novitiate.
The allegorical picture of Cebes, in which the Divine Comedy of Dante
was sketched in Plato's time, the description whereof has been
preserved for us, and which many painters of the middle age have
reproduced by this description, is a monument at once philosophical
and magical. It is a most complete moral synthesis, and at the same
time the most audacious demonstration ever given of the Grand Arcanum,
of that secret whose revelation would overturn Earth and Heaven. Let
no one expect us to give them its explanation ! He who passes behind
the veil that hides this mystery, understands that it is in its very
nature inexplicable, and that it is death to those who win it by
surprise, as well as to him who reveals it.
This secret is the Royalty of the Sages, the Crown of the Initiate
whom we see redescend victorious from the summit of Trials, in the
fine allegory of Cebes. The Grand Arcanun1 makes him master of gold
and the light, which are at bottom the same thing, he has solved the
problem of the quadrature of the circle, he directs the perpetual
movement, and he possesses the philosophical stone. Here the Adepts
will understand us. There is neither interruption in the toil of
nature, nor gap in her work. The Harmonies of Heaven correspond to
those of Earth, and the Eternal Life accomplishes its evolutions in
accordance with the same laws as the life of a dog. "God has arranged
all things by weight, number, and measure," says the Bible; and this
luminous doctrine was also that of Plato.
Humanity has never really had but one religion and one worship. This
universal light has had its uncertain mirages, its deceitful
reflections, and its shadows; but always, after the nights of Error,
we see it reappear, one and pure like the Sun.
The magnificences of worship are the life of religion, and if Christ
wishes poor ministers, His Sovereign Divinity does not wish paltry
altars. Some Protestants have not comprehended that worship is a
teaching, and that we must not create in the imagination of the
multitude a mean or miserable God. Those oratories that resemble
poorly-furnished offices or inns, and those worthy ministers clad like
notaries or lawyer's clerks, do they not necessarily cause religion to
be regarded as a mere puritanic formality, and God as a Justice of the
Peace?
We scoff at the Augurs. It is so easy to scoff, and so difficult well
to comprehend. Did the Deity leave the whole world without Light for
two score centuries, to illuminate only a little corner of Palestine
and a brutal, ignorant, and ungrateful people? Why always calumniate
God and the Sanctuary ? Were there never any others than rogues among
the priests? Could no honest and sincere men be found among the
Hierophants of Ceres or Diana, of Dionusos or Apollo, of Hermes or
Mithras ? Were these, then, all deceived, like the rest? Who, then,
constantly deceived them, without betraying themselves, during a
series of centuries?--for the cheats are not immortal ! Arago said,
that outside of the pure mathematics, he who utters the word
"impossible," is wanting in prudence and good sense.
The true name of Satan, the Kabalists say, is that of Yahveh reversed;
for Satan is not a black god, but the negation of God. The Devil is
the personification of Atheism or Idolatry.
For the Initiates, this is not a Person, but a Force, created for
good, but which may serve for evil. It is the instrument of Liberty or
Free Will. They represent this Force, which presides over the physical
generation, under the mythologic and horned form of the God PAN;
thence came the he-goat of the Sabbat, brother of the Ancient Serpent,
and the Light-bearer or Phosphor, of which the poets have made the
false Lucifer of the legend.
Gold, to the eyes of the Initiates, is Light condensed. They style the
sacred numbers of the Kabalah "golden numbers," and the moral
teachings of Pythagoras his "golden verses." For the same reason, a
mysterious book of Apuleius, in which an ass figures largely, was
called "The Golden Ass."
The Pagans accused the Christians of worshipping an ass, and they did
not invent this reproach, but it came from the Samaritan Jews, who,
figuring the data of the Kabalah in regard to the Divinity by Egyptian
symbols, also represented the Intelligence by the figure of the
Magical Star adored under the name of Remphan, Science under the
emblem of Anubis, whose name they changed to Nibbas, and the vulgar
faith or credulity under the figure of Thartac, a god represented with
a book, a cloak, and the head of an ass. According to the Samaritan
Doctors, Christianity was the reign of Thartac, blind Faith and vulgar
credulity erected into a universal oracle, and preferred to
Intelligence and Science.
Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, a great Kabalist, but of doubtful
orthodoxy, wrote:
"The people will always mock at things easy to be misunderstood; it
must needs have impostures."
"A Spirit," he said, "that loves wisdom and contemplates the Trufh
close at hand, is forced to disguise it, to induce the multitudes to
accept it.... Fictions are necessary to the people, and the Truth
becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in
all its brilliance. If the sacerdotal laws allowed the reservation of
judgments and the allegory of words, I would accept the proposed
dignity on condition that I might be a philosopher at home, and abroad
a narrator of apologues and parables..... In fact, what can there be
in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? The truth
must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to
their imperfect reason."
Moral disorders produce physical ugliness, and in some sort realize
those frightful faces which tradition assigns to the demons.
The first Druids were the true children of the Magi, and their
initiation came from Egypt and Chaldaea, that is to say, from the pure
sources of the primitive Kabalah. They adored the Trinity under the
names of Isis or Hesus, the Supreme Harmony; of Belerl or Bel, which
in Assyrian means Lord, a name corresponding to that of ADONAI; and of
Camul or Camael, a name that in the Kabalah personifies the Divine
Justice. Below this triangle of Light they supposed a divine
reflection, also composed of three personified rays: first, Teutates
or Teuth, the same as the Thoth of the Egyptians, the Word, or the
Intelligence formulated; then Force and Beauty, whose names varied
like their emblems. Finally, they completed the sacred Septenary by a
mysterious image that represented the progress of the dogma and its
future realizations. This was a young girl veiled, holding a child in
her arms; and they dedicated this image to "The Virgin who will become
a mother;--Virgini pariturae."
Hertha or Wertha, the young Isis of Gaul, Queen of Heaven, the Virgin
who was to bear a child, held the spindle of the Fates, filled with
wool half white and half black; because she presides over all forms
and all symbols, and weaves the garment of the Ideas.
One of the most mysterious pantacles of the Kabalah, contained in the
Enchiridion of Leo III., represents an equilateral triangle reversed,
inscribed in a double circle. On the triangle are written, in such
manner as to form the prophetic Tau, the two Hebrew words so often
found appended to the Ineffable Name, and ALOHAYIM, or the Powers, and
TSABAOTH, or the starry Armies and their guiding spirits; words also
which symbolize the Equilibrium of the Forces of Nature and the
Harmony of Numbers. To the three sides of the triangle belong the
three great Names IAHAVEH, ADONAI, and AGLA. Above the first is
written in Latin, Formatio, above the second Reformatio, and above the
third, Transformatio. So Creation is ascribed to the FATHER,
Redemption or Reformation to the SON, and Sanctification or
Transformation to the HOLY SPIRIT, answering unto the mathematical
laws of Action, Reaction, and Equilibrium. IAHAVEH is also, in effect,
the Genesis or Formation of dogma, by the elementary signification of
the four letters of the Sacred Tetragram; ADONAI; is the realization
of this dogma in the Human Form, in the Visible LORD, who is the Son
of God or the perfect Man; and AGLA (formed of the initials of the
four words Ath Gebur Laulaim Adonai) expresses the synthesis of the
whole dogma and the totality of the Kabali.stic science, clearly
indicating by the hieroglyphics of which this admirable name is formed
the Triple Secret of the Great Work.
Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and
Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or
the Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its
symbols to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; to conceal the
Truth, which it calls Light, from tl1em, and todraw them away from it.
Truth is not for those who are unworthy or unable to receive it, or
would pervert it. So God Himself incapacitates many men, by
color-blindness, to distinguish colors, and leads the masses away from
the highest Truth, giving them the power to attain only so much of it
as it is profitable to them to know. Every age has had a religion
suited to its capacity.
The Teachers, even of Christianity, are, in general, the most ignorant
of the true meaning of that which they teach. There is no book of
which so little is known as the Bible. To most who read it, it is as
incomprehensible as the Sohar.
So Masonry jealously conceals its secrets, and intentionally leads
conceited interpreters astray. There is no sight under the sun more
pitiful and ludicrous at once, than the spectacle of the Prestons and
the Webbs, not to mention the later incarnations of Dullness and
Commonplace, undertaking to "explain" the old symbols of Masonry, and
adding to and "improving" them, or inventing new ones.
To the Circle inclosing the central point, and itself traced between
two parallel lines, a figure purely Kabalistic, these persons have
added the superimposed Bible, and even reared on that the ladder with
three or nine rounds, and then given a vapid interpretation of the
whole, so profoundly absurd as actually to excite admiration.
M & D Chapter IV
Secret Master
MORALS AND DOGMA
by Albert Pike
IV. SECRET MASTER.
MASONRY is a succession of allegories, the mere vehicles of great
lessons in morality and philosophy. You will more fully appreciate its
spirit, its object, its purposes, as you advance in the different
Degrees, which you will find to constitute a great, complete, and
harmonious system.
If you have been disappointed in the first three Degrees, as you have
received them, and if it has seemed to you that the performance has
not come up to the promise, that the lessons of morality are not new,
and the scientific instruction is but rudimentary, and the symbols are
imperfectly explained, remember that the ceremonies and lessons of
those Degrees have been for ages more and more accommodating
themselves, by curtailment and sinking into commonplace, to the often
limited memory and capacity of the Master and Instructor, and to the
intellect and needs of the Pupil and Initiate; that they have come to
us from an age when symbols were used, not to reveal but to conceal;
when the commonest learning was confined to a select few, and the
simplest principles of morality seemed newly discovered truths; and
that these antique and simple Degrees now stand like the broken
columns of a roofless Druidic temple, in their rude and mutilated
greatness; in many parts, also, corrupted by time, and disfigured by
modern additions and absurd interpretations. They are but the entrance
to the great Masonic Temple, the triple columns of the portico.
You have taken the first step over its threshold, the first step
toward the inner sanctuary and heart of the temple. You are in the
path that leads up the slope of the mountain of Truth; and it depends
upon your secrecy, obedience, and fidelity, whether you will advance
or remain stationary.
Imagine not that you will become indeed a Mason by learning what is
commonly called the "work," or even by becoming familiar with our
traditions. Masonry has a history, a literature, a philosophy. Its
allegories and traditions will teach you much; but much is to be
sought elsewhere. The streams of learning that now flow full and broad
must be followed to their heads in the springs that well up in the
remote past, and you will there find the origin and meaning of
Masonry.
A few rudimentary lessons in architecture, a few universally admitted
maxims of morality, a few unimportant traditions, whose real meaning
is unknown or misunderstood, will no longer satisfy the earnest
inquirer after Masonic truth. Let whoso is content with these, seek to
climb no higher. He who desires to understand the harmonious and
beautiful proportions of Freemasonry must read, study, reflect,
digest, and discriminate. The true Mason is an ardent seeker after
knowledge; and he knows that both books and the antique symbols of
Masonry are vessels which come down to us full-freighted with the
intellectual riches of the Past; and that in the lading of these
argosies is much that sheds light on the history of Masonry, and
proves its claim to be acknowledged the benefactor of mankind, born in
the very cradle of the race.
Knowledge is the most genuine and real of human treasures; for it is
Light, as Ignorance is Darkness. It is the development of the human
soul, and its acquisition the growth of the soul, which at the birth
of man knows nothing, and therefore, in one sense, may be said to be
nothing. It is the seed, which has in it the power to grow, to
acquire, and by acquiring to be developed, as the seed is developed
into the shoot, the plant, the tree. "We need not pause at the common
argument that by learning man excelleth man, in that wherein man
excelleth beasts; that by learning man ascendeth to the heavens and
their motions, where in body he cannot come, and the like. Let us
rather regard the dignity and excellency of knowledge and learning in
that whereunto man's nature doth most aspire, which is immortality or
continuance. For to this tendeth generation, and raising of Houses and
Families; to this buildings, foundations, and monuments; to this
tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect the
strength of all other human desires." That our influences shall
survive us, and be living forces when we are in our graves; and no
merely that our names shall be remembered; but rather that our works
shall be read, our acts spoken of, our names recollected an mentioned
when we are dead, as evidences that those influences live and rule,
sway and control some portion of mankind and of the world,--this is
the aspiration of the human soul. "We see then how far the monuments
of genius and learning are more durable than monuments of power or of
the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five
hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter,
during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have
decayed and been demolished? It is no possible to have the true
pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander Caesar, no, nor of the Kings
or great personages of much late years; for the originals cannot last,
and the copies cannot but lose of the life and truth. But the images
of men's genius and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong
of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly
to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds
in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and
opinions in succeeding ages; so that if the invention of the ship was
thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to
place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of
their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified which, as
ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make age so distant to
participate of the wisdom, illumination, and inventions, the one of
the other."
To learn, to attain knowledge, to be wise, is a necessity for ever
truly noble soul; to teach, to communicate that knowledge, to share
that wisdom with others, and not churlishly to lock up his exchequer,
and place a sentinel at the door to drive away the needy, is equally
an impulse of a noble nature, and the worthies work of man.
"There was a little city," says the Preacher, the son of David "and
few men within it; and there came a great King against it and besieged
it, and built great bulwarks against it. Now there was found in it a
poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man
remembered that same poor man. Then said I, wisdom is better than
strength: nevertheless, the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his
words are not heard." If it should chance to you, my brother, to do
mankind good service, and be rewarded with indifference and
forgetfulness only, still be not discouraged, but remember the further
advice of the wise King. "In the morning sow the seed, and in the
evening withhold not thy hand; for thou knowest not which shall
prosper, this or that, or whether both shall be alike good." Sow you
the seed, whoever reaps. Learn, that you may be enabled to do good;
and do so because it is right, finding in the act itself ample reward
and recompense.
To attain the truth, and to serve our fellows, our country, and
mankind-- this is the noblest destiny of man. Hereafter and all your
life it is to be your object. If you desire to ascend to that destiny,
advance! If you have other and less noble objects, and are contented
with a lower flight, halt here ! let others scale the heights, and
Masonry fulfill her mission.
If you will advance, gird up your loins for the struggle ! for the way
is long and toilsome. Pleasure, all smiles, will beckon you on the one
hand, and Indolence will invite you to sleep among the flowers, upon
the other. Prepare, by secrecy, obedience, and fidelity, to resist the
allurements of both !
Secrecy is indispensable in a Mason of whatever Degree. It is the
first and almost the only lesson taught to the Entered Apprentice. The
obligations which we have each assumed toward every Mason that lives,
requiring of us the performance of the most serious and onerous duties
toward those personally unknown to us until they demand our aid,--
duties that must be performed, even at the risk of life, or our solemn
oaths be broken and violated, and we be branded as false Masons and
faithless men, teach us how profound a folly it would be to betray our
secrets to those who, bound to us by no tie of common obligation,
might, by obtaining them, call on us in their extremity, when the
urgency of the occasion should allow us no time for inquiry, and the
peremptory mandate of our obligation compel us to do a brother's duty
to a base impostor.
The secrets of our brother, when communicated to us, must be sacred,
if they be such as the law of our country warrants us to keep. We are
required to keep none other, when the law that we are called on to
obey is indeed a law, by having emanated from the only source of
power, the People. Edicts which emanate from the mere arbitrary will
of a despotic power, contrary to the law of God or the Great Law of
Nature, destructive of the inherent rights of man, violative of the
right of free thought, free speech, free conscience, it is lawful to
rebel against and strive to abrogate.
For obedience to the Law does not mean submission to tyranny nor that,
by a profligate sacrifice of every noble feeling, we should offer to
despotism the homage of adulation. As every new victim falls, we may
lift our voice in still louder flattery. We may fall at the proud
feet, we may beg, as a boon, the honour of kissing that bloody hand
which has been lifted against the helpless. We may do more: we may
bring the altar and the sacrifice, and implore the God not to ascend
too soon to Heaven. This we may do, for this we have the sad
remembrance that beings of a human form and soul have done. But this
is all we can do. We can constrain our tongues to be false, our
features to bend themselves to the semblance of that passionate
adoration which we wish to express, our knees to fall prostrate; but
our heart we cannot constrain. There virtue must still have a voice
which is not to be drowned by hymns and acclamations; there the crimes
which we laud as virtues, are crimes still, and he whom we have made a
God is the most contemptible of mankind; if, indeed, we do not feel,
perhaps, that we are ourselves still more contemptible.
But that law which is the fair expression of the will and judgment of
the people, is the enactment of the whole and of every individual.
Consistent with the law of God and the great law of nature, consistent
with pure and abstract right as tempered by necessity and the general
interest, as contra-distinguished from the private interest of
individuals, it is obligatory upon all, because it is the work of all,
the will of all, the solemn judgment of all, from which there is no
appeal.
In this Degree, my brother, you are especially to learn the duty of
obedience to that law. There is one true and original law, conformable
to reason and to nature, diffused over all, invariable, eternal, which
calls to the fulfillment of duty and to abstinence from injustice, and
calls with that irresistible voice which is felt l in all its
authority wherever it is heard. This law cannot be abrogated or
diminished, or its sanctions affected, by any law of man. A whole
senate, a whole people, cannot dissent from its paramount obligation.
It requires no commentator to render it distinctly intelligible: nor
is it one thing at Rome, another at Athens; one thing now, and another
in the ages to come; but in all times and in all nations, it is, and
has been, and will be, one and everlasting;--one as that God, its
great Author and Promulgator, who is the Common Sovereign of all
mankind, is Himself One. No man can disobey it without flying, as it
were, from his own bosom, and repudiating his nature; and in this very
act he will inflict on himself the severest of retributions, even
though he escape what is regarded as punishment.
It is our duty to obey the laws of our country, and to be careful that
prejudice or passion, fancy or affection, error and illusion, be not
mistaken for conscience. Nothing is more usual than to pretend
conscience in all the actions of man which are public and cannot be
concealed. The disobedient refuse to submit to the laws, and they also
in many cases pretend conscience; and so disobedience and rebellion
become conscience, in which there is neither knowledge nor revelation,
nor truth nor charity, nor reason nor religion. Conscience is tied to
laws. Right or sure conscience is right reason reduced to practice,
and conducting moral actions, while perverse conscience is seated in
the fancy or affections--a heap of irregular principles and irregular
defects-- and is the same in conscience as deformity is in the body,
or peevishness in the affections. It is not enough that the conscience
be taught by nature; but it must be taught by God, conducted by
reason, made operative by discourse, assisted by choice, instructed by
laws and sober principles; and then it is right, and it may be sure.
All the general measures of justice, are the laws of God, and
therefore they constitute the general rules of government for the
conscience; but necessity also hath a large voice in the arrangement
of human affairs, and the disposal of human relations, and the
dispositions of human laws; and these general measures, like a great
river into little streams, are deduced into little rivulets and
particularities, by the laws and customs, by the sentences and
agreements of men, and by the absolute despotism of necessity, that
will not allow perfect and abstract justice and equity to be the sole
rule of civil government in an imperfect world; and that must needs be
law which is for the greatest good of the greatest number.
When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it. It is better
thou shouldest not vow than thou shouldest vow and not pay. Be not
rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter
anything before God: for God is in Heaven, and thou art upon earth;
therefore let thy words be few. Weigh well what it is you promise; but
once the promise and pledge are given remember that he who is false to
his obligation will be false to his family, his friends, his country,
and his God.
Fides servailda est: Faith plighted is ever to be kept, was a maxim
and an axiom even among pagans. The virtuous Roman said, either let
not that which seems expedient be base, or if it be base, let it not
seem expedient. What is there which that so-called expediency can
bring, so valuable as that which it takes away, if it deprives you of
the name of a good man and robs you of your integrity and honour? In
all ages, he who violates his plighted word has been held unspeakably
base. The word of a Mason, like the word of a knight in the times of
chivalry, once given must be sacred; and the judgment of his brothers,
upon him who violates his pledge, should be stern as the judgments of
the Roman Censors against him who violated his oath. Good faith is
revered among Masons as it was among the Romans, who placed its statue
in the capitol, next to that of Jupiter Maximus Optimus; and we, like
them, hold that calamity should always be chosen rather than baseness;
and with the knights of old, that one should always die rather than be
dishonoured.
Be faithful, therefore, to the promises you make, to the pledges you
give, and to the vows that you assume, since to break either is base
and dishonourable.
Be faithful to your family, and perform all the duties of a good
father, a good son, a good husband, and a good brother.
Be faithful to your friends; for true friendship is of a nature not
only to survive through all the vicissitudes of life, but to continue
through an endless duration; not only to stand the shock of
conflicting opinions, and the roar of a revolution that shakes the
world, but to last when the heavens are no more, and to spring fresh
from the ruins of the universe.
Be faithful to your country, and prefer its dignity and honour to any
degree of popularity and honour for yourself; consulting its interest
rather than your own, and rather than the pleasure and gratification
of the people, which are often at variance with their welfare.
Be faithful to Masonry, which is to be faithful to the best interests
of mankind. Labour, by precept and example, to elevate the standard of
Masonic character, to enlarge its sphere of influence, to popularize
its teachings, and to make all men know it for the Great Apostle of
Peace, Harmony, and Good-will on earth among men; of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity.
Masonry is useful to all men: to the learned, because it affords them
the opportunity of exercising their talents upon subjects eminently
worthy of their attention; to the illiterate, because it offers them
important instruction; to the young, because it presents them with
salutary precepts and good examples, and accustoms them to reflect on
the proper mode of living; to the man of the world, whom it furnishes
with noble and useful recreation; to the traveller, whom it enables to
find friends and brothers in countries where else he would be isolated
and solitary; to the worthy man in misfortune, to whom it gives
assistance; to the afflicted, on whom it lavishes consolation; to the
charitable man, whom it enables to do more good, by uniting with those
who are charitable like himself; and to all who have souls capable of
appreciating its importance, and of enjoying the charms of a
friendship founded on the same principles of religion, morality, and
philanthropy.
A Freemason, therefore, should be a man of honour and of conscience,
preferring his duty to everything beside, even to his life;
independent in his opinions, and of good morals, submissive to the
laws, devoted to humanity, to his country, to his family; kind and
indulgent to his brethren, friend of all virtuous men, and ready to
assist his fellows by all means in his power.
Thus will you be faithful to yourself, to your fellows, and to God,
and thus will you do honour to the name and rank of SECRET MASTER;
which, like other Masonic honours, degrades if it is not deserved.
M & D Chapter XIV
Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason
MORALS & DOGMA
Albert Pike
XIV
GRAND ELECT, PERFECT, AND SUBLIME MASON.
[Perfect Elu.]
It is for each individual Mason to discover the secret of Ma- sonry,
by reflection upon its symbols and a wise consideration and analysis
of what is said and done in the work. Masonry does not inculcate her
truths. She states them, once and briefly; or hints them, perhaps,
darkly; or interposes a cloud between them and eyes that would be
dazzled by them. "Seek, and ye shall find," knowledge and the truth.
The practical object of Masonry is the physical and moral amelioration
and the intellectual and spiritual improvement of individuals and
society. Neither can be effected, except by the dissemination of
truth. It is falsehood in doctrines and fallacy in principles, to
which most of the miseries of men and the mis- fortunes of nations are
owing. Public opinion is rarely right on any point; and there are and
always will be important truths to be substituted in that opinion in
the place of many errors and absurd and injurious prejudices. There
are few truths that public opinion has not at some time hated and
persecuted as heresies; and few errors that have not at some time
seemed to it truths radi- ant from the immediate presence of God.
There are moral mala- dies, also, of man and society, the treatment of
which requires not only boldness, but also, and more, prudence and
discretion; since they are more the fruit of false and pernicious
doctrines, moral, political, and religious, than of vicious
inclinations.
Much of the Masonic secret manifests itself, without speech revealing
it to him who even partially comprehends all the De- grees in
proportion as he receives them; and particularly to those who advance
to the highest Degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. That
Rite raises a corner of the veil, even in the Degree of Apprentice;
for it there declares that Masonry is a worship.
Masonry labors to improve the social order by enlightening men's
minds, warming their hearts with the love of the good, in- spiring
them with the great principle of human fraternity, and requiring of
its disciples that their language and actions shall con- form to that
principle, that they shall enlighten each other, con- trol their
passions, abhor vice, and pity the vicious man as one afflicted with a
deplorable malady.
It is the universal, eternal, immutable religion, such as God planted
it in the heart of universal humanity. No creed has ever been
long-lived that was not built on this foundation. It is the base, and
they are the superstructure. "Pure religion and unde- filed before God
and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." "Is not
this the fast that I have chosen ? to loose the bands of wickedness,
to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that
ye break every yoke ?" The ministers of this religion are all Masons
who comprehend it and are devoted to it; its sacrifices to God are
good works, the sacrifices of the base and disorderly passions, the
offering up of self-interest on the altar of humanity, and perpetual
efforts to attain to all the moral perfection of which man is capable.
To make honor and duty the steady beacon-lights that shall guide your
life-vessel over the stormy seas of time; to do that which it is right
to do, not because it will insure you success, or bring with it a
reward, or gain the applause of men, or be "the best policy," more
prudent or more advisable; but because it is right, and therefore
ought to be done; to war incessantly against error, intolerance,
ignorance, and vice, and yet to pity those who err, to be tolerant
even of intolerance, to teach the ignorant, and to labor to reclaim
the vicious, are some of the duties of a Mason.
A good Mason is one that can look upon death, and see its face with
the same countenance with which he hears its story; that can endure
all the labors of his life with his soul supporting his body, that can
equally despise riches when he hath them and when he hath them
not;that is, not sadder if they are in his neigh- bor's exchequer, nor
more lifted up if they shine around about his own walls; one that is
not moved with good fortune coming to him, nor going from him; that
can look upon another man's lands with equanimity and pleasure, as if
they were his own; and yet look upon his own, and use them too, just
as if they were another man's; that neither spends his goods
prodigally and foolishly, nor yet keeps them avariciously and like a
miser; that weighs not benefits by weight and number, but by the mind
and circumstances of him who confers them; that never thinks his
charity expen- sive, if a worthy person be the receiver; that does
nothing for opinion's sake, but everything for conscience, being as
careful of his thoughts as of his acting in markets and theatres, and
in as much awe of himself as of a whole assembly; that is, bountiful
and cheerful to his friends, and charitable and apt to forgive his
enemies; that loves his country, consults its honor, and obeys its
laws, and desires and endeavors nothing more than that he may do his
duty and honor God. And such a Mason may reckon his life to be the
life of a man, and compute his months, not by the course of the sun,
but by the zodiac and circle of his vir- tues.
The whole world is but one republic, of which each nation is a family,
and every individual a child. Masonry, not in anywise derogating from
the differing duties which the diversity of states requires, tends to
create a new people, which, composed of men of many nations and
tongues, shall all be bound together by the bonds of science,
morality, and virtue.
Essentially philanthropic, philosophical, and progressive, it has for
the basis of its dogma a firm belief in the existence of God and his
providence, and of the immortality of the soul; for its object, the
dissemination of moral, political, philosophical, and religious truth,
and the practice of all the virtues. In every age, its device has
been, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," with constitu- tional
government, law, order, discipline, and subordination to legitimate
authority--government and not anarchy.
But it is neither a political party nor a religious sect. It braces
all parties and all sects, to form from among them all a vast
fraternal association. It recognizes the dignity of human nature, and
man's right to such freedom as he is fitted for; and it knows nothing
that should place one man below another, except ignorance, debasement,
and crime, and the necessity of subordina- tion to lawful will and
authority.
It is philanthropic; for it recognizes the great truth that all men
are of the same origin, have common interests, and should co-operate
together to the same end.
Therefore it teaches its members to love one another, to give to each
other mutual assistance and support in all the circumstances of life,
to share each other's pains and sorrows, as well as their joys and
pleasures; to guard the reputations, respect the opinions, and be
perfectly tolerant of the errors, of each other, in matters of faith
and beliefs.
It is philisophical because it teaches the great Truths concern- ing
the nature and existence of one Supreme Deity, and the exist- ence and
immortality of the soul. It revives the Academy of Plato and the wise
teachings of Socrates. It reiterates the max- ims of Pythagoras,
Confucius, and Zoroaster, and reverentially enforces the sublime
lessons of Him who died upon the Cross.
The ancients thought that universal humanity acted under the influence
of two opposing Principles, the Good and the Evil: of which the Good
urged men toward Truth, Independence, and De- votedness and the Evil
toward Falsehood, Servility, and Selfish- ness. Masonry represents the
Good Principle and constantly wars against the evil one. It is the
Hercules, the Osiris, the Apollo, the Mithras, and the Ormuzd, at
everlasting and deadly feud with the demons of ignorance, brutality,
baseness, falsehood, slavish- ness of soul, intolerance, superstition,
tyranny, meanness, the in- solence of wealth, and bigotry.
When despotism and superstition, twin-powers of evil and dark- ness,
reigned everywhere and seemed invincible and immortal, it invented, to
avoid persecution, the mysteries, that is to say, the allegory, the
symbol, and the emblem, and transmitted its doc- trines by the secret
mode of initiation. Now, retaining its ancient symbols, and in part
its ancient ceremonies, it displays in every civilized country its
banner, on which in letters of living light its great principles are
written; and it smiles at the puny efforts of kings and popes to crush
it out by excommunication and inter- diction.
Man's views in regard to God, will contain only so much posi- tive
truth as the human mind is capable of receiving; whether that truth is
attained by the exercise of reason, or communicated by revelation. It
must necessarily be both limited and alloyed, to bring it within the
competence of finite human intelligence. Be- ing finite, we can form
no correct or adequate idea of the Infinite; being material, we can
form no clear conception of the Spiritual. We do believe in and know
the infinity of Space and Time, and the spirituality of the Soul; but
the idea of that infinity and spirituality eludes us. Even Omnipotence
cannot infuse infinite conceptions into finite minds; nor can God,
without first entirely changing the conditions of our being, pour a
complete and full knowledge of His own nature and attributes into the
narrow capacity of a human soul. Human intelligence could not grasp
it, nor human language express it. The visible is, necessarily, the
measure of the invisible.
The consciousness of the individual reveals itself alone. His
knowledge cannot pass beyond the limits of his own being. His
conceptions of other things and other beings are only his concep-
tions. They are not those things or beings themselves. The living
principle of a living Universe must be INFINITE; while all our ideas
and conceptions are finite, and applicable only to finite beings.
The Deity is thus not an object of knowledge, but of faith; not to be
approached by the understanding, but by the moral sense; not to be
conceived, but to be felt. All attempts to embrace the Infinite in the
conception of the Finite are, and must be only ac- commodations to the
frailty of man. Shrouded from human com- prehension in an obscurity
from which a chastened imagination is awed back, and Thought retreats
in conscious weakness, the Divine Nature is a theme on which man is
little entitled to dog- matize. Here the philosophic Intellect becomes
most painfully aware of its own insufficiency.
And yet it is here that man most dogmatizes, classifies and de-
scribes God's attributes, makes out his map of God's nature, and his
inventory of God's qualities, feelings, impulses, and passions; and
then hangs and burns his brother, who, as dogmatically as he, makes
out a different map and inventory. The common under- standing has no
humility. Its God is an incarnate Divinity. Im- perfection imposes its
own limitations on the Illimitable, and clothes the Inconceivable
Spirit of the Universe in forms that come within the grasp of the
senses and the intellect, and are derived from that infinite and
imperfect nature which is but God's creation.
We are all of us, though not all equally, mistaken. The cher- ished
dogmas of each of us are not, as we fondly suppose, the pure truth of
God; but simply our own special form of error, our guesses at truth,
the refracted and fragmentary rays of light that have fallen upon our
own minds. Our little systems have their day, and cease to be; they
are but broken lights of God; and He is more than they. Perfect truth
is not attainable anywhere. We style this Degree that of Perfection;
and yet what it teaches is imperfect and defective. Yet we are not to
relax in the pursuit of truth, nor contentedly acquiesce in error. It
is our duty always to press forward in the search; for though absolute
truth is unat- tainable, yet the amount of error in our views is
capable of pro- gressive and perpetual diminution; and thus Masonry is
a con- tinual struggle toward the light.
All errors are not equally innocuous. That which is most in- jurious
is to entertain unworthy conceptions of the nature and attributes of
God; and it is this that Masonry symbolizes by igno- rance of the True
Word. The true word of a Mason is, not the entire, perfect, absolute
truth in regard to God; but the highest and noblest conception of Him
that our minds are capable of forming; and this word is Ineffable,
because one man cannot communicate to another his own conception of
Deity; since every man's conception of God must be proportioned to his
mental cul- tivation and intellectual powers, and moral excellence.
God is, as man conceives Him, the reflected image of man himself.
For every man's conception of God must vary with his mental
cultivation and mental powers. If any one contents himself with any
lower image than his intellect is capable of grasping, then he
contents himself with that which is false to him, as well as false in
fact. If lower than he can reach, he must needs feel it to be false.
And if we, of the nineteenth century after Christ, adopt the con-
ceptions of the nineteenth century before Him; if our conceptions of
God are those of the ignorant, narrow-minded, and vindictive
Israelite; then we think worse of God, and have a lower, meaner, and
more limited view of His nature, than the faculties which He has
bestowed are capable of grasping. The highest view we can form is
nearest to the truth. If we acquiesce in any lower one, we acquiesce
in an untruth. We feel that it is an affront and an indignity to Him,
to conceive of Him as cruel, short-sighted, ca- pricious, and unjust;
as a jealous, an angry, a vindictive Being. When we examine our
conceptions of His character, if we can conceive of a loftier, nobler,
higher, more beneficent, glorious, and magnificent character, then
this latter is to us the true conception of Deity; for nothing can be
imagined more excellent than He.
Religion, to obtain currency and influence with the great mass of
mankind, must needs be alloyed with such an amount of error as to
place it far below the standard attainable by the higher human
capacities. A religion as pure as the loftiest and most cul- tivated
human reason could discern, would not be comprehended by, or effective
over, the less educated portion of mankind. What is Truth to the
philosopher, would not be Truth, nor have the effect of Truth, to the
peasant. The religion of the many must necessarily be more incorrect
than that of the refined and reflective few, not so much in its
essence as in its forms, not so much in the spiritual idea which lies
latent at the bottom of it, as in the sym- bols and dogmas in which
that idea is embodied. The truest religion would, in many points, not
be comprehended by the igno- rant, nor consolatory to them, nor
guiding and supporting for them. The doctrines of the Bible are often
not clothed in the language of strict truth, but in that which was
fittest to convey to a rude and ignorant people the practical
essentials of the doc- trine. A perfectly pure faith, free from all
extraneous admixtures, a system of noble theism and lofty morality,
would find too little preparation for it in the common mind and heart,
to admit of prompt reception by the masses of mankind; and Truth might
not have reached us, if it had not borrowed the wings of Error.
The Mason regards God as a Moral Governor, as well as an Original
Creator; as a God at hand, and not merely one afar off in the distance
of infinite space, and in the remoteness of Past or Future Eternity.
He conceives of Him as taking a watchful and presiding interest in the
affairs of the world, and as influenc- ing the hearts and actions of
men.
To him, God is the great Source of the World of Life and Mat- ter; and
man, with his wonderful corporeal and mental frame, His direct work.
He believes that God has made men with differ- ent intellectual
capacities, and enabled some, by superior intellect- ual power, to see
and originate truths which are hidden from the mass of men. He
believes that when it is His will that mankind should make some great
step forward, or achieve some pregnant discovery, He calls into being
some intellect of more than ordi- nary magnitude and power, to give
birth to new ideas, and grander conceptions of the Truths vital to
Humanity.
We hold that God has so ordered matters in this beautiful and
harmonious, but mysteriously-governed Universe, that one great mind
after another will arise, from time to time, as such are needed, to
reveal to men the truths that are wanted, and the amount of truth than
can be borne. He so arranges, that nature and the course of events
shall send men into the world, endowed with that higher mental and
moral organization, in which grand truths, and sublime gleams of
spiritual light will spontaneously and inevitably arise. These speak
to men by inspiration.
Whatever Hiram really was, he is the type, perhaps an imag- inary
type, to us, of humanity in its highest phase; an exemplar of what man
may and should become, in the course of ages, in his progress toward
the realization of his destiny; an individual gifted with a glorious
intellect, a noble soul, a fine organization, and a perfectly balanced
moral being; an earnest of what humanity may be, and what we believe
it will hereafter be in God's good time; the possibility of the race
made real.
The Mason believes that God has arranged this glorious but per-
plexing world with a purpose, and on a plan. He holds that every man
sent upon this earth, and especially every man of superior capacity,
has a duty to perform, a mission to fulfill, a baptism to be baptized
with; that every great and good man possesses some portion of God's
truth, which he must proclaim to the world, and which must bear fruit
in his own bosom. In a true and simple sense, he believes all the
pure, wise, and intellectual to be inspired, and to be so for the
instruction, advancement, and elevation of mankind. That kind of
inspiration, like God's omnipresence, is not limited to the few
writers claimed by Jews, Christians, or Moslems, but is co-extensive
with the race. It is the consequence of a faithful use of our
faculties. Each man is its subject, God is its source, and Truth its
only test. It differs in degrees, as the intellectual endowments, the
moral wealth of the soul, and the de- gree of cultivation of those
endowments and faculties differ. It is limited to no sect, age, or
nation. It is wide as the world and common as God. It was not given to
a few men, in the infancy of mankind, to monopolize inspiration, and
bar God out of the soul. We are not born in the dotage and decay of
the world. The stars are beautiful as in their prime; the most ancient
Heavens are fresh and strong. God is still everywhere in nature. Wher-
ever a heart beats with love, wherever Faith and Reason utter their
oracles, there is God, as formerly in the hearts of seers and
prophets. No soil on earth is so holy as the good man's heart; nothing
is so full of God. This inspiration is not given to the learned alone,
not alone to the great and wise, but to every faithful child of God.
Certain as the open eye drinks in the light, do the pure in heart see
God; and he who lives truly, feels Him as a pres- ence within the
soul. The conscience is the very voice of Deity.
Masonry, around whose altars the Christian, the Hebrew, the Moslem,
the Brahmin, the followers of Confucius and Zoroaster, can assemble as
brethren and unite in prayer to the one God who is above all the
Baalim, must needs leave it to each of its Initiates to look for the
foundation of his faith and hope to the written scriptures of his own
religion. For itself it finds those truths definite enough, which are
written by the finger of God upon the heart of man and on the pages of
the book of nature. Views of religion and duty, wrought out by the
meditations of the studious, confirmed by the allegiance of the good
and wise, stamped as sterling by the response they find in every
uncorrupted mind, com- mend themselves to Masons of every creed, and
may well be ac- cepted by all.
The Mason does not pretend to dogmatic certainty, nor vainly imagine
such certainty attainable. He considers that if there were no written
revelation, he could safely rest the hopes that ani- mate him and the
principles that guide him, on the deductions of reason and the
convictions of instinct and consciousness. He can find a sure
foundation for his religious belief, in these deductions of the
intellect and convictions of the heart. For reason proves to him the
existence and attributes of God; and those spiritual instincts which
he feels are the voice of God in his soul, infuse into his mind a
sense of his relation to God, a conviction of the beneficence of his
Creator and Preserver, and a hope of future ex- istence; and his
reason and conscience alike unerringly point to virtue as the highest
good, and the destined aim and purpose of man's life.
He studies the wonders of the Heavens, the frame-work and revolutions
of the Earth, the mysterious beauties and adaptations of animal
existence, the moral and material constitution of the human creature,
so fearfully and wonderfully made; and is satis- fied that God IS; and
that a Wise and Good Being is the author of the starry Heavens above
him, and of the moral world within him; and his mind finds an adequate
foundation for its hopes, its worship, its principles of action, in
the far-stretching Universe, in the glorious firmament, in the deep,
full soul, bursting with un- utterable thoughts.
These are truths which every reflecting mind will unhesitatingly
receive, as not to be surpassed, nor capable of improvement; and
fitted, if obeyed, to make earth indeed a Paradise, and man only a
little lower than the angels. The worthlessness of ceremonial
observances, and the necessity of active virtue; the enforcement of
purity of heart as the security for purity of life, and of the
government of the thoughts, as the originators and forerunners of
action; universal philanthropy, requiring us to love all men, and to
do unto others that and that only which we should think it right,
just, and generous for them to do unto us; forgiveness of injuries;
the necessity of self-sacrifice in the discharge of duty; humility;
genuine sincerity, and being that which we seem to be; all these
sublime precepts need no miracle, no voice from the clouds, to
recommend them to our allegiance, or to assure us of their divine
origin. They command obedience by virtue of their inherent rectitude
and beauty; and have been, and are, and will be the law in every age
and every country of the world. God revealed them to man in the
beginning.
To the Mason, God is our Father in Heaven, to be Whose especial
children is the sufficient reward of the peacemakers, to see Whose
face the highest hope of the pure in heart; Who is ever at hand to
strengthen His true worshippers; to Whom our most fer- vent love is
due, our most humble and patient submission; Whose most acceptable
worship is a pure and pitying heart and a benefi- cent life; in Whose
constant presence we live and act, to Whose merciful disposal we are
resigned by that death which, we hope and believe, is but the entrance
to a better life; and Whose wise decrees forbid a man to lap his soul
in an elysium of mere indolent content.
As to our feelings toward Him and our conduct toward man, Masonry
teaches little about which men can differ, and little from which they
can dissent. He is our Father; and we are all breth- ren. This much
lies open to the most ignorant and busy, as fully as to those who have
most leisure and are most learned. This needs no Priest to teach it,
and no authority to indorse it; and if every man did that only which
is consistent with it, it would exile barbarity, cruelty, intolerance,
uncharitableness, perfidy, treach- ery, revenge, selfishness, and all
their kindred vices and bad pas- sions beyond the confines of the
world.
The true Mason, sincerely holding that a Supreme God created and
governs this world, believes also that He governs it by laws, which,
though wise, just, and beneficent, are yet steady, unwaver- ing,
inexorable. He believes that his agonies and sorrows are or- dained
for his chastening, his strengthening, his elaboration and
development; because they are the necessary results of the opera- tion
of laws, the best that could be devised for the happiness and
purification of the species, and to give occasion and opportunity for
the practice of all the virtues, from the homeliest and most common,
to the noblest and most sublime; or perhaps not even that, but the
best adapted to work out the vast, awful, glorious, eternal designs of
the Great Spirit of the Universe. He believes that the ordained
operations of nature, which have brought misery to him, have, from the
very unswerving tranquility of their career, showered blessings and
sunshine upon many another path; that the unrelenting chariot of Time,
which has crushed or maimed him in its allotted course, is pressing
onward to the accomplish- ment of those serene and mighty purposes, to
have contributed to which, even as a victim, is an honor and a
recompense. He takes this view of Time and Nature and God, and yet
bears his lot with- out murmur or distrust; because it is a portion of
a system, the best possible, because ordained by God. He does not
believe that God loses sight of him, while superintending the march of
the great harmonies of the Universe; nor that it was not foreseen,
when the Universe was created, its laws enacted, and the long suc-
cession of its operations pre-ordained, that in the great march of
those events, he would suffer pain and undergo calamity. He be- lieves
that his individual good entered into God's consideration, as well as
the great cardinal results to which the course of all things is
tending.
Thus believing, he has attained an eminence in virtue, the high- est,
amid passive excellence, which humanity can reach. He finds his reward
and his support in the reflection that he is an unreluc- tant and
self-sacrificing co-operator with the Creator of the Uni- verse; and
in the noble consciousness of being worthy and capable of so sublime a
conception, yet so sad a destiny. He is then truly entitled to be
called a Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason. He is content to
fall early in the battle, if his body may but form a stepping-stone
for the future conquests of humanity.
It cannot be that God, Who, we are certain, is perfectly good, can
choose us to suffer pain, unless either we are ourselves to re- ceive
from it an antidote to what is evil in ourselves, or else as such pain
is a necessary part in the scheme of the Universe, which as a whole is
good. In either case, the Mason receives it with submission. He would
not suffer unless it was ordered so. What- ever his creed, if he
believes that God is, and that He cares for His creatures, he cannot
doubt that; nor that it would not have been so ordered, unless it was
either better for himself, or for some other persons, or for some
things. To complain and lament is to murmur against God's will, and
worse than unbelief.
The Mason, whose mind is cast in a nobler mould than those of the
ignorant and unreflecting, and is instinct with a diviner life,- who
loves truth more than rest, and the peace of Heaven rather than the
peace of Eden,--to whom a loftier being brings severer cares,--who
knows that man does not live by pleasure or content alone, but by the
presence of the power of God,--must cast be- hind him the hope of any
other repose or tranquillity, than that which is the last reward of
long agonies of thought; he must re- linquish all prospect of any
Heaven save that of which trouble is the avenue and portal; he must
gird up his loins, and trim his lamp, for a work that must be done,
and must not be negligently done. If he does not like to live in the
furnished lodgings of tra- dition, he must build his own house, his
own system of faith and thought, for himself.
The hope of success, and not the hope of reward, should be our
stimulating and sustaining power. Our object, and not ourselves,
should be our inspiring thought. Selfishness is a sin, when tem-
porary, and for time. Spun out to eternity, it does not become
celestial prudence. We should toil and die, not for Heaven or Bliss,
but for Duty.
In the more frequent cases, where we have to join our efforts to those
of thousands of others, to contribute to the carrying forward of a
great cause; merely to till the ground or sow the seed for a very
distant harvest, or to prepare the way for the future advent of some
great amendment; the amount which each one contrib- utes to the
achievement of ultimate success, the portion of the price which
justice should assign to each as his especial produc- tion, can never
be accurately ascertained. Perhaps few of those who have ever labored,
in the patience of secrecy and silence, to bring about some political
or social change, which they felt con- vinced would ultimately prove
of vast service to humanity, lived to see the change effected, or the
anticipated good flow from it. Fewer still of them were able to
pronounce what appreciable weight their several efforts contributed to
the achievement of the change desired. Many will doubt, whether, in
truth, these exer- tions have any influence whatever; and,
discouraged, cease all active effort.
Not to be thus discouraged, the Mason must labor to elevate and purify
his motives, as well as sedulously cherish the convic- tion, assuredly
a true one, that in this world there is no such thing as effort thrown
away; that in all labor there is profit; that all sincere exertion, in
a righteous and unselfish cause, is necessarily followed, in spite of
all appearance to the contrary, by an appro- priate and proportionate
success; that no bread cast upon the waters can be wholly lost; that
no seed planted in the ground can fail to quicken in due time and
measure; and that, however we may, in moments of despondency, be apt
to doubt, not only whether our cause will triumph, but whether, if it
does, we shall have contributed to its triumph,--there is One, Who has
not only seen every exertion we have made, but Who can assign the
exact degree in which each soldier has assisted to gain the great
victory over social evil. No good work is done wholly in vain.
The Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason will in nowise deserve
that honorable title, if he has not that strength, that will, that
self-sustaining energy; that Faith, that feeds upon no earthly hope,
nor ever thinks of victory, but, content in its own consum- mation,
combats, because it ought to combat, rejoicing fights, and still
rejoicing falls.
The Augean Stables of the World, the accumulated uncleanness and
misery of centuries, require a mighty river to cleanse them thoroughly
away; every drop we contribute aids to swell that river and augment
its force, in a degree appreciable by God, though not by man; and he
whose zeal is deep and earnest, will not be over-anxious that his
individual drops should be distin- guishable amid the mighty mass of
cleansing and fertilizing waters; far less that, for the sake of
distinction, it should flow in ineffective singleness away.
The true Mason will not be careful that his name should be inscribed
upon the mite which he casts into the treasury of God. It suffices him
to know that if he has labored, with purity of pur- pose, in any good
cause, he must have contributed to its success; that the degree in
which he has contributed is a matter of infi- nitely small concern;
and still more, that the consciousness of having so contributed,
however obscurely and unnoticed, is his sufficient, even if it be his
sole, reward. Let every Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason
cherish this faith. It is a duty. It is the brilliant and never-dying
light that shines within and through the symbolic pedestal of
alabaster, on which reposes the perfect cube of agate, symbol of duty,
inscribed with the divine name of God. He who industriously sows and
reaps is a good laborer, and worthy of his hire. But he who sows that
which shall be reaped by others, by those who will know not of and
care not for the sower, is a laborer of a nobler order, and, worthy of
a more excellent reward.
The Mason does not exhort others to an ascetic undervaluing of this
life, as an insignificant and unworthy portion of existence; for that
demands feelings which are unnatural, and which, there- fore, if
attained, must be morbid, and if merely professed, insin- cere; and
teaches us to look rather to a future life for the com- pensation of
social evils, than to this life for their cure; and so does injury to
the cause of virtue and to that of social progress. Life is real, and
is earnest, and it is full of duties to be performed. It is the
beginning of our immortality. Those only who feel a deep interest and
affection for this world will work resolutely for its amelioration;
those whose affections are transferred to Heaven, easily acquiesce in
the miseries of earth, deeming them hopeless, befitting, and ordained;
and console themselves with the idea of the ammends which are one day
to be theirs. It is a sad truth, that those most decidedly given to
spiritual contemplation, and to making religion rule in their hearts,
are often most apathetic to- ward all improvement of this world's
systems, and in many cases virtual conservatives of evil, and hostile
to political and social re- form, as diverting men's energies from
eternity.
The Mason does not war with his own instincts, macerate the body into
weakness and disorder, and disparage what he sees to be beautiful,
knows to be wonderful, and feels to be unspeakably dear and
fascinating. He does not put aside the nature which God has given him,
to struggle after one which He has not be- stowed. He knows that man
is sent into the world, not a spir- itual, but a composite being, made
up of body and mind, the body having, as is fit and needful in a
material world, its full, rightful, and allotted share. His life is
guided by a full recognition of this fact. He does not deny it in bold
words, and admit it in weak- nesses and inevitable failings. He
believes that his spirituality will come in the next stage of his
being, when he puts on the spir- itual body; that his body will be
dropped at death; and that, until then, God meant it to be commanded
and controlled, but not neg- lected, despised, or ignored by the soul,
under pain of heavy con- sequences.
Yet the Mason is not indifferent as to the fate of the soul, after its
present life, as to its continued and eternal being, and the char-
acter of the scenes in which that being will be fully developed. These
are to him topics of the proroundest interest, and the most ennobling
and refining contemplation. They occupy much of his leisure; and as he
becomes familiar with the sorrows and calami- ties of this life, as
his hopes are disappointed and his visions of happiness here fade
away; when life has wearied him in its race of hours; when he is
harassed and toil-worn, and the bur- den of his years weighs heavy on
him, the balance of attraction gradually inclines in favor of another
life; and he clings to his lofty speculations with a tenacity of
interest which needs no in- junction, and will listen to no
prohibition. They are the consol- ing privilege of the aspiring, the
wayworn, the weary, and the bereaved.
To him the contemplation of the Future lets in light upon the Present,
and develops the higher portions of his nature. He en- deavors rightly
to adjust the respective claims of Heaven and earth upon his time and
thought, so as to give the proper propor- tions thereof to performing
the duties and entering into the inter- ests of this world, and to
preparation for a better; to the cultiva- tion and purification of his
own character, and to the public service of his fellow-men.
The Mason does not dogmatize, but entertaining and uttering his own
convictions, he leaves every one else free to do the same; and only
hopes that the time will come, even if after the lapse of ages, when
all men shall form one great family of brethren, and one law alone,
the law of love, shall govern God's whole Uni- verse.
Believe as you may, my brother; if the Universe is not, to you,
without a God, and if man is not like the beast that perishes, but
hath an immortal soul, we welcome you among us, to wear, as we wear,
with humility, and conscious of your demerits and short- comings, the
title of Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason.
It is not without a secret meaning, that twelve was the num- ber of
the Apostles of Christ, and seventy-two that of his Dis- ciples: that
John addressed his rebukes and menaces to the Seven churches, the
number of the Archangels and the Planets. At Babylon were the Seven
Stages of Bersippa, a pyramid of Seven stories, and at Ecbatana Seven
concentric inclosures, each of a different color. Thebes also had
Seven gates, and the same num- ber is repeated again and again in the
account of the flood. The Sephiroth, or Emanations, ten in number,
three in one class, and seven in the other, repeat the mystic numbers
of Pythagoras. Seven Amschaspands or planetary spirits were invoked
with Ormuzd: Seven inferior Rishis of Hindustan were saved with the
head of their family in an ark: and Seven ancient personages alone
returned with the British just man, Hu, from the dale of the grievous
waters. There were Seven Heliadae, whose father Helias, or the Sun,
once crossed the sea in a golden cup; Seven Titans, children of the
older Titan, Kronos or Saturn; Seven Corybantes; and Seven Cabiri,
sons of Sydyk; Seven primeval Celestial spirits of the Japanese, and
Seven Karlesters who escaped from the deluge and began to be the
parents of a new race, on the summit of Mount Albordi. Seven Cyclopes,
also, built the walls of Tiryus.
Celus, as quoted by Origen, tells us that the Persians repre- sented
by symbols the two-fold motion of the stars, fixed and planetary, and
the passage of the Soul through their successive spheres. They erected
in their holy caves, in which the mystic rites of the Mithriac
Initiations were practised, what he denomi- nates a high ladder, on
the Seven steps of which were Seven gates or portals, according to the
number of the Seven principal heavenly bodies. Through these the
aspirants passed, until they reached the summit of the whole; and this
passage was styled a transmigration through the spheres.
Jacob saw in his dream a ladder planted or set on the earth, and its
top reaching to Heaven, and the Malaki Alohim ascending and descending
on it, and above it stood IHUH, declaring Himself to be Ihuh-Alhi
Abraham. The word translated ladder, is Salam, from Salal, raised,
elevated, reared up, exalted, piled up into a heap, Aggeravit.
Salalah, means a heap, rampart, or other accumulation of earth or
stone, artificially made; and Salaa or Salo, is a rock or cliff or
boulder, and the name of the city of Petra. There is no ancient Hebrew
word to designate a pyramid.
The symbolic mountain Meru was ascended by Seven steps or stages; and
all the pyramids and artificial tumuli and hillocks thrown up in flat
countries were imitations of this fabulous and mystic mountain, for
purposes of worship. These were the "High Places" so often mentioned
in the Hebrew books, on which the idolaters sacrificed to foreign
gods.
The pyramids were sometimes square, and sometimes round. The sacred
Babylonian tower [Magdol], dedicated to the great Father Bal, was an
artificial hill, of pyramidal shape, and Seven stages, built of brick,
and each stage of a different color, representing the Seven planetary
spheres by the appropriate color of each planet. Meru itself was said
to be a single mountain, ter- minating in three peaks, and thus a
symbol of the Trimurti. The great Pagoda at Tanjore was of six
stories, surmounted by a tem- ple as the seventh, and on this three
spires or towers. An ancient pagoda at Deogur was surmounted by a
tower, sustaining the mystic egg and a trident. Herodotus tells us
that the Temple of Bal at Babylon was a tower composed of Seven
towers, resting on an eighth that served as basis, and successively
diminishing in size from the bottom to the top; and Strabo tells us it
was a pyramid.
Faber thinks that the Mithriac ladder was really a pyramid with Seven
stages, each provided with a narrow door or aperture, through each of
which doors the aspirant passed, to reach the summit, and then
descended through similar doors on the opposite side of the pyramid;
the ascent and descent of the Soul being thus represented.
Each Mithriac cave and all the most ancient temples were tended to
symbolize the Universe, which itself was habitually called the Temple
and habitation of Deity. Every temple was the world in miniature; and
so the whole world was one grand temple. The most ancient temples were
roofless; and therefore the Persians, Celts, and Scythians strongly
disliked artificial cov- ered edifices. Cicero says that Xerxes burned
the Grecian tem- ples, on the express ground that the whole world was
the Magnifi- cent Temple and Habitation of the Supreme Deity.
Macrobius says that the entire Universe was judiciously deemed by many
the Temple of God. Plato pronounced the real Temple of the Deity to be
the world; and Heraclitus declared that the Universe, varie- gated
with animals and plants and stars was the only genuine Temple of the
Divinity.
How completely the Temple of Solomon was symbolic, is manifest, not
only from the continual reproduction in it of the sacred numbers and
of astrological symbols in the histor- ical descriptions of it; but
also, and yet more, from the de- tails of the imaginary reconstructed
edifice, seen by Ezekiel in his vision. The Apocalypse completes the
demonstration, and shows the kabalistic meanings of the whole. The
Sym- bola Architectonica are found on the most ancient edifices; and
these mathematical figures and instruments, adopted by the Templars,
and identical with those on the gnostic seals and abraxae, connect
their dogma with the Chaldaic, Syriac, and Egyptian Oriental
philosophy. The secret Pythagorean doc- trines of numbers were
preserved by the monks of Thibet, by the Hierophants of Egypt and
Eleusis, at Jerusalem, and in the circular Chapters of the Druids; and
they are especially consecrated in that mysterious book, the
Apocalypse of Saint John.
All temples were surrounded by pillars, recording the number of the
constellations, the signs of the zodiac, or the cycles of the planets;
and each one was a microcosm or symbol of the Universe, having for
roof or ceiling the starred vault of Heaven.
All temples were originally open at the top, having for roof the sky.
Twelve pillars described the belt of the zodiac. Whatever the number
of the pillars, they were mystical everywhere. At Abury, the Druidic
temple reproduced all the cycles by its col- umns. Around the temples
of Chilminar in Persia, of Baalbec, and of Tukhti Schlomoh in Tartary,
on the frontier of China, stood forty pillars. On each side of the
temple at Paestum were fourteen, recording the Egyptian cycle of the
dark and light sides of the moon, as described by Plutarch; the whole
thirty-eight that surrounded them recording the two meteoric cycles so
often found in the Druidic temples.
The theatre built by Scaurus, in Greece, was surrounded by 360
columns; the Temple at Mecca, and that at Iona in Scotland, by 360
stones.
M & D Chapter XVII
Knight of the East and West
MORALS AND DOGMA
by Albert Pike
XVII. KNIGHT OF THE EAST AND WEST.
This is the first of the Philosophical Degrees of the Ancient and
Accepted Scottish Rite; and the beginning of a course of in- struction
which will fully unveil to you the heart and inner mys- teries of
Masonry. Do not despair because you have often seemed on the point of
attaining the inmost light, and have as often been disappointed. In
all time, truth has been hidden under symbols, and often under a
succession of allegories: where veil after veil had to be penetrated
before the true Light was reached, and the essential truth stood
revealed. The Human Light is but an im- perfect reflection of a ray of
the Infinite and Divine.
We are about to approach those ancient Religions which once ruled the
minds of men, and whose ruins encumber the plains of the great Past,
as the broken columns of Palmyra and Tadmor lie bleaching on the sands
of the desert. They rise before us, those old, strange, mysterious
creeds and faiths, shrouded in the mists of antiquity, and stalk dimly
and undefined along the line which divides Time from Eternity; and
forms of strange, wild, startling beauty mingled in the vast throngs
of figures with shapes mon- strous, grotesque, and hideous.
The religion taught by Moses, which, like the laws of Egypt, enuciated
the principle of exclusion, borrowed, at every period of its
existence, from all the creeds with which it came in contact. While,
by the studies of the learned and wise, it enriched itself with the
most admirable principles of the religions of Egypt and Asia, it was
changed, in the wanderings of the People, by every- thing that was
most impure or seductive in the pagan manners and superstitions. It
was one thing in the times of Moses and Aaron, another in those of
David and Solomon, and still another in those of Daniel and Philo.
At the time when John the Baptist made his appearance in the desert,
near the shores of the Dead Sea, all the old philosophical and
religious systems were approximating toward each other. A general
lassitude inclined the minds of all toward the quietude of that
amalgamation of doctrines for which the expeditions of Alex- ander and
the more peaceful occurrences that followed, with the establishment in
Asia and Africa of many Grecian dynasties and a great number of
Grecian colonies, had prepared the way. After the intermingling of
different nations, which resulted from the wars of Alexander in
three-quarters of the globe, the doctrines of Greece, of Egypt, of
Persia, and of India, met and intermingled everywhere. All the
barriers that had formerly kept the nations apart, were thrown down;
and while the People of the West readily connected their faith with
those of the East, those of the Orient hastened to learn the
traditions of Rome and the legends of Athens. While the Philosophers
of Greece, all (except the dis- ciples of Epicurus) more or less
Platonists, seized eargerly upon the beliefs and doctrines of the
East,--the Jews and Egyptians, be- fore then the most exclusive of all
peoples, yielded to that eclecti- cism which prevailed among their
masters, the Greeks and Romans.
Under the same influences of toleration, even those who em- braced
Christianity, mingled together the old and the new, Chris- tianity and
Philosophy, the Apostolic teachings and the traditions of Mythology
The man of intellect, devotee of one system, rarely displaces it with
another in all its purity. The people take such a creed as is offered
them. Accordingly, the distinction be- tween the esoteric and the
exoteric doctrine, immemorial in other creeds, easily gained a
foothold among many of the Christians; and it was held by a vast
number, even during the preaching of Paul, that the writings of the
Apostles were incomplete; that they contained only the germs of
another doctrine, which must receive from the hands of philosophy, not
only the systematic arrange- ment which was wanting, but all the
development which lay con- cealed therein. The writings of the
Apostles, they said, in address- ing themselves to mankind in general,
enunciated only the articles of the vulgar faith; but transmitted the
mysteries of knowledge to superior minds, to the Elect,--mysteries
handed down from gen- eration to generation in esoteric traditions;
and to this science of the mysteries they gave the name of Gnosis.
The Gnostics derived their leading doctrines and ideas from Plato and
Philo, the Zend-avesta and the Kabalah, and the Sacred books of India
and Egypt; and thus introduced into the bosom of Christianity the
cosmological and theosophical speculations, which had formed the
larger portion of the ancient religions of the Orient, joined to those
of the Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish doctrines, which the Neo-Platonists
had equally adopted in the Occident.
Emanation from the Deity of all spiritual beings, progressive
degeneration of these beings from emanation to emanation, re- demption
and return of all to the purity of the Creator; and, after the
re-establishment of the primitive harmony of all, a for- tunate and
truly divine condition of all, in the bosom of God; such were the
fundamental teachings of Gnosticism. The genius of the Orient, with
its contemplations, irradiations, and intuitions, dictated its
doctrines. Its language corresponded to its origin. Full of imagery,
it had all the magnificence, the inconsistencies, and the mobility of
the figurative style.
Behold, it said, the light, which emanates from an immense centre of
Light, that spreads everywhere its benevolent rays; so do the spirits
of Light emanate from the Divine Light. Behold, all the springs which
nourish, embellish, fertilize, and purify the Earth; they emanate from
one and the same ocean; so from the bosom of the Divinity emanate so
many streams, which form and fill the universe of intelligences.
Behold numbers, which all emanate from one primitive number, all
resemble it, all are com- posed of its essence, and still vary
infinitely; and utterances, de- composable into so many syllables and
elements, all contained in the primitive Word, and still infinitely
various; so the world of Intelligences emanated from a Primary
Intelligence, and they all resemble it, and yet display an infinite
variety of existences.
It revived and combined the old doctrines of the Orient and the
Occident; and it found in many passages of the Gospels and the
Pastoral letters, a warrant for doing so. Christ himself spoke in
parables and allegories, John borrowed the enigmatical language of the
Platonists, and Paul often indulged in incomprehensible rhapsodies,
the meaning of which could have been clear to the Initiates alone.
It is admitted that the cradle of Gnosticism is probably to be looked
for in Syria, and even in Palestine. Most of its expound- ers wrote in
that corrupted form of the Greek used by the Hellen- istic Jews, and
in the Septuagint and the New Testament; and there is a striking
analogy between their doctrines and those of the Judaeo-Egyptian
Philo, of Alexandria; itself the seat of three schools, at once
philosophic and religious--the Greek, the Egyp- tian, and the Jewish.
Pythagoras and Plato, the most mystical of the Grecian Philos- ophers
(the latter heir to the doctrines of the former), and who had
travelled, the latter in Egypt, and the former in Phoenicia, India,
and Persia, also taught the esoteric doctrine and the distinc- tion
between the initiated and the profane. The dominant doc- trines of
Platonism were found in Gnosticism. Emanation of Intelligences from
the bosom of the Deity; the going astray in error and the sufferings
of spirits, so long as they are remote from God, and imprisoned in
matter; vain and long-continued efforts to arrive at the knowledge of
the Truth, and re-enter into their primitive union with the Supreme
Being; alliance of a pure and divine soul with an irrational soul, the
seat of evil desires; angels or demons who dwell in and govern the
planets, having but an imperfect knowledge of the ideas that presided
at the creation; regeneration of all beings by their return to the
kosmos noetos, the world of Intelligences, and its Chief, the Supreme
Being; sole possible mode of re-establishing that primi- tive harmony
of the creation, of which the music of the spheres of Pythagoras was
the image; these were the analogies of the two systems; and we
discover in them some of the ideas that form a part of Masonry; in
which, in the present mutilated condition of the symbolic Degrees,
they are disguised and overlaid with fiction and absurdity, or present
themselves as casual hints that are pass- ed by wholly unnoticed.
The distinction between the esoteric and exoteric doctrines (a
distinction purely Masonic), was always and from the very earliest
times preserved among the Greeks. It remounted to the fabulous times
of Orpheus; and the mysteries of Theosophy were found in all their
traditions and myths. And after the time of Alexander, they resorted
for instruction, dogmas, and mysteries, to all the schools, to those
of Egypt and Asia, as well as those of Ancient Thrace, Sicily,
Etruria, and Attica.
The Jewish-Greek School of Alexandria is known only by two of its
Chiefs, Aristobulus and Philo, both Jews of Alexandria in Egypt.
Belonging to Asia by its origin, to Egypt by its residence, to Greece
by its language and studies, it strove to show that all truths
embedded in the philosophies of other countries were trans- planted
thither from Palestine. Aristobulus declared that all the facts and
details of the Jewish Scriptures were so many allegories, concealing
the most profound meanings, and that Plato had bor- rowed from them
all his finest ideas. Philo, who lived a century after him, following
the same theory, endeavored to show that the Hebrew writings, by their
system of allegories, were the true source of all religious and
philosophical doctrines. According to him, the literal meaning is for
the vulgar alone. Whoever has meditated on philosophy, purified
himself by virtue, and raised himself by contemplation, to God and the
intellectual world, and received their inspiration, pierces the gross
envelope of the letter, discovers a wholly different order of things,
and is initiated into mysteries, of which the elementary or literal
instruction offers but an imperfect image. A historical fact, a
figure, a word, a letter, a number, a rite, a custom, the parable or
vision of a prophet, veils the most profound truths; and he who has
the key of science will interpret all according to the light he
possesses.
Again we see the symbolism of Masonry, and the search of the Candidate
for light. "Let men of narrow minds withdraw," he says, "with closed
ears. We transmit the divine mysteries to those who have received the
sacred initiation, to those who prac- tise true piety and who are not
enslaved by the empty trappings of words or the preconceived opinions
of the pagans."
To Philo, the Supreme Being was the Primitive Light, or the Archetype
of Light, Source whence the rays emanate that illumi- nate Souls. He
was also the Soul of the Universe, and as such acted in all its parts.
He Himself fills and limits His whole Being. His Powers and Virtues
fill and penetrate all. These Powers (dunameis) are Spirits distinct
from God, the "Ideas" of Plato personified. He is without beginning,
and lives in the prototype of Time (aion).
His image is THE WORD, a form more brilliant than fire; that not being
the pure light. This LOGOS dwells in God; for the Supreme Being makes
to Himself within His Intelligence the types or ideas of everything
that is to become reality in this World. The LOGOS is the vehicle by
which God acts on the Uni- verse, and may be compared to the speech of
man.
The LOGOS being the World of Ideas, by means whereof God has created
visible things, He is the most ancient God, in comparison with the
World, which is the youngest pro- duction. The LOGOS, Chief of
Intelligence, of which He is the general representative, is named
Archangel, type and representa- tive of all spirits, even those of
mortals. He is also styled the man-type and primitive man, Adam
Kadmon.
God only is Wise. The wisdom of man is but the reflection and image of
that of God. He is the Father, and His WISDOM the mother of creation:
for He united Himself with WISDOM (Sophia), and communicated to it the
germ of creation, and it brought forth the material world. He created
the ideal world only, and caused the material world to be made real
after its type, by His LOGOS, which is His speech, and at the same
time the Idea of Ideas, the Intellectual World. The Intellectual City
was but the Thought of the Architect, who meditated the creation,
accord- ing to that plan of the Material City.
The Word is not only the Creator, but occupies the place of the
Supreme Being. Through Him all the Powers and Attributes of God act.
On the other side, as first representative of the Human Family, He is
the Protector of men and their Shepherd.
God gives to man the Soul or Intelligence, which exists before the
body, and which he unites with the body. The reasoning Principle comes
from God through the Word, and communes with God and with the Word;
but there is also in man an irrational Principle, that of the
inclinations and passions which produce disorder, emanating from
inferior spirits who fill the air as ministers of God. The body, taken
from the Earth, and the irrational Principle that animates it
concurrently with the rational Principle, are hated by God, while the
rational soul which He has given it, is, as it were, captive in this
prison, this coffin, that encompasses it. The present condition of man
is not his primi- tive condition, when he was the image of the Logos.
He has fallen from his first estate. But he may raise himself again,
by following the directions of WISDOM and of the Angels which God has
commissioned to aid him in freeing himself from the bonds of the body,
and combating Evil, the existence whereof God has permitted, to
furnish him the means of exercising his liberty. The souls that are
purified, not by the Law but by light, rise to the Heavenly regions,
to enjoy there a perfect felicity. Those that persevere in evil go
from body to body, the seats of passions and evil desires. The
familiar lineaments of these doc- trines will be recognized by all who
read the Epistles of St. Paul, who wrote after Philo, the latter
living till the reign of Caligula, and being the contemporary of
Christ.
And the Mason is familiar with these doctrines of Philo: that the
Supreme Being is a centre of Light whose rays or emanations pervade
the Universe; for that is the Light for which all Masonic journeys are
a search, and of which the sun and moon in our Lodges are only
emblems: that Light and Darkness, chief enemies from the beginning of
Time, dispute with each other the empire of the world; which we
symbolize by the candidate wandering in darkness and being brought to
light: that the world was created, not by the Supreme Being, but by a
secondary agent, who is but His WORD, and by types which are but his
ideas, aided by an INTELLIGENCE, or WISDOM, which gives one of His
Attributes; in which we see the occult meaning of the ne- cessity of
recovering "the Word"; and of our two columns of STRENGTH and WISDOM,
which are also the two parallel lines that bound the circle
representing the Universe: that the visible world is the image of the
invisible world; that the essence of the Human Soul is the image of
God, and it existed before the body; that the object of its
terrestrial life is to disengage itself of its body or its sepulchre;
and that it will ascend to the Heavenly regions when- ever it shall be
purified; in which we see the meaning, now almost forgotten in our
Lodges, of the mode of preparation of the candi- date for
apprenticeship, and his tests and purifications in the first Degree,
according to the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.
Philo incorporated in his eclecticism neither Egyptian nor Oriental
elements. But there were other Jewish Teachers in Alex- andria who did
both. The Jews of Egypt were slightly jealous of, and a little hostile
to, those of Palestine, particularly after the erection of the
sanctuary at Leontopolis by the High-Priest Onias; and therefore they
admired and magnified those sages, who, like Jeremiah, had resided in
Egypt. "The wisdom of Solomon" was written at Alexandria, and, in the
time of St. Jerome, was attrib- uted to Philo; but it contains
principles at variance with his. It personifies Wisdom, and draws
between its children and the Profane, the same line of demarcation
that Egypt had long before taught to the Jews. That distinction
existed at the beginning of the Mosaic creed. Moshah himself was an
Initiate in the mysteries of Egypt, as he was compelled to be, as the
adopted son of the daughter of Pharaoh, Thouoris, daughter of
Sesostris-Ramses; who, as her tomb and monuments show, was, in the
right of her infant husband, Regent of Lower Egypt or the Delta at the
time of the Hebrew Prophet's birth, reigning at Heliopolis. She was
also, as the reliefs on her tomb show, a Priestess of HATHOR and
NEITH, the two great primeval goddesses. As her adopted son, living in
her Palace and presence forty years, and during that time scarcely
acquainted with his brethren the Jews, the law of Egypt compelled his
initiation: and we find in many of his enact- ments the intention of
preserving, between the common people and the Initiates, the line of
separation which he found in Egypt. Moshah and Aharun his brother, the
whole series of High-Priests, the Council of the 70 Elders, Salomoh
and the entire succession of Prophets, were in possession of a higher
science; and of that science Masonry is, at least, the lineal
descendant. It was famili- arly known as THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORD.
AMUN, at first the God of Lower Egypt only, where Moshah was reared (a
word that in Hebrew means Truth), was the Su- preme God. He was styled
"the Celestial Lord, who sheds Light on hidden things." He was the
source of that divine life, of which the crux ansata is the symbol;
and the source of all power. He united all the attributes that the
Ancient Oriental Theosophy assigned to the Supreme Being. He was the
Pleroma, or "Fullness of things," for He comprehended in Himself
every- thing; and the LIGHT; for he was the Sun-God. He was un-
changeable in the midst of everything phenomenal in his worlds. He
created nothing; but everything emanated from Him; and of Him all the
other Gods were but manifestations.
The Ram was His living symbol; which you see reproduced in this
Degree, lying on the book with seven seals on the tracing- board. He
caused the creation of the world by the Primitive Thought (Ennoia), or
Spirit (Pneuma), that issued from him by means of his Voice or the
WORD; and which Thought or Spirit was personified as the Goddess
NEITH. She, too, was a divinity of Light, and mother of the Sun; and
the Feast of Lamps was celebrated in her honor at Sais. The Creative
Power, another manifestation of Deity, proceeding to the creation
conceived of in her, the Divine Intelligence, produced with its Word
the Universe, symbolized by an egg issuing from the mouth of KNEPH;
from which egg came PHTHA, image of the Supreme Intelligence as
realized in the world, and the type of that mani- fested in man; the
principal agent, also, of Nature, or the creative and productive Fire.
PHRE or RS, the Sun, or Celestial Light, whose symbol was the point
within a circle, was the son of PHTHA; and TIPHE, his wife, or the
celestial firmament, with the seven celestial bodies, animated by
spirits of genii that govern them, was represented on many of the
monuments, clad in blue or yellow, her garments sprinkled with stars,
and accompanied by the sun, moon, and five planets; and she was the
type of Wisdom, and they of the Seven Planetary Spirits of the
Gnostics, that with her presided over and governed the sublunary
world.
In this Degree, unknown for a hundred years to those who have
practised it, these emblems reproduced refer to these old doctrines.
The lamb, the yellow hangings strewed with stars, the seven columns,
candlesticks, and seals all recall them to us.
The Lion was the symbol of ATHOM-RE, the Great God of Upper Egypt; the
Hawk, of RA or PHRE; the Eagle, of MENDES; the Bull, of APIS; and
three of these are seen under the platform on which our altar stands.
The first HERMES was the INTELLIGENCE, or WORD of God. Moved with
compassion for a race living without law, and wishing to teach them
that they sprang from His bosom, and to point out to them the way that
they should go (the books which the first Hermes, the same with Enoch,
had written on the mysteries of divine science, in the sacred
characters, being unknown to those who lived after the flood), God
sent to man OSIRIS and ISIS, ac- accompanied by THOTH, the incarnation
or terrestrial repetition of the first Hermes; who taught men the
arts, science, and the cer- emonies of religion; and then ascended to
Heaven or the Moon. OSIRIS was the Principle of Good. TYPHON, like
AHRIMAN, was the principle and source of all that is evil in the moral
and physi- cal order. Like the Satan of Gnosticism, he was confounded
with Matter.
From Egypt or Persia the new Platonists borrowed the idea, and the
Gnostics received it from them, that man, in his terres- trial career,
is successively under the influence of the Moon, of Mercury, of Venus,
of the Sun, of Mars, of Jupiter, and of Saturn, until he finally
reaches the Elysian Fields; an idea again symbolized in the Seven
Seals.
The Jews of Syria and Judea were the direct precursors of Gnosticism;
and in their doctrines were ample oriental elements. These Jews had
had with the Orient, at two different periods, inti- mate relations,
familiarizing them with the doctrines of Asia, and especially of
Chaldea and Persia;--their forced residence in Cen- tral Asia under
the Assyrians and Persians; and their voluntary dispersion over the
whole East, when subjects of the Seleucidae and the Romans. Living
near two-thirds of a century, and many of them long afterward, in
Mesopotamia, the cradle of their race; speaking the same language, and
their children reared with those of the Chaldeans, Assyrians, Medes,
and Persians, and receiving from them their names (as the case of
Danayal, who was called Baeltasatsar, proves), they necessarily
adopted many of the doc- trines of their conquerors. Their
descendants, as Azra and Na- hamaiah show us, hardly desired to leave
Persia, when they were allowed to do so. They had a special
jurisdiction, and governors and judges taken from their own people;
many of them held high office, and their children were educated with
those of the highest nobles. Danayal was the friend and minister of
the King, and the Chief of the College of the Magi at Babylon; if we
may be- lieve the book which bears his name, and trust to the
incidents related in its highly figurative and imaginative style.
Mordecai, too, occupied a high station, no less than that of Prime
Minister, and Esther or Astar, his cousin, was the Monarch's wife.
The Magi of Babylon were expounders of figurative writings,
interpreters of nature, and of dreams,--astronomers and divines; and
from their influences arose among the Jews, after their rescue from
captivity, a number of sects, and a new exposition, the mys- tical
interpretation, with all its wild fancies and infinite caprices. The
Aions of the Gnostics, the Ideas of Plato, the Angels of the Jews, and
the Demons of the Greeks, all correspond to the Ferouers of Zoroaster.
A great number of Jewish families remained permanently in their new
country; and one of the most celebrated of their schools was at
Babylon. They were soon familiarized with the doctrine of Zoroaster,
which itself was more ancient than Kuros. From the system of the
Zend-Avesta they borrowed, and subsequently gave large development to,
everything that could be reconciled with their own faith; and these
additions to the old doctrine were soon spread, by the constant
intercourse of commerce, into Syria and Palestine.
In the Zend-Avesta, God is Illimitable Time. No origin can be assigned
to Him: He is so entirely enveloped in His glory, His nature and
attributes are so inaccessible to human Intelligence, that He can be
only the object of a silent Veneration. Creation took place by
emanation from Him. The first emanation was the primitive Light, and
from that the King of Light, ORMUZD. By the "WORD," Ormuzd created the
world pure. He is its pre- server and Judge; a Being Holy and
Heavenly; Intelligence and Knowledge; the First-born of Time without
limits; and invested with all the Powers of the Supreme Being.
Still he is, strictly speaking, the Fourth Being. He had a Ferouer, a
pre-existing Soul (in the language of Plato, a type or ideal); and it
is said of Him, that He existed from the beginning, in the primitive
Light. But, that Light being but an element, and His Ferouer a type,
he is, in ordinary language, the First-born of ZEROUANE-AKHERENE.
Behold again "THE WORD" of Masonry; the Man, on the Tracing-Board of
this Degree; the LIGHT toward which all Masons travel.
He created after his own image, six Genii called Amshaspands, who
surround his Throne, are his organs of communication with inferior
spirits and men, transmit to Him their prayers, solicit for them His
favors, and serve them as models of purity and perfec- tion. Thus we
have the Demiourgos of Gnosticism, and the six Genii that assist him.
These are the Hebrew Archangels of the Planets.
The names of these Amshaspands are Bahman, Ardibehest, Schariver,
Sapandomad, Khordad, and Amerdad.
The fourth, the Holy SAPANDOMAD, created the first man and woman.
Then ORMUZD created 28 Iseds, of whom MITHERAS is the chief. They
watch, with Ormuzd and the Amshaspands, over the happi- ness, purity,
and preservation of the world, which is under their government; and
they are also models for mankind and interpre- ters of men's prayers.
With Mithras and Ormuzd, they make a pleroma (or complete number) of
30, corresponding to the thirty Aions of the Gnostics, and to the
ogdoade, dodecade, and decade of the Egyptians. Mithras was the
Sun-God, invoked with, and soon confounded with him, becoming the
object of a special wor- ship, and eclipsing Ormuzd himself.
The third order of pure spirits is more numerous. They are the
Ferouers, the THOUGHTS of Ormuzd, or the IDEAS which he conceived
before proceeding to the creation of things. They too are superior to
men. They protect them during their life on earth; they will purify
them from evil at their resurrection. They are their tutelary genii,
from the fall to the complete regeneration.
AHRIMAN, second-born of the Primitive Light, emanated from it, pure
like ORMUZD; but, proud and ambitious, yielded to jeal- ousy of the
First-born. For his hatred and pride, the Eternal condemned him to
dwell, for 12,000 years, in that part of space where no ray of light
reaches; the black empire of darkness. In that period the struggle
between Light and Darkness, Good and Evil will be terminated.
AHRIMAN scorned to submit, and took the field against OR- MUZD. To the
good spirits created by his Brother, he opposed an innumerable army of
Evil Ones. To the seven Amshaspands he opposed seven Archdevs,
attached to the seven Planets; to the Izeds and Ferouers an equal
number of Devs, which brought upon the world all moral and physical
evils. Hence Poverty, Maladies, Impurity, Envy, Chagrin, Drunkenness,
Falsehood, Calumny, and their horrible array.
The image of Ahriman was the Dragon, confounded by the Jews with Satan
and the Serpent-Tempter. After a reign of 3000 years, Ormuzd had
created the Material World, in six periods, calling successively into
existence the Light, Water, Earth, plants, animals, and Man. But
Ahriman concurred in creatmg the earth and water; for darkness was
already an element, and Ormuzd could not exclude its Master. So also
the two concurred in pro- ducing Man. Ormuzd produced, by his Will and
Word, a Being that was the type and source of universal life for
everything that exists under Heaven. He placed in man a pure
principle, or Life, proceeding from the Supreme Being. But Ahriman
destroyed that pure principle, in the form wherewith it was clothed;
and when Ormuzd had made, of its recovered and purified essence, the
first man and woman, Ahriman seduced and tempted them with wine and
fruits; the woman yielding first.
Often, during the three latter periods of 3000 years each, Ahri- man
and Darkness are, and are to be, triumphant. But the pure souls are
assisted by the Good Spirits; the Triumph of Good is decreed by the
Supreme Being, and the period of that triumph will infallibly arrive.
When the world shall be most afflicted with the evils poured out upon
it by the spirits of perdition, three Prophets will come to bring
relief to mortals. SOSIOSCH, the principal of the Three, will
regenerate the earth, 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, he will conduct them to a home of
everlasting happiness. Ahriman, his evil demons, and all wicked men,
will also be purified in a tor- rent of melted metal. The law of
Ormuzd will reign everywhere; all men will be happy; all, enjoying
unalterable bliss, will sing with Sosiosch the praises of the Supreme
Being.
These doctrines, the details of which were sparingly borrowed by the
Pharisaic Jews, were much more fully adopted by the Gnostics; who
taught the restoration of all things, their return to their original
pure condition, the happiness of those to be saved, and their
admission to the feast of Heavenly Wisdom.
The doctrines of Zoroaster came originally from Bactria, an Indian
Province of Persia. Naturally, therefore, it would include Hindu or
Buddhist elements, as it did. The fundamental idea of Buddhism was,
matter subjugating the intelligence, and intelli- gence freeing itself
from that slavery. Perhaps something came to Gnosticism from China.
"Before the chaos which preceded the birth of Heaven and Earth," says
Lao-Tseu, "a single Being existed, immense and silent, immovable and
ever active--the mother of the Universe. I know not its name: but I
designate it by the word Reason. Man has his type and model in the
Earth; Earth in Heaven; Heaven in Reason; and Reason in Itself." Here
again are the Ferouers, the Ideas, the Aions--the REASON or
INTELLIGENCE, SILENCE, WORD, and WISDOM of the Gnostics.
The dominant system among the Jews after their captivity was that of
the Pharoschim or Pharisees. Whether their name was derived from that
of the Parsees, or followers of Zoroaster, or from some other source,
it is certain that they had borrowed much of their doctrine from the
Persians. Like them they claimed to have the exclusive and mysterious
knowledge, unknown to the mass. Like them they taught that a constant
war was waged be- tween the Empire of Good and that of Evil. Like them
they at- tributed the sin and fall of man to the demons and their
chief; and like them they admitted a special protection of the
righteous by inferior beings, agents of Jehovah. All their doctrines
on these subjects were at bottom those of the Holy Books; but
singularly developed and the Orient was evidently the source from
which those developments came.
They styled themselves Interpreters; a name indicating their claim to
the exclusive possession of the true meaning of the Holy Writings, by
virtue of the oral tradition which Moses had re- ceived on Mount
Sinai, and which successive generations of Ini- tiates had
transmitted, as they claimed, unaltered, unto them. Their very
costume, their belief in the influences of the stars, and in the
immortality and transmigration of souls, their system of angels and
their astronomy, were all foreign.
Sadduceeism arose merely from an opposition essentially Jewish, to
these foreign teachings, and that mixture of doctrines, adopted by the
Pharisees, and which constituted the popular creed.
We come at last to the Essenes and Therapeuts, with whom this Degree
is particularly concerned. That intermingling of oriental and
occidental rites, of Persian and Pythagorean opinions, which we have
pointed out in the doctrines of Philo, is unmistak- able in the creeds
of these two sects.
They were less distinguished by metaphysical speculations than by
simple meditations and moral practices. But the latter always partook
of the Zoroastrian principle, that it was necessary to free the soul
from the trammels and influences of matter; which led to a system of
abstinence and maceration entirely opposed to the ancient Hebrai
cideas, favorable as they were to physical pleasures.
In general, the life and manners of these mystical associa- tions, as
Philo and Josephus describe them, and particularly their prayers at
sunrise, seem the image of what the Zend-Avesta pre- scribes to the
faithful adorer or Ormuzd; and some of their observances cannot
otherwise be explained.
The Therapeuts resided in Egypt, in the neighborhood of Alex- andria;
and the Essenes in Palestine, in the vicinity of the Dead Sea. But
there was nevertheless a striking coincidence in their ideas, readily
explained by attributing it to a foreign influence. The Jews of Egypt,
under the influence of the School of Alexan- dria, endeavored in
general to make their doctrines harmonize with the traditions of
Greece; and thence came, in the doctrines of the Therapeuts, as stated
by Philo, the many analogies between the Pythagorean and Orphic ideas,
on one side, and those of Ju- daism on the other: while the Jews of
Palestine, having less com- munication with Greece, or contemning its
teachings, rather im- bibed the Oriental doctrines, which they drank
in at the source and with which their relations with Persia made them
familiar. This attachment was particularly shown in the Kabalah, which
belonged rather to Palestine than to Egypt, though extensively known
in the latter; and furnished the Gnostics with some of their most
striking theories.
It is a significant fact, that while Christ spoke often of the
Pharisees and Sadducees, He never once mentioned the Essenes, between
whose doctrines and His there was so great a resem- blance, and, in
many points, so perfect an identity. Indeed, they are not named, nor
even distinctly alluded to, anywhere in the New Testament.
John, the son of a Priest who ministered in the Temple at Jerusalem,
and whose mother was of the family of Aharun, was in the deserts until
the day of his showing unto Israel. He drank neither wine nor strong
drink. Clad in hair-cloth, and with a girdle of leather, and feeding
upon such food as the desert afford- ed, he preached, in the country
about Jordan, the baptism of re- pentance, for the remission of sins;
that is, the necessity of repent- ance proven by reformation. He
taught the people charity and liberality; the publicans, justice,
equity, and fair dealing; the soldiery peace, truth, and contentment;
to do violence to none, accuse none falsely, and be content with their
pay. He incul- cated necessity of a virtuous life, and the folly of
trusting to their descent from Abraham.
He denounced both Pharisees and Sadducees as a generation of vipers
threatened with the anger of God. He baptized those who confessed
their sins. He preached in the desert; and therefore in the country
where the Essenes lived, professing the same doctrines. He was
imprisoned before Christ began to preach. Matthew men- tions him
without preface or explanation; as if, apparently, his history was too
well known to need any. "In those days," he says, "came John the
Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea." His disciples
frequently fasted; for we find them with the Pharisees coming to Jesus
to inquire why His Disciples did not fast as often as they; and He did
not denounce them, as His habit was to denounce the Pharisees; but
answered them kindly and gently.
From his prison, John sent two of his disciples to inquire of Christ:
"Art thou he that is to come, or do we look for another ?" Christ
referred them to his miracles as an answer; and declared to the people
that John was a prophet, and more than a prophet, and that no greater
man had ever been born; but that the hum- blest Christian was his
superior. He declared him to be Elias, who was to come.
John had denounced to Herod his marriage with his brother's wife as
unlawful; and for this he was imprisoned, and finally exe- cuted to
gratify her. His disciples buried him; and Herod and others thought he
had risen from the dead and appeared again in the person of Christ.
The people all regarded John as a prophet; and Christ silenced the
Priests and Elders by asking them whether he was inspired. They feared
to excite the anger of the people by saying that he was not. Christ
declared that he came "in the way of righteousness"; and that the
lower classes believed him, though the Priests and Pharisees did not.
Thus John, who was often consulted by Herod, and to whom that monarch
showed great deference and was often governed by his advice; whose
doctrine prevailed very extensively among the people and the
publicans, taught some creed older than Chris- tianity. That is plain:
and it is equally plain, that the very large body of the Jews that
adopted his doctrines, were neither Phari- sees nor Sadducees, but the
humble, common people. They must, therefore, have been Essenes. It is
plain, too, that Christ applied for baptism as a sacred rite, well
known and long practiced. It was becoming to him, he said, to fulfill
all righteousness.
In the 18th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read thus: "And a
certain Jew, named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an elo- quent man, and
mighty in the Scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man was instructed in
the way of the Lord, and, being fervent in spirit, he spake and taught
diligently the things of the Lord, know- ing only the baptism of John;
and he began to speak boldly in the synagogue; whom, when Aquilla and
Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them, and expounded unto him
the way of God more perfectly."
Translating this from the symbolic and figurative language into the
true ordinary sense of the Greek text, it reads thus: "And a certain
Jew, named Apollos, an Alexandrian by birth, an eloquent man, and of
extensive learning, came to Ephesus. He had learned in the mysteries
the true doctrine in regard to God; and, being a zealous enthusiast,
he spoke and taught diligently the truths in regard to the Deity,
having received no other baptism than that of John." He knew nothing
in regard to Christianity; for he had resided in Alexandria, and had
just then come to Ephesus; being, probably, a disciple of Philo, and a
Therapeut.
"That, in all times," says St. Augustine, "is the Christian re-
ligion, which to know and follow is the most sure and certain health,
called according to that name, but not according to the thing itself,
of which it is the name; for the thing itself, which is now called the
Christian religion, really was known to the An- cients, nor was
wanting at any time from the beginning of the human race, until the
time when Christ came in the flesh; from whence the true religion,
which had previously existed, began to be called Christian; and this
in our days is the Christian religion, not as having been wanting in
former times, but as having, in later times, received this name." The
disciples were first called "Christians," at Antioch, when Barnabas
and Paul began to preach there.
The Wandering or Itinerant Jews or Exorcists, who assumed to employ
the Sacred Name in exorcising evil spirits, were no doubt Therapeutae
or Essenes.
"And it it came to pass," we read in the 19th chapter of the Acts,
verses 1 to 4, "that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul, having passed
through the upper parts of Asia Minor, came to Ephesus; and finding
certain disciples, he said to them, 'Have ye received the Holy Ghost
since ye became Believers ?' And they said unto him, 'We have not so
much as heard that there is any Holy Ghost.' And he said to them, 'In
what, then, were you baptized ?' And they said 'In John's baptism.'
Then said Paul, 'John in- deed baptized with the baptism of
repentance, saying to the people that they should believe in Him who
was to come after him, that is, in Jesus Christ. When they heard this,
they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus."
This faith, taught by John, and so nearly Christianity, could have
been nothing but the doctrine of the Essenes; and there can be no
doubt that John belonged to that sect. The place where he preached,
his macerations and frugal diet, the doctrines he taught, all prove it
conclusively. There was no other sect to which he could have belonged;
certainly none so numerous as his, except the Essenes.
We find, from the two letters written by Paul to the brethren at
Corinth, that City of Luxury and Corruption, that there were
contentions among them. Rival sects had already, about the 57th year
of our era, reared their banners there, as followers, some of Paul,
some of Apollos, and some of Cephas. Some of them de- nied the
resurrection. Paul urged them to adhere to the doctrines taught by
himself, and had sent Timothy to them to bring them afresh to their
recollection.
According to Paul, Christ was to come again. He was to put an end to
all other Principalities and Powers, and finally to Death, and then be
Himself once more merged in God; who should then be all in all.
The forms and ceremonies of the Essenes were symbolical. They had,
according to Philo the Jew, four Degrees; the members being divided
into two Orders, the Practici and Therapeutici; the latter being the
contemplative and medical Brethren; and the former the active,
practical, business men. They were Jews by birth; and had a greater
affection for each other than the mem- bers of any other sect. Their
brotherly love was intense. They fulfilled the Christian law, "Love
one another." They despised riches. No one was to be found among them,
having more than another. The possessions of one were intermingled
with those of the others; so that they all had but one patrimony, and
were brethren. Their piety toward God was extraordinary. Before
sunrise they never spake a word about profane matters; but put up
certain prayers which they had received from their forefathers. At
dawn of day, and before it was light, their prayers and hymns ascended
to Heaven. They were eminently faithful and true, and the Ministers of
Peace. They had mysterious ceremonies, and initiations into their
mysteries; and the Candidate promised that he would ever practise
fidelity to all men, and especially to those in authority, "because no
one obtains the government without God's assistance."
Whatever they said, was firmer than an oath; but they avoided
swearing, and esteemed it worse than perjury. They were simple in
their diet and mode of living, bore torture with fortitude, and
despised death. They cultivated the science of medicine and were very
skillful. They deemed it a good omen to dress in white robes. They had
their own courts, and passed righteous judgments. They kept the
Sabbath more rigorously than the Jews.
Their chief towns were Engaddi, near the Dead Sea, and Hebron. Engaddi
was about 30 miles southeast from Jerusalem, and Hebron about 20 miles
south of that city. Josephus and Eusebius speak of them as an ancient
sect; and they were no doubt the first among the Jews to embrace
Christianity: with whose faith and doctrine their own tenets had so
many points of resemblance, and were indeed in a great measure the
same. Pliny regarded them as a very ancient people.
In their devotions they turned toward the rising sun; as the Jews
generally did toward the Temple. But they were no idola- ters; for
they observed the law of Moses with scrupulous fidelity. They held all
things in common, and despised riches, their wants being supplied by
the administration of Curators or Stewards. The Tetractys, composed of
round dots instead of jods, was re- vered among them. This being a
Pythagorean symbol, evidently shows their connection with the school
of Pythagoras; but their peculiar tenets more resemble those of
Confucius and Zoroaster; and probably were adopted while they were
prisoners in Persia; which explains their turning toward the Sun in
prayer.
Their demeanor was sober and chaste. They submitted to the
superintendence of governors whom they appointed over them- selves.
The whole of their time was spent in labor, meditation, and prayer;
and they were most sedulously attentive to every call of justice and
humanity, and every moral duty. They believed in the unity of God.
They supposed the souls of men to have fallen, by a disastrous fate,
from the regions of purity and light, into the bodies which they
occupy; during their continuance in which they considered them
confined as in a prison. Therefore they did not believe in the
resurrection of the body; but in that of the soul only. They believed
in a future state of rewards and punishments; and they disregarded the
ceremonies or external forms enjoined in the law of Moses to be
observed in the worship og God; holding that the words of that
lawgiver were to be un- derstood in a mysterious and recondite sense,
and not according to their literal meaning. They offered no
sacrifices, except at home; and by meditation they endeavored, as far
as possible, to isolate the soul from the body, and carry it back to
God.
Eusebius broadly admits "that the ancient Therapeutae were Christians;
and that their ancient writings were our Gospels and Epistles."
The ESSENES were of the Eclectic Sect of Philosophers, and held PLATo
in the highest esteem; they believed that true philos- ophy, the
greatest and most salutary gift of God to mortals, was scattered, in
various portions, through all the different Sects; and that it was,
consequently, the duty of every wise man to gather it from the several
quarters where it lay dispersed, and to employ it, thus reunited, in
destroying the dominion of impiety and vice.
The great festivals of the Solstices were observed in a distin-
guished manner by the Essenes; as would naturally be supposed, from
the fact that they reverenced the Sun, not as a god, but as a symbol
of light and fire; the fountain of which, the Orientals supposed God
to be. They lived in continence and abstinence, and had establislments
similar to the monasteries of the early Christians.
The writings of the Essenes were full of mysticism, parables, enigmas,
and allegories. They believed in the esoteric and exote- ric meanings
of the Scriptures; and, as we have already said, they had a warrant
for that in the Scriptures themselves. They found it in the Old
Testament, as the Gnostics found it in the New. The Christian writers,
and even Christ himself, recognized it as a truth, that all Scripture
had an inner and an outer meaning. Thus we find it said as follows, in
one of the Gospels:
"Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom of God; but
unto men that are without, all these things are done in parables; that
seeing, they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and
not understand .... And the disciples came and said unto him, 'Why
speakest Thou the truth in parables ?'-- He answered and said unto
them, 'Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the
Kingdom of Heaven, but to them it is not given.'"
Paul, in the 4th chapter of his Epistle to the Galatians, speak- ing
of the simplest facts of the Old Testament, asserts that they are an
allegory. In the 3d chapter of the second letter to the Corinthians,
he declares himself a minister of the New Testament, appointed by God;
"Not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter killeth." Origen
and St. Gregory held that the Gospels were not to be taken in their
literal sense; and Athanasius ad- monishes us that "Should we
understand sacred writ according to the letter, we should fall into
the most enormous blasphemies."
Eusebius said, "Those who preside over the Holy Scriptures,
philosophize over them, and expound their literal sense by alle-
gory."
The sources of our knowledge of the Kabalistic doctrines, are the
books of Jezirah and Sohar, the former drawn up in the second century,
and the latter a little later; but containing materials much older
than themselves. In their most characteristic ele- ments, they go back
to the time of the exile. In them, as in the teachings of Zoroaster,
everything that exists emanated from a source of infinite LiGHT.
Before everything, existed THE AN- CIENT OF DAYS, the KING OF LIGHT; a
title often given to the Creator in the Zend-Avesta and the code of
the Sabaeans. With the idea so expressed is connected the pantheism of
India. KING OF LIGHT, THE ANCIENT, is ALL THAT IS. He is not only the
real cause of all Existences; he is Infinite (AINSOPH). He is HIMSELF:
there is nothing in Him that We can call Thou.
In the Indian doctrine, not only is the Supreme Being the real cause
of all, but he is the only real Existence: all the rest is illu- sion.
In the Kabalah, as in the Persian and Gnostic doctrines, He is the
Supreme Being unknown to all, the "Unknown Father." The world is his
revelation, and subsists only in Him. His attri- butes are reproduced
there, with different modifications, and in different degrees, so that
the Universe is His Holy Splendor:it is but His Mantle; but it must be
revered in silence. All beings have emanated from the Supreme Being:
The nearer a being is to Him, the more perfect it is; the more remote
in the scale, the less its purity.
A ray of Light, shot from the Deity, is the cause and principle of all
that exists. It is at once Father and Mother of All, in the sublimest
sense. It penetrates everything; and without it nothing can exist an
instant. From this double FORCE, designated by the two parts of the
word I.ù. H.ù. U.ù. H.ù. 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 ani- mating
Principle of the Universe. It is THE LIGHT OF LIGHT. It possesses the
three Primitive Forces of the Divinity, LIGHT, SPIRIT and LIFE. As it
has received what it gives, Light and Life, it is equally considered
as the gen- erative 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 Cre- ation.
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 re- veals 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, lN- TELLECT or the WORD.
Intelligence, source of the oil of anoint- ing, responds to the Holy
Ghost of the Christian Faith.
Beauty is represented by green and yellow. Victory is YA-
HOVAH-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, crea- tion,
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 crea- tion; 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 Phoenician 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 Phoenicians 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, 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 (IHIH ALHIM) will
be with me... then shall IHUH be my ALHIM; UHIH IHUH LI LALHIM; and
this stone shall be God's House (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" (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."
And in xviii. Wisdom, 15, "Thine Almighty Word leap- ed down from
Heaven."
Philo speaks of the Word as being the same with God. So in several
places he calls it the Second Di- vinity; the Image of God: the Divine
Word that made all things: 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 Su- preme God; the
origin, object, and final extinction of evil; the relations between
the intellectual and material worlds, and be- tween 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 inter- mediary, 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 im- poverish 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, 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 INTELL- GENCES, 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
REA- SON, 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 re- straints
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 Intellec-
tuality, 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 of the same God. To others they were, as were the
multitude of Sub- ordinate Intelligences, real and distinct beings.
The Oriental imagination revelled in the creation of these In- ferior
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 col- umns are not representatives of these alone.
To Basilides, God was without name, uncreated, at first contain- ing
and concealing in Himself the Plenitude of His Perfections; and when
these are by Him displayed and nianifested, 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 Be- ings, 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 be- tween 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 First-born, Nous or Mind: from it emanates Logos, or THE WORD
from it : Phronesis, Intellect :from it Sophia, Wisdom :from it
Dunamis, Power: and from it Dikaiosune, Righteousness: to which latter
the Jews gave the name of 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
Abraxas; desig- nating God as manifested, or the aggregate of his
manifestations; but not the Supreme and Secret God Himself. These
three hun- dred and sixty-five Intelligences compose altogether the
Fullness or Plenitude of the Divine Emanations.
With the Ophites, a sect of the Gnostics, there were seven infe- rior
spirits (inferior to Ialdabaoth, the Demiourgos or Actual Cre- ator :
Michael, Suriel, Raphael, 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, Adonai, Eloi, Orai, and As- taphai 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 manifesta- tions
of the Supreme Being, held that His identity was immutable and
permanent. That was Plato's distinction between the Being always the
same and the perpetual flow of things inces- santly 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 Dark- ness, audacious against the
Empire of Light. So the Persians and Sabeans understood it. In Egypt,
this second Principle was Mat- ter, as the word was used by the
Platonic School, with its sad at- tributes, 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 Mat- ter, 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, cre- ating
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 Ori- ental
genius ever employed, the closing scenes of the great strug- gle 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 appli- cation of the
ancient myth of Ormuzd and his Genii against Ahri- man 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 Vengence, 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 re- produce the
twenty-four Good Spirits created by Ormuzd and in- closed 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 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 be- ginning and the end--He that
was, and is, and is to come, i.e., Time illimitable, is Zoroaster's
definition of Zerouane-Ak- herene.
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 Ka- balah, 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 ve- hicles 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
inexplicable. A vast crowd of indistinct abstractions, hovering in the
imagination, a train of words embodying no tangible mean- ing, an
inextricable labyrinth of subtleties, was the result.
But one grand idea ever emerged and stood prominent and un- changeable
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 pre- vail, 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 Ma- sayah, 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 Philon- ism; 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 neces- sary 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 antici-
pation 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 doc- trines 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 Alexan- dria 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, Phoenicia, 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
seperated 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 know- ing
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.
M & D Chapter XVIII
Knight Rose Croix
MORALS AND DOGMA
by Albert Pike
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 Khurum, 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 Univer- sality;
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 tem- ple arose; and
the men of Gebal, bowing down to the Phoenician 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 gen- eral
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
Sthe existence of a single uncreated God, in whose bosom everything
grows, is developed and trans- formed. 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 docfirst falling themselves, and plunged in misery
and darkness, tempted man to his fall, and brought sin into the world.
All be- lieved 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 Scandina- vians, Balder.
Chrishna,the Hindoo Redeemer, was cradled and educated among
Shepherds. A Tyrant, at the time of his birth, ordered all male
children to be slain. He performed miracles, say his legends, even
raising the dead. He washed the feet of the Brah- mins, and was meek
and lowly of spirit. He was born of a Vir- gin; descended to Hell,
rose again, ascended to Heaven, charged his disciples to teach his
doctrines, and gave them the gift of mir- acles.
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 them- selves inspired by
God to instruct men. Those who so associated themselves formed a
Society of Prophets under the name of Sa- maneans. They recognized the
existence of a single uncreated God, in whose bosom everything grows,
is developed and trans- formed. 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 Phoenician Cosmogony, like all others in Asia, was the Word of
God, written in astral characters, by the planetary Divin- ities, 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 Sabe- ism, and being the faith of
Hiram the King and his namesake the Artist, are of interest to all
Masons. With them, the First Prin- ciple 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
Phoenicians, 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 ser- pent 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, im- mense 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 perish- able 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 perish- able 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 Nous 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 evolu- tion of
existences inferior to the Supreme God began, the Word came into
existence and was: and this word was 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
Arch- angel 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 Amun, a secret and concealed
God, the Unknown Father of the Gnostics, the Source of Divine Life,
and of all force, the Plenitude of all, comprehend- ing 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, ema- nated 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 mat- ter, 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 Intelli- gence, that He was but the object of a
silent veneration. The com- mencement of Creation was by emanation
from Him. The first emanation was the Primitive Light, and from this
Light emerged Ormuzd, the King o[ Light, who, by the WORD, created the
World in its purity, is its Preserver and Judge, a Holy and Sacred Be-
ing, 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 Prin- ciple,
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 Ahrirnan 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 Su- preme
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. Ahri- man, his evil Demons, and all
the world, will be purified in a tor- rent 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 Su- preme 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 appropri- ate
worship to the Deity, when to that God whom we call the First, who is
One, and separate from all, and after whom we recog- nize 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 ad- dressing 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 our- selves; 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."
Aristolte 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 con- sider 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 igno- rant consider
the images to be nothing more than wood or stone; for just so, they
who are ignorant of writing see nothing in monu- ments 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 ap-
pearance; 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 in- visible. 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, ante- rior
to all existence; of which nothing determinate can be predi- cated; to
which no consciousness, no self-contemplation can be ascribed;
inasmuch as to do so, would immediately imply a qual- ity, a
distinction of subject and object. This Supreme Entity can be known
only by an intellectual intuition of the Spirit, trans- scending
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 ov, was united with a certain
mysticism, which, by a transcendent state of feel- ing, communicated,
as it were, to this abstraction what the mind would receive as a
reality. The absorption of the Spirit into that superexistence, 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 Origi- nal
Essence, exalted akes 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 aren; 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 manifold- ness)
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, the Good, in and by itself, the
Absolute of Platonism, was substituted for the personal Deity of the
Old Testament. By soaring up- ward, beyond all created existence, the
mind, disengaging itself from the Sensible, attains to the
intellectual intuition of this Ab- solute 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.
"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 re-
sembles truth. He is the universal spirit that pervades and dif-
fuseth 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 every- thing; 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, ex- isting in this
Light, resolved to display His perfections, or mani- fest 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 every- thing, 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 dark- ness 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 ma- terial 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 contradis- tinguished
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 Croix teaches three things;--the unity, im-
mutability and goodness of God; the immortality of the Soul; and the
ultimate defeat and extinction of evil and wrong and sor- row, 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 reward- ed; 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 free- dom 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 tor- tures 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 bril- liant 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 good- ness, 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 Croix were to
fulfill all the duties of friendship, cheerfulness, charity, peace,
lib- erality, temperance and chastity: and scrupulously to avoid im-
purity, haughtiness, hatred, anger, and every other kind of vice. They
took their philosophy from the old Theology of the Egyp- tians, as
Moses and Solomon had done, and borrowed its hiero- glyphics and the
ciphers of the Hebrews. Their principal rules were to exercise the
profession of medicine charitably and with- out 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
produce fruit. All labor, like us, for the ex- tirpation 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 prac- tice,
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 pur- poses
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 re- fuse him its mysteries, if he
will not take them with the explana- tion 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. Tltoth or Phika is represented on the old- est
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 Nob 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 we all hope; through our faith in God's
infinite goodness.
The ROSE was anciently sacred to Aurora and the Sun. It is a symbol of
Dawn, of the resurrection of Light and the renewal of life, and
therefore of the dawn of the first day, and more par- ticularly 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 Re- deemer.
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 notwith- standing
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 ludce- orum. The sages of
Antiquity connected it with one of the great- est secrets of Nature,
that of universal regeneration. They inter- preted 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 Jes- uits 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--lammim, the seas or water; Nour, fire; Rouach, the air, and
Iebeschah, the dry earth. How we read it, I need not repeat to you.
The CROSS, X, was the Sign of the Creative Wisdom or Logos, the Son of
God. Plato says, "He expressed him upon the Uni- verse in the figure
of the letter X. The next Power to the Su- preme God was decussated or
figured in the shape of a Cross on the Universe." Mithras signed his
soldiers on the forehead with a Cross. X is the mark of 600, the
mysterious cycle of the Incar- nations.
We constantly see the Tau and the Resh united thus P . 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 P of Constanius is this inscription, "In hoc
X
|
signo victor eris." An inscription in the Duomo at Milan reads, "X. et
P. Christi. Nomina. Sancta. Tenei."
The Egyptians used as a Sign of their God Canobus, a T or a -l-
indifferently. The Vaishnavas of India have also the same Sacred Tau,
which they also mark with crosses, and with triangles. The vestments
of the ptiests of Horus were covered with these crosses. So was the
dress of the Lama of Thibet. The Sectarian marks of the Jains are
similar. The distinctive badge of the Sect of Xac Jaonicus is the
swastica. 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. 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 in- terests
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, ask- ing
whether, after all, it is certain that its convictions are true, and
its faith well rounded: 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 writings and contortions of
the insignificant insects that compose Humanity, and idly imagine that
they resemble the Om- nipotent. "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 re- spect 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 quan- tity ?" 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, unintel-
lectural 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 rec- ords 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 idola- trous
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 cen- turies, as
much the Religion of Hate, and infinitely more the Re- ligion of
Persecution, than Mahometanism, its unconquerable rival. Heresies grew
up before the Apostles died; and God hated the Nicolaitans, 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 pro- longed and made more exquisite.
"By what right," whispers the Voice, "does this savage, merci- less,
persecuting animal, to which the sufferings and writhings of others of
its wretched kind furnish the most pleasurable sensa- tions, 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 convic- tion 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 com- mence 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 ani- mals that only faintly imitate
the wanton, savage, human cruelty and thirst for blood, the same right
as man has, to expect a resur- rection and an Eternity of existence,
or a Heaven of Love?
The world improves. Man ceases to persecute,--when the per- secuted
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 opin- ions contrary to his own, upon subjects totally beyond the
compre- hension 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 hutcheries, and the remorse- less 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 aspi- rations
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 Adonai, under another name,
worshipped with the old Pagan cere- monies 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 Athe-
ists those who do not believe what they themselves imagine they
believe, and which yet they do not believe, because it is incompre-
hensible to them in their ignorance and want of intellect. To the vast
majority of mankind, God is but the reflected image, in infi- nite
space, of the earthly Tyrant on his Throne, only more power- ful, 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 antago- nistic 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 neces- sary 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 mur- dering 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 re- pudiation.
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 seperate
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 blas- phemy 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 destruc-
tion, by which human bodies may be the more expeditiously and
effectually crushed, shattered, torn, and mangled; and yet hypo-
critical Humanity, drunk with blood and drenched with gore, shrieks to
Heaven at a single murder, perpetrated to gratify a re- venge 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 sav- age 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 peas- ant 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 sub- terranean 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
pande- monium: 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. Else- where, the
universal pursuit of wealth dethrones God and pays divine honors to
Mammon and Baalzebub. Selfishness rules su- preme: to win wealth
becomes the whole business of life. The villanies of legalized gaming
and speculation become epidemic; treacery is but evidence of
shrewdness; office becomes the prey of successful faction; the
Country, like Actaeon, 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 com- pensation: whether
advance in civilization is not increase of self- ishness: 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 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 pal-
pable 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
anywher; and if he does not doubt whether God exists, and is just and
beneficent, he at least cannot silence the constantly recur- ring
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 con- tentment like the kine, or doze
under the opiate of a blind faith; on whose souls never rests that
Awful Shadow which is the ab- sence 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 Ahri- man 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 Omnipo- tent 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 happi- ness 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 diffi-
culty. They say, with the Suppliant, "Lord! I believe!"--but like him
they are constrained to add, "Help Thou my unbelief!"--Rea- son must,
for these, co-operate and coincide with Faith, or they remain still in
the darkness of doubt,--most miserable of all con- ditions of the
human mind.
Those only, who care for nothing beyond the interests and pur- suits
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 immor- tality, 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 un- aware 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 Spirit- ual 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, how- ever 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 pre- sented
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 cer- tain
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 glit- tering
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 be- lieved, 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 Uni- verse. 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 Chaldaea, 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 continu- ally
centred upon the earth and man. The Grecian Divinities in- habited
Olympus, an insignificant mountain of the Earth. There was the Court
of Zeus, to which Neptune came from the Sea, and Pluto and Persephone
from the glooms of Tartarus in the un- fathomable 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
nebulae of Hercules, Orion, and Andromeda, and find them re- solvable
into Stars more numerous than the sands on the sea- shore; 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 imagi- nation 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 zoophytes 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 inter- est 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 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 Rea- son
belongs to us alone, in no way tends to satisfy us of the radi- cal
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
prompt- ings 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 ver- sion 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 per- fect and
eternal distinction of the two primitive terms of the cre- ative
syllogism, in order to attain to the demonstration of their harmony by
the analogy of contraries, is the second grand prin- ciple of that
occult philosophy veiled under the name "Kabalah," and indicated by
all the sacred hieroglyphs of the Ancient Sanctu- aries, 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 Under- standing, 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; Estab- lishment or Stability is the
intellectual Capacity to produce, a Tpassivity. They are the POWER of
generation and the CAPACITY of production. By WISDOM, it is said, God
creates, and by UN- DERSTANDING 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 un- just 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. There- fore 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 noth- ingness 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 descend- ing 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 inter- esting
and most difficult problem of modern philosophy,--the definite and
permanent accord of Reason and Faith, of Author- ity and Liberty of
examination, of Science and Belief, of Perfec- tion 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 Tem- ple 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 whom personal or
national resentments have in ad- vance 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 theoret- ical
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 field 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, the equilibrium of forces cease, the rush of
the Spheres to the central Sun would annihilate the system. Instead of
consolida- tion, 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 indi- vidual 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 ve- locity that is accelerated like
that of a falling body, until the feebler is annihilated, and then,
there being no resistance to sup- port 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 bless- ings 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 Geth- semane and those of the Cross on
Calvary preceded the Resurrec- tion and were the means of Redemption.
It is with prosperity that God afflicts Humanity.
The Degree of Rose is devoted to and symbolizes tne 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 in 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 Reform- er, 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. De- votedly He loved the children of Israel. To
them He came, and to them alone He preached that Gospel which His
disciples after- ward carried among foreigners. He would fain have
freed the chosen People from their spiritual bondage of ignorance and
deg- radation. 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 be- yond 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 low- est 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 immeasurable and
exhaustless; Who feels for us, and sympa- thizes 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 Paraihs 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 sypathizes 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 fisher- men 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 ines- timable
inheritance. Perverted and corrupted, they have served as a basis for
many creeds, and been even made the warrant for in- tolerance 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 for- give; that
man has an immortal soul, a free will, a right to free- dom of thought
and action; that all men are equal in God's sight; that we best serve
God by humility, meekness, gentleness, kind- ness, 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 deem- ing Him Divine.
Hear Philo, the Greek Jew. "The contemplative soul, un- equally
guided, sometimes toward abundance and sometimes to- ward barrenness,
though ever advancing, is illuminated by the primitive ideas, the rays
that emanate from the Divine Intelli- gence, whenever it ascends
toward the Sublime Treasures. When, on the contrary, it descends, and
is barren, it falls within the do- main 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 treas- ure, 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, be- siege 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 recog- nized him not only as an Initiate, but
as a Hierophant; and I fol- low his school."
We, like him, recognize all Initiates as our Brothers. We be- long 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 man- kind 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 in- vites 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!
M & D Chapter XXXI
Grand Inspector Inquisitor Commander
XXXI
GRAND INSPECTOR INQUISITOR COMMANDER.
[Inspector Inquisitor.]
To hear patiently, to weigh deliberately and dispassionately, and to
decide impartially;--these are the chief duties of a Judge. After the
lessons you have received, I need not further enlarge upon them. You
will be ever eloquently reminded of them by the furniture upon our
Altar, and the decorations of the Tribunal.
The Holy Bible will remind you of your obligation; and that as you
judge here below, so you will be yourself judged hereafter, by One who
has not to submit, like an earthly judge, to the sad necessity of
inferring the motives, intentions, and purposes of men [of which all
crime essentially consists] from the uncertain and often unsafe
testimony of their acts and words; as men in thick darkness grope
their way, with hands outstretched before them: but before Whom every
thought, feeling, impulse, and intention of every soul that now is, or
ever was, or ever will be on earth, is, and ever will be through the
whole infinite duration of eternity, present and visible.
The Square and Compass, the Plumb and Level, are well known to you as
a Mason. Upon you as a Judge, they peculiarly inculcate uprightness,
impartiality, careful consideration of facts and circumstances,
accuracy in judgment, and uniformity in decision. As a Judge, too, you
are to bring up square work and square work only. Like a temple
erected by the plumb, you are to lean neither to one side nor the
other. Like a building well squared and levelled, you are to be firm
and steadfast in your convictions of right and justice. Like the
circle swept with the compasses, you are to be true. In the scales of
justice you are to weigh the facts and the law alone, nor place in
either scale personal friendship or personal dislike, neither fear nor
favour: and when reformation is no longer to be hoped for, you are to
smite relentlessly with the sword of justice.
The peculiar and principal symbol of this Degree is the Tetractys of
Pythagoras, suspended in the East, where ordinarily the sacred word or
letter glitters, like it, representing the Deity. Its nine external
points form the triangle, the chief symbol in Masonry, with many of
the meanings of which you are familiar.
To us, its three sides represent the three principal attributes of the
Deity, which created, and now, as ever, support, uphold, and guide the
Universe in its eternal movement; the three supports of the Masonic
Temple, itself an emblem of the Universe:--Wisdom, or the Infinite
Divine Intelligence; Strength, or Power, the Infinite Divine Will; and
Beauty, or the Infinite Divine Harmony, the Eternal Law, by virtue of
which the infinite myriads of suns and worlds flash ever onward in
their ceaseless revolutions, without clash or conflict, in the
Infinite of space, and change and movement are the law of all created
existences.
To us, as Masonic Judges, the triangle figures forth the Pyramids,
which, planted firmly as the everlasting hills, and accurately
adjusted to the four cardinal points, defiant of all assaults of men
and time, teach us to stand firm and unshaken as they, when our feet
are planted upon the solid truth.
It includes a multitude of geometrical figures, all having a deep
significance to Masons. The triple triangle is peculiarly sacred,
having ever been among all nations a symbol of the Deity. Prolonging
all the external lines of the Hexagon, which also it includes, we have
six smaller triangles, whose bases cut each other in the central point
of the Tetractys, itself always the symbol of the generative power of
the Universe, the Sun, Brahma, Osiris, Apollo, Bel, and the Deity
Himself. Thus, too, we form twelve still smaller triangles, three
times three of which compose the Tetractys itself.
I refrain from enumerating all the figures that you may trace within
it: but one may not be passed unnoticed. The Hexagon itself faintly
images to us a cube, not visible at the first glance, and therefore
the fit emblem of that faith in things invisible, most essential to
salvation. The first perfect solid, and reminding you of the cubical
stone that sweated blood, and of that deposited by Enoch, it teaches
justice, accuracy, and consistency.
The infinite divisibility of the triangle teaches the infinity of the
Universe, of time, of space, and of the Deity, as do the lines that,
diverging from the common centre, ever increase their distance from
each other as they are infinitely prolonged. As they may be infinite
in number, so are the attributes of Deity infinite; and as they
emanate from one-centre and are projected into space, so the whole
Universe has emanated from God.
Remember also, my Brother, that you have other duties to perform than
those of a judge. You are to inquire into and scrutinize carefully the
work of the subordinate Bodies in Masonry You are to see that
recipients of the higher Degrees are not un necessarily multiplied;
that improper persons are carefully excluded from membership, and that
in their life and conversation Masons bear testimony to the excellence
of our doctrines and the incalculable value of the institution itself.
You are to inquire also into your own heart and conduct, and keep
careful watch over yourself, that you go not astray. If you harbour
ill-will and jealousy, if you are hospitable to intolerance and
bigotry, and churlish to gentleness and kind affections, opening wide
your heart to one and closing its portals to the other, it is time for
you to set in order your own temple, or else you wear in vain the name
and insignia of a Mason, while yet uninvested with the Masonic nature.
Everywhere in the world there is a natural law, that is, a constant
mode of action, which seems to belong to the nature of things, to the
constitution of the Universe. This fact is universal. In different
departments we call this mode of action by different names, as the law
of Matter, the law of Mind, the law of Morals, and the like. We mean
by this, a certain mode of action which belongs to the material,
mental, or moral forces, the mode in which commonly they are found to
act, and in which it is their ideal to act always. The ideal laws of
matter we know only from the fact that they are always obeyed. To us
the actual obedience is the only evidence of the ideal rule; for in
respect to the conduct of the material world, the ideal and the actual
are the same.
The laws of matter we learn only by observation and experience. Before
experience of the fact, no man could foretell that a body, falling
toward the earth, would descend sixteen feet the first second, twice
that the next, four times the third, and sixteen times the fourth. No
mode of action in our consciousness anticipates this rule of action in
the outer world. The same is true of all the laws of matter. The ideal
law is known because it is a fact. The law is imperative. It must be
obeyed without hesitation. Laws of crystallization, laws of proportion
in chemical combination,-- neither in these nor in any other law of
Nature is there any margin left for oscillation of disobedience. Only
the primal will of God works in the material world, and no secondary
finite will.
There are no exceptions to the great general law of Attraction, which
binds atom to atom in the body of a rotifier visible only by aid of a
microscope, orb to orb, system to system; gives unity to the world of
things, and rounds these worlds of systems to a Universe. At first
there seem to be exceptions to this law, as in growth and
decomposition, in the repulsions of electricity; but at length all
these are found to be special cases of the one great law of attraction
acting in various modes.
The variety of effect of this law at first surprises the senses; but
in the end the unity of cause astonishes the cultivated mind. Looked
at in reference to this globe, an earthquake is no more than a chink
that opens in a garden-walk of a dry day in Summer. A sponge is
porous, having small spaces between the solid parts: the solar system
is only more porous, having larger room between the several orbs: the
Universe yet more so, with spaces between the systems, as small,
compared with infinite space, as those between the atoms that compose
the bulk of the smallest invisible animalcule, of which millions swim
in a drop of salt-water. The same attraction holds together the
animalcule, the sponge, the system, and the Universe. Every particle
of matter in that Universe is related to each and all the other
particles; and attraction is their common bond.
In the spiritual world, the world of human consciousness, there is
also a law, an ideal mode of action for the spiritual forces of man.
The law of Justice is as universal an one as the law of Attraction;
though we are very far from being able to reconcile all the phenomena
of Nature with it. The lark has the same right in our view, to live,
to sing, to dart at pleasure through the ambient atmosphere, as the
hawk has to ply his strong wings in the Summer sunshine: and yet the
hawk pounces on and devours the harmless lark, as it devours the worm,
and as the worm devours the animalcule; and, so far as we know, there
is nowhere, in any future state of animal existence, any compensation
for this apparent injustice. Among the bees, one rules, while the
others obey --some work, while others are idle. With the small ants,
the soldiers feed on the proceeds of the workmen's labour. The lion
lies in wait for and devours the antelope that has apparently as good
a right to life as he. Among men, some govern and others serve,
capital commands and labour obeys, and one race, superior in
intellect, avails itself of the strong muscles of another that is
inferior; and yet, for all this, no one impeaches the justice of God.
No doubt all these varied phenomena are consistent with one great law
of justice; and the only difficulty is that we do not, and no doubt we
cannot, understand that law. It is very easy for some dreaming and
visionary theorist to say that it is most evidently unjust for the
lion to devour the deer, and for the eagle to tear and eat the wren;
but the trouble is, that we know of no other way, according to the
frame, the constitution, and the organs which God has given them, in
which the lion and the eagle could manage to live at all. Our little
measure of justice is not God's measure. His justice does not require
us to relieve the hard working millions of all labour, to emancipate
the serf or slave, unfitted to be free, from all control.
No doubt, underneath all the little bubbles, which are the lives, the
wishes, the wills, and the plans of the two thousand millions or more
of human beings on this earth (for bubbles they are, judging by the
space and time they occupy in this great and age-outlasting sea of
human-kind),--no doubt, underneath them all resides one and the same
eternal force, which they shape into this or the other special form;
and over all the same paternal Providence presides, keeping eternal
watch over the little and the great, and producing variety of effect
from Unity of Force.
It is entirely true to say that justice is the constitution or
fundamental law of the moral Universe, the law of right, a rule of
conduct for man (as it is for every other living creature), in all his
moral relations. No doubt all human affairs (like all other affairs),
must be subject to that as the law paramount; and what is right agrees
therewith and stands, while what is wrong conflicts with it and falls.
The difficulty is that we ever erect our notions of what is right and
just into the law of justice, and insist that God shall adopt that as
His law; instead of striving to learn by observation and reflection
what His law is, and then believing that law to be consistent with His
infinite justice, whether it corresponds with our limited notion of
justice, or does not so correspond. We are too wise in our own
conceit, and ever strive to enact our own little notions into the
Universal Laws of God.
It might be difficult for man to prove, even to his own satisfaction,
how it is right or just for him to subjugate the horse and ox to his
service, giving them in return only their daily food, which God has
spread out for them on all the green meadows and savannas of the
world: or how it is just that we should slay and eat the harmless deer
that only crops the green herbage, the buds, and the young leaves, and
drinks the free-running water that God made common to all; or the
gentle dove, the innocent kid, the many other living things that so
confidently trust to our protection;--quite as difficult, perhaps, as
to prove it just for one man's intellect or even his wealth to make
another's strong arms his servants, for daily wages or for a bare
subsistence.
To find out this universal law of justice is one thing--to undertake
to measure off something with our own little tape-line, and call that
God's law of justice, is another. The great general plan and system,
and the great general laws enacted by God, continually produce what to
our limited notions is wrong and injustice, which hitherto men have
been able to explain to their own satisfaction only by the hypothesis
of another existence in which all inequalities and injustices in this
life will be remedied and compensated for. To our ideas of justice, it
is very unjust that the child is made miserable for life by deformity
or organic disease, in consequence of the vices of its father; and yet
that is part of the universal law. The ancients said that the child
was punished for the sins of its father. We say that this its
deformity or disease is the consequence of its father's vices; but so
far as concerns the question of justice or injustice, that is merely
the change of a word.
It is very easy to lay down a broad, general principle, embodying our
own idea of what is absolute justice, and to insist that everything
shall conform to that: to say, "all human affairs must be subject to
that as the law paramount; what is right agrees therewith and stands,
what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private cohesions of self-love, of
friendship, or of patriotism, must all be subordinate to this
universal gravitation toward the eternal right." The difficulty is
that this Universe of necessities God-created, of sequences of cause
and effect, and of life evolved from death, this interminable
succession and aggregate of cruelties, will not conform to any such
absolute principle or arbitrary theory, no matter in what sounding
words and glittering phrases it may be embodied.
Impracticable rules in morals are always injurious; for as all men
fall short of compliance with them, they turn real virtues into
imaginary offenses against a forged law. Justice as between man and
man and as between man and the animals below him, is that which, under
and according to the God-created relations existing between them, and
the whole aggregate of circumstances surrounding them, is fit and
right and proper to be done, with a view to the general as well as to
the individual interest. It is not a theoretical principle by which
the very relations that God has created and imposed on us are to be
tried, and approved or condemned.
God has made this great system of the Universe, and enacted general
laws for its government. Those laws environ everything that lives with
a mighty network of necessity. He chose to create the tiger with such
organs that he cannot crop the grass, but must eat other flesh or
starve. He has made man carnivorous also; and some of the smallest
birds are as much so as the tiger. In every step we take, in every
breath we draw, is involved the destruction of a multitude of animate
existences, each, no matter how minute, as much a living creature as
ourself. He has made necessary among mankind a division of labour,
intellectual and moral. He has made necessary the varied relations of
society and dependence, of obedience and control.
What is thus made necessary cannot be unjust; for if it be, then God
the great Lawgiver is Himself unjust. The evil to be avoided is, the
legalization of injustice and wrong under the false plea of necessity.
Out of all the relations of life grow duties,--as naturally grow and
as undeniably, as the leaves grow upon the trees. If we have the
right, created by God's law of necessity, to slay the lamb that we may
eat and live, we have no right to torture it in doing so, because that
is in no wise necessary. We have the right to live, if we fairly can,
by the legitimate exercise of our intellect, and hire or buy the
labour of the strong arms of others, to till our grounds, to dig in
our mines, to toil in our manufactories; but we have no right to
overwork or underpay them.
It is not only true that we may learn the moral law of justice, the
law of right, by experience and observation; but that God has given us
a moral faculty, our conscience, which is able to perceive this law
directly and immediately, by intuitive perception of it; and it is
true that man has in his nature a rule of conduct higher than what he
has ever yet come up to,--an ideal of nature that shames his actual of
history: because man has ever been prone to make necessity, his own
necessity, the necessities of society, a plea for injustice. But this
notion must not be pushed too far--for if we substitute this ideality
for actuality, then it is equally true that we have within us an ideal
rule of right and wrong, to which God Himself in His government of the
world has never come, and against which He (we say it reverentially)
every day offends. We detest the tiger and the wolf for the rapacity
and love of blood which are their nature; we revolt against the law by
which the crooked limbs and diseased organism of the child are the
fruits of the father's vices; we even think that a God Omnipotent and
Omniscient ought to have permitted no pain, no poverty, no servitude;
our ideal of justice is more lofty than the actualities of God. It is
well, as all else is well. He has given us that moral sense for wise
and beneficent purposes. We accept it as a significant proof of the
inherent loftiness of human nature, that it can entertain an ideal so
exalted; and should strive to attain it, as far as we can do so
consistently with the relations which He has created, and the
circum.stances which surround us and hold us captive.
If we faithfully use this faculty of conscience; if, applying it to
the existing relations and circumstances, we develop it and all its
kindred powers, and so deduce the duties that out of these relation.s
and those circumstances, and limited and qualified by them, arise and
become obligatory upon us, then we learn justice, the law of right,
the divine rule of conduct for human life. But if we undertake to
define and settle "the mode of action that belongs to the infinitely
perfect nature of God," and so set up any ideal rule, beyond all human
reach, we soon come to judge and condemn His work and the relations
which it has pleased Him in His infinite wisdom to create.
A sense of justice belongs to human nature, and is a part of it. Men
find a deep, permanent, and instinctive delight in justice, not only
in the outward effects, but in the inward cause, and by their nature
love this law of right, this reasonable rule of conduct, this justice,
with a deep and abiding love. Justice is the object of the conscience,
and fits it as light fits the eye and truth the mind.
Justice keeps just relations between men. It holds the balance between
nation and nation, between a man and his family, tribe, nation, and
race, so that his absolute rights and theirs do not interfere, nor
their ultimate interests ever clash, nor the eternal interests of the
one prove antagonistic to those of all or of any other one. This we
must believe, if we believe that God is just. We must do justice to
all, and demand it of all; it is a universal human debt, a universal
human claim. But we may err greatly in defining what that justice is.
The temporary interests, and what to human view are the rights, of
men, do often interfere and clash. The life-interests of the
individual often conflict with the permanent interests and welfare of
society; and what may seem to be the natural rights of one class or
race, with those of another.
It is not true to say that "one man, however little, must not be
sacrificed to another, however great, to a majority, or to all men."
That is not only a fallacy, but a most dangerous one. Often one man
and many men must be sacrificed, in the ordinary sense of the term, to
the interest of the many. It is a comfortable fallacy to the selfish;
for if they cannot, by the law of justice, be sacrificed for the
common good, then their country has no right to demand of them
self-sacrifice; and he is a fool who lays down his life, or sacrifices
his estate, or even his luxuries, to insure the safety or prosperity
of his country. According to that doctrine, Curtius was a fool, and
Leonidas an idiot; and to die for one's country is no longer beautiful
and glorious, but a mere absurdity. Then it is no longer to be asked
that the common soldier shall receive in his bosom the sword or
bayonet-thrust which otherwise would let out the life of the great
commander on whose fate hang the liberties of his country, and the
welfare of millions yet unborn.
On the contrary, it is certain that necessity rules in all the affairs
of men, and that the interest and even the life of one man must often
be sacrificed to the interest and welfare of his country. Some must
ever lead the forlorn hope: the missionary must go among savages,
bearing his life in his hand; the physician must expose himself to
pestilence for the sake of others; the sailor, in the frail boat upon
the wide ocean, escaped from the foundering or burning ship, must step
calmly into the hungry waters, if the lives of the passengers can be
saved only by the sacrifice of his own; the pilot must stand firm at
the wheel, and let the flames scorch away his own life to insure the
common safety of those whom the doomed vessel bears.
The mass of men are always looking for what is just. All the vast
machinery which makes up a State, a world of States, is, on the part
of the people, an attempt to organize, not that ideal justice which
finds fault with God's ordinances, but that practical justice which
may be attained in the actual organization of the world. The minute
and wide-extending civil machinery which makes up the law and the
courts, with all their officers and implements, on the part of
mankind, is chiefly an effort to reduce to practice the theory of
right. Constitutions are made to establish justice; the decisions of
courts are reported to help us judge more wisely in time to come. The
nation aims to get together the most nearly just men in the State,
that they may incorporate into statutes their aggregate sense of what
is right. The people wish law to be embodied justice, administered
without passion. Even in the wildest ages there has been a wild
popular justice, but always mixed with passion and administered in
hate; for justice takes a rude form with rude men, and becomes less
mixed with hate and passion in more civilized communities. Every
progressive State revises its statutes and revolutionizes its
constitution from time to time, seeking to come closer to the utmost
possible practical justice and right; and sometimes, following
theorists and dreamers in their adoration for the ideal, by erecting
into law positive principle of theoretical right, works practical
injustice, and then has to retrace its steps.
In literature men always look for practical justice, and desire that
virtue should have its own reward, and vice its appropriate
punishment. They are ever on the side of justice and humanity; and the
majority of them have an ideal justice, better than the things about
them, juster than the law: for the law is ever imperfect, not
attaining even to the utmost practicable degree of perfection; and no
man is as just as his own idea of possible and practicable justice.
His passions and his necessities ever cause him to sink below his own
ideal. The ideal justice which men ever look up to and strive to rise
toward, is true; but it will not be realized in this world. Yet we
must approach as near to it as practicable, as we should do toward
that ideal democracy that "now floats before the eyes of earnest and
religious men,--fairer than the Republic of Plato, or More's Utopia,
or the Golden Age of fabled memory," only taking care that we do not,
in striving to reach and ascend to the impossible ideal, neglect to
seize upon and hold fast to the possible actual. To aim at the best,
but be content with the best possible, is the only true wisdom. To
insist on the absolute right, and throw out of the calculation the
important and all controlling element of necessity, is the folly of a
mere dreamer.
In a world inhabited by men with bodies, and necessarily with bodily
wants and animal passions, the time will never come when there will be
no want, no oppression, nor servitude, no fear of man no fear of God,
but only Love. That can never be while there are inferior intellect,
indulgence in low vice, improvidence, indolence, awful visitations of
pestilence and war and famine, earthquake and volcano, that must of
necessity cause men to want, and serve, and suffer, and fear.
But still the ploughshare of justice is ever drawn through and through
the field of the world, uprooting the savage plants. Ever we see a
continual and progressive triumph of the right. The injustice of
England lost her America, the fairest jewel of her crown. The
injustice of Napoleon bore him to the ground more than the snows of
Russia did, and exiled him to a barren rock there to pine away and
die, his life a warning to bid mankind be just.
We intuitively understand what justice is, better than we can depict
it. What it is in a given case depends so much on circumstances, that
definitions of it are wholly deceitful. Often it would be unjust to
society to do what would, in the absence of that consideration, be
pronounced just to the individual. General propositions of man's right
to this or that are ever fallacious: and not infrequently it would be
most unjust to the individual himself to do for him what the theorist,
as a general proposition, would say was right and his due.
We should ever do unto others what, under the same circumstances, we
ought to wish, and should have the right to wish they should do unto
us. There are many cases, cases constantly occurring, where one man
must take care of himself, in preference to another, as where two
struggle for the possession of a plank that will save one, but cannot
uphold both; or where, assailed, he can save his own life only by
slaying his adversary. So one must prefer the safety of his country to
the lives of her enemies; and sometimes, to insure it, to those of her
own innocent citizens. . The retreating general may cut away a bridge
behind him, to delay pursuit and save the main body of his army,
though he thereby surrenders a detachment, a battalion, or even a
corps of his own force to certain destruction.
These are not departures from justice; though, like other instances
where the injury or death of the individual is the safety of the many,
where the interest of one individual, class, or race is postponed to
that of the public, or of the superior race, they may infringe some
dreamer's ideal rule of justice. But every departure from real,
practical justice is no doubt attended with loss to the unjust man,
though the loss is not reported to the public. Injustice, public or
private, like every other sin and wrong, is inevitably followed by its
consequences. The selfish, the grasping, the inhuman, the fraudulently
unjust, the ungenerous employer, and the cruel master, are detested by
the great popular heart; while the kind master, the liberal employer,
the generous, the humane, and the just have the good opinion of all
men, and even envy is a tribute to their virtues. Men honour all who
stand up for truth and right, and never shrink. The world builds
monuments to its patriots. Four great statesmen, organizers of the
right, embalmed in stone, look down upon the lawgivers of France as
they pass to their hall of legislation, silent orators to tell how
nations love the just. How we revere the marble lineaments of those
just judges, Jay and Marshall, that look so calmly toward the living
Bench of the Supreme Court of the United States! What a monument
Washington has built in the heart of America and all the world, not
because he dreamed of an impracticable ideal justice, but by his
constant effort to be practically just !
But necessity alone, and the greatest good of the greatest number, can
legitimately interfere with the dominion of absolute and ideal
justice. Government should not foster the strong at the expense of the
weak, nor protect the capitalist and tax the labourer. The powerful
should not seek a monopoly of development and enjoyment; not prudence
only and the expedient for to-day should be appealed to by statesmen,
but conscience and the right: justice should not be forgotten in
looking at interest, nor political morality neglected for political
economy: we should not have national housekeeping instead of national
organization on the basis of right.
We may well differ as to the abstract right of many things; for every
such question has many sides, and few men look at all of them, many
only at one. But we all readily recognize cruelty, unfairness,
inhumanity, partiality, over-reaching, hard-dealing, by their ugly and
familiar lineaments, and in order to know and to hate and despise
them, we do not need to sit as a Court of Errors and Appeals to revise
and reverse God's Providences.
There are certainly great evils of civilization at this day, and many
questions of humanity long adjourned and put off. The hideous aspect
of pauperism, the debasement and vice in our cities, tell us by their
eloquent silence or in inarticulate mutterings, that the rich and the
powerful and the intellectual do not do their duty by the poor, the
feeble, and the ignorant; and every wretched woman who lives, Heaven
scarce knows how, by making shirts at sixpence each, attests the
injustice and inhumanity of man. There are cruelties to slaves, and
worse cruelties to animals, each disgraceful to their perpetrators,
and equally unwarranted by the lawful relation of control and
dependence which it has pleased God to create.
A sentence is written against all that is unjust, written by God in
the nature of man and in the nature of the Universe, because it is in
the nature of the Infinite God. Fidelity to your faculties, trust in
their convictions, that is justice to yourself; a life in obedience
thereto, that is justice toward men. No wrong is really successful.
The gain of injustice is a loss, its pleasure suffering. Iniquity
often seems to prosper, but its success is its defeat and shame. After
a long while, the day of reckoning ever comes, to nation as to
individual. The knave deceives himself. The miser, starving his
brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep
out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable.
Whoso escapes a duty avoids a gain. Outward judgment often fails,
inward justice never. Let a man try to love the wrong and to do the
wrong, it is eating stones and not bread, the swift feet of justice
are upon him, following with woolen tread, and her iron hands are
round his neck. No man can escape from this, any more than from
himself. Justice is the angel of God that flies from East to West; and
where she stoops her broad wings, it is to bring the counsel of God,
and feed mankind with angel's bread.
We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one, and
our eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and
complete the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine it
by conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward justice.
Justice will not fail, though wickedness appears strong, and has on
its side the armies and thrones of power, the riches and the glory of
the world, and though poor men crouch down in despair. Justice will
not fail and perish out from the world of men! nor will what is really
wrong and contrary to God's real law of justice continually endure.
The Power, the Wisdom, and the Justice of God are on the side of every
just thought, and it cannot fail, any more than God Himself can
perish.
In human affairs, the justice of God must work by human means. Men are
the instruments of God's principles; our morality is the instrument of
His justice, which, incomprehensible to us, seems to our short vision
often to work injustice. but will at some time still the oppressor's
brutal laugh. Justice is the rule of conduct written in the nature of
mankind. We may, in our daily life, in house or field or shop, in the
office or in the court, help to prepare the way for the commonwealth
of justice which is slowly, but, we would fain hope, surely
approaching. All the justice we mature will bless us here and
hereafter, and at our death we shall leave it added to the common
store of human-kind. And every Mason who, content to do that which is
possible and practicable, does and enforces justice, may help deepen
the channel of human morality in which God's justice runs; and so the
wrecks of evil that now check and obstruct the stream may the sooner
be swept out and borne away by the resistless tide of Omnipotent
Right. Let us, my Brother, in this as in all else, endeavour always to
perform the duties of a good Mason and a good man.
M & D Chapter XXXII
The Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret
XXXII
SUBLIME PRINCE OF THE ROYAL SECRET.
[Master of Royal Secret.]
Albert Pike
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry
The Occult Science of the Ancient Magi was concealed under the shadows
of the Ancient Mysteries: it was imperfectly revealed or rather
disfigured by the Gnostics: it is guessed at under the obscurities
that cover the pretended crimes of the Templars; and it is found
enveloped in enigmas that seem impenetrable, in the Rites of the
Highest Masonry.
Magism was the Science of Abraham and Orpheus, of Confucius and
Zoroaster. It was the dogmas of this Science that were engraven on the
tables of stone by Hanoch and Trismegistus. Moses purified and
re-veiled them, for that is the meaning of the word reveal. He covered
them with a new veil, when he made of the Holy Kabalah the exclusive
heritage of the people of Israel, and the inviolable Secret of its
priests. The Mysteries of Thebes and Eleusis preserved among the
nations some symbols of it, already altered, and the mysterious key
whereof was lost among the instruments of an ever-growing
superstition. Jerusalem, the murderess of her prophets, and so often
prostituted to the false gods of the Syrians and Babylonians, had at
length in its turn lost the Holy Word, when a Prophet announced to the
Magi by the consecrated Star of Initiation, came to rend asunder the
worn veil of the old Temple, in order to give the Church a new tissue
of legends and symbols, that still and ever conceals from the Profane,
and ever preserves to the Elect the same truths.
It was the remembrance of this scientific and religious Absolute, of
this doctrine that is summed up in a word, of this Word, in fine,
alternately lost and found again, that was transmitted to the Elect of
all the Ancient Initiations: it was this same remembrance, preserved,
or perhaps profaned in the celebrated Order of the Templars, that
became for all the secret associations, of the Rose-Croix, of the
Illuminati, and of the Hermetic Freemasons, the reason of their
strange rites, of their signs more or less conventional, and, above
all, of their mutual devotedness and of their power.
The Gnostics caused the Gnosis to be proscribed by the Christians, and
the official Sanctuary was closed against the high initiation. Thus
the Hierarchy of Knowledge was compromitted by the violences of
usurping ignorance, and the disorders of the Sanctuary are reproduced
in the State; for always, willingly or unwillingly, the King is
sustained by the Priest, and it is from the eternal Sanctuary of the
Divine instruction that the Powers of the Earth, to insure themselves
durability, must receive their consecration and their force.
The Hermetic Science of the early Christian ages, cultivated also by
Geber, Alfarabius, and others of the Arabs, studied by the Chiefs of
the Templars, and embodied in certain symbols of the higher Degrees of
Freemasonry, may be accurately defined as the Kabalah in active
realization,or the Magic of Works. It has three analogous Degrees,
religious, philosophical, and physical realization.
Its religious realization is the durable foundation of the true Empire
and the true Priesthood that rule in the realm of human intellect: its
philosophical realization is the establishment of absolute Doctrine,
known in all times as the "Holy Doctrine," and of which PLUTARCH, in
the Treatise "de Iside et Osiride," speaks at large but mysteriously;
and of a Hierarchical instruction to secure the uninterrupted
succession of Adepts among the Initiates: its physical realization is
the discovery and application, in the Microcosm, or Little World, of
the creative law that incessantly peoples the great Universe.
Measure a corner of the Creation, and multiply that space in
proportional progression, and the entire Infinite will multiply its
circles filled with universes, which will pass in proportional
segments between the ideal and elongating branches of your Compass.
Now suppose that from any point whatever of the Infinite above you a
hand holds another Compass or a Square, the lines of the Celestial
triangle will necessarily meet those of the Compass of Science, to
form the Mysterious Star of Solomon.
All hypotheses scientifically probable are the last gleams of the
twilight of knowledge, or its last shadows. Faith begins where Reason
sinks exhausted. Beyond the human Reason is the Divine Reason, to our
feebleness the great Absurdity, the Infinite Absurd, which confounds
us and which we believe. For the Master, the Compass of Faith is above
the Square of Reason; but both rest upon the Holy Scriptures and
combine to form the Blazing Star of Truth.
All eyes do not see alike. Even the visible creation is not, for all
who look upon it, of one form and one color. Our brain is a book
printed within and without, and the two writings are, with all men,
more or less confused.
The primary tradition of the single revelation has been preserved
under the name of the "Kabalah," by the Priesthood of Israel. The
Kabalistic doctrine, which was also the dogma of the Magi and of
Hermes, is contained in the Sepher Yetsairah, the Sohar, and the
Talmud. According to that doctrine, the Absolute is the Being, in
which The Word Is, the Word that is the utterance and expression of
being and life.
Magic is that which it is; it is by itself, like the mathematics; for
it is the exact and absolute science of Nature and its laws.
Magic is the science of the Ancient Magi: and the Christian religion,
which has imposed silence on the lying oracles, and put an end to the
prestiges of the false Gods, itself reveres those Magi who came from
the East, guided by a Star, to adore the Saviour of the world in His
cradle.
Tradition also gives these Magi the title of "Kings;" because
initiation into Magism constitutes a genuine royalty; and because the
grand art of the Magi is styled by all the Adepts, "The Royal Art," or
the Holy Realm or Empire, Sanctum Regnum.
The Star which guided them is that same Blazing Star, the image
whereof we find in all initiations. To the Alchemists it is the sign
of the Quintessence; to the Magists, the Grand Arcanum; to the
Kabalists, the Sacred Pentagram. The study of this Pentagram could not
but lead the Magi to the knowledge of the New Name which was about to
raise itself above all names, and cause all creatures capable of
adoration to bend the knee.
Magic unites in one and the same science, whatsoever Philosophy can
possess that is most certain, and Religion of the Infallible and the
Eternal. It perfectly and incontestably reconciles these two terms
that at first blush seem so opposed to each other; faith and reason,
science and creed, authority and liberty.
It supplies the human mind with an instrument of philosophical and
religious certainty, exact as the mathematics, and accounting for the
infallibility of the mathematics themselves.
Thus there is an Absolute, in the matters of the Intelligence and of
Faith. The Supreme Reason has not left the gleams of the human
understanding to vacillate at hazard. There is an incontestable
verity, there is an infallible method of knowing this verity, and by
the knowledge of it, those who accept it as a rule may give their will
a sovereign power that will make them the masters of all inferior
things and of all errant spirits; that is to say, will make them the
Arbiters and Kings of the World.
Science has its nights and its dawns, because it gives the
intellectual world a life which has its regulated movements and its
progressive phases. It is with Truths, as with the luminous rays:
nothing of what is concealed is lost; but also, nothing of what is
discovered is absolutely new. God has been pleased to give to Science,
which is the reflection of His Glory, the Seal of His Eternity.
It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious
symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of
Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge. The Priests of
Egypt knew, better than we do, the laws of movement and of life. They
knew how to temper or intensify action by reaction; and readily
foresaw the realization of these effects, the causes of which they had
determined. The Columns of Seth, Enoch, Solomon, and Hercules have
symbolized in the Magian traditions this universal law of the
Equilibrium; and the Science of the Equilibrium or balancing of Forces
had led the Initiates to that of the universal gravitation around the
centres of Life, Heat, and Light.
Thales and Pythagoras learned in the Sanctuaries of Egypt that the
Earth revolved around the Sun; but they did not attempt to make this
generally known, because to do so it would have been necessary to
reveal one of the great Secrets of the Temple, that double law of
attraction and radiation or of sympathy and antipathy, of fixedness
and movement, which is the principle of Creation, and the perpetual
cause of life. This Truth was ridiculed by the Christian Lactantius,
as it was long after sought to be proven a falsehood by persecution,
by Papal Rome.
So the philosophers reasoned, while the Priests, without replying to
them or even smiling at their errors, wrote, in those Hieroglyphics
that created all dogmas and all poetry, the Secrets of the Truth.
When Truth comes into the world, the Star of Knowledge advises the
Magi of it, and they hasten to adore the Infant who creates the
Future. It is by means of the Intelligence of the Hierarchy and the
practice of obedience, that one obtains Initiation. If the Rulers have
the Divine Right to govern, the true Initiate will cheerfully obey.
The orthodox traditions were carried from Chaldea by Abraham. They
reigned in Egypt in the time of Joseph, together with the knowledge of
the True God. Moses carried Orthodoxy out of Egypt, and in the Secret
Traditions of the Kabalah we find a Theology entire, perfect, unique,
like that which in Christianity is most grand and best explained by
the Fathers and the Doctors, the whole with a consistency and a
harmoniousness which it is not as yet given to the world to
comprehend. The Sohar, which is the Key of the Holy Books, opens also
all the depths and lights, all the obscurities of the Ancient
Mythologies and of the Sciences originally concealed in the
Sanctuaries. It is true that the Secret of this Key must be known, to
enable one to make use of it, and that for even the most penetrating
intellects, not initiated in this Secret, the Sohar is absolutely
incomprehensible and almost illegible.
The Secret of the Occult Sciences is that of Nature itself, the Secret
of the generation of the Angels and Worlds, that of the Omnipotence of
God.
"Ye shall be like the Elohim, knowing good and evil," had the Serpent
of Genesis said, and the Tree of Knowledge became the Tree of Death.
For six thousand years the Martyrs of Knowledge toil and die at the
foot of this tree, that it may again become the Tree of Life.
The Absolute sought for unsuccessfully by the insensate and found by
the Sages, is the TRUTH, the REALITY, and the REASON of the universal
equilibrium!
Equilibrium is the Harmony that results from the analogy of
Contraries.
Until now, Humanity has been endeavoring to stand on one foot;
sometimes on one, sometimes on the other.
Civilizations have risen and perished, either by the anarchical
insanity of Despotism, or by the despotic anarchy of Revolt.
To organize Anarchy, is the problem which the revolutionists have and
will eternally have to resolve. It is the rock of Sisyphus that will
always fall back upon them. To exist a single instant, they are and
always will be by fatality reduced to improvise a despotism without
other reason of existence than necessity, and which, consequently, is
violent and blind as Necessity. We escape from the harmonious monarchy
of Reason, only to fall under the irregular dictatorship of Folly.
Sometimes superstitious enthusiasms, sometimes the miserable
calculations of the materialist instinct have led astray the nations,
and God at last urges the world on toward believing Reason and
reasonable Beliefs.
We have had prophets enough without philosophy, and philosophers
without religion; the blind believers and the sceptics resemble each
other, and are as far the one as the other from the eternal salvation.
In the chaos of universal doubt and of the conflicts of Reason and
Faith, the great men and Seers have been but infirm and morbid
artists, seeking the beau-ideal at the risk and peril of their reason
and life.
Living only in the hope to be crowned, they are the first to do what
Pythagoras in so touching a manner prohibits in his admirable Symbols;
they rend crowns, and tread them under foot.
Light is the equilibrium of Shadow and Lucidity. Movement is the
equilibrium of Inertia and Activity. Authority is the equilibrium of
Liberty and Power. Wisdom is equilibrium in the Thoughts, which are
the scintillations and rays of the Intellect. Virtue is equilibrium in
the Affections: Beauty is harmonious proportion in Forms. The
beautiful lives are the accurate ones, and the magnificences of Nature
are an algebra of graces and splendors. Everything just is beautiful;
everything beautiful ought to be just.
There is, in fact, no Nothing, no void Emptiness, in the Universe.
From the upper or outer surface of our atmosphere to that of the Sun,
and to those of the Planets and remote Stars, in different directions,
Science has for hundreds of centuries imagined that there was simple,
void, empty Space. Comparing finite knowledge with the Infinite, the
Philosophers know little more than the apes ! In all that "void" space
are the Infinite Forces of God, acting in an infinite variety of
directions, back and forth, and never for an instant inactive. In all
of it, active through the whole of its Infinity, is the Light that is
the Visible Manifestation of God. The earth and every other planet and
sphere that is not a Centre of Light, carries its cone of shadow with
it as it flies and flashes round in its orbit; but the darkness has no
home in the Universe. To illuminate the sphere on one side, is to
project a cone of darkness on the other; and Error also is the Shadow
of the Truth with which God illuminates the Soul.
In all that "Void," also, is the Mysterious and ever Active
Electricity, and Heat, and the Omnipresent Ether. At the will of God
the Invisible becomes Visible. Two invisible gases, combined by the
action of a Force of God, and compressed, become and remain the water
that fills the great basins of the seas, flows in the rivers and
rivulets, leaps forth from the rocks or springs, drops upon the earth
in rains, or whitens it with snows, and bridges the Danubes with ice,
or gathers in vast reservoirs in the earth's bosom. God manifested
fills all the extension that we foolishly call Empty Space and the
Void.
And everywhere in the Universe, what we call life and Movement results
from a continual conflict of Forces or Impulses. Whenever that active
antagonism ceases, the immobility and inertia, which are Death,
result.
If, says the Kabalah, the Justice of God, which is Severity or the
Female, alone reigned, creation of imperfect beings such as man would
from the beginning have been impossible, because Sin being congenital
with Humanity, the Infinite Justice, measuring the Sin by the Infinity
of the God offended against, must have annihilated Humanity at the
instant of its creation; and not only Humanity but the Angels, since
these also, like all created by God and less than perfect, are sinful.
Nothing imperfect would have been possible. If, on the other hand, the
Mercy or Benignity of God, the Male, were in no wise counteracted, Sin
would go unpunished, and the Universe fall into a chaos of corruption.
Let God but repeal a single principle or law of chemical attraction or
sympathy, and the antagonistic forces equilibrated in matter, released
from constraint, would instantaneously expand all that we term matter
into impalpable and invisible gases, such as water or steam is, when,
confined in a cylinder and subjected to an immense degree of that
mysterious force of the Deity which we call "heat," it is by its
expansion released.
Incessantly the great currents and rivers of air flow and rush and
roll from the equator to the frozen polar regions, and back from these
to the torrid equatorial realms. Necessarily incident to these great,
immense, equilibrated and beneficent movements, caused by the
antagonism of equatorial heat and polar cold, are the typhoons,
tornadoes, and cyclones that result from conflicts between the rushing
currents. These and the benign trade-winds result from the same great
law. God is omnipotent; but effects without causes are impossible, and
these effects cannot but sometimes be evil. The fire would not warm,
if it could not also burn, the human flesh. The most virulent poisons
are the most sovereign remedies, when given in due proportion. The
Evil is the shadow of the Good, and inseparable from it.
The Divine Wisdom limits by equipoise the Omnipotence of the Divine
Will or Power, and the result is Beauty or Harmony. The arch rests not
on a single column, but springs from one on either side. So is it also
with the Divine Justice and Mercy, and with the Human Reason and Human
Faith.
That purely scholastic Theology, issue of the Categories of Aristotle
and of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, that logic of the syllogism
which argues instead of reasoning, and finds a response to every thing
by subtilizing on terms, wholly ignored the Kabalastic dogma and
wandered off into the drear vacuity of darkness. It was less a
philosophy or a wisdom than a philosophical automaton, replying by
means of springs, and uncoiling its theses like a wheeled movement. It
was not the human verb but the monotonous cry of a machine, the
inanimate speech of an Android. It was the fatal precision of
mechanism, instead of a free application of rational necessities. ST
THOMAS AQUINAS crushed with a single blow all this scaffolding of
words built one upon the other, by proclaiming the eternal Empire of
Reason, in that magnificent sentence, "A thing is not just because GOD
wills it,- but GOD wills it because it is just." The proximate
consequence of this proposition, arguing from the greater to the less,
was this: "A thing is not true because ARISTOTLE has said it; but
ARISTOTLE could not reasonably say it unless it was true. Seek then,
first of, all, the TRUTH and JUSTICE, and the Science of ARISTOTLE
will be given you in addition."
It is the fine dream of the greatest of the Poets, that Hell, become
useless, is to be closed at length, by the aggrandizement of Heaven;
that the problem of Evil is to receive its final solution, and Good
alone, necessary and triumphant, is to reign in Eternity. So the
Persian dogma taught that AHRIMAN and his subordinate ministers of
Evil were at last, by means of a Redeemer and Mediator, to be
reconciled with Deity, and all Evil to end. But unfortunately, the
philosopher forgets all the laws of equilibrium, and seeks to absorb
the Light in a splendor without shadow, and movement in an absolute
repose that would be the cessation of life. So long as there shall be
a visible light, there will be a shadow proportional to this Light,
and whatever is illuminated will cast its cone of shadow. Repose will
never be happiness, if it is not balanced by an analogous and contrary
movement. This is the immutable law of Nature, the Eternal Will of the
JUSTICE which is GOD.
The same reason necessitates Evil and Sorrow in Humanity which renders
indispensable the bitterness of the waters of the seas. Here also,
Harmony can result only from the analogy of contraries, and what is
above exists by reason of what is below. It is the depth that
determines the height; and if the valleys are filled up, the mountains
disappear: so, if the shadows are effaced, the Light is annulled,
which is only visible by the graduated contrast of gloom and splendor,
and universal obscurity will be produced by an immense dazzling. Even
the colors in the Light only exist by the presence of the shadow: it
is the threefold alliance of the day and night, the luminous image of
the dogma, the Light made Shadow, as the Saviour is the Logos made
man: and all this reposes on the same law, the primary law of
creation, the single and absolute law of Nature, that of the
distinction and harmonious ponderation of the contrary forces in the
universal equipoise.
The two great columns of the Temple that symbolizes the Universe are
Necessity, or the omnipotent Will of God, which nothing can disobey,
and Liberty, or the free-will of His creatures. Apparently and to our
human reason antagonistic, the same Reason is not incapable of
comprehending how they can be in equipoise. The Infinite Power and
Wisdom could so plan the Universe and the Infinite Succession of
things as to leave man free to act, and, foreseeing what each would at
every instant think and do, to make of the free-will and free-action
of each an instrument to aid in effecting its general purpose. For
even a man, foreseeing that another will do a certain act, and in
nowise controlling or even influencing him may use that action as an
instrument to effect his own purposes.
The Infinite Wisdom of God foresees what each will do, and uses it as
an instrument, by the exertion of His Infinite Power, which yet does
not control the Human action so as to annihilate its freedom The
result is Harmony, the third column that upholds the Lodge. The same
Harmony results from the equipoise of Necessity and Liberty. The will
of God is not for an instant defeated nor thwarted, and this is the
Divine Victory; and yet He does not tempt nor constrain men to do
Evil, and thus His Infinite Glory is unimpaired. The result is
Stability, Cohesion, and Permanence in the Universe, and undivided
Dominion and Autocracy in the Deity. And these, Victory, Glory,
Stability, and Dominion, are the last four Sephiroth of the Kabalah.
I AM, God said to Moses, that which Is, Was and Shall forever Be. But
the Very God, in His unmanifested Essence, conceived of as not yet
having created and as Alone, has no Name. Such was the doctrine of all
the ancient Sages, and it is so expressly declared in the Kabalah. is
the Name of the Deity manifested in a single act, that of Creation,
and containing within Himself, in idea and actuality, the whole
Universe, to be invested with form and be materially developed during
the eternal succession of ages. As God never WAS NOT, so He never
THOUGHT not, and the Universe has no more had a beginning than the
Divine Thought of which it is the utterance,--no more than the Deity
Himself. The duration of the Universe is but a point halfway upon the
infinite line of eternity; and God was not inert and uncreative during
the eternity that stretches behind that point. The Archetype of the
Universe did never not exist in the Divine Mind. The Word was in the
BEGINNING with God, and WAS God. And the Ineffable NAME is that, not
of the Very Essence but of the Absolute, manifested as Being or
Existence. For Existence or Being, said the Philosophers, is
limitation; and the Very Deity is not limited nor defined, but is all
that may possibly be, besides all that is, was, and shall be.
Reversing the letters of the Ineffable Name, and dividing it, it
becomes bi-sexual, as the word Yud-He or JAH is, and discloses the
meaning of much of the obscure language of the Kabalah, and is The
Highest of which the Columns Jachin and Boaz are the symbol. "In the
image of Deity," we are told, "God created the Man; Male and Female
created He them:" and the writer, symbolizing the Divine by the Human,
then tells us that the woman, at first contained in the man, was taken
from his side. So Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, was born, a woman and in
armor, of the brain of Jove; Isis was the sister before she was the
wife of Osiris, and within BRAHM, the Source of all, the Very God,
without sex or name, was developed MAYA, the Mother of all that is.
The WORD is the First and Only-begotten of the Father; and the awe
with which the Highest Mysteries were regarded has imposed silence in
respect to the Nature of the Holy Spirit. The Word is Light, and the
Life of Humanity.
It is for the Adepts to understand the meaning of the Symbols.
Return now, with us, to the Degrees of the Blue Masonry, and for your
last lesson, receive the explanation of one of their Symbols.
You see upon the altar of those Degrees the SQUARE and the COMPASS,
and you remember how they lay upon the altar in each Degree.
The SQUARE is an instrument adapted for plane surfaces only, and
therefore appropriate to Geometry, or measurement of the Earth, which
appears to be, and was by the Ancients supposed to be, a plane. The
COMPASS is an instrument that has relation to spheres and spherical
surfaces, and is adapted to spherical trigonometry, or that branch of
mathematics which deals with the Heavens and the orbits of the
planetary bodies.
The SQUARE, therefore, is a natural and appropriate Symbol of this
Earth and the things that belong to it, are of it, or concern it. The
Compass is an equally natural and appropriate Symbol of the Heavens,
and of all celestial things and celestial natures.
You see at the beginning of this reading, an old Hermetic Symbol,
copied from the MATERIA PRIMA of Valentinus, printed at Frankfurt, in
1613, with a treatise entitled "AZOTEI." Upon it you see a Triangle
upon a Square, both of these contained in a circle; and above this,
standing upon a dragon, a human body, with two arms only,but two
heads,one male and the other female. By the side of the male head is
the Sun, and by that of the female head, the Moon, the crescent within
the circle of the full moon. And the hand on the male side holds a
Compass, and that on the female side, a Square.
The Heavens and the Earth were personified as Deities, even among the
Aryan Ancestors of the European nations of the Hindus, Zends,
Bactrians, and Persians; and the Rig Veda Sanhita contains hymns
addressed to them as gods. They were deified also among the
Phoenicians; and among the Greeks OURANOS and GEA, Heaven and Earth,
were sung as the most ancient of the Deities, by Hesiod.
It is the great, fertile, beautiful MOTHER, Earth, that produces, with
limitless profusion of beneficence, everything that ministers to the
needs, to the comfort, and to the luxury of man. From her teeming and
inexhaustible bosom come the fruits, the grain, the flowers, in their
season. From it comes all that feeds the animals which serve man as
labourers and for food. She, in the fair Springtime, is green with
abundant grass, and the trees spring from her soil, and from her
teeming vitality take their wealth of green leaves. In her womb are
found the useful and valuable minerals; hers are the seas the swarm
with life; hers the rivers that furnish food and irrigation, and the
mountains that send down the streams which swell into these rivers;
hers the forests that feed the sacred fires for the sacrifices, and
blaze upon the domestic hearths. The EARTH, therefore, the great
PRODUCER, was always represented as a female, as the MOTHER,--Great,
Bounteous, Beneficent Mother Earth.
On the other hand, it is the light and heat of the Sun in the Heavens,
and the rains that seem to come from them, that in the Springtime make
fruitful this bountifully-producing Earth, that restore life and
warmth to her veins, chilled by Winter, set running free her streams,
and beget, as it were, that greenness and that abundance of which she
is so prolific. As the procreative and generative agents, the Heavens
and the Sun have always been regarded as male; as the generators that
fructify the Earth and cause it to produce.
The Hermaphroditic figure is the Symbol of the double nature anciently
assigned to the Deity, as Generator and Producer, as BRAHM and MAYA
among the Aryans, Osiris and Isis among the Egyptians. As the Sun was
male, so the Moon was female; and Isis was both the sister and the
wife of Osiris. The Compass, therefore, is the Hermetic Symbol of the
Creative Deity, and the Square of the productive Earth or Universe.
From the Heavens come the spiritual and immortal portion of man; from
the Earth his material and mortal portion. The Hebrew Genesis says
that YEHOUAH formed man of the dust of the Earth, and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life. Through the seven planetary spheres,
represented by the Mystic Ladder of the Mithriac Initiations, and it
by that which Jacob saw in his dream (not with three, but with seven
steps), the Souls, emanating from the Deity, descended, to be united
to their human bodies; and through those seven spheres they must
re-ascend, to return to their origin and home in the bosom of the
Deity.
The COMPASS, therefore, as the Symbol of the Heavens, represents the
spiritual, intellectual, and moral portion of this double nature of
humanity; and the SQUARE, as the Symbol of the Earth, its material,
sensual, and baser portion. "Truth and Intelligence," said one of the
Ancient Indian Sects of Philosophers, "are the Eternal attributes of
God, not of the individual Soul, which is susceptible both of
knowledge and ignorance, of pleasure and pain; therefore God and the
individual Soul are distinct :" and this expression of the ancient
Nyaya Philosophers, in regard to Truth, has been handed down to us
through the long succession of ages, in the lessons of Freemasonry,
wherein we read, that "Truth is a Divine Attribute, and the foundation
of every virtue."
"While embodied in matter," they said, "the Soul is in a state of
imprisonment, and is under the influence of evil passions; but having,
by intense study, arrived at the knowledge of the elements and
principles of Nature, it attains unto the place of THE ETERNAL; in
which state of happiness, its individuality does not cease."
The vitality which animates the mortal frame, the Breath of Life of
the Hebrew Genesis, the Hindu Philosophers in general held, perishes
with it; but the Soul is divine, all emanation of the Spirit of God,
but not a portion of that Spirit. For they compared it to the heat and
light sent forth from the Sun, or to a ray of that light, which
neither lessens nor divides its own essence.
However created, or invested with separate existence, the Soul, which
is but the creature of the Deity, cannot know the mode of its
creation, nor comprehend its own individuality. It cannot even
comprehend how the being which it and the body constitute, can feel
pain, or see, or hear. It has pleased the Universal: Creator to set
bounds to the scope of our human and finite reason, beyond which it
cannot reach; and if we are capable of comprehending the mode and
manner of the creation or generation of the Universe of things, He has
been pleased to conceal it from us by an impenetrable veil, while the
words used to express the act have no other definite meaning than that
He caused that Universe to commence to exist.
It is enough for us to know, what Masonry teaches, that we are not all
mortal; that the Soul or Spirit, the intellectual and reasoning
portion of ourself, is our Very Self, is not subject to decay and
dissolution, but is simple and immaterial, survives the death of the
body, and is capable of immortality; that it is also capable of
improvement and advancement, of increase of knowledge of the things
that are divine, of becoming wiser and better, and more and more
worthy of immortality; and that to become so, and to help to improve
and benefit others and all our race, is the noblest ambition and
highest glory that we can entertain and attain unto, in this momentary
and imperfect life.
In every human being the Divine and the Human are intermingled. In
every one there are the Reason and the Moral sense, the passions that
prompt to evil, and the sensual appetites. "If ye live after the
flesh, ye shall die," said Paul, writing to the Christians at Rome,
"but if ye through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye
shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the
sons of God." "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit
against the flesh," he said, writing to the Christians of Galatia,
"and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye cannot do the
things that ye would." "That which I do, I do not willingly do," he
wrote to the Romans, "for what I wish to do, that I do not do, but
that which I hate I do. It is no more I that do it, but sin that
dwelleth in me. To will, is present with me; but how to perform that
which is good, I find not. For, I do not do the good that I desire to
do; and the evil that I do not wish to do, that I do do. I find then a
law, that when I desire to do good, evil is present with me; for I
delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see another law
in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me
into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. . . So then,
with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the
law of sin."
Life is a battle, and to fight that battle heroically and well is the
great purpose of every man's existence, who is worthy and fit to live
at all. To stem the strong currents of adversity, to advance in
despite of all obstacles, to snatch victory from the jealous grasp of
fortune, to become a chief and a leader among men, to rise to rank and
power by eloquence, courage, perseverance, study, energy, activity,
discouraged by no reverses, impatient of no delays, deterred by no
hazards; to win wealth, to subjugate men by our intellect, the very
elements by our audacity, to succeed, to prosper, to thrive;--thus it
is, according to the general understanding, that one fights well the
battle of life. Even to succeed in business by that boldness which
halts for no risks, that audacity which stakes all upon hazardous
chances; by the shrewdness of the close dealer, the boldness of the
unscrupulous operator, ever by the knaveries of the stock-board and
the gold-room; to crawl up into place by disreputable means or the
votes of brutal ignorance,--these also are deemed to be among the
great successes of life.
But that which is the greatest battle, and in which the truest honour
and most real success are to be won, is that which our intellect and
reason and moral sense, our spiritual natures, fight against our
sensual appetites and evil passions, our earthly and material or
animal nature. Therein only are the true glories of heroism to be won,
there only the successes that entitle us to triumphs.
In every human life that battle is fought; and those who win
elsewhere, often suffer ignominious defeat and disastrous rout, and
discomfiture and shameful downfall in this encounter.
You have heard more than one definition of Freemasonry. The truest and
the most significant you have yet to hear. It is taught to the entered
Apprentice, the Fellow-Craft, and the Master, and it is taught in
every Degree through which you have advanced to this. It is a
definition of what Freemasonry is, of what its purposes and its very
essence and spirit are; and it has for every one of us the force and
sanctity of a divine law, and imposes on every one of us a solemn
obligation.
It is symbolized and; taught, to the Apprentice as well as to you, by
the COMPASS and the SQUARE; upon which, as well as upon the Book of
your Religion and the Book of the law of the Scottish Freemasonry, you
have taken so many obligations. As a Knight, you have been taught it
by the Swords, the symbols of HONOUR and DUTY, on which you have taken
your vows: it was taught you by the BALANCE, the symbol of all
Equilibrium, and by the CROSS, the symbol of devotedness and
self-sacrifice; but all that these teach and contain is taught and
contained, for Entered Apprentice, Knight, and Prince alike, by the
Compass and the Square.
For the Apprentice, the points of the Compass are beneath the Square.
For the Fellow-Craft, one is above and one beneath. For the Master,
both are dominant, and have rule, control, and empire over the symbol
of the earthly and the material.
FREEMASONRY is the subjugation of the Human that is in man by the
Divine; the Conquest of the Appetites and Passions by the Moral Sense
and the Reason; a continual effort, struggle, and warfare of the
Spiritual against the Material and Sensual. That victory, when it has
been achieved and secured, and the conqueror may rest upon his shield
and wear the well-earned laurels, is the true HOLY EMPIRE.
To achieve it, the Mason must first attain a solid conviction, founded
upon reason, that he hath within him a spiritual nature, a soul that
is not to die when the body is dissolved, but is to continue to exist
and to advance toward perfection through all the ages of eternity, and
to see more and more clearly, as it draws nearer unto God, the Light
of the Divine Presence. This the Philosophy of the Ancient and
Accepted Rite teaches him; and it encourages him to persevere by
helping him to believe that his free will is entirely consistent with
God's Omnipotence and Omniscience; that He is not only infinite in
power, and of infinite wisdom, but of infinite mercy, and an
infinitely tender pity and love for the frail and imperfect creatures
that He has made. Every Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish
Rite, from the first to the thirty-second, teaches by its ceremonial
as well as by its instruction, that the noblest purpose of life and
the highest duty of a man are to strive incessantly and vigorously to
win the mastery of everything, of that which in him is spiritual and
divine, over that which is material and sensual; so that in him also,
as in the Universe which God governs, Harmony and Beauty may be the
result of a just equilibrium.
You have been taught this in those Degrees, conferred in the Lodge of
Perfection, which inculcate particularly the practical morality of
Freemasonry. To be true, under whatever temptation to be false; to be
honest in all your dealings, even if great losses should be the
consequence; to be charitable, when selfishness would prompt you to
close your hand, and deprivation of luxury or comfort must follow the
charitable act; to judge justly and impartially, even in your own
case, when baser impulses prompt you to do an injustice in order that
you may be benefited or justified; to be tolerant, when passion
prompts to intolerance and persecution; to do that which is right,
when the wrong seems to promise larger profit; and to wrong no man of
anything that is his, however easy it may seem so to enrich
yourself;--in all these things and others which you promised in those
Degrees, your spiritual nature is taught and encouraged to assert its
rightful dominion over your appetites and passions.
The philosophical Degrees have taught you the value of knowledge, the
excellence of truth, the superiority of intellectual labour, the
dignity and value of your soul, the worth of great and noble thoughts;
and thus endeavoured to assist you to rise above the level of the
animal appetites and passions, the pursuits of greed and the miserable
struggles of ambition, and to find purer pleasure and nobler prizes
and rewards in the acquisition of knowledge, the enlargement of the
intellect, the interpretation of the sacred writing of God upon the
great pages of the Book of Nature.
And the Chivalric Degrees have led you on the same path, by showing
you the excellence of generosity, clemency, forgiveness of injuries,
magnanimity, contempt of danger, and the paramount obligations of Duty
and Honour. They have taught you to overcome the fear of death, to
devote yourself to the great cause of civil and religious Liberty, to
be the Soldier of all that is just right, and true; in the midst of
pestilence to deserve your title of Knight Commander of the Temple,
and neither there nor elsewhere to desert your post and flee
dastard-like from the foe. In all this, you assert the superiority and
right to dominion of that in you which is spiritual and divine. No
base fear of danger or death, no sordid ambitions or pitiful greeds or
base considerations can tempt a true Scottish Knight to dishonour, and
so make his intellect, his reason, his soul, the bond-slave of his
appetites, of his passions, of that which is material and animal,
selfish and brutish in his nature.
It is not possible to create a true and genuine Brotherhood upon any
theory of the baseness of human nature: nor by a community of belief
in abstract propositions as to the nature of the Deity, the number of
His persons, or other theorems of religious faith: nor by the
establishment of a system of association simply for mutual relief, and
by which, in consideration of certain payments regularly made, each
becomes entitled to a certain stipend in case of sickness, to
attention then, and to the ceremonies of burial after death.
There can be no genuine Brotherhood without mutual regard good opinion
and esteem, mutual charity, and mutual allowance for faults and
failings. It is those only who learn habitually to think better of
each other, to look habitually for the good that is in each other, and
expect, allow for, and overlook, the evil, who can be Brethren one of
the other, in any truse sense of the word. Those who gloat over the
failings of one another, who think each other to be naturally base and
low, of a nature in which the Evil predominates and excellence is not
to be looked for, cannot be even friends, and much less Brethren.
No one can have a right to think meanly of his race, unless he also
thinks meanly of himself. If, from a single fault or error, he judges
of the character of another, and takes the single act as evidence of
the whole nature of the man and of the whole course of his life, he
ought to consent to be judged by the same rule, and to admit it to be
right that others should thus uncharitably condemn himself. But such
judgments will become impossible when he incessantly reminds himself
that in every man who lives there is an immortal Soul endeavouring to
do that which is right and just; a Ray, however small, and almost
inappreciable, from the Great Source of Light and Intelligence, which
ever struggles upward amid all the impediments of sense and the
obstructions of the passions; and that in every man this ray
continually wages war against his evil passions and his unruly
appetites, or, if it has succumbed, is never wholly extinguished and
annihilated. For he will then see that it is not victory, but the
struggle that deserves honour; since in this as in all else no man can
always command success. Amid a cloud of errors, of failure, and
shortcomings, he will look for the struggling Soul, for that which is
good in every one amid the evil, and, believing that each is better
than from his acts and omissions he seems to be, and that God cares
for him still, and pities him and loves him, he will feel that even
the erring sinner is still his brother, still entitled to his
sympathy, and bound to him by the indissoluble ties of fellowship.
If there be nothing of the divine in man, what is he, after all, but a
more intelligent animal? He hath no fault nor vice which some beast
hath not; and therefore in his vices he is but a beast of a higher
order; and he hath hardly any moral excellence, perhaps none, which
some animal hath not in as great a degree,-- even the more excellent
of these, such as generosity, fidelity, and magnanimity.
Bardesan, the Syrian Christian, in his Book of the Laws of Countries,
says, of men, that "in the things belonging to their bodies, they
maintain their nature like animals, and in the things which belong to
their minds, they do that which they wish, as being free and with
power, and as the likeness of God"- and Meliton, Bishop of Sardis, in
his Oration to Antoninus Caesar, says, "Let Him, the ever-living God,
be always present in thy, mind; for thy mind itself is His likeness,
for it, too, is invisible and impalpable, and without form. . . As He
exists forever, so thou also, when thou shalt have put off this which
is visible and corruptible, shalt stand before Him forever, living and
endowed with knowledge."
As a matter far above our comprehension, and in the Hebrew Genesis the
words that are used to express the origin of things are of uncertain
meaning, and with equal propriety may be translated by the word
"generated," "produced," "made," or "created," we need not dispute nor
debate whether the Soul or Spirit of man be a ray that has emanated or
flowed forth from the Supreme Intelligence, or whether the Infinite
Power hath called each into existence from nothing, by a mere exertion
of Its will, and endowed it with immortality, and with intelligence
like unto the Divine Intelligence: for, in either case it may be said
that in man the Divine is united to the Human. Of this union the
equilateral Triangle inscribed within the Square is a Symbol.
We see the Soul, Plato said, as men see the statue of Glaucus,
recovered from the sea wherein it had lain many years--which viewing,
it was not easy, if possible, to discern what was its original nature,
its limbs having been partly broken and partly worn and by defacement
changed, by the action of the waves, and shells, weeds, and pebbles
adhering to it, so that it more resembled some strange monster than
that which it was when it left its Divine Source. Even so, he said, we
see the Soul, deformed by innumerable things that have done it harm,
have mutilated and defaced it. But the Mason who hath the ROYAL SECRET
can also with him argue, from beholding its love of wisdom, its
tendency toward association with what is divine and immortal, its
larger aspirations, its struggles, though they may have ended in
defeat, with the impediments and enthralments of the senses and the
passions, that when it shall have been rescued from the material
environments that now prove too strong for it, and be freed from the
deforming and disfiguring accretions that here adhere to it, it will
again be seen in its true nature, and by degrees ascend by the mystic
ladder of the Spheres, to its first home and place of origin.
The ROYAL SECRET, of which you are Prince, if you are a true Adept, if
knowledge seems to you advisable, and Philosophy is, for you, radiant
with a divine beauty, is that which the Sohar terms The Mystery of the
BALANCE. It is the Secret of the UNIVERSAL EQUILIBRIUM:--
-- Of that Equilibrium in the Deity, between the Infinite Divine
WISDOM and the Infinite Divine POWER, from which result the Stability
of the Universe, the unchangeableness of the Divine Law, and the
Principles of Truth, Justice, and Right which are a part of it; and
the Supreme Obligation of the Divine Law upon all men, as superior to
all other law, and forming a part of all the laws of men and nations.
--Of that Equilibrium also, between the Infinite Divine JUSTICE and
the Infinite Divine MERCY, the result of which is the Infinite Divine
EQUITY, and the Moral Harmony or Beauty of the Universe. By it the
endurance of created and imperfect natures in the presence of a
Perfect Deity is made possible; and for Him, also, as for us, to love
is better than to hate, and Forgiveness is wiser than Revenge or
Punishment.
--Of that Equilibrium between NECESSITY and LIBERTY, between the
action of the DIVINE Omnipotence and the Free-will of man, by which
vices and base actions, and ungenerous thoughts and words are crimes
and wrongs, justly punished by the law of cause and consequence,
though nothing in the Universe can happen or be done contrary to the
will of God; and without which co-existence of Liberty and Necessity,
of Free-will in the creature and Omnipotence in the Creator, there
could be no religion, nor any law of right and wrong, or merit and
demerit, nor any justice in human punishments or penal laws.
--Of that Equilibrium between Good and Evil, and Light and Darkness in
the world, which assures us that all is the work of the Infinite
Wisdom and of an Infinite Love; and that there is no rebellious demon
of Evil, or Principle of Darkness co-existent and in eternal
controversy with God, or the Principle of Light and of Good: by
attaining to the knowledge of which equilibrium we can, through Faith,
see that the existence of Evil, Sin, Suffering, and Sorrow in the
world, is consistent with the Infinite Goodness as well as with the
Infinite Wisdom of the Almighty.
Sympathy and Antipathy, Attraction and Repulsion, each a Force of
nature, are contraries, in the souls of men and in the Universe of
spheres and worlds; and from the action and opposition of each against
the other, result Harmony, and that movement which is the Life of the
Universe and the Soul alike. They are not antagonists of each other.
The force that repels a planet from the Sun is no more an evil force,
than that which attracts the Planet toward the central Luminary; for
each is created and exerted by the Deity, and the result is the
harmonious movement of the obedient Planets in their elliptic orbits,
and the mathematical accuracy and unvarying regularity of their
movements.
--Of that Equilibrium between Authority and Individual Action which
constitutes Free Government, by settling on immutable foundations
Liberty with Obedience to Law, Equality with Subjection to Authority,
and Fraternity with Subordination to the Wisest and the Best: and of
that Equilibrium between the Active Energy of the Will of the Present,
expressed by the Vote of the People, and the Passive Stability and
Permanence of the Will of the Past, expressed in constitutions of
government, written or unwritten, and in the laws and customs, gray
with age and sanctified by time, as precedents and authority; which is
represented by the arch resting on the two columns, Jachin and Boaz,
that stand at the portals of the Temple builded by Wisdom, on one of
which Masonry sets the celestial Globe, symbol of the spiritual part
of our composite nature, and on the other the terrestrial Globe,
symbol of the material part.
--And, finally, of that Equilibrium, possible in ourselves, and which
Masonry incessantly labours to accomplish in its Initiates, and
demands of its Adepts and Princes (else unworthy of their titles),
between the Spiritual and Divine and the Material and Human in man;
between the Intellect, Reason, and Moral Sense on one side, and the
Appetites and Passions on the other, from which result the Harmony and
Beauty of a well-regulated life.
Which possible Equilibrium proves to us that our Appetites and Senses
also are Forces given unto us by God, for purposes of good, and not
the fruits of the malignancy of a Devil, to be detested, mortified,
and, if possible, rendered inert and dead: that they are given us to
be the means by which we shall be strengthened and incited to great
and good deeds, and are to be wisely used, and not abused; to be
controlled and kept within due bounds by the Reason and the Moral
Sense; to be made useful instruments and servants, and not permitted
to become the managers and masters, using our intellect and reason as
base instrument for their gratification.
And this Equilibrium teaches us, above all, to reverence ourselves as
immortal souls, and to have respect and charity for others, who are
even such as we are, partakers with us of the Divine Nature, lighted
by a ray of the Divine Intelligence, struggling, like us, toward the
light; capable, like us, of progress upward toward perfection, and
deserving to be loved and pitied, but never to be hated nor despised;
to be aided and encouraged in this life-struggle, and not to be
abandoned nor left to wander in the darkness alone, still less to be
trampled upon in our own efforts to ascend.
From the mutual action and re-action of each of these pairs of
opposites and contraries results that which with them forms the
Triangle, to all the Ancient Sages the expressive symbol of the Deity;
as from Osiris and Isis, Har-oeri, the Master of Light and Life, and
the Creative Word. At the angles of one stand, symbolically, the three
columns that support the Lodge, itself a symbol of the Universe,
Wisdom, Power, and Harmony or Beauty. One of these symbols, found on
the Tracing-Board of the Apprentice's Degree, teaches this last lesson
of Freemasonry. It is the right-angled Triangle, representing man, as
a union of the spiritual and material, of the divine arid human. The
base, measured by the number 3, the number of the Triangle, represents
the Deity and the Divine; the perpendicular, measured by the number 4,
the number of the Square, represents the Earth, the Material, and the
Human; and the hypothenuse, measured by 5, represents that nature
which is produced by the union of the Divine and Human, the Soul and
the Body; the squares, 9 and 16, of the base and perpendicular, added
together, producing 25, the square root whereof is 5, the measure of
the hypothenuse.
And as in each Triangle of Perfection, one is three and three are one,
so man is one, though of a double nature; and he attains the purposes
of his being only when the two natures that are in him are in just
equilibrium; and his life is a success only when it too is a harmony,
and beautiful, like the great Harmonies of God and the Universe.
Such, my Brother, is the TRUE WORD of a Master Mason; such the true
ROYAL SECRET, which makes possible, and shall at length make real, the
HOLY EMPIRE of true Masonic Brotherhood.
GLORIA DEI EST CELARE VERBUM. AMEN.
Travel to Freemasonry Watch
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