XXV NIGHT OF THE BRAZEN SERPENT. ( Part 4 of 4 )T.
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The blazing Star in our Lodges, we have already said, represents Sirius,
Anubis, or Mercury, Guardian and Guide of Souls. Our Ancient English
brethren also considered it an emblem of the Sun. In the old Lectures
they 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." It is also said in those lectures to be 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 Ancients was the Sun.
Even the Dagger of the Elu of Nine is that used in the Mysteries of
Mithras; Which, with its blade black and hilt white, was an emblem of the
two principles of Light and Darkness.
Isis, the same as Ceres, was, as we learn from Eratosthenes, the
Constellation Virgo, represented by a woman holding an ear of wheat.
The different emblems which accompany her in the description given by
Apuleius, a serpent on either side, a golden vase, with a serpent twined
round the handle, and the animals that marched in procession, the bear,
the ape, and Pegasus, represented the Constellations that, rising with the
Virgin, when on the day of the Vernal Equinox she stood in the Oriental
gate of Heaven, brilliant with the rays of the full moon, seemed to march
in her train.
The cup, consecrated in the Mysteries both of Isis and Eleusis, was the
Constellation Crater or the Cup. The sacred vessel of the Isiac ceremony
finds its counterpart in the Heavens.
The Olympic robe presented to the
Initiate, a magnificent mantle, covered with figures of serpents and
animals, and under which were twelve other sacred robes, wherewith he
was clothed in the sanctuary, alluded to the starry Heaven and the twelve
signs: while the seven preparatory immersions in the sea alluded to the
seven spheres, through which the soul plunged, to arrive here below and
take up its abode in a body.
The Celestial Virgin, during the last three centuries that preceded the
Christian era, occupied the horoscope or Oriental point, and that gate
of Heaven through which the Sun and Moon ascended above the
horizon at the two equinoxes.
Again it occupied it at midnight, at the
Winter Solstice, the precise moment when the year commenced. Thus
it was essentially connected with the march of times and seasons, of
the Sun, the Moon, and day and night, at the principal epochs of the
year. At the equinoxes were celebrated the greater and lesser
Mysteries of Ceres.
When souls descended past the Balance, at the
moment when the Sun occupied that point, the Virgin rose before him;
she stood at the gates of day and opened them to him. Her brilliant
Star, Spica Virginis, and Arcturus, in Boötes, northwest of it, heralded
his coming. When he had returned to the Vernal Equinox, at the
moment when souls were generated, again it was the Celestial Virgin
that led the march of the signs of night; and in her stars came the
beautiful full moon of that month.
Night and day were in succession
introduced by her, when they began to diminish in length; and souls,
before arriving at the gates of Hell, were also led by her. In going
through these signs, they passed the Styx in the 8th Degree of Libra.
She was the famous Sibyl who initiated Eneas, and opened to him the
way to the infernal regions.
This peculiar situation of the Constellation Virgo, has caused it to enter
into all the sacred fables in regard to nature, under different names and
the most varied forms. It often takes the name of Isis or the Moon,
which, when at its full at the Vernal Equinox, was in union with it or
beneath its feet. Mercury (or Anubis) having his domicile and exaltation
in the sign Virgo, was, in all the sacred fables and Sanctuaries, the
inseparable companion of Isis, without whose counsels she did
nothing.
This relation between the emblems and mysterious recitals of the
initiations, and the Heavenly bodies and order of the world, was still
more clear in the Mysteries of Mithras, adored as the Sun in Asia
Minor, Cappadocia, Armenia, and Persia, and whose Mysteries went to
Rome in the time of Sylla. This is amply proved by the descriptions we
have of the Mithriac cave, in which were figured the two movements of
the Heavens, that of the fixed Stars and that of the Planets, the
Constellations, the eight mystic gates of the spheres, and the symbols
of the elements.
So on a celebrated monument of that religion, found at
Rome, were figured, the Serpent or Hydra tinder Leo,
as in the Heavens, the Celestial Dog,
the Bull, the Scorpion, the Seven Planets, represented by seven
altars, the Sun, Moon, and emblems relating to Light, to Darkness, and
to their succession during the year, where each in turn triumphs for six
months.
The Mysteries of Atys were celebrated when the Sun entered Aries;
and among the emblems was a ram at the foot of a tree which was
being cut down.
Thus, if not the whole truth, it is yet a large part of it, that the Heathen
Pantheon, in its infinite diversity of names and personifications, was
but a multitudinous, though in its origin unconscious allegory, of which
physical phenomena, and principally the Heavenly Bodies, were the
fundamental types. The glorious images of Divinity which formed
Jehovah's Host, were the Divine Dynasty or real theocracy which
governed the early world; and the men of the golden age, whose looks
held commerce with the skies, and who watched the radiant rulers
bringing Winter and Summer to mortals, might be said with poetic truth
to live in immediate communication with Heaven, and, like the Hebrew
Patriarchs, to see God face to face.
Then the Gods introduced their
own worship among mankind: then Oannes, Oe or Aquarius rose from
the Red Sea to impart science to the Babylonians; then the bright Bull
legislated for India and Crete; and the Lights of Heaven, personified as
Liber and Ceres, hung the Bœotian hills with vineyards, and gave the
golden sheaf to Eleusis.
The children of men were, in a sense, allied or
married to those sons of God who sang the jubilee of creation; and the
encircling vault with its countless Stars, which to the excited
imagination of the solitary Chaldean wanderer appeared as animated
intelligences, might naturally be compared to a gigantic ladder, on
which, in their rising and setting, the Angel luminaries appeared to be
ascending and descending between earth and Heaven.
The original
revelation died out of men's memories; they worshipped the Creature
instead of the Creator; and holding all earthly things as connected by
eternal links of harmony and sympathy with the heavenly bodies, they
united in one view astronomy, astrology, and religion. Long wandering
thus in error, they at length ceased to look upon the Stars and external
nature as Gods; and by directing their attention to the microcosm or
narrower world of self, they again became acquainted with the True
Ruler and Guide of the Universe,
and used the old fables and superstitions as symbols and allegories,
by which to convey and under which to hide the great truths which had
faded out of most men's remembrance.
In the Hebrew writings, the term "Heavenly Hosts" includes not only the
counsellors and emissaries of Jehovah, but also the celestial
luminaries; and the stars, imagined in the East to be animated
intelligences, presiding over human weal and woe, are identified with
the more distinctly impersonated messengers or angels, who execute
the Divine decrees, and whose predominance in Heaven is in
mysterious correspondence and relation with the powers and
dominions of the earth. In job, the Morning Stars and the Sons of God
are identified; they join in the same chorus of praise to the Almighty;
they are both susceptible of joy; they walk in brightness, and are liable
to impurity and imperfection in the sight of God.
The Elohim originally
included hot only foreign superstitious forms, but also all that host of
Heaven which was revealed in poetry to the shepherds of the desert,
now as an encampment of warriors, now as careering in chariots of fire,
and now as winged messengers, ascending and descending the vault
of Heaven, to communicate the will of God to mankind.
"The Eternal," says the Bereshith Rabba to Genesis, "called forth
Abraham and his posterity out of the dominion of the stars; by nature,
the Israelite was a servant to the stars, and born under their influence,
as are the heathen; but by virtue of the law given on Mount Sinai, he
became liberated from this degrading servitude." The Arabs had a
similar legend.
The Prophet Amos explicitly asserts that the Israelites,
in the desert, worshipped, not Jehovah, but Moloch, or a Star-God,
equivalent to Saturn. The Gods El or Jehovah were not merely
planetary or solar.
Their symbolism, like that of every other Deity, was
coextensive with nature, and with the mind of man. Yet the astrological
character is assigned even to Jehovah. He is described as seated on
the pinnacle of the Universe, leading forth the Hosts of Heaven, and
telling them unerringly by name and number. His stars are His sons
and His eyes, which run through the whole world, keeping watch over
men’s deeds.
The stars and planets were properly the angels. In
Pharisaic tradition, as in the phraseology of the New Testament, the
Heavenly Host appears as an Angelic Army, divided into regiments and
brigades, under the command
of imaginary chiefs, such as Massaloth, Legion, Kartor Gistra, etc., - each
Gistra being captain of 365,000 myriads of stars.
The Seven Spirits which
stand before the throne, spoken of by several Jewish writers, and
generally presumed to have been immediately derived from the. Persian
Amshaspands, were ultimately the seven planetary intelligences, the
original model of the seven-branched golden candlestick exhibited to
Moses on God's mountain.
The stars were imagined to have fought in
their courses against Sisera.
The heavens were spoken of as holding a
predominance over earth, as governing it by signs and ordinances, and
as containing the elements of that astrological wisdom, more especially
cultivated by the Babylonians and Egyptians.
Each nation was supposed by the Hebrews to have its own guardian
angel, and its own provincial star. One of the chiefs of the Celestial
Powers, at first Jehovah Himself in the character of the Sun, standing in
the height of Heaven, overlooking and governing all things, afterward one
of the angels or subordinate planetary genii of Babylonian or Persian
mythology, was the patron and protector of their own nation, "the Prince
that standeth for the children of thy people."
The discords of earth were
accompanied by a warfare in the sky; and no people underwent the
visitation of the Almighty, without a corresponding chastisement being
inflicted on its tutelary angel.
The fallen Angels were also fallen Stars; and the first allusion to a feud
among the spiritual powers in early Hebrew Mythology, where Rahab and
his confederates are defeated, like the Titans in a battle against the
Gods, seems to identify the rebellious Spirits as part of the visible
Heavens, where the "high ones on high" are punished or chained, as a
signal proof of God's power and justice.
God, it is said
"Stirs the sea with His might - by His understanding He smote Rahab - His
breath clears the face of Heaven - His hand pierced the crooked Serpent
.... God withdraws not His anger; beneath Him bow the confederates of
Rahab."
Rahab always means a sea-monster: probably some such legendary
monstrous dragon, as in almost all mythologies is the adversary of
Heaven and demon of eclipse, in whose belly, significantly called the
belly of Hell, Hercules, like Jonah, passed three days, ultimately escaping
with the loss of his hair or rays.
Chesil, the rebellious giant Orion,
represented in Job as riveted to the sky,
was compared to Ninus or Nimrod, the mythical founder of Nineveh
(City of Fish) the mighty hunter, who slew lions and panthers before the
Lord. Rahab's confederates are probably the "High ones on High," the
Chesilim or constellations in Isaiah, the Heavenly Host or Heavenly
Powers, among whose number were found folly and disobedience.
"I beheld," says Pseudo-Enoch, "seven stars like great blazing
mountains, and like Spirits, entreating me. And the angel said, This
place, until the consummation of Heaven and Earth, will be the prison
of the Stars and of the Host of Heaven.
These are the Stars which
overstepped God's command before their time arrived; and came not at
their proper season; therefore was he offended with them, and bound
them, until the time of the consummation of their crimes in the secret
year."
And again:
"These Seven Stars are those which have
transgressed the commandment of the Most High God, and which are
here bound until the number of the days of their crimes be completed."
The Jewish and early Christian writers looked on the worship of the
sun and the elements with comparative indulgence.
Justin Martyr and
Clemens of Alexandria admit that God had appointed the stars as
legitimate objects of heathen worship, in order to preserve throughout
the world some tolerable notions of natural religion.
It seemed a middle
point between Heathenism and Christianity; and to it certain emblems
and ordinances of that faith seemed to relate.
The advent of Christ was
announced by a Star from the East; and His nativity was celebrated on
the shortest day of the Julian Calendar, the day when, in the physical
commemorations of Persia and Egypt, Mithras or Osiris was newly
found.
It was then that the acclamations of the Host of Heaven, the
unfailing attendants of the Sun, surrounded, as at the spring-dawn of
creation, the cradle of His birth-place, and that, in the words of
Ignatius, "a star, with light inexpressible, shone forth in the Heavens, to
destroy the power of magic and the bonds of wickedness; for God
Himself had appeared, in the form of man, for the renewal of eternal
life."
But however infinite the variety of objects which helped to develop the
notion of Deity, and eventually assumed its place, substituting the
worship of the creature for that of the creator; of parts of the body, for
that of the soul, of the Universe, still the notion itself was essentially
one of unity.
The idea of one
God, of a creative, productive, governing unity, resided in the earliest
exertion of thought: and this monotheism of the primitive ages, makes
every succeeding epoch, unless it be the present, appear only as a
stage in the progress of degeneracy and aberration. Everywhere in the
old faiths we find the idea of a supreme or presiding Deity.
Amun or
Osiris presides among the many gods of Egypt; Pan, with the music of
his pipe, directs the chorus of the constellations, as Zeus leads the
solemn procession of the celestial troops in the astronomical theology
of the Pythagoreans. "Amidst an infinite diversity of opinions on all
other subjects," says Maximus Tyrius, "the whole world is unanimous in
the belief of one only almighty King and Father of all."
There is always a Sovereign Power, a Zeus or Deus, Mahadeva or
Adideva, to whom belongs the maintenance of the order of the
Universe.
Among the thousand gods of India, the doctrine of Divine
Unity is never lost sight of; and the ethereal Jove, worshipped by the
Persian in an age long before Xenophanes or Anaxagoras, appears as
supremely comprehensive and independent of planetary or elemental
subdivisions, as the "Vast One" or "Great Soul" of the Vedas.
But the simplicity of belief of the patriarchs did not exclude the
employment of symbolical representations. The mind never rests
satisfied with a mere feeling.
That feeling ever strives to assume
precision and durability as an idea, by some outward delineation of its
thought. Even the ideas that are above and beyond the senses, as all
ideas of God are, require the aid of the senses for their expression and
communication.
Hence come the representative forms and symbols
which constitute the external investiture of every religion; attempts to
express a religious sentiment that is essentially one, and that vainly
struggles for adequate external utterance, striving to tell to one man, to
paint to him, an idea existing in the mind of another, and essentially
incapable of utterance or description, in a language all the words of
which have a sensuous meaning.
Thus, the idea being perhaps the
same in all, its expressions and utterances are infinitely various, and
branch into an infinite diversity of creeds and sects.
All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what
we see; and the true objects of religion are unseen. 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.
To present a visible symbol to the
eye of another is not to inform him of the meaning which that symbol
has to you. Hence the philosopher soon super-added to these symbols,
explanations addressed to the ear, susceptible of more precision, but
less effective, obvious, and impressive than the painted or sculptured
forms which he despised. Out of these explanations grew by degrees a
variety of narratives, whose true object and meaning were gradually
forgotten.
And when these were abandoned, and philosophy resorted
to definitions and formulas, its language was but a more refined
symbolism, grappling with and attempting to picture ideas impossible to
be expressed. For the most abstract expression for Deity which
language can supply, is but a sign or symbol for an object unknown,
and no more truthful and adequate than the terms Osiris and Vishnu,
except as being less sensuous and explicit.
To say that He is a Spirit,
is but to say that He is not matter. What spirit is, we can only define as
the Ancients did, by resorting, as if in despair, to some sublimized
species of matter, as Light, Fire, or Ether.
No symbol of Deity can be appropriate or durable except in a relative
or moral sense. We cannot exalt words that have only a sensuous
meaning, above sense. To call Him a Power or a Force, or an
Intelligence, is merely to deceive ourselves into the belief that we use
words that have a meaning to us, when they have none, or at least no
more than the ancient visible symbols had.
To call Him Sovereign,
Father, Grand Architect of the Universe, Extension, Time, Beginning,
Middle, and End, whose face is turned on all sides, the Source of life
and death, is but to present other men with symbols by which we vainly
endeavor to communicate to them the same vague ideas which men in
all ages have impotently struggled to express. And it may be doubted
whether we have succeeded either in communicating, or in forming in
our own minds, any more distinct and definite and true and adequate
idea of the Deity, with all our metaphysical conceits and logical
subtleties, than the rude ancients did, who endeavored to symbolize
and so to express His attributes, by the Fire, the Light, the Sun and
Stars, the Lotus and the Scarabæus; all of them types of what, except
by types, more or less sufficient, could not be expressed at all.
The Primitive man recognized the Divine Presence under a
variety of appearances, without losing his faith in this unity and
Supremacy.
The invisible God, manifested and on one of His many
sides visible, did not cease to be God to him. He recognized Him in the
evening breeze of Eden, in the whirlwind of Sinai, in he Stone of Beth-
El.: and identified Him with the fire or thunder or the immovable rock
adored in Ancient Arabia. To him the image of the Deity was reflected
in all that was pre-eminent in excellence.
He saw Jehovah, like Osiris
and Bel, in the Sun as well as in the Stars, which were His children, His
eyes, "which run through the whole world, and watch over the Sacred
Soil of Palestine, from the year's commencement to its close." He was
the sacred fire of Mount Sinai, of the burning bush, of the Persians,
those Puritans of Paganism.
Naturally it followed that Symbolism soon became more complicated,
and all the powers of Heaven were reproduced on earth, until a web of
fiction and allegory was woven, which the wit of man, with his limited
means of explanation, will never unravel. Hebrew Theism itself became
involved in symbolism and image-worship, to which all religions ever
tend. We have already seen what was the symbolism of the
Tabernacle, the Temple, and the Ark. The Hebrew establishment
tolerated not only the use of emblematic vessels, vestments, and
cherubs, of Sacred Pillars and Seraphim, but symbolical
representations of Jehovah Himself, not even confined to poetical or
illustrative language.
"Among the Adityas," says Chrishna, in the Bagvat Ghita, "I am Vishnu,
the radiant Sun among the Stars; among the waters, am ocean; among
the mountains, the Himalaya; and among the mountain-tops, Meru."
The Psalins and Isaiah are full of similar attempts to convey to the mind
ideas of God, by ascribing to Him sensual proportions. He rides on the
clouds, and sits on the wings of the wind. Heaven is His pavilion, and
out of His mouth issue lightnings.
Men cannot worship a mere
abstraction. They require some outward form in which to clothe their
conceptions, and invest their sympathies. If they do not shape and
carve or paint visible images, they have invisible ones, perhaps quite
as inadequate and unfaithful, within their own minds.
The incongruous and monstrous in the Oriental images came from the
desire to embody the Infinite, and to convey by multiplied, because
individually inadequate symbols, a notion of the Divine Attributes to the
understanding.
Perhaps we should find
that we mentally do the same thing, and make within ourselves images
quite as incongruous, if judged of by our own limited conceptions, if we
were to undertake to analyze and gain a clear idea of the mass of
infinite attributes which we assign to the Deity; and even of His infinite
justice and infinite Mercy and Love.
We may well say, in the language of Maximus Tyrius: "If, in the desire
to obtain some faint conception of the Universal Father, the Nameless
Lawgiver, men had recourse to words or names, to silver or gold, to
animals or plants, to mountain-tops or flowing rivers, every one
inscribing the most valued and most beautiful things with the name of
Deity, and with the fondness of a lover clinging with rapture to each
trivial reminiscence of the Beloved, why should we seek to reduce this
universal practice of symbolism, necessary, indeed, since the mind
often needs the excitement of the imagination to rouse it into activity, to
one monotonous standard of formal propriety?
Only let the image duly
perform its task, and bring the divine idea with vividness and truth
before the mental eye; if this be effected, whether by the art of Phidias,
the poetry of Homer, the Egyptian Hieroglyph, or the Persian element,
we need not cavil at external differences, or lament the seeming fertility
of unfamiliar creeds, so long as the great essential is attained, THAT
MEN ARE MADE TO REMEMBER, TO UNDERSTAND, AND TO
LOVE.”
Certainly, when men regarded Light and Fire as something spiritual,
and above all the corruptions and exempt from all the decay of matter;
when they looked upon the Sun and Stars and Planets as composed of
this finer element, and as themselves great and mysterious
Intelligences, infinitely superior to man, living Existences, gifted with
mighty powers and wielding vast influences, those elements and
bodies conveyed to them, when used as symbols of Deity, a far more
adequate idea than they can now do to us, or than we can
comprehend, now that Fire and Light are familiar to us as air and
water, and the Heavenly Luminaries are lifeless worlds like our own.
Perhaps they gave them ideas as adequate as we obtain from the mere
words by which we endeavor to symbolize and shadow forth the
ineffable mysteries and infinite attributes of God.
There are, it is true, dangers inseparable from symbolism, which
countervail its advantages, and afford an impressive lesson in regard
to the similar risks attendant on the use of language.
The
imagination, invited to assist the reason, usurps its place, or leaves its
ally helplessly entangled in its web. 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."
All great Reformers have warred against this evil, deeply feeling the
intellectual mischief arising out of a degraded idea of the Supreme
Being; and have claimed for their own God an existence or personality
distinct from the objects of ancient superstition; disowning in His name
the symbols and images that had profaned His Temple.
But they have
not seen that the utmost which can be effected by human effort, is to
substitute impressions relatively correct, for others whose falsehood
has been detected, and to replace a gross symbolism by a purer one.
Every man, without being aware of it, worships a conception of his own
mind; for all symbolism, as well as all language, shares the subjective
character of the ideas it represents.
The epithets we apply to God only
recall either visible or intellectual symbols to the eye or mind. The
modes or forms of manifestation of the reverential feeling that
constitutes the religious sentiment, are incomplete and progressive;
each term and symbol predicates a partial truth, remaining always
amenable to improvement or modification, and, in its turn, to be
superseded by others more accurate and comprehensive.
Idolatry consists in confounding the symbol with the thing signified, the
substitution of a material for a mental object of worship, after a higher
spiritualism has become possible; an ill-judged preference of the
inferior to the superior symbol, an inadequate and sensual conception
of the Deity: and every religion and every conception of God is
idolatrous, in so far as it is imperfect, and as it substitutes a feeble and
temporary idea in the shrine of that Undiscoverable Being who can be
known only in part, and who can therefore be honored, even by the
most enlightened among His worshippers, only in proportion to their
limited powers of understanding and imagining to themselves His
perfections.
Like the belief in a Deity, the belief in the soul's immortality is rather a
natural feeling, an adjunct of self-consciousness, than a dogma
belonging to any particular age or country.
It gives eternity to man's
nature, and reconciles its seeming anomalies and contradictions; it
makes him strong in weakness and perfectable in imperfection; and it
alone gives an adequate object for his hopes and energies, and value
and dignity to his pursuits. It is concurrent with the belief in an infinite,
eternal Spirit, since it is chiefly through consciousness of the dignity of
the mind within us, that we learn to appreciate its evidences in the
Universe.
To fortify, and as far as possible to impart this hope, was the great aim
of ancient wisdom, whether expressed in forms of poetry or philosophy;
as it was of the Mysteries, and as it is of Masonry. Life rising out of
death was the great mystery, which symbolism delighted to represent
under a thousand ingenious forms. Nature was ransacked for
attestations to the grand truth which seems to transcend all other gifts
of imagination, or rather to be their essence and consummation. Such
evidences were easily discovered.
They were found in the olive and
the lotus, in the evergreen myrtle of the Mystœ, and of the grave of
Polydorus, in the deadly but self-renewing serpent, the wonderful moth
emerging from the coffin of the worm, the phenomena of germination,
the settings and risings of the sun and stars, the darkening and growth
of the moon, and in sleep, "the minor mystery of death."
The stories of the birth of Apollo from Latona, and of dead heroes, like
Glaucus, resuscitated in caves, were allegories of the natural
alternations of life and death in nature, changes that are but
expedients to preserve her virginity and purity inviolable in the general
sum of her operations, whose aggregate presents only a majestic calm,
rebuking alike man's presumption and his despair.
The typical death of
the Nature-God, Osiris, Atys, Adonis, Hiram, was a profound but
consolatory mystery: the healing charms of Orpheus were connected
with his destruction; and his bones, those valued pledges of fertility
and victory, were, by a beautiful contrivance, often buried within the
sacred precincts of his immortal equivalent.
In their doctrines as to the immortality of the soul, the Greek
Philosophers merely stated with more precision ideas long before
extant independently among themselves, in the form of symbolical
suggestion.
Egypt and Ethiopia in these matters learned from
India, where, as everywhere else, the origin of the doctrine was as
remote and untraceable as the origin of man himself. Its natural
expression is found in the language of Chrishna, in the Bagvat Ghita: "I
myself never was non-existent, nor thou, nor these princes of the Earth;
nor shall we ever hereafter cease to be. The soul is not a thing of
which a man may say, it hath been, or is about to be, or is to be
hereafter; for it is a thing without birth; it is pre-existent, changeless,
eternal, and is not to be destroyed with this mortal frame."
According to the dogma of antiquity, the thronging forms of life are a
series of purifying migrations, through which the divine principle reascends
to the unity of its source.
Inebriated in the bowl of Dionusos,
and dazzled in the mirror of existence, the souls, those fragments or
sparks of the Universal Intelligence, forgot their native dignity, and
passed into the terrestrial frames they coveted. The most usual type of
the spirit's descent was suggested by the sinking of the Sun and Stars
from the upper to the lower hemisphere.
When it arrived within the
portals of the proper empire of Dionusos, the God of this World, the
scene of delusion and change, its individuality became clothed in a
material form; and as individual bodies were compared to a garment,
the world was the investiture of the Universal Spirit. Again, the body
was compared to a vase or urn, the soul's recipient; the world being the
mighty bowl which received the descending Deity. In another image,
ancient as the Grottoes of the Magi and the denunciations of Ezekiel,
the world was as a dimly illuminated cavern, where shadows seem
realities, and where the soul becomes forgetful of its celestial origin in
proportion to its proneness to material fascinations.
By another, the
period of the Soul's embodiment is as when exhalations are
condensed, and the aerial element assumes the grosser form of water.
But if vapor falls in water, it was held, water is again the birth of vapors,
which ascend and adorn the Heavens. If our mortal existence be the
death of the spirit, our death may be the renewal of its life; as physical
bodies are exalted from earth to water, from water to air, from air to fire,
so the man may rise into the Hero, the Hero into the God. In the course
of Nature, the soul, to recover its lost estate, must pass through a
series of trials and migrations.
The scene of those trials is the Grand
Sanctuary of Initiations, the world: their primary agents are the
elements; and Dionusos, as Sovereign of Nature, or the sensuous
world personified,
is official Arbiter of the Mysteries, and guide of the soul, which he
introduces into the body and dismisses from it.
He is the Sun, that
liberator of the elements, and his spiritual mediation was suggested by
the same imagery which made the Zodiac the supposed path of the
spirits in their descent and their return, and Cancer and Capricorn the
gates through which they passed.
He was not only Creator of the World, but guardian, liberator, and
Saviour of the Soul. Ushered into the world amidst lightning and
thunder he became the Liberator celebrated in the Mysteries of
Thebes, delivering earth from Winter's chain, conducting the nightly
chorus of the Stars and the celestial revolution of the year.
His
symbolism was the inexhaustible imagery employed to fill up the stellar
devices of the Zodiac: he was the Vernal Bull, the Lion, the Ram, the
Autumnal Goat, the Serpent: in short, the varied Deity, the resulting
manifestation personified, the all in the many, the varied year, life
passing into innumerable forms; essentially inferior to none, yet
changing with the seasons, and undergoing their periodical decay.
He mediates and intercedes for man, and reconciles the Universal
Unseen Mind with the individualized spirit of which he is emphatically
the Perfecter; a consummation which he effects, first through the
vicissitudes of the elemental ordeal, the alternate fire of Summer and
the showers of Winter, "the trials or test of an immortal Nature"; and
secondarily and symbolically through the Mysteries. He holds not only
the cup of generation, but also that of wisdom or initiation, whose
influence is contrary to that of the former, causing the soul to abhor its
material bonds, and to long for its return.
The first was the Cup of
Forgetfulness; while the second is the Urn of Aquarius, quaffed by the
returning spirit, as by the returning Sun at the Winter Solstice, and
emblematic of the exchange of wordly impressions for the recovered
recollections of the glorious sights and enjoyments of its preexistence.
Water nourishes and purifies; and the urn from which it flows was
thought worthy to be a symbol of Deity, as of the Osiris-Canobus who
with living water irrigated the soil of Egypt; and also an emblem of
Hope that should cheer the dwellings of the dead.
The second birth of Dionusos, like the rising of Osiris and Atys from the
dead, and the raising of Khürüm, is a type of the spiritual regeneration
of man. Psyche (the Soul), like Ariadne, had
two lovers, an earthly and an immortal one. The immortal suitor is
Dionusos, the Eros-Phanes of the Orphici, gradually exalted by the
progress of thought, out of the symbol of Sensuality into the torchbearer
of the Nuptials of the Gods; the Divine Influence which
physically called the world into being, and which, awakening the soul
from its Stygian trance, restores it from earth to Heaven.
Thus the scientific theories of the ancients, expounded in the
Mysteries, as to the origin of the soul, its descent, its sojourn here
below, and its return, were not a mere barren contemplation of the
nature of the world, and of the intelligent beings existing there.
They
were not an idle speculation as to the order of the world, and about the
soul, but a study of the means for arriving at the great object proposed,
- the perfecting of the soul; and, as a necessary consequence, that of
morals and society. This Earth, to them, was not the Soul's home, but
its place of exile. Heaven was its home, and there was its birth-place.
To it, it ought incessantly to turn its eyes. Man was not a terrestrial
plant. His roots were in Heaven. The soul had lost its wings, clogged
by the viscosity of matter. It would recover them when it extricated itself
from matter and commenced its upward flight.
Matter being, in their view, as it was in that of St. Paul, the principle of
all the passions that trouble reason, mislead the intelligence, and stain
the purity of the soul, the Mysteries taught man how to enfeeble the
action of matter on the soul, and to restore to the latter its natural
dominion. And lest the stains so contracted should continue after
death, lustrations were used, fastings, expiations, macerations,
continence, and above all, initiations.
Many of these practices were at
first merely symbolical, - material signs indicating the moral purity
required of the Initiates; but they afterward came to be regarded as
actual productive causes of that purity.
The effect of initiation was meant to be the same as that of philosophy,
to purify the soul of its passions, to weaken the empire of the body over
the divine portion of man, and to give him here below a happiness
anticipatory of the felicity to be one day enjoyed by him, and of the
future vision by him of the Divine Beings. And therefore Proclus and
the other Platonists taught "that the Mysteries and initiations withdrew
souls from this mortal and material life, to re-unite them to the gods;
and dissipated
for the adepts the shades of ignorance 'by the splendors of the Deity."
Such were the precious fruits of the last Degree of the Mystic Science,
- to see Nature in her springs and sources, and to become familiar with
the causes of things and with real existences.
Cicero says that the soul must exercise itself in the practice of the
virtues, if it would speedily return to its place of origin. It should, while
imprisoned in the body, free itself therefrom by the contemplation of
superior beings, and in some sort be divorced from the body and the
senses.
Those who remain enslaved, subjugated by their passions and
violating the sacred laws of religion and society, will re-ascend to
Heaven, only after they shall have been purified through a long
succession of ages.
The Initiate was required to emancipate himself from his passions, and
to free himself from the hindrances of the senses and of matter, in
order that he might rise to the contemplation of the Deity, or of that
incorporeal and unchanging light in which live and subsist the causes
of created natures. "We must," says Porphyry, "flee from everything
sensual, that the soul may with ease re-unite itself with God, and live
happily with Him."
"This is the great work of initiation," says Hierocles, -
“to recall the soul to what is truly good and beautiful, and make it
familiar therewith, and they its own; to deliver it from the pains and ills
it endures here below, enchained in matter as in a dark prison; to
facilitate its return to the celestial splendors, and to establish it in the
Fortunate Isles, by restoring it to its first estate. Thereby, when the
hour of death arrives, the soul, freed of its mortal garmenting, which it
leaves behind it as a legacy to earth, will rise buoyantly to its home
among the Stars, there to re-take its ancient condition, and approach
toward the Divine nature as far as man may do."
Plutarch compares Isis to knowledge, and Typhon to ignorance,
obscuring the light of the sacred doctrine whose blaze lights the soul of
the Initiate. No gift of the gods, he holds, is so precious as the
knowledge of the Truth, and that of the Nature of the gods, so far as
our limited capacities allow us to rise toward them. The Valentinians
termed initiation LIGHT.
The Initiate, says Psellus, becomes an Epopt,
when admitted to see THE DIVINE LIGHTS. Clemens of Alexandria,
imitating the language of an Initiate in the Mysteries of Bacchus, and
inviting this Initiate, whom he terms blind like Tiresias, to come to see
Christ, Who will
blaze upon his eyes with greater glory than the Sun, exclaims: "Oh
Mysteries most truly holy! Oh pure Light! When the torch of the
Dadoukos gleams, Heaven and the Deity are displayed to my eyes!
I
am initiated, and become holy!" This was the true object of initiation; to
be sanctified, and TO SEE, that is, to have just and faithful conceptions
of the Deity, the knowledge of Whom was THE LIGHT of the Mysteries.
It was promised the Initiate at Samothrace, that he should become pure
and just. Clemens says that by baptism, souls are illuminated, and led
to the pure light with which mingles no darkness, nor anything material.
The Initiate, become an Epopt, was called A SEER. "HAIL, NEWBORN
LIGHT!" the Initiates cried in the Mysteries of Bacchus.
Such was held to be the effect of complete initiation. It lighted up the
soul with rays from the Divinity, and became for it, as it were, the eye
with which, according to the Pythagoreans, it contemplates the field of
Truth; in its mystical abstractions, wherein it rises superior to the body,
whose action on it, it annuls for the time, to re-enter into itself, so as
entirely to occupy itself with the view of the Divinity, and the means of
coming to resemble Him.
Thus enfeebling the dominion of the senses and the passions over the
soul, and as it were freeing the latter from a sordid slavery, and by the
steady practice of all the virtues, active and contemplative, our ancient
brethren strove to fit themselves to return to the bosom of the Deity. Let
not our objects as Masons fall below theirs. We use the symbols which
they used; and teach the same great cardinal doctrines that they
taught, of the existence of an intellectual God, and the immortality of
the soul of man. If the details of their doctrines as to the soul seem to
us to verge on absurdity, let us compare them with the common notions
of our own day, and be silent.
If it seems to us that they regarded the
symbol in some cases as the thing symbolized, and worshipped the
sign as if it were itself Deity, let us reflect how insufficient are our own
ideas of Deity, and how we worship those ideas and images formed
and fashioned in our own minds, and not the Deity Himself: and if we
are inclined to smile at the importance they attached to lustrations and
fasts, let us pause and inquire whether the same weakness of human
nature does not exist to-day, causing rites and ceremonies to be
regarded as actively efficient for the salvation of souls.
And let us ever remember the words of an old writer, with which we
conclude this lecture: "It is a pleasure to stand on the shore, and to see
ships tossed upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a
castle, and see a battle and the adventures thereof: but no pleasure is
comparable to the standing on the vantage-ground of TRUTH (a hill not
to be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and
to see the errors and wanderings, and mists and tempests, in the vale
below; so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or
pride. Certainly it is Heaven upon Earth to have a man's mind move in
charity, rest in Providence, AND TURN UPON THE POLES OF
TRUTH."
end 4 of 4