bad act, we form another judgment, as necessary as the first; that if he
has done well, he deserves compensation; if ill, punishment. That
judgment may be expressed in a manner more or less vivid, according as
it is mingled with sentiments more or less ardent. Sometimes it will be
a merely kind feeling toward a virtuous agent, and moderately hostile to
a guilty one; sometimes enthusiasm or indignation. The judgment of merit
and demerit is intimately connected with the judgment of good and evil.
Merit is the natural right which we have to be rewarded; demerit the
natural right which others have to punish us. But whether the reward is
received, or the punishment undergone, or not, the merit or demerit
equally subsists. Punishment and reward are the satisfaction of merit
and demerit, but do not constitute them. Take away the former, and the
latter continue. Take away the latter, and there are no longer real
rewards or punishments. When a base man encompasses our merited honors,
he has obtained but the mere appearance of a reward; a mere material
advantage. The reward is essentially moral; and its value is independent
of its form. One of those simple crowns of oak with which the early
Romans rewarded heroism, was of more real value than all the wealth of
the world, when it was the sign of the gratitude and admiration of a
people. Reward accorded to merit is a debt; without merit it is an alms
or a theft.
The Good is good in itself, and to be accomplished, whatever the
consequences. The results of the Good cannot but be fortunate.
Happiness, separated from the Good, is but a fact to which no moral idea
is attached. As an effect of the Good, it enters into the moral order,
completes and crowns it.
Virtue without happiness, and crime without misery, is a contradiction
and disorder. If virtue suppose sacrifice (that is, suffering), eternal
justice requires that sacrifice generously accepted and courageously
borne, shall have for its reward the same happiness that was sacrificed:
and it also requires that crime shall be punished with unhappiness, for
the guilty happiness which it attempted to procure.
This law that attaches pleasure and sorrow to the good and the evil, is,
in general, accomplished even here below. For order rules in the world;
because the world lasts. Is that order sometimes disturbed? Are
happiness and sorrow not always distributed in legitimate proportion to
crime and virtue? The absolute judgment of the Good, the absolute
judgment of obligation, the absolute judgment of merit and demerit,
continue to subsist, inviolable and imprescriptible; and we cannot help
but believe that He Who has implanted in us the sentiment and idea of
order, cannot therein Himself be wanting; and that He will, sooner or
later, reestablish the holy harmony of virtue and happiness, by means
belonging to Himself.
The Judgment of the Good, the decision that such a thing is good, and
that such another is not,--this is the primitive fact, and reposes on
itself. By its intimate resemblances to the judgment of the true and the
beautiful, it shows us the secret affinities of morality, metaphysics,
and aesthetics. The good, so especially united to the true, is
distinguished from it, only because it is truth put in practice. The
good is obligatory. These are two indivisible but not identical ideas.
The idea of obligation reposes on the idea of the Good. In this intimate
alliance, the former borrows from the latter its universal and absolute
character.
The obligatory good is the moral law. That is the foundation of all
morality. By it we separate ourselves from the morality of interest and
the morality of sentiment. We admit the existence of those facts, and
their influence; but we do not assign them the same rank.
To the moral law, in the reason of man, corresponds liberty in action.
Liberty is deduced from obligation, and is a fact irresistibly evident.
Man, as free, and subject to obligation, is a moral person; and that
involves the idea of rights. To these ideas is added that of merit and
demerit; which supposes the distinction between good and evil,
obligation and liberty; and creates the idea of reward and punishment.
The sentiments play no unimportant part in morality. All the moral
judgments are accompanied by sentiments that respond to them. From the
secret sources of enthusiasm the human will draws the mysterious virtue
that makes heroes. Truth enlightens and illumines. Sentiment warms and
inclines to action. Interest also bears its part; and the hope of
happiness is the work of God, and one of the motive powers of human
action.
Such is the admirable economy of the moral constitution of man. His
Supreme Object, the Good: his law, Virtue, which often imposes upon him
suffering, thus making him to excel all other created beings known to
us. But this law is harsh, and in contradiction with the instinctive
desire for happiness. Wherefore the Beneficent Author of his being has
placed in his soul, by the side of the severe law of duty, the sweet,
delightful force of sentiment. Generally he attaches happiness to
virtue; and for the exceptions, for such there are, he has placed Hope
at the end of the journey to be travelled.
Thus there is a side on which morality touches religion. It is a sublime
necessity of Humanity to see in God the Legislator supremely wise, the
Witness always present, the infallible Judge of virtue. The human mind,
ever climbing up to God, would deem the foundations of morality too
unstable, if it did not place in God the first principle of the moral
law. Wishing to give to the moral law a _religious_ character, we run
the risk of taking from it its _moral_ character. We may refer it so
entirely to God as to make His will an arbitrary degree. But the will of
God, whence we deduce morality, in order to give it authority, itself
has no moral authority, except as it is just. The Good comes from the
will of God alone; but from His will, in so far as it is the expression
of His wisdom and justice. The Eternal Justice of God is the sole
foundation of Justice, such as Humanity perceives and practises it. The
Good, duty, merit and demerit, are referred to God, as everything is
referred to Him; but they have none the less a proper evidence and
authority. Religion is the crown of Morality, not its base. The base of
Morality is in itself.
The Moral Code of Masonry is still more extensive than that developed by
philosophy. To the requisitions of the law of Nature and the law of God,
it adds the imperative obligation of a contract. Upon entering the
Order, the Initiate binds to himself every Mason in the world. Once
enrolled among the children of Light, every Mason on earth becomes his
brother, and owes him the duties, the kindnesses, and the sympathies of
a brother. On every one he may call for assistance in need, protection
against danger, sympathy in sorrow, attention in sickness, and decent
burial after death. There is not a Mason in the world who is not bound
to go to his relief, when he is in danger, if there be a greater
probability of saving his life than of losing his own. No Mason can
wrong him to the value of anything, knowingly, himself, nor suffer it to
be done by others, if it be in his power to prevent it. No Mason can
speak evil of him, to his face or behind his back. Every Mason must keep
his lawful secrets, and aid him in his business, defend his character
when unjustly assailed, and protect, counsel, and assist his widow and
his orphans. What so many thousands owe to him, he owes to each of them.
He has solemnly bound himself to be ever ready to discharge this sacred
debt. If he fails to do it he is dishonest and forsworn; and it is an
unparalleled meanness in him to obtain good offices by false pretences,
to receive kindness and service, rendered him under the confident
expectation that he will in his turn render the same, and then to
disappoint, without ample reason, that just expectation.
Masonry holds him also, by his solemn promise, to a purer life, a nobler
generosity, a more perfect charity of opinion and action; to be
tolerant, catholic in his love for his race, ardent in his zeal for the
interest of mankind, the advancement and progress of humanity.
Such are, we think, the Philosophy and the Morality, such the TRUE WORD
of a Master Mason.
The world, the ancients believed, was governed by Seven Secondary
Causes; and these were the universal forces, known to the Hebrews by the
plural name ELOHIM. These forces, analogous and contrary one to the
other, produce equilibrium by their contrasts, and regulate the
movements of the spheres. The Hebrews called them the Seven great
Archangels, and gave them names, each of which, being a combination of
another word with AL, the first Phœnician Nature-God, considered as the
Principle of Light, represented them as His manifestations. Other
peoples assigned to these Spirits the government of the Seven Planets
then known, and gave them the names of their great divinities.
So, in the Kabala, the last Seven Sephiroth constituted ATIK YOMIN, the
Ancient of Days; and these, as well as the Seven planets, correspond
with the Seven colors separated by the prism, and the Seven notes of the
musical octave.
Seven is the sacred number in all theogonies and all symbols, because it
is composed of 3 and 4. It represents the magical power in its full
force. It is the Spirit assisted by all the Elementary Powers, the Soul
served by Nature, the Holy Empire spoken of in the clavicules of
Solomon, symbolized by a warrior, crowned, bearing a triangle on his
cuirass, and standing on a cube, to which are harnessed two Sphinxes,
one white and the other black, pulling contrary ways, and turning the
head to look backward.
The vices are Seven, like the virtues; and the latter were anciently
symbolized by the Seven Celestial bodies then known as planets. FAITH,
as the converse of arrogant Confidence, was represented by the Sun;
HOPE, enemy of Avarice, by the _Moon_; CHARITY, opposed to Luxury, by
_Venus_; FORCE, stronger than Rage, by _Mars_; PRUDENCE, the opposite of
Indolence, by _Mercury_; TEMPERANCE, the antipodes of Gluttony, by
Saturn; and JUSTICE, the opposite of Envy, by _Jupiter_.
The Kabalistic book of the Apocalypse is represented as closed with
Seven Seals. In it we find the Seven genii of the Ancient Mythologies;
and the doctrine concealed under its emblems is the pure Kabala, already
lost by the Pharisees at the advent of the Saviour. The pictures that
follow in this wondrous epic are so many pantacles, of which the
numbers 3, 4, 7, and 12 are the keys.
The Cherub, or symbolic bull, which Moses places at the gate of the
Edenic world, holding a blazing sword, is a Sphinx, with the body of a
bull and a human head; the old Assyrian Sphinx whereof the combat and
victory of Mithras were the hieroglyphic analysis. This armed Sphinx
represents the law of the Mystery, which keeps watch at the door of
initiation, to repulse the Profane. It also represents the grand Magical
Mystery, all the elements whereof the number 7 expresses, still without
giving its last word. This "unspeakable word" of the Sages of the school
of Alexandria, this word, which the Hebrew Kabalists wrote יהוה [IHUH],
and translated by אראריהא, [ARARITA,] so expressing the threefoldness of
the Secondary Principle, the dualism of the middle ones, and the Unity
as well of the first Principle as of the end; and also the junction of
the number 3 with the number 4 in a word composed of four letters, but
formed of seven by one triplicate and two repeated,--this word is
pronounced _Ararita_.
The vowels in the Greek language are also _Seven_ in number, and were
used to designate the Seven planets.
Tsadok or Sydyc was the Supreme God in Phœnicia. His Seven Sons were
probably the Seven Cabiri; and he was the Heptaktis, the God of Seven
Rays.
Kronos, the Greek Saturn, Philo makes Sanchoniathon say, had six sons,
and by Astarte Seven daughters, the Titanides. The Persians adored Ahura
Masda or Ormuzd and the Six Amshaspands, the first three of whom were
Lords of the Empires of Light, Fire, and Splendor; the Babylonians, Bal
and the Gods; the Chinese, Shangti, and the Six Chief Spirits; and the
Greeks, Kronos, and the Six great Male Gods, his progeny, Zeus,
Poseidon, Apollo, Arēs, Hēphaistos, and Hermes; while the female deities
were also Seven: Rhea, wife of Kronos, Hērē, Athēnē, Artemis, Aphrodite,
Hestia, and Dēmētēi. In the Orphic Theogony, Gaia produced the fourteen
Titans, Seven male and Seven female, Kronos being the most potent of the
males; and as the number _Seven_ appears in these, nine by threes, or
the triple triangle, is found in the three Mœraê or Fates, the three
Centimanēs, and the three Cyclopēs, offspring of Ouranos and Gaia, or
Heaven and Earth.
The metals, like the colors, were deemed to be Seven in number, and a
metal and color were assigned to each planet. Of the metals, gold was
assigned to the Sun and silver to the Moon.
The palace of Deioces in Echatana had Seven circular walls of different
colors, the two innermost having their battlements covered respectively
with silvering and gilding.
And the Seven Spheres of Borsippa were represented by the Seven Stories,
each of a different color, of the tower or truncated pyramid of Bel at
Babylon.
Pharaoh saw in his dream, which Joseph interpreted, _Seven_ ears of
wheat on one stalk, full and good, and after them _Seven_ ears,
withered, thin, and blasted with the East wind; and the Seven thin ears
devoured the Seven good ears; and Joseph interpreted these to mean Seven
years of plenty succeeded by Seven years of famine.
Connected with this Ebn Hesham relates that a flood of rain laid bare to
view a sepulchre in Yemen, in which lay a woman having on her neck
_Seven_ collars of _pearls_, and on her hands and feet bracelets and
ankle-rings and armlets, Seven on each, with an inscription on a tablet
showing that, after attempting in vain to purchase grain of Joseph, she,
Tajah, daughter of Dzu Shefar, and her people, died of famine.
Hear again the words of an adept, who had profoundly studied the
mysteries of science, and wrote, as the Ancient Oracles spoke, in
enigmas; but who knew that the theory of mechanical forces and of the
materiality of the most potent agents of Divinity, explains nothing, and
ought to satisfy no one!
Through the veil of all the hieratic and mystic allegories of the
ancient dogmas, under the seal of all the sacred writings, in the ruins
of Nineveh or Thebes, on the worn stones of the ancient temples, and on
the blackened face of the sphinx of Assyria or Egypt, in the monstrous
or marvellous pictures which the sacred pages of the Vedas translate for
the believers of India, in the strange emblems of our old books of
alchemy, in the ceremonies of reception practised by all the mysterious
Societies, we find the traces of a doctrine, everywhere the same, and
everywhere carefully concealed. The occult philosophy seems to have been
the nurse or the godmother of all religions, the secret lever of all the
intellectual forces, the key of all divine obscurities, and the absolute
Queen of Society, in the ages when it was exclusively reserved for the
education of the Priests and Kings.
It had reigned in Persia with the Magi, who perished one day, as the
masters of the world had perished, for having abused their power. It had
endowed India with the most marvellous traditions, and an incredible
luxury of poetry, grace, and terror in its emblems: it had civilized
Greece by the sounds of the lyre of Orpheus: it hid the principles of
all the sciences, and of the whole progression of the human spirit, in
the audacious calculations of Pythagoras: fable teemed with its
miracles; and history, when it undertook to judge of this unknown power,
confounded itself with fable: it shook or enfeebled empires by its
oracles; made tyrants turn pale on their thrones, and ruled over all
minds by means of curiosity or fear. To this science, said the crowd,
nothing is impossible; it commands the elements, knows the language of
the planets, and controls the movements of the stars; the moon, at its
voice, falls, reeking with blood, from Heaven; the dead rise upright on
their graves, and shape into fatal words the wind that breathes through
their skulls. Controller of Love or Hate, this science can at pleasure
confer on human hearts Paradise or Hell: it disposes at will of all
forms, and distributes beauty or deformity as it pleases: it changes in
turn, with the rod of Circe, men into brutes and animals into men: it
even disposes of Life or of Death, and can bestow on its adepts riches
by the transmutation of metals, and immortality by its quintessence and
elixir, compounded of gold and light.
This is what magic had been, from Zoroaster to Manes, from Orpheus to
Apollonius Thyaneus; when positive Christianity, triumphing over the
splendid dreams and gigantic aspirations of the school of Alexandria,
publicly crushed this philosophy with its anathemas, and compelled it to
become more occult and more mysterious than ever.
At the bottom of magic, nevertheless, was science, as at the bottom of
Christianity there was love; and in the Evangelic Symbols we see the
incarnate WORD adored in its infancy by three magi whom a star guides
(the ternary and the sign of the microcosm), and receiving from them
gold, frankincense, and myrrh; another mysterious ternary, under the
emblem whereof are allegorically contained the highest secrets of the
Kabala.
Christianity should not have hated magic; but human ignorance always
fears the unknown. Science was obliged to conceal itself, to avoid the
impassioned aggressions of a blind love. It enveloped itself in new
hieroglyphs, concealed its efforts, disguised its hopes. Then was
created the jargon of alchemy, a continual deception for the vulgar
herd, greedy of gold, and a living language for the true disciples of
Hermes alone.
Resorting to Masonry, the alchemists there invented Degrees, and partly
unveiled their doctrine to their Initiates; not by the language of their
receptions, but by oral instruction afterward; for their rituals, to one
who has not the key, are but incomprehensible and absurd jargon.
Among the sacred books of the Christians are two works which the
infallible church does not pretend to understand, and never attempts to
explain,--the prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse; two cabalistic
clavicules, reserved, no doubt, in Heaven, for the exposition of the
Magian kings; closed with Seven seals for all faithful believers; and
perfectly clear to the unbeliever initiated in the occult sciences.
For Christians, and in their opinion, the scientific and magical
clavicules of Solomon are lost. Nevertheless, it is certain that, in the
domain of intelligence governed by the WORD, nothing that is written is
lost. Only those things which men cease to understand no longer exist
for them, at least as WORD; then they enter into the domain of enigmas
and mystery.
The mysterious founder of the Christian Church was saluted in His cradle
by the three Magi, that is to say by the hieratic ambassadors from the
three parts of the known world, and from the three analogical worlds of
the occult philosophy.
In the school of Alexandria, Magic and Christianity almost take each
other by the hand under the auspices of Ammonius Saccos and Plato. The
dogma of Hermes is found almost entire in the writings attributed to
Dionysius the Areopagite. Synesius traces the plan of a treatise on
dreams, which was subsequently to be commented on by Cardan, and
composes hymns which might serve for the liturgy of the Church of
Swedenborg, if a church of illuminati could have a liturgy.
To this epoch of ardent abstractions and impassioned logomachies belongs
the philosophical reign of Julian, an illuminatus and Initiate of the
first order, who believed in the unity of God and the universal Dogma of
the Trinity, and regretted the loss of nothing of the old world but its
magnificent symbols and too graceful images. He was no Pagan, but a
Gnostic, infected with the allegories of Grecian polytheism, and whose
misfortune it was to find the name of Jesus Christ less sonorous than
that of Orpheus.
We may be sure that so soon as Religion and Philosophy become distinct
departments, the mental activity of the age is in advance of its Faith;
and that, though habit may sustain the latter for a time, its vitality
is gone.
The dunces who led primitive Christianity astray, by substituting faith
for science, reverie for experience, the fantastic for the reality; and
the inquisitors who for so many ages waged against Magism a war of
extermination, have succeeded in shrouding in darkness the ancient
discoveries of the human mind; so that we now grope in the dark to find
again the key of the phenomena of nature. But all natural phenomena
depend on a single and immutable law, represented by the philosophal
stone and its symbolic form, which is that of a cube. This law,
expressed in the Kabala by the number 4, furnished the Hebrews with all
the mysteries of their divine Tetragram.
Everything is contained in that word of four letters. It is the _Asot_
of the Alchemists, the _Thot_ of the Bohemians, the _Taro_ of the
Kabalists. It supplies to the Adept the last word of the human Sciences,
and the Key of the Divine Power: but he alone understands how to avail
himself of it who comprehends the necessity of never revealing it. If
Œdipus, in place of _slaying_ the Sphynx, had _conquered_ it, and driven
it into Thebes harnessed to his chariot, he would have been King,
without incest, calamities, or exile. If Psyche, by submission and
caresses, had persuaded Love to reveal himself, she would never have
lost him. Love is one of the mythological images of the grand secret and
the grand agent, because it expresses at once an action and a passion, a
void and a plenitude, an arrow and a wound. The Initiates ought to
understand this, and, lest the profane should overhear, Masonry never
says too much.
When Science had been overcome in Alexandria by the fanaticism of the
murderers of Hypalia, it became Christian, or, rather, it concealed
itself under Christian disguises, with Ammonius, Synosius, and the
author of the books of Dionysius the Areopagite. Then it was necessary
to win the pardon of miracles by the appearances of superstition, and of
science by a language unintelligible. Hieroglyphic writing was revived,
and pantacles and characters were invented, that summed up a whole
doctrine in a sign, a whole series of tendencies and revelations in a
word. What was the object of the aspirants to knowledge? They sought for
the secret of the great work, or the Philosophal Stone, or the perpetual
motion, or the squaring of the circle, or the universal medicine;
formulas which often saved them from persecution and general ill-will,
by exposing them to the charge of folly; and each of which expressed one
of the forces of the grand magical secret. This lasted until the time of
the Roman de la Rose, which also expresses the mysterious and magical
meaning of the poem of Dante, borrowed from the High Kabalah, that
immense and concealed source of the universal philosophy.
It is not strange that man knows but little of the powers of the human
will, and imperfectly appreciates them; since he knows nothing as to the
nature of the will and its mode of operation. That his own will can move
his arm, or compel another to obey him; that his thoughts, symbolically
expressed by the signs of writing, can influence and lead other men, are
mysteries as incomprehensible to him, as that the will of Deity could
effect the creation of a Universe.
The powers of the will are as yet chiefly indefinite and unknown.
Whether a multitude of well-established phenomena are to be ascribed to
the power of the will alone, or to magnetism or some other natural
agent, is a point as yet unsettled; but it is agreed by all that a
concentrated effort of the will is in every case necessary to success.
That the phenomena are real is not to be doubted, unless credit is no
longer to be given to human testimony; and if they are real, there is no
reason for doubting the exercise heretofore, by many adepts, of the
powers that were then termed magical. Nothing is better vouched for than
the extraordinary performances of the Brahmins. No religion is supported
by stronger testimony; nor has any one ever even attempted to explain
what may well be termed their miracles.
How far, in this life, the mind and soul can act without and
independently of the body, no one as yet knows. That the will can act at
all without bodily contact, and the phenomena of dreams, are mysteries
that confound the wisest and most learned, whose explanations are but a
Babel of words.
Man as yet knows little of the forces of nature. Surrounded,
controlled, and governed by them, while he vainly thinks himself
independent, not only of his race, but the universal nature and her
infinite manifold forces, he is the slave of these forces, unless he
becomes their master. He can neither ignore their existence nor be
simply their neighbor.
There is in nature one most potent force, by means whereof a single man,
who could possess himself of it, and should know how to direct it, could
revolutionize and change the face of the world.