Says the _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, art. “Sun:”
In all times, the Sun has necessarily played an important part as
a symbol, and especially in Freemasonry. The W.M. represents the
rising sun, the J.W. the sun at the meridian, and the S.W. the
setting sun. In the Druidical rites, the Arch‐Druid represented
the sun, and was aided by two other officers, one representing the
Moon in the West, and the other the Sun at the South in its
meridian. It is quite unnecessary to enter into any lengthened
discussion on this symbol.
It is the more “unnecessary” since J. M. Ragon has discussed it very
fully, as one may find at the end of Section XXIX., where part of his
explanations have been quoted. Freemasonry derived her rites from the
East, as we have said. And if it be true to say of the modern Rosicrucians
that “they are invested with a knowledge of chaos, not perhaps a very
desirable acquisition,” the remark is still more true when applied to all
the other branches of Masonry, since the knowledge of their members about
the full signification of their symbols is _nil_. Dozens of hypotheses are
resorted to, one more unlikely than the other, as to the “Round Towers” of
Ireland; one fact is enough to show the ignorance of the Masons, namely,
that, according to the _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, the idea that they are
connected with Masonic Initiation may be at once dismissed as unworthy of
notice. The “Towers,” which are found throughout the East in Asia, were
connected with the Mystery‐Initiations, namely, with the Vishvakarma and
the Vikarttana rites. The candidates for Initiation were placed in them
for three days and three nights, wherever there was no temple with a
subterranean crypt close at hand. These round towers were built for no
other purposes. Discredited as are all such monuments of Pagan origin by
the Christian clergy, who thus “soil their own nest,” they are still the
living and indestructible relics of the Wisdom of old. Nothing exists in
this objective and illusive world of ours that cannot be made to serve two
purposes—a good and a bad one. Thus in later ages, the Initiates of the
_Left_ Path and the anthropomorphists took in hand most of those venerable
ruins, then silent and deserted by their first wise inmates, and turned
them indeed into phallic monuments. But this was a deliberate, wilful, and
vicious misinterpretation of their real meaning, a deflection from their
first use. The Sun—though ever, even for the multitudes, μὸνος οὐρανοῦ
θεὸς, “the only and one King and God in Heaven,” and the Εὐβουλῆ, “the God
of Good Counsel” of Orpheus—had in every exoteric popular religion a dual
aspect which was anthropomorphised by the profane. Thus the Sun was
Osiris‐_Typhon_, Ormuzd‐_Ahriman_, Bel‐Jupiter and _Baal_, the life‐giving
and the _death_‐giving luminary. And thus one and the same monolith,
pillar, pyramid, tower or temple, originally built to glorify the first
principle or aspect, might become in time an idol‐fane, or worse, a
phallic emblem in its crude and brutal form. The Lingam of the Hindus has
a spiritual and highly philosophical meaning, while the missionaries see
in it but an “indecent emblem;” it has just the meaning which is to be
found in all those baalim, chammanim, and the bamoth with the pillars of
unhewn stone of the Bible, set up for the glorification of the male
Jehovah. But this does not alter the fact that the pureia of the Greeks,
the nur‐hags of Sardinia, the teocalli of Mexico, etc., were all in the
beginning of the same character as the “Round Towers” of Ireland. They
were sacred places of Initiation.
In 1877, the writer, quoting the authority and opinions of some most
eminent scholars, ventured to assert that there was a great difference
between the terms _Chrestos_ and _Christos_, a difference having a
profound and Esoteric meaning. Also that while _Christos_ means “to live”
and “to be born into a new life,” _Chrestos_, in “Initiation” phraseology,
signified the death of the inner, lower, or personal nature in man; thus
is given the key to the Brâhmanical title, the twice‐born; and finally,
There were _Chrestians_ long before the era of Christianity, and
the Essenes belonged to them.(536)...
For this epithets sufficiently opprobrious to characterise the writer
could hardly be found. And yet then as well as now, the author never
attempted a statement of such a serious nature without showing as many
learned authorities for it as could be mustered. Thus on the next page it
was said:
Lepsius shows that the word _Nofre_ means Chrestos, “good,” and
that one of the titles of Osiris, “Onnofre,” must be translated
“the goodness of God made manifest.” “The worship of Christ was
not universal at this early date,” explains Mackenzie, “by which I
mean that Christolatry had not been introduced; but the worship of
_Chrestos_—the Good Principle—had preceded it by many centuries,
and even survived the general adoption of Christianity, as shown
on monuments still in existence....” Again, we have an inscription
which is pre‐Christian on an epitaphial tablet (Spon. _Misc.
Erud._, Ant., x. xviii. 2). Υαχινθε Λαρισαιων Δησμοσιε Πρως Χρηστε
Χαιρε, and de Rossi (_Roma Sotteranea_, tome i., tav. xxi.) gives
us another example from the catacombs—“Ælia Chreste, in
Pace.”(537)
To‐day the writer is able to add to all those testimonies the
corroboration of an erudite author, who proves whatever he undertakes to
show on the authority of geometrical demonstration. There is a most
curious passage with remarks and explanations in the _Source of Measures_,
whose author has probably never heard of the “Mystery‐God” Visvakarma of
the early Âryans. Treating on the difference between the terms Chrest and
Christ, he ends by saying that:
There were two Messiahs: one who went down into the pit for the
salvation of this world; this was the Sun shorn of his golden
rays, and crowned with blackened ones (symbolising this loss), as
the thorns: the other was the triumphant Messiah mounting up to
the summit of the arch of heaven, and _personified as the Lion of
the Tribe of Judah_. In both instances he had the cross; once in
humiliation and once holding it in his control as the law of
creation, He being Jehovah.
And then the author proceeds to give “the fact” that “there were two
Messiahs,” etc., as quoted above. And this—leaving the divine and mystic
character and claim for Jesus entirely independent of this event of His
mortal life—shows Him, beyond any doubt, as an Initiate of the Egyptian
Mysteries, where the same rite of Death and of spiritual Resurrection for
the neophyte, or the suffering Chrestos on his trial and new birth by
Regeneration, was enacted—for this was a universally adopted rite.
The “pit” into which the Eastern Initiate was made to descend was, as
shown before, Pâtâla, one of the seven regions of the nether world, over
which ruled Vâsuki, the great “snake God.” This pit, Pâtâla, has in the
Eastern Symbolism precisely the same manifold meaning as is found by Mr.
Ralston Skinner in the Hebrew word _shiac_ in its application to the case
in hand. For it was the synonym of Scorpio—Pâtâla’s depths being
“impregnated with the brightness of the new Sun”—represented by the “newly
born” into the glory; and Pâtâla was and is in a sense, “a pit, a grave,
the place of death, and the door of Hades or Sheol”—as, in the partially
exoteric Initiations in India, the candidate had to pass through the
matrix of the heifer before proceeding to Pâtâla. In its non‐mystic sense
it is the Antipodes—America being referred to in India as Pâtâla. But in
its symbolism it meant all that, and much more. The fact alone that
Vâsuki, the ruling Deity of Pâtâla, is represented in the Hindu Pantheon
as the great Nâga (Serpent)—who was used by the Gods and Asuras as a rope
round the mountain Mandara, at the churning of the ocean for Amrita, the
water of immortality—connects him directly with Initiation.
For he is Shesha Nâga also, serving as a couch for Vishnu, and upholding
the seven worlds; and he is also Ananta, “the endless,” and the symbol of
eternity—hence the “God of Secret Wisdom,” degraded by the Church to the
_rôle_ of the tempting Serpent, of Satan. That what is now said is correct
may be verified by the evidence of even the exoteric rendering of the
attributes of various Gods and Sages both in the Hindu and the Buddhist
Pantheons. Two instances will suffice to show how little our best and most
erudite Orientalists are capable of dealing correctly and fairly with the
symbolism of Eastern nations, while remaining ignorant of the
corresponding points to be found only in Occultism and the Secret
Doctrine.
(1) The learned Orientalist and Tibetan traveller, Professor Emil
Schlagintweit, mentions in one of his works on Tibet, a national legend to
the effect that
Nâgârjuna [a “mythological” personage “without any real
existence,” the learned German scholar thinks] received the book
Paramârtha, or according to others, the book _Avatamsaka_, from
the Nâgas, fabulous creatures of the nature of serpents, who
occupy a place among the beings superior to man, and are regarded
as protectors of the law of Buddha. To these spiritual beings
Shâkyamuni is said to have taught a more philosophical religious
system than to men, who were not sufficiently advanced to
understand it at the time of his appearance.(538)
Nor are men sufficiently advanced for it now; for “the more philosophical
religious system” is the Secret Doctrine, the Occult Eastern Philosophy,
which is the corner‐stone of all sciences rejected by the unwise builders
even at this day, and more to‐day perhaps than ever before, in the great
conceit of our age. The allegory means simply that Nâgârjuna having been
initiated by the “Serpents”—the Adepts, “the wise ones”—and driven out
from India by the Brâhmans, who dreaded to have their Mysteries and
sacerdotal Science divulged (the real cause of their hatred of Buddhism),
went away to China and Tibet, where he initiated many into the truths of
the hidden Mysteries taught by Gautama Buddha.
(2) The hidden symbolism of Nârada—the great Rishi and the author of some
of the Rig‐Vaidic hymns, who incarnated again later on during Krishna’s
time—has never been understood. Yet, in connection with the Occult
Sciences, Nârada, the son of Brahmâ, is one of the most prominent
characters; he is directly connected in his first incarnation with the
“Builders”—hence with the seven “Rectors” of the Christian Church, who
“helped God in the work of creation.” This grand personification is hardly
noticed by our Orientalists, who refer only to that which he is alleged to
have said of Pâtâla, namely, “that it is a place of sexual and sensual
gratifications.” This is thought to be amusing, and the reflection is
suggested that Nârada, no doubt, “found the place delightful.” Yet this
sentence simply shows him to have been an Initiate, connected directly
with the Mysteries, and walking, as all the other neophytes, before and
after him, had to walk, in “the pit among the thorns” in the “sacrificial
_Chrest_ condition,” as the suffering victim made to descend thereinto—a
mystery, truly!
Nârada is one of the seven Rishis, the “mind‐born sons” of Brahmâ. The
fact of his having been during his incarnation a high Initiate—he, like
Orpheus, being the founder of the Mysteries—is corroborated, and made
evident by his history. The _Mahâbhârata_ states that Nârada, having
frustrated the scheme formed for peopling the universe, in order to remain
true to his vow of chastity, was cursed by Daksha, and sentenced to be
born once more. Again, when born during Krishna’s time, he is accused of
calling his father Brahmâ “a false teacher,” because the latter advised
him to get married, and he refused to do so. This shows him to have been
an Initiate, going against the orthodox worship and religion. It is
curious to find this Rishi and leader among the “Builders” and the
“Heavenly Host” as the prototype of the Christian “leader” of the same
“Host”—the Archangel Mikael. Both are the male “Virgins,” and both are the
only ones among their respective “Hosts” who refuse to create. Nârada is
said to have dissuaded the Hari‐ashvas, the five thousand sons of Daksha,
begotten by him for the purpose of peopling the Earth, from producing
offspring. Since then the Hari‐ashvas have “dispersed themselves through
the regions, and have never returned.” The Initiates are, perhaps, the
incarnations of these Hari‐ashvas?
It was on the seventh day, the third of his ultimate trial, that the
neophyte arose, a regenerated man, who, having passed through his second
spiritual birth, returned to earth a glorified and triumphant conqueror of
Death, a Hierophant.
An Eastern neophyte in his Chrest condition may be seen in a certain
engraving in Moor’s _Hindu Pantheon_, whose author mistook another form of
the crucified Sun or Vishnu, Vittoba, for Krishna, and calls it “Krishna
crucified in Space.” The engraving is also given in Dr. Lundy’s
_Monumental Christianity_, in which work the reverend author has collected
as many proofs as his ponderous volume could hold of “Christian symbols
_before_ Christianity,” as he expresses it. Thus he shows us Krishna and
Apollo as good shepherds, Krishna holding the cruciform Conch and the
Chakra, and Krishna “crucified in Space,” as he calls it. Of this figure
it may be truly said, as the author says of it himself:
This representation I believe to be anterior to Christianity....
It looks like a Christian crucifix in many respects.... The
drawing, the attitude, the nail‐marks in hands and feet, indicate
a Christian origin, while the Parthian coronet of seven points,
the absence of the wood, and of the usual inscription, and the
rays of glory above, would seem to point to some other than a
Christian origin. Can it be the victim‐man, or the priest and
victim both in one, of the Hindu Mythology, who offered himself a
sacrifice before the worlds were?
It is surely so.
Can it be Plato’s Second God who impressed himself on the universe
in the form of the cross? Or is it his divine man, who would be
scourged, tormented, fettered, have his eyes burnt out; and lastly
... _would be crucified_?
It is all that and much more; archaic religious Philosophy was universal,
and its Mysteries are as old as man. It is the eternal symbol of the
personified Sun—astronomically purified—in its mystic meaning regenerated,
and symbolised by all the Initiates in memory of a sinless Humanity when
all were “Sons of God.” Now, mankind has become the “Son of Evil” truly.
Does all this take anything away from the dignity of Christ as an ideal,
or of Jesus as a divine man? Not at all. On the contrary, made to stand
alone, glorified above all other “Sons of God,” He can only foment evil
feelings in all those many millioned nations who do not believe in the
Christian system, provoking their hatred and leading to iniquitous wars
and strifes. If, on the other hand, we place Him among a long series of
“Sons of God” and Sons of divine Light, every man may then be left to
choose for himself, among those many ideals, which he will choose as a God
to call to his help, and worship on earth as in Heaven.
Many among those called “Saviours” were “good shepherds,” as was Krishna
for one, and all of them are said to have “crushed the serpent’s head”—in
other words to have conquered their sensual nature and to have mastered
divine and Occult Wisdom. Apollo killed Python, a fact which exonerates
him from the charge of being himself the great Dragon, Satan: Krishna slew
the snake Kalinâga, the Black Serpent; and the Scandinavian Thor bruised
the head of the symbolical reptile with his crucifixion mace.
In Egypt every city of importance was separated from its burial‐place by a
sacred lake. The same ceremony of judgment, as is described in _The Book
of the Dead_—“that precious and mysterious book” (Bunsen)—as taking place
in the world of Spirit, took place on earth during the burial of the
mummy. Forty‐two judges or assessors assembled on the shore and judged the
departed “Soul” according to its actions when in the body. After that the
priests returned within the sacred precincts and instructed the neophytes
upon the probable fate of the Soul, and the solemn drama that was then
taking place in the invisible realm whither the Soul had fled. The
immortality of the Spirit was strongly inculcated on the neophytes by the
_Al‐om‐jah_—the name of the highest Egyptian Hierophant. In the Crata
Nepoa—the priestly Mysteries in Egypt—the following are described as four
out of the seven degrees of Initiation.
After a preliminary trial at Thebes, where the neophyte had to pass
through many probations, called the “Twelve Tortures,” he was commanded,
in order that he might come out triumphant, to govern his passions and
never lose for a moment the idea of his inner God or seventh Principle.
Then, as a symbol of the wanderings of the unpurified Soul, he had to
ascend several ladders and wander in darkness in a cave with many doors,
all of which were locked. Having overcome all, he received the degree of
Pastophoris, after which he became, in the second and third degrees, the
Neocoris and Melancphoris. Brought into a vast subterranean chamber,
thickly furnished with mummies lying in state, he was placed in presence
of the coffin which contained the mutilated body of Osiris. This was the
hall called the “Gates of Death,” whence the verse in Job:
Have the gates of Death been opened to thee,
Hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?
Thus asks the “Lord,” the Hierophant, the Al‐om‐jah, the Initiator of Job,
alluding to this third degree of Initiation. For the _Book of Job_ is the
poem of Initiation _par excellence_.
When the neophyte had conquered the terrors of this trial, he was
conducted to the “Hall of Spirits,” to be judged by them. Among the rules
in which he was instructed, he was commanded:
Never to either desire or seek revenge; to be always ready to help
a brother in danger, even unto the risk of his own life; to bury
every dead body; to honour his parents above all; to respect old
age, and protect those weaker than himself; and, finally, to ever
bear in mind the hour of death, and that of resurrection in a new
and imperishable body.
Purity and chastity were highly recommended, and adultery was threatened
with death. Thus the Egyptian neophyte was made a Kristophoros. In this
degree the mystery‐name of IAO was communicated to him.
Let the reader compare the above sublime precepts with the precepts of
Buddha, and the noble commandments in the “Rule of Life” for the ascetics
of India, and he will understand the unity of the Secret Doctrine
everywhere.
It is impossible to deny the presence of a sexual element in many
religious symbols, but this fact is not in the least open to censure, once
it becomes generally known that—in the religious traditions of every
country—man was not born in the first “human” race from father and mother.
From the bright “mind‐born Sons of Brahmâ,” the Rishis, and from Adam
Kadmon with his Emanations, the Sephiroth, down to the “parentless,” the
Anupâdaka, or the Dhyâni‐Buddhas, from whom sprang the Bodhisattvas and
Manushi‐Buddhas, the earthly Initiates—men—the first race of men was with
every nation held as being born without father or mother. Man, the
“Manushi‐Buddha,” the Manu, the “Enosh,” son of Seth, or the “Son of Man”
as he is called—is born in the present way only as the consequence, the
unavoidable fatality, of the law of natural evolution. Mankind—having
reached the last limit, and that turning point where its spiritual nature
had to make room for mere physical organisation—had to “fall into matter”
and generation. But man’s evolution and involution are cyclic. He will end
as he began. Of course to our grossly material minds even the sublime
symbolism of Kosmos conceived in the matrix of Space after the divine Unit
had entered into and fructified it with Its holy fiat, will no doubt
suggest materiality. Not so with primitive mankind. The initiatory rite in
the Mysteries of the self‐sacrificing Victim that dies a spiritual death
to save the world from destruction—really from depopulation—was
established during the Fourth Race, to commemorate an event, which,
physiologically, has now become the Mystery of Mysteries among the world‐
problems. In the Jewish script it is Cain and the female Abel who are the
sacrificed and sacrificing couple—both immolating themselves (as
permutations of Adam and Eve, or the dual Jehovah) and shedding their
blood “of separation and union,” for the sake of and to save mankind by
inaugurating a new physiological race. Later still, when the neophyte, as
already mentioned, in order to be re‐born once more into his lost
spiritual state, had to pass through the entrails (the womb) of a _virgin_
heifer(539) killed at the moment of the rite, it involved again a mystery
and one as great, for it referred to the process of birth, or rather the
first entrance of man on to this earth, through Vâch—“the melodious cow
who milks forth sustenance and water”—and who is the female Logos. It had
also reference to the same self‐sacrifice of the “divine Hermaphrodite”—of
the third Root‐Race—the transformation of Humanity into truly physical
men, after the loss of spiritual potency. When, the fruit of evil having
been tasted along with the fruit of good, there was as a result the
gradual atrophy of spirituality and a strengthening of the materiality in
man, then he was doomed to be born thenceforth through the present
process. This is the Mystery of the Hermaphrodite, which the Ancients kept
so secret and veiled. It was neither the absence of moral feeling, nor the
presence of gross sensuality in them that made them imagine their Deities
under a dual aspect; but rather their knowledge of the mysteries and
processes of primitive Nature. The Science of Physiology was better known
to them than it is to us now. It is in this that lies buried the key to
the Symbolism of old, the true focus of national thought, and the strange
dual‐sexed images of nearly every God and Goddess in both pagan and
monotheistic Pantheons.
Says Sir William Drummond in _Œdipus Judaïcus_:
The truths of science were the arcana of the priests because these
truths were the foundations of religion.
But why should the missionaries so cruelly twit the Vaishnavas and Krishna
worshippers for the supposed grossly indecent meaning of their symbols,
since it is made clear beyond the slightest doubt, and by the most
unprejudiced writers, that Chrestos in the pit—whether the pit be taken as
meaning the grave or hell—had likewise a sexual element in it, from the
very origin of the symbol.
This fact is no longer denied to‐day. The “Brothers of the Rosy Cross” of
the Middle Ages were as good Christians as any to be found in Europe,
nevertheless, all their rites were based on symbols whose meaning was pre‐
eminently phallic and sexual. Their biographer, Hargrave Jennings, the
best modern authority on Rosicrucianism, speaking of this mystic
Brotherhood, describes how
The tortures and the sacrifice of Calvary, the Passion of the
Cross, were, in their [the Rose‐Croix’s] glorious blessed magic
and triumph, the protest and appeal.
Protest—by whom? The answer is, the protest of the crucified Rose, the
greatest and the most unveiled of all sexual symbols—the Yoni and Lingam,
the “victim” and the “murderer,” the female and male principles in Nature.
Open the last work of that author, _Phallicism_, and see in what glowing
terms he describes the sexual symbolism in that which is most sacred to
the Christian:
The flowing blood streamed from the crown, or the piercing circlet
of the thorns of Hell. The Rose is feminine. Its lustrous carmine
petals are guarded with thorns. The Rose is the most beautiful of
flowers. The Rose is the Queen of God’s Garden (Mary, the Virgin).
It is not the Rose alone which is the magical idea, or truth. But
it is the “crucified rose,” or the “martyred rose” (by the grand
mystic apocalyptic figure) which is the talisman, the standard,
the object of adoration of all the “Sons of Wisdom” or the true
Rosicrucians.(540)
Not of _all_ the “Sons of Wisdom,” by any means, not even of the _true_
Rosicrucian. For the latter would never put in such sickening relievo, in
such a purely sensual and terrestrial, not to say animal light, the
grandest, the noblest of Nature’s symbols. To the Rosicrucian, the “Rose”
was the symbol of Nature, of the ever prolific and virgin Earth, or Isis,
the mother and nourisher of man, considered as feminine and represented as
a virgin woman by the Egyptian Initiates. Like every other personification
of Nature and the Earth she is the sister and wife of Osiris, as the two
characters answer to the personified symbol of the Earth, both she and the
Sun being the progeny of the same mysterious Father, because the Earth is
fecundated by the Sun—according to the earliest Mysticism—by divine
insufflation. It was the pure ideal of mystic Nature that was personified
in the “World Virgins,” the “Celestial Maidens,” and later on by the human
Virgin, Mary, the Mother of the Saviour, the _Salvator Mundi_ now chosen
by the Christian World. And it was the character of the Jewish maiden that
was adapted by Theology to archaic Symbolism,(541) and not the Pagan
symbol that was modelled for the new occasion.
We know through Herodotus that the Mysteries were brought from India by
Orpheus—a hero far anterior to both Homer and Hesiod. Very little is
really known of him, and till very lately Orphic literature, and even the
Argonauts, were attributed to Onamacritus, a contemporary of Pisistratus,
Solon and Pythagoras—who was credited with their compilation in the
present form toward the close of the sixth century B.C., or 800 years
after the time of Orpheus. But we are told that in the days of Pausanias
there was a sacerdotal family, who, like the Brâhmans with the _Vedas_,
had committed to memory all the Orphic Hymns, and that they were usually
thus transmitted from one generation to another. By placing Orpheus so far
back as 1200 B.C., official Science—so careful in her chronology to choose
in each case as late a period as possible—admits that the Mysteries, or in
other words Occultism dramatised, belong to a still earlier epoch than the
Chaldæan and Egyptians.
The downfall of the Mysteries in Europe may now be mentioned.