light and darkness; by glittering lightning and the crash of thunder,
and apparitions of spectres, or magical illusions, impressing at once
the eyes and ears. This Claudian describes, in his poem on the rape of
Proserpine, where he alludes to what passed in her Mysteries. "The
temple is shaken," he cries; "fiercely gleams the lightning, by which
the Deity announces his presence. Earth trembles; and a terrible noise
is heard in the midst of these terrors. The Temple of the Son of Cecrops
resounds with long-continued roars; Eleusis uplifts her sacred torches;
the serpents of Triptolemus are heard to hiss; and fearful Hecate
appears afar."
The celebration of the Greek Mysteries continued, according to the
better opinion, for nine days.
On the first the Initiates met. It was the day of the full moon, of the
month Boëdromion; when the moon was full at the end of the sign Aries,
near the Pleiades and the place of her exaltation in Taurus.
The second day there was a procession to the sea, for purification by
bathing.
The third was occupied with offerings, expiatory sacrifices, and other
religious rites, such as fasting, mourning, continence, etc. A mullet
was immolated, and offerings of grain and living animals made.
On the fourth they carried in procession the mystic wreath of flowers,
representing that which Proserpine dropped when seized by Pluto, and the
Crown of Ariadne in the Heavens. It was borne on a triumphal car drawn
by oxen; and women followed bearing mystic chests or boxes, wrapped with
purple cloths, containing grains of sesame, pyramidal biscuits, salt,
pomegranates and the mysterious serpent, and perhaps the mystic phallus.
On the fifth was the superb procession of torches, commemorative of the
search for Proserpine by Ceres; the Initiates marching by trios, and
each bearing a torch; while at the head of the procession marched the
Dadoukos.
The sixth was consecrated to Iakchos, the young Light-God, son of Ceres,
reared in the sanctuaries and bearing the torch of the Sun-God. The
chorus in Aristophanes terms him the luminous star that lights the
nocturnal initiation. He was brought from the sanctuary, his head
crowned with myrtle, and borne from the gate of the Ceramicus to
Eleusis, along the sacred way, amid dances, sacred songs, every mark of
joy, and mystic cries of _Iakchos_.
On the seventh there were gymnastic exercises and combats, the victors
in which were crowned and rewarded.
On the eighth was the feast of Æsculapius.
On the ninth the famous libation was made for the souls of the departed.
The Priests, according to Athenæus, filled two vases, placed one in the
East and one in the West, toward the gates of day and night, and
overturned them, pronouncing a formula of mysterious prayers. Thus they
invoked Light and Darkness, the two great principles of nature.
During all these days no one could be arrested, nor any suit brought, on
pain of death, or at least a heavy fine: and no one was allowed, by the
display of unusual wealth or magnificence, to endeavor to rival this
sacred pomp. Everything was for religion.
Such were the Mysteries; and such the Old Thought, as in scattered and
widely separated fragments it has come down to us. The human mind still
speculates upon the great mysteries of nature, and still finds its ideas
anticipated by the ancients, whose profoundest thoughts are to be looked
for, not in their philosophies, but in their symbols, by which they
endeavored to express the great ideas that vainly struggled for
utterance in words, as they viewed the great circle of
phenomena,--Birth, Life, Death, or Decomposition, and New Life out of
Death and Rottenness,--to them the greatest of mysteries. Remember,
while you study their symbols, that they had a profounder sense of these
wonders than we have. To them the transformations of the worm were a
greater wonder than the stars; and hence the poor dumb scarabæus or
beetle was sacred to them. Thus their faiths are condensed into symbols
or expanded into allegories, which they understood, but were not always
able to explain in language; for there are thoughts and ideas which no
language ever spoken by man has words to express.
[Illustration]
XXV.
KNIGHT OF THE BRAZEN SERPENT.
This Degree is both philosophical and moral. While it teaches the
necessity of reformation as well as repentance, as a means of obtaining
mercy and forgiveness, it is also devoted to an explanation of the
symbols of Masonry; and especially to those which are connected with
that ancient and universal legend, of which that of Khir-Om Abi is but a
variation; that legend which, representing a murder or a death, and a
restoration to life, by a drama in which figure Osiris, Isis and Horus,
Atys and Cybele, Adonis and Venus, the Cabiri, Dionusos, and many
another representative of the active and passive Powers of Nature,
taught the Initiates in the Mysteries that the rule of Evil and Darkness
is but temporary, and that of Light and Good will be eternal.
Maimonides says: "In the days of Enos, the son of Seth, men fell into
grievous errors, and even Enos himself partook of their infatuation.
Their language was, that since God has placed on high the heavenly
bodies, and used them as His ministers, it was evidently His will that
they should receive from man the same veneration as the servants of a
great prince justly claim from the subject multitude. Impressed with
this notion, they began to build temples to the Stars, to sacrifice to
them, and to worship them, in the vain expectation that they should thus
please the Creator of all things. At first, indeed, they did not suppose
the Stars to be the only Deities, but adored in conjunction with them
the Lord God Omnipotent. In process of time, however, that great and
venerable Name was totally forgotten, and the whole human race retained
no other religion than the idolatrous worship of the Host of Heaven."
The first learning in the world consisted chiefly in symbols. The wisdom
of the Chaldæans, Phœnicians, Egyptians, Jews; of Zoroaster,
Sanchoniathon, Pherecydes, Syrus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, of all
the ancients, that is come to our hand, is symbolic. It was the mode,
says Serranus on Plato's Symposium, of the Ancient Philosophers, to
represent truth by certain symbols and hidden images.
"All that can be said concerning the Gods," says Strabo, "must be by the
exposition of old opinions and fables; it being the custom of the
ancients to wrap up in enigma and allegory their thoughts and discourses
concerning Nature; which are therefore not easily explained."
As you learned in the 24th Degree, my Brother, the ancient Philosophers
regarded the soul of man as having had its origin in Heaven. That was,
Macrobius says, a settled opinion among them all; and they held it to be
the only true wisdom, for the soul, while united with the body, to look
ever toward its source, and strive to return to the place whence it
came. Among the fixed stars it dwelt, until, seduced by the desire of
animating a body, it descended to be imprisoned in matter. Thenceforward
it has no other resource than recollection, and is ever attracted toward
its birth-place and home. The means of return are to be sought for in
itself. To re-ascend to its source, it must do and suffer in the body.
Thus the Mysteries taught the great doctrine of the divine nature and
longings after immortality of the soul, of the nobility of its origin,
the grandeur of its destiny, its superiority over the animals who have
no aspirations heavenward. If they struggled in vain to express its
_nature_, by comparing it to Fire and Light,--if they erred as to its
original place of abode, and the mode of its descent, and the path
which, descending and ascending, it pursued among the stars and spheres,
these were the accessories of the Great Truth, and mere allegories
designed to make the idea more impressive, and, as it were, tangible, to
the human mind.
Let us, in order to understand this old Thought, first follow the soul
in its descent. The sphere or Heaven of the fixed stars was that Holy
Region, and those Elysian Fields, that were the native domicile of
souls, and the place to which they re-ascended, when they had recovered
their primitive purity and simplicity. From that luminous region the
soul set forth, when it journeyed toward the body; a destination which
it did not reach until it had undergone three degradations, designated
by the name of Deaths; and until it had passed through the several
spheres and the elements. All souls remained in possession of Heaven and
of happiness, so long as they were wise enough to avoid the contagion of
the body, and to keep themselves from any contact with matter. But those
who, from that lofty abode, where they were lapped in eternal light,
have looked longingly toward the body, and toward that which we here
below call _life_, but which is to the soul a real _death_; and who have
conceived for it a secret desire,--those souls, victims of their
concupiscence, are attracted by degrees toward the inferior regions of
the world, by the mere weight of thought and of that terrestrial desire.
The soul, perfectly incorporeal, does not at once invest itself with the
gross envelope of the body, but little by little, by successive and
insensible alterations, and in proportion as it removes further and
further from the simple and perfect substance in which it dwelt at
first. It first surrounds itself with a body composed of the substance
of the stars; and afterward, as it descends through the several spheres,
with ethereal matter more and more gross, thus by degrees descending to
an earthly body; and its number of degradations or deaths being the same
as that of the spheres which it traverses.
The Galaxy, Macrobius says, crosses the Zodiac in two opposite points,
Cancer and Capricorn, the tropical points in the sun's course,
ordinarily called the Gates of the Sun. These two tropics, before his
time, corresponded with those constellations, but in his day with Gemini
and Sagittarius, in consequence of the precession of the equinoxes; but
the _signs_ of the Zodiac remained unchanged; and the Milky Way crossed
at the _signs_ Cancer and Capricorn, though not at those
_constellations_.
Through these _gates_ souls were supposed to descend to earth and
re-ascend to Heaven. One, Macrobius says, in his dream of Scipio, was
styled the Gate of Men; and the other, the Gate of the Gods. Cancer was
the former, because souls descended by it to the earth; and Capricorn
the latter, because by it they re-ascended to their seats of
immortality, and became Gods. From the Milky Way, according to
Pythagoras, diverged the route to the dominions of Pluto. Until they
left the Galaxy, they were not deemed to have commenced to descend
toward the terrestrial bodies. From that they departed, and to that they
returned. Until they reached the sign Cancer, they had not left it, and
were still Gods. When they reached Leo, they commenced their
apprenticeship for their future condition; and when they were at
Aquarius, the sign opposite Leo, they were furthest removed from human
life.
The soul, descending from the celestial limits, where the Zodiac and
Galaxy unite, loses its spherical shape, the shape of all Divine Nature,
and is lengthened into a cone, as a point is lengthened into a line; and
then, an indivisible monad before, it divides itself and becomes a
duad--that is, unity becomes division, disturbance, and conflict. Then
it begins to experience the disorder which reigns in matter, to which it
unites itself, becoming, as it were, intoxicated by draughts of grosser
matter: of which inebriation the cup of Bakchos, between Cancer and Leo,
is a symbol. It is for them the cup of forgetfulness. They assemble,
says Plato, in the fields of oblivion, to drink there the water of the
river Ameles, which causes men to forget everything. This fiction is
also found in Virgil. "If souls," says Macrobius, "carried with them
into the bodies they occupy all the knowledge which they had acquired of
divine things, during their sojourn in the Heavens, men would not differ
in opinion as to the Deity; but some of them forget more, and some less,
of that which they had learned."
We smile at these notions of the ancients; but we must learn to look
through these material images and allegories, to the ideas, struggling
for utterance, the great speechless thoughts which they envelop: and it
is well for us to consider whether we ourselves have yet found out any
_better_ way of representing to ourselves the soul's origin and its
advent into this body, so entirely foreign to it; if, indeed, we have
ever thought about it at all; or have not ceased to think, in despair.
The highest and purest portion of matter, which nourishes and
constitutes divine existences, is what the poets term _nectar_, the
beverage of the Gods. The lower, more disturbed and grosser portion, is
what intoxicates souls. The ancients symbolized it as the River Lethe,
dark stream of oblivion. How do _we_ explain the soul's forgetfulness of
its antecedents, or reconcile that utter absence of remembrance of its
former condition, with its essential immortality? In truth, we for the
most part dread and shrink from any attempt at explanation of it to
ourselves.
Dragged down by the heaviness produced by this inebriating draught, the
soul falls along the zodiac and the milky way to the lower spheres, and
in its descent not only takes, in each sphere, a new envelope of the
material composing the luminous bodies of the planets, but receives
there the different faculties which it is to exercise while it inhabits
the body.
In Saturn, it acquires the power of reasoning and intelligence, or what
is termed the logical and contemplative faculty. From Jupiter it
receives the power of action. Mars gives it valor, enterprise, and
impetuosity. From the Sun it receives the senses and imagination, which
produce sensation, perception, and thought. Venus inspires it with
desires. Mercury gives it the faculty of expressing and enunciating what
it thinks and feels. And, on entering the sphere of the Moon, it
acquires the force of generation and growth. This lunary sphere, lowest
and basest to divine bodies, is first and highest to terrestrial bodies.
And the lunary body there assumed by the soul, while, as it were, the
sediment of celestial matter, is also the first substance of animal
matter.
The celestial bodies, Heaven, the Stars, and the other Divine elements,
ever aspire to rise. The soul reaching the region which mortality
inhabits, tends toward terrestrial bodies, and is deemed to die. Let no
one, says Macrobius, be surprised that we so frequently speak of the
_death_ of this soul, which yet we call immortal. It is neither annulled
nor destroyed by such death: but merely enfeebled for a time; and does
not thereby forfeit its prerogative of immortality; for afterward, freed
from the body, when it has been purified from the vice-stains contracted
during that connection, it is re-established in all its privileges, and
returns to the luminous abode of its immortality.
On its return, it restores to each sphere through which it ascends, the
passions and earthly faculties received from them: to the Moon, the
faculty of increase and diminution of the body; to Mercury, fraud, the
architect of evils; to Venus, the seductive love of pleasure; to the
Sun, the passion for greatness and empire; to Mars, audacity and
temerity; to Jupiter, avarice; and to Saturn, falsehood and deceit: and
at last, relieved of all, it enters naked and pure into the eighth
sphere or highest Heaven.
All this agrees with the doctrine of Plato, that the soul cannot
re-enter into Heaven, until the revolutions of the Universe shall have
restored it to its primitive condition, and purified it from the effects
of its contact with the four elements.
This opinion of the pre-existence of souls, as pure and celestial
substances, before their union with our bodies, to put on and animate
which they descend from Heaven, is one of great antiquity. A modern
Rabbi, Manasseh Ben Israel, says it was always the belief of the
Hebrews. It was that of most philosophers who admitted the immortality
of the soul: and therefore it was taught in the Mysteries; for, as
Lactantius says, they could not see how it was possible that the soul
should exist _after_ the body, if it had not existed _before_ it, and if
its nature was not independent of that of the body. The same doctrine
was adopted by the most learned of the Greek Fathers, and by many of the
Latins: and it would probably prevail largely at the present day, if men
troubled themselves to think upon this subject at all, and to inquire
whether the soul's immortality involved its prior existence.
Some philosophers held that the soul was incarcerated in the body, by
way of punishment for sins committed by it in a prior state. How they
reconciled this with the same soul's unconsciousness of any such prior
state, or of sin committed there, does not appear. Others held that God,
of his mere will, sent the soul to inhabit the body. The Kabalists
united the two opinions. They held that there are four worlds, _Asiluth,
Briarth, Jezirath_, and _Aziath_; the world of _emanation_, that of
_creation_, that of _forms_, and the _material_ world; one above and
more perfect than the other, in that order, both as regards their own
nature and that of the beings who inhabit them. All souls are originally
in the world Aziluth, the Supreme Heaven, abode of God, and of pure and
immortal spirits. Those who descend from it without fault of their own,
by God's order, are gifted with a divine fire, which preserves them from
the contagion of matter, and restores them to Heaven so soon as their
mission is ended. Those who descend through their own fault, go from
world to world, insensibly losing their love of Divine things, and their
self-contemplation; until they reach the world Aziath, falling by their
own weight. This is a pure Platonism, clothed with the images and words
peculiar to the Kabalists. It was the doctrine of the Essenes, who, says
Porphyry, "believe that souls descend from the most subtile ether,
attracted to bodies by the seductions of matter." It was in substance
the doctrine of Origen; and it came from the Chaldæans, who largely
studied the theory of the Heavens, the spheres, and the influences of
the signs and constellations.
The Gnostics made souls ascend and descend through eight Heavens, in
each of which were certain Powers that opposed their return, and often
drove them back to earth, when not sufficiently purified. The last of
these Powers, nearest the luminous abode of souls, was a serpent or
dragon.
In the ancient doctrine, certain Genii were charged with the duty of
conducting souls to the bodies destined to receive them, and of
withdrawing them from those bodies. According to Plutarch, these were
the functions of Proserpine and Mercury. In Plato, a familiar Genius
accompanies man at his birth, follows and watches him all his life, and
at death conducts him to the tribunal of the Great Judge. These Genii
are the media of communication between man and the Gods; and the soul is
ever in their presence. This doctrine is taught in the oracles of
Zoroaster: and these Genii were the Intelligences that resided in the
planets.
Thus the secret science and mysterious emblems of initiation were
connected with the Heavens, the Spheres, and the Constellations: and
this connection must be studied by whomsoever would understand the
ancient mind, and be enabled to interpret the allegories, and explore
the meaning of the symbols, in which the old sages endeavored to
delineate the ideas that struggled within them for utterance, and could
be but insufficiently and inadequately expressed by language, whose
words are images of those things alone that can be grasped by and are
within the empire of the senses.
It is not possible for us thoroughly to appreciate the feelings with
which the ancients regarded the Heavenly bodies, and the ideas to which
their observation of the Heavens gave rise, because We cannot put
ourselves in their places, look at the stars with their eyes in the
world's youth, and divest ourselves of the knowledge which even the
commonest of us have, that makes us regard the Stars and Planets and all
the Universe of Suns and Worlds, as a mere inanimate machine and
aggregate of senseless orbs, no more astonishing, except in degree, than
a clock or an orrery. _We_ wonder and are amazed at the Power and Wisdom
(to most men it seems only a kind of Infinite _Ingenuity_) of the MAKER:
they wondered at the _Work_, and endowed _it_ with Life and Force and
mysterious Powers and mighty Influences.
Memphis, in Egypt, was in Latitude 29˚ 5' North, and in Longitude 30˚
18' East. Thebæ, in Upper Egypt, in Latitude 25˚ 45' North, and
Longitude 32˚ 43' East. Babylon was in Latitude 32˚ 30' North, and
Longitude 44˚ 23' East: while Saba, the ancient Sabæan capital of
Ethiopia, was about in Latitude 15˚ North.
Through Egypt ran the great River Nile, coming from beyond Ethiopia, its
source in regions wholly unknown, in the abodes of heat and fire, and
its course from South to North. Its inundations had formed the alluvial
lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, which they continued to raise higher and
higher, and to fertilize by their deposits. At first, as in all
newly-settled countries, those inundations, occurring annually and
always at the same period of the year, were calamities: until, by means
of levees and drains and artificial lakes for irrigation, they became
blessings, and were looked for with joyful anticipation, as they had
before been awaited with terror. Upon the deposit left by the Sacred
River, as it withdrew into its banks, the husbandman sowed his seed; and
the rich soil and the genial sun insured him an abundant harvest.
Babylon lay on the Euphrates, which ran from Southeast to Northwest,
blessing, as all rivers in the Orient do, the arid country through which
it flowed; but its rapid and uncertain overflows bringing terror and
disaster.
To the ancients, as yet inventors of no astronomical instruments, and
looking at the Heavens with the eyes of children, this earth was a level
plain of unknown extent. About its boundaries there was speculation, but
no knowledge. The inequalities of its surface were the irregularities of
a plane. That it was a globe, or that anything lived on its under
surface, or on what it rested, they had no idea. Every twenty-four hours
the sun came up from beyond the Eastern rim of the world, and travelled
across the sky, over the earth, always South of, but sometimes nearer
and sometimes further from the point overhead; and sunk below the
world's Western rim. With him went light, and after him followed
darkness.
And every twenty-four hours appeared in the Heavens another body,
visible chiefly at night, but sometimes even when the sun shone, which
likewise, as if following the sun at a greater or less distance,
travelled across the sky; sometimes as a thin crescent, and thence
increasing to a full orb resplendent with silver light; and sometimes
more and sometimes less to the Southward of the point overhead, within
the same limits as the Sun.