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.