moral sense. We cannot exalt words that have only a sensuous meaning,
_above_ sense. To call Him a _Power_ or a _Force_, or an _Intelligence_,
is merely to deceive ourselves into the belief that we use words that
have a meaning to us, when they have none, or at least no more than the
ancient visible symbols had. To call Him _Sovereign, Father, Grand
Architect of the Universe, Extension, Time, Beginning, Middle, and End,
whose face is turned on all sides, the Source of life and death_, is but
to present other men with symbols by which we vainly endeavor to
communicate to them the same vague ideas which men in all ages have
impotently struggled to express. And it may be doubted whether we have
succeeded either in communicating, or in forming in our own minds, any
more distinct and definite and true and adequate idea of the Deity, with
all our metaphysical conceits and logical subtleties, than the rude
ancients did, who endeavored to symbolize and so to express His
attributes, by the Fire, the Light, the Sun and Stars, the Lotus and the
Scarabæus; all of them types of what, except by types, more or less
sufficient, could not be expressed at all.
The primitive man recognized the Divine Presence under a variety of
appearances, without losing his faith in this unity and Supremacy. The
invisible God, manifested and on one of His many sides visible, did not
cease to be God to him. He recognized Him in the evening breeze of Eden,
in the whirlwind of Sinai in the Stone of Beth-El: and identified Him
with the fire or thunder or the immovable rock adored in Ancient Arabia.
To him the image of the Deity was reflected in all that was pre-eminent
in excellence. He saw Jehovah, like Osiris and Bel, in the Sun as well
as in the Stars, which were His children, His eyes, "which run through
the whole world, and watch over the Sacred Soil of Palestine, from the
year's commencement to its close." He was the sacred fire of Mount
Sinai, of the burning bush, of the Persians, those Puritans of Paganism.
Naturally it followed that Symbolism soon became more complicated, and
all the powers of Heaven were reproduced on earth, until a web of
fiction and allegory was woven, which the wit of man, with his limited
means of explanation, will never unravel. Hebrew Theism itself became
involved in symbolism and image-worship, to which all religions ever
tend. We have already seen what was the symbolism of the Tabernacle, the
Temple, and the Ark. The Hebrew establishment tolerated not only the use
of emblematic vessels, vestments, and cherubs, of Sacred Pillars and
Seraphim, but symbolical representations of Jehovah Himself, not even
confined to poetical or illustrative language.
"Among the Adityas," says Chrishna, in the Bagvat Ghita, "I am Vishnu,
the radiant Sun among the Stars; among the waters, I am ocean; among the
mountains, the Himalaya; and among the mountain-tops, Meru." The Psalms
and Isaiah are full of similar attempts to convey to the mind ideas of
God, by ascribing to Him sensual proportions. He rides on the clouds,
and sits on the wings of the wind. Heaven is His pavilion, and out of
His mouth issue lightnings. Men cannot worship a mere abstraction. They
require some outward form in which to clothe their conceptions, and
invest their sympathies. If they do not shape and carve or paint visible
images, they have invisible ones, perhaps quite as inadequate and
unfaithful, within their own minds.
The incongruous and monstrous in the Oriental images came from the
desire to embody the Infinite, and to convey by multiplied, because
individually inadequate symbols, a notion of Divine Attributes to the
understanding. Perhaps we should find that we mentally do the same
thing, and make within ourselves images quite as incongruous, if judged
of by our own limited conceptions, if we were to undertake to analyze
and gain a clear idea of the mass of infinite attributes which we assign
to the Deity: and even of His infinite Justice and infinite Mercy and
Love.
We may well say, in the language of Maximus Tyrius: "If, in the desire
to obtain some faint conception of the Universal Father, the Nameless
Lawgiver, men had recourse to words or names, to silver or gold, to
animals or plants, to mountain-tops or flowing rivers, every one
inscribing the most valued and most beautiful things with the name of
Deity, and with the fondness of a lover clinging with rapture to each
trivial reminiscence of the Beloved, why should we seek to reduce this
universal practice of symbolism, necessary, indeed, since the mind often
needs the excitement of the imagination to rouse it into activity, to
one monotonous standard of formal propriety? Only let the image duly
perform its task, and bring the divine idea with vividness and truth
before the mental eye; if this be effected, whether by the art of
Phidias, the poetry of Homer, the Egyptian Hieroglyph, or the Persian
element, we need not cavil at external differences, or lament the
seeming fertility of unfamiliar creeds, _so long as the great essential
is attained_, THAT MEN ARE MADE TO REMEMBER, TO UNDERSTAND, AND TO
LOVE."
Certainly, when men regarded Light and Fire as something spiritual, and
above all the corruptions and exempt from all the decay of matter; when
they looked upon the Sun and Stars and Planets as composed of this finer
element, and as themselves great and mysterious Intelligences,
infinitely superior to man, living Existences, gifted with mighty powers
and wielding vast influences, those elements and bodies conveyed to
them, when used as symbols of Deity, a far more adequate idea than they
can now do to us, or than we can comprehend, now that Fire and Light are
familiar to us as air and water, and the Heavenly Luminaries are
lifeless worlds like our own. Perhaps they gave them ideas as adequate
as we obtain from the mere _words_ by which we endeavor to symbolize and
shadow forth the ineffable mysteries and infinite attributes of God.
There are, it is true, dangers inseparable from symbolism, which
countervail its advantages, and afford an impressive lesson in regard to
the similar risks attendant on the use of language. The imagination,
invited to assist the reason, usurps its place, or leaves its ally
helplessly entangled in its web. Names which stand for things are
confounded with them; the means are mistaken for the end: the instrument
of interpretation for the object; and thus symbols come to usurp an
independent character as truths and persons. Though perhaps a necessary
path, they were a dangerous one by which to approach the Deity; in which
"many," says Plutarch, "mistaking the sign for the thing signified, fell
into a ridiculous superstition; while others, in avoiding one extreme,
plunged into the no less hideous gulf of irreligion and impiety."
All great Reformers have warred against this evil, deeply feeling the
intellectual mischief arising out of a degraded idea of the Supreme
Being; and have claimed for their own God an existence or personality
distinct from the objects of ancient superstition; disowning in His name
the symbols and images that had profaned His Temple. But they have not
seen that the utmost which can be effected by human effort, is to
substitute impressions relatively correct, for others whose falsehood
has been detected, and to replace a gross symbolism by a purer one.
Every man, without being aware of it, worships a conception of his own
mind; for all symbolism, as well as all language, shares the subjective
character of the ideas it represents. The epithets we apply to God only
recall either visible or intellectual symbols to the eye or mind. The
modes or forms of manifestation of the reverential feeling that
constitutes the religious sentiment, are incomplete and progressive;
each term and symbol predicates a partial truth, remaining always
amenable to improvement or modification, and, in its turn, to be
superseded by others more accurate and comprehensive.
Idolatry consists in confounding the symbol with the thing signified,
the substitution of a material for a mental object of worship, after a
higher spiritualism has become possible; an ill-judged preference of the
inferior to the superior symbol, an inadequate and sensual conception of
the Deity: and every religion and every conception of God is idolatrous,
in so far as it is imperfect, and as it substitutes a feeble and
temporary idea in the shrine of that Undiscoverable Being who can be
known only in part, and who can therefore be honored, even by the most
enlightened among His worshippers, only in proportion to their limited
powers of understanding and imagining to themselves His perfections.
Like the belief in a Deity, the belief in the soul's immortality is
rather a natural feeling, an adjunct of self-consciousness, than a dogma
belonging to any particular age or country. It gives eternity to man's
nature, and reconciles its seeming anomalies and contradictions; it
makes him strong in weakness and perfectable in imperfection; and it
alone gives an adequate object for his hopes and energies, and value and
dignity to his pursuits. It is concurrent with the belief in an
infinite, eternal Spirit, since it is chiefly through consciousness of
the dignity of the mind within us, that we learn to appreciate its
evidences in the Universe.
To fortify, and as far as possible to impart this hope, was the great
aim of ancient wisdom, whether expressed in forms of poetry or
philosophy; as it was of the Mysteries, and as it is of Masonry. Life
rising out of death was the great mystery, which symbolism delighted to
represent under a thousand ingenious forms. Nature was ransacked for
attestations to the grand truth which seems to transcend all other gifts
of imagination, or rather to be their essence and consummation. Such
evidences were easily discovered. They were found in the olive and the
lotus, in the evergreen myrtle of the _Mystæ_ and of the grave of
Polydorus, in the deadly but self-renewing serpent, the wonderful moth
emerging from the coffin of the worm, the phenomena of germination, the
settings and risings of the sun and stars, the darkening and growth of
the moon, and in sleep, "the minor mystery of death."
The stories of the birth of Apollo from Latona, and of dead heroes, like
Glaucus, resuscitated in caves, were allegories of the natural
alternations of life and death in nature, changes that are but
expedients to preserve her virginity and purity inviolable in the
general sum of her operations, whose aggregate presents only a majestic
calm, rebuking alike man's presumption and his despair. The typical
death of the Nature-God, Osiris, Atys, Adonis, Hiram, was a profound but
consolatory mystery: the healing charms of Orpheus were connected with
his destruction; and his bones, those valued pledges of fertility and
victory, were, by a beautiful contrivance, often buried within the
sacred precincts of his immortal equivalent.
In their doctrines as to the immortality of the soul, the Greek
Philosophers merely stated with more precision ideas long before extant
independently among themselves, in the form of symbolical suggestion.
Egypt and Ethiopia in these matters learned from India, where, as
everywhere else, the origin of the doctrine was as remote and
untraceable as the origin of man himself. Its natural expression is
found in the language of Chrishna, in the Bagvat Ghita: "I myself never
was non-existent, nor thou, nor these princes of the Earth; nor shall we
ever hereafter cease to be ... The soul is not a thing of which a man
may say, it hath been, or is about to be, or is to be hereafter; for it
is a thing without birth; it is pre-existent, changeless, eternal, and
is not to be destroyed with this mortal frame."
According to the dogma of antiquity, the thronging forms of life are a
series of purifying migrations, through which the divine principle
re-ascends to the unity of its source. Inebriated in the bowl of
Dionusos, and dazzled in the mirror of existence, the souls, those
fragments or sparks of the Universal Intelligence, forgot their native
dignity, and passed into the terrestrial frames they coveted. The most
usual type of the spirit's descent was suggested by the sinking of the
Sun and Stars from the upper to the lower hemisphere. When it arrived
within the portals of the proper empire of Dionusos, the God of this
World, the scene of delusion and change, its individuality became
clothed in a material form; and as individual bodies were compared to a
garment, the world was the investiture of the Universal Spirit. Again,
the body was compared to a vase or urn, the soul's recipient; the world
being the mighty bowl which received the descending Deity. In another
image, ancient as the Grottoes of the Magi and the denunciations of
Ezekiel, the world was as a dimly illuminated cavern, where shadows seem
realities, and where the soul becomes forgetful of its celestial origin
in proportion to its proneness to material fascinations. By another, the
period of the Soul's embodiment is as when exhalations are condensed,
and the aerial element assumes the grosser form of water.
But if vapor falls in water, it was held, water is again the birth of
vapors, which ascend and adorn the Heavens. If our mortal existence be
the death of the spirit, our death may be the renewal of its life; as
physical bodies are exalted from earth to water, from water to air, from
air to fire, so the man may rise into the Hero, the Hero into the God.
In the course of Nature, the soul, to recover its lost estate, must pass
through a series of trials and migrations. The scene of those trials is
the Grand Sanctuary of Initiations, the world: their primary agents are
the elements; and Dionusos, as Sovereign of Nature, or the sensuous
world personified, is official Arbiter of the Mysteries, and guide of
the soul, which he introduces into the body and dismisses from it. He is
the Sun, that liberator of the elements, and his spiritual mediation was
suggested by the same imagery which made the Zodiac the supposed path of
the spirits in their descent and their return, and Cancer and Capricorn
the gates through which they passed.
He was not only Creator of the World, but guardian, liberator, and
Saviour of the Soul. Ushered into the world amidst lightning and
thunder, he became the Liberator celebrated in the Mysteries of Thebes,
delivering earth from Winter's chain, conducting the nightly chorus of
the Stars and the celestial revolution of the year. His symbolism was
the inexhaustible imagery employed to fill up the stellar devices of the
Zodiac: he was the Vernal Bull, the Lion, the Ram, the Autumnal Goat,
the Serpent: in short, the varied Deity, the resulting manifestation
personified, the all in the many, the varied year, life passing into
innumerable forms; essentially inferior to none, yet changing with the
seasons, and undergoing their periodical decay.
He mediates and intercedes for man, and reconciles the Universal Unseen
Mind with the individualized spirit of which he is emphatically the
Perfecter; a consummation which he effects, first through the
vicissitudes of the elemental ordeal, the alternate fire of Summer and
the showers of Winter, "the trials or test of an immortal Nature"; and
secondarily and symbolically through the Mysteries. He holds not only
the cup of generation, but also that of wisdom or initiation, whose
influence is contrary to that of the former, causing the soul to abhor
its material bonds, and to long for its return. The first was the Cup of
Forgetfulness; while the second is the Urn of Aquarius, quaffed by the
returning spirit, as by the returning Sun at the Winter Solstice, and
emblematic of the exchange of wordly impressions for the recovered
recollections of the glorious sights and enjoyments of its
pre-existence. Water nourishes and purifies; and the urn from which it
flows was thought worthy to be a symbol of Deity, as of the
Osiris-Canobus who with living water irrigated the soil of Egypt; and
also an emblem of Hope that should cheer the dwellings of the dead.
The second birth of Dionusos, like the rising of Osiris and Atys from
the dead, and the raising of Khurum, is a type of the spiritual
regeneration of man. Psyche (the Soul), like Ariadne, had two lovers,
an earthly and an immortal one. The immortal suitor is Dionusos, the
Eros-Phanes of the Orphici, gradually exalted by the progress of
thought, out of the symbol of Sensuality into the torch-bearer of the
Nuptials of the Gods; the Divine Influence which physically called the
world into being, and which, awakening the soul from its Stygian trance,
restores it from earth to Heaven.
Thus the scientific theories of the ancients, expounded in the
Mysteries, as to the origin of the soul, its descent, its sojourn here
below, and its return, were not a mere barren contemplation of the
nature of the world, and of the intelligent beings existing there. They
were not an idle speculation as to the order of the world, and about the
soul, but a study of the means for arriving at the great object
proposed,--the perfecting of the soul; and, as a necessary consequence,
that of morals and society. This Earth, to them, was not the Soul's
home, but its place of exile. Heaven was its home, and there was its
birth-place. To it, it ought incessantly to turn its eyes. Man was not a
terrestrial plant. His roots were in Heaven. The soul had lost its
wings, clogged by the viscosity of matter. It would recover them when it
extricated itself from matter and commenced its upward flight.
Matter being, in their view, as it was in that of St. Paul, the
principle of all the passions that trouble reason, mislead the
intelligence, and stain the purity of the soul, the Mysteries taught man
how to enfeeble the action of matter on the soul, and to restore to the
latter its natural dominion. And lest the stains so contracted should
continue after death, lustrations were used, fastings, expiations,
macerations, continence, and above all, initiations. Many of these
practices were at first merely symbolical,--material signs indicating
the moral purity required of the Initiates; but they afterward came to
be regarded as actual productive causes of that purity.
The effect of initiation was meant to be the same as that of philosophy,
to purify the soul of its passions, to weaken the empire of the body
over the divine portion of man, and to give him here below a happiness
anticipatory of the felicity to be one day enjoyed by him, and of the
future vision by him of the Divine Beings. And therefore Proclus and the
other Platonists taught "that the Mysteries and initiations withdrew
souls from this mortal and material life, to re-unite them to the gods;
and dissipated for the adepts the shades of ignorance by the splendors
of the Deity." Such were the precious fruits of the last Degree of the
Mystic Science,--to see Nature in her springs and sources, and to become
familiar with the causes of things and with real existences.
Cicero says that the soul must exercise itself in the practice of the
virtues, if it would speedily return to its place of origin. It should,
while imprisoned in the body, free itself therefrom by the contemplation
of superior beings, and in some sort be divorced from the body and the
senses. Those who remain enslaved, subjugated by their passions and
violating the sacred laws of religion and society, will re-ascend to
Heaven, only after they shall have been purified through a long
succession of ages.
The Initiate was required to emancipate himself from his passions, and
to free himself from the hindrances of the senses and of matter, in
order that he might rise to the contemplation of the Deity, or of that
incorporeal and unchanging light in which live and subsist the causes of
created natures. "We must," says Porphyry, "flee from everything
sensual, that the soul may with ease re-unite itself with God, and live
happily with Him." "This is the great work of initiation," says
Hierocles,--"to recall the soul to what is truly good and beautiful, and
make it familiar therewith, and they its own; to deliver it from the
pains and ills it endures here below, enchained in matter as in a dark
prison; to facilitate its return to the celestial splendors, and to
establish it in the Fortunate Isles, by restoring it to its first
estate. Thereby, when the hour of death arrives, the soul, freed of its
mortal garmenting, which it leaves behind it as a legacy to earth, will
rise buoyantly to its home among the Stars, there to re-take its ancient
condition, and approach toward the Divine nature as far as man may do."
Plutarch compares Isis to knowledge, and Typhon to ignorance, obscuring
the light of the sacred doctrine whose blaze lights the soul of the
Initiate. No gift of the gods, he holds, is so precious as the knowledge
of the Truth, and that of the Nature of the gods, so far as our limited
capacities allow us to rise toward them. The Valentinians termed
initiation LIGHT. The Initiate, says Psellus, becomes an Epopt, when
admitted to see THE DIVINE LIGHTS. Clemens of Alexandria, imitating the
language of an Initiate in the Mysteries of Bacchus, and inviting this
Initiate, whom he terms blind like Tiresias, to come to see Christ, Who
will blaze upon his eyes with greater glory than the Sun, exclaims: "Oh
Mysteries most truly holy! Oh pure Light! When the torch of the Dadoukos
gleams, Heaven and the Deity are displayed to my eyes! I am initiated,
and become holy!" This was the true object of initiation; to be
sanctified, and TO SEE, that is, to have just and faithful conceptions
of the Deity, the knowledge of Whom was THE LIGHT of the Mysteries. It
was promised the Initiate at Samothrace, that he should become pure and
just Clemens says that by baptism, souls are _illuminated_, and led to
_the pure light_ with which mingles no darkness, nor anything material.
The Initiate, become an Epopt, was called A SEER. "HAIL, NEW-BORN
LIGHT!" the Initiates cried in the Mysteries of Bacchus.
Such was held to be the effect of complete initiation. It lighted up the
soul with rays from the Divinity, and became for it, as it were, the eye
with which, according to the Pythagoreans, it contemplates the field of
Truth; in its mystical abstractions, wherein it rises superior to the
body, whose action on it, it annuls for the time, to re-enter into
itself, so as entirely to occupy itself with the view of the Divinity,
and the means of coming to resemble Him.
Thus enfeebling the dominion of the senses and the passions over the
soul, and as it were freeing the latter from a sordid slavery, and by
the steady practice of all the virtues, active and contemplative, our
ancient brethren strove to fit themselves to return to the bosom of the
Deity. Let not our objects as Masons fall below theirs. We use the
symbols which they used; and teach the same great cardinal doctrines
that they taught, of the existence of an intellectual God, and the
immortality of the soul of man. If the details of their doctrines as to
the soul seem to us to verge on absurdity, let us compare them with the
common notions of our own day, and be silent. If it seems to us that
they regarded the symbol in some cases as the thing symbolized, and
worshipped the sign as if it were itself Deity, let us reflect how
insufficient are our own ideas of Deity, and how we worship those ideas
and images formed and fashioned in our own minds, and not the Deity
Himself: and if we are inclined to smile at the importance they attached
to lustrations and fasts, let us pause and inquire whether the same
weakness of human nature does not exist to-day, causing rites and
ceremonies to be regarded as _actively_ efficient for the salvation of
souls.
And let us ever remember the words of an old writer, with which we
conclude this lecture: "It is a pleasure to stand on the shore, and to
see ships tossed upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a
castle, and see a battle and the adventures thereof: but no pleasure is
comparable to the standing on the vantage-ground of TRUTH (a hill not to
be commanded, and where the air is always clear and serene), and to see
the errors and wanderings, and mists and tempests, in the vale below;
_so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or
pride_. Certainly it is Heaven upon Earth to have a man's mind move in
charity, rest in Providence, AND TURN UPON THE POLES OF TRUTH."
XXVI.