degenerating afterward into those heretical forms which Gnosticism
developed, so that even Manes had his followers among them. Many adopted
his doctrines of the two Principles, the recollection of which is
perpetuated by the handle of the dagger and the tesselated pavement or
floor of the Lodge, stupidly called "_the Indented Tessel_," and
represented by great hanging tassels, when it really means a
_tesserated_ floor (from the Latin _tessera_) of white and black
lozenges, with a necessarily _denticulated_ or _indented_ border or
edging. And wherever, in the higher Degrees, the two colors white and
black, are in juxtaposition, the two Principles of Zoroaster and Manes
are alluded to. With others the doctrine became a mystic Pantheism,
descended from that of the Brahmins, and even pushed to an idolatry of
Nature and hatred of every revealed dogma.
[To all this the absurd reading of the established Church, taking
literally the figurative, allegorical, and mythical language of a
collection of Oriental books of different ages, directly and inevitably
led. The same result long after followed the folly of regarding the
Hebrew books as if they had been written by the unimaginative, hard,
practical intellect of the England of James the First and the bigoted
stolidity of Scottish Presbyterianism.]
"The better to succeed and win partisans, the Templars sympathized with
regrets for dethroned creeds and encouraged the hopes of new worships,
promising to all liberty of conscience and a new orthodoxy that should
be the synthesis of all the persecuted creeds."
It is absurd to suppose that men of intellect adored a monstrous idol
called Baphomet, or recognized Mahomet as an inspired prophet. Their
symbolism, invented ages before, to conceal what it was dangerous to
avow, was of course misunderstood by those who were not adepts, and to
their enemies seemed to be pantheistic. The calf of gold, made by Aaron
for the Israelites, was but one of the oxen under the laver of bronze,
and the Karobim on the Propitiatory, misunderstood. The symbols of the
wise always become the idols of the ignorant multitude. What the Chiefs
of the Order really believed and taught, is indicated to the Adepts by
the hints contained in the high Degrees of Free-Masonry, and by the
symbols which only the Adepts understand.
[The Blue Degrees are but the outer court or portico of the Temple. Part
of the symbols are displayed there to the Initiate, but he is
intentionally misled by false interpretations. It is not intended that
he shall understand them; but it is intended that he shall imagine he
understands them. Their true explication is reserved for the Adepts, the
Princes of Masonry. The whole body of the Royal and Sacerdotal Art was
hidden so carefully, centuries since, in the High Degrees, as that it is
even yet impossible to solve many of the enigmas which they contain. It
is well enough for the mass of those called Masons, to imagine that all
is contained in the Blue Degrees; and whose attempts to undeceive them
will labor in vain, and without any true reward violate his obligations
as an Adept. Masonry is the veritable Sphinx, buried to the head in the
sands heaped round it by the ages.]
"The seeds of decay were sown in the Order of the Temple at its origin.
Hypocrisy is a mortal disease. It had conceived a great work which it
was incapable of executing, because it knew neither humility nor
personal abnegation, because Rome was then invincible, and because the
later Chiefs of the Order did not comprehend its mission. Moreover, the
Templars were in general uneducated, and capable only of wielding the
sword, with no qualifications for governing, and at need enchaining,
that queen of the world called Opinion." [The doctrines of the Chiefs
would, if expounded to the masses, have seemed to them the babblings of
folly. The symbols of the wise are the idols of the vulgar, or else as
meaningless as the hieroglyphics of Egypt to the nomadic Arabs. There
must always be a common-place interpretation for the mass of Initiates,
of the symbols that are eloquent to the Adepts.]
"Hugues de Payens himself had not that keen and far-sighted intellect
nor that grandeur of purpose which afterward distinguished the military
founder of another soldiery that became formidable to kings. The
Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits.
"Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the world. They
became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe alone more than nine
thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on which they were wrecked.
They became insolent, and unwisely showed their contempt for the
religious and social institutions which they aimed to overthrow. Their
ambition was fatal to them. Their projects were divined and prevented.
[Rome, more intolerant of heresy than of vice and crime, came to fear
the Order, and fear is always cruel. It has always deemed philosophical
truth the most dangerous of heresies, and has never been at a loss for a
false accusation, by means of which to crush free thought.] Pope Clement
V. and King Philip le Bel gave the signal to Europe, and the Templars,
taken as it were in an immense net, were arrested, disarmed, and cast
into prison. Never was a _Coup d'État_ accomplished with a more
formidable concert of action. The whole world was struck with stupor,
and eagerly waited for the strange revelations of a process that was to
echo through so many ages.
"It was impossible to unfold to the people the conspiracy of the
Templars against the Thrones and the Tiara. It was impossible to expose
to them the doctrines of the Chiefs of the Order. [This would have been
to initiate the multitude into the secrets of the Masters, and to have
uplifted the veil of Isis. Recourse was therefore had to the charge of
magic, and denouncers and false witnesses were easily found. When the
temporal and spiritual tyrannies unite to crush a victim they never want
for serviceable instruments.] The Templars were gravely accused of
spitting upon Christ and denying God at their receptions, of gross
obscenities, conversations with female devils, and the worship of a
monstrous idol.
"The end of the drama is well known, and how Jacques de Molai and his
fellows perished in the flames. But before his execution, the Chief of
the doomed Order organized and instituted what afterward came to be
called the Occult, Hermetic, or Scottish Masonry. In the gloom of his
prison, the Grand Master created four Metropolitan Lodges, at Naples for
the East, at Edinburg for the West, at Stockholm for the North, and at
Paris for the South." [The initials of his name, J.'. B.'. M.'. found in
the same order in the first three Degrees, are but one of the many
internal and cogent proofs that such was the origin of modern
Free-Masonry. The legend of Osiris was revived and adopted, to symbolize
the destruction of the Order, and the resurrection of Khūrūm, slain in
the body of the Temple, of KHŪRŪM ABAI, the Master, as the martyr of
fidelity to obligation, of Truth and Conscience, prophesied the
restoration to life of the buried association.]
"The Pope and the King soon after perished in a strange and sudden
manner. Squin de Florian, the chief denouncer of the Order, died
assassinated. In breaking the sword of the Templars, they made of it a
poniard; and their proscribed trowels thenceforward built only tombs."
[The Order disappeared at once. Its estates and wealth were confiscated,
and it seemed to have ceased to exist. Nevertheless it lived, under
other names and governed by unknown Chiefs, revealing itself only to
those, who, in passing through a series of Degrees, had proven
themselves worthy to be entrusted with the dangerous Secret. The modern
Orders that style themselves Templars have assumed a name to which they
have not the shadow of a title.]
"The Successors of the Ancient Adepts Rose-Croix, abandoning by degrees
the austere and hierarchial Science of their Ancestors in initiation,
became a Mystic Sect, united with many of the Templars, the dogmas of
the two intermingling, and believed themselves to be the sole
depositaries of the secrets of the Gospel of St. John, seeing in its
recitals an allegorical series of rites proper to complete the
initiation.
"The Initiates, in fact, thought in the eighteenth century that their
time had arrived, some to found a new Hierarchy, others to overturn all
authority, and to press down all the summits of the Social Order under
the level of Equality."
The mystical meanings of the Rose as a Symbol are to be looked for in
the Kabalistic Commentaries on the Canticles.
The Rose was for the Initiates the living and blooming symbol of the
revelation of the harmonies of being. It was the emblem of beauty, life,
love, and pleasure. Flamel, or the Book of the Jew Abraham, made it the
hieroglyphical sign of the accomplishment of the great Work. Such is the
key of the Roman de la Rose. The Conquest of the Rose was the problem
propounded to Science by Initiation, while Religion was laboring to
prepare and establish the universal triumph, exclusive and definitive,
of the Cross.
To unite the Rose to the Cross, was the problem proposed by the High
Initiation; and in fact the Occult philosophy being the Universal
Synthesis, ought to explain all the phenomena of Being. Religion,
considered solely as a physiological fact, is the revelation and
satisfaction of a necessity of souls. Its existence is a scientific
fact; to deny it, would be to deny humanity itself.
The Rose-Croix Adepts respected the dominant, hierarchical, and revealed
religion. Consequently they could no more be the enemies of the Papacy
than of legitimate Monarchy; and if they conspired against the Popes and
Kings, it was because they considered them personally as apostates from
duty and supreme favorers of anarchy.
What, in fact, is a despot, spiritual or temporal, but a crowned
anarchist?
One of the magnificent pantacles that express the esoteric and
unutterable part of Science, is a Rose of Light, in the centre of which
a human form extends its arms in the form of a cross.
Commentaries and studies have been multiplied upon the _Divine Comedy_,
the work of DANTE, and yet no one, so far as we know, has pointed out
its especial character. The work of the great Ghibellin is a declaration
of war against the Papacy, by bold revelations of the Mysteries. The
Epic of Dante is Johannite and Gnostic, an audacious application, like
that of the Apocalypse, of the figures and numbers of the Kabalah to the
Christian dogmas, and a secret negation of every thing absolute in these
dogmas. His Journey through the supernatural worlds is accomplished like
the initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis and Thebes. He escapes from
that gulf of Hell over the gate of which the sentence of despair was
written, _by reversing the positions of his head and feet_, that is to
say, _by accepting the direct opposite of the Catholic dogma:_ and then
he reascends to the light, by using the Devil himself as a monstrous
ladder. Faust ascends to Heaven, by stepping on the head of the
vanquished Mephistopheles. Hell is impassable for those only who know
not how to turn back from it. We free ourselves from its bondage by
audacity.
His Hell is but a negative Purgatory. His Heaven is composed of a series
of Kabalistic circles, divided by a cross, like the Pantacle of Ezekiel.
In the centre of this cross blooms a rose, and we see the symbol of the
Adepts of the Rose-Croix for the first time publicly expounded and
almost categorically explained.
For the first time, because Guillaume de Lorris, who died in 1260, five
years before the birth of Alighieri, had not completed his _Roman de la
Rose_, which was continued by Chopinel, a half century afterward. One is
astonished to discover that the Roman de la Rose and the Divina Commedia
are two opposite forms of one and the same work, initiation into
independence of spirit, a satire on all contemporary institutions, and
the allegorical formula of the great Secrets of the Society of the
Roses-Croix.
The important manifestations of Occultism coincide with the period of
the fall of the Templars; since Jean de Meung or Chopinel, contemporary
of the old age of Dante, flourished during the best years of his life at
the Court of Philippe le Bel. The Roman de la Rose is the Epic of old
France. It is a profound book, under the form of levity, a revelation as
learned as that of Apuleius, of the Mysteries of Occultism. The Rose of
Flamel, that of Jean de Meung, and that of Dante, grew on the same stem.
Swedenborg's system was nothing else than the Kabalah, minus the
principle of the Hierarchy. It is the Temple, without the keystone and
the foundation.
Cagliostro was the Agent of the Templars, and therefore wrote to the
Free-Masons of London that the time had come to begin the work of
re-building the Temple of the Eternal. He had introduced into Masonry a
new Rite called the _Egyptian_, and endeavored to resuscitate the
mysterious worship of Isis. The three letters L. P. D. on his seal, were
the initials of the words _"Lilia pedibus destrue;" tread under foot the
Lilies_ [of France], and a Masonic medal of the sixteenth or seventeenth
century has upon it a sword cutting off the stalk of a lily, and the
words "_talem dabit ultio messem_," such harvest revenge will give.
A Lodge inaugurated under the auspices of Rousseau, the fanatic of
Geneva, became the centre of the revolutionary movement in France, and a
Prince of the blood-royal went thither to swear the destruction of the
successors of Philippe le Bel on the tomb of Jacques de Molai. The
registers of the Order of Templars attest that the Regent, the Duc d'
Orleans, was Grand Master of that formidable Secret Society, and that
his successors were the Duc de Maine, the Prince of Bourbon-Condé, and
the Duc de Cossé-Brissac.
The Templars compromitted the King; they saved him from the rage of the
People, to exasperate that rage and bring on the catastrophe prepared
for centuries; it was a scaffold that the vengeance of the Templars
demanded. The secret movers of the French Revolution had sworn to
overturn the Throne and the Altar upon the Tomb of Jacques de Molai.
When Louis XVI. was executed, half the work was done; and thenceforward
the Army of the Temple was to direct all its efforts against the Pope.
Jacques de Molai and his companions were perhaps martyrs, but their
avengers dishonored their memory. Royalty was regenerated on the
scaffold of Louis XVI., the Church triumphed in the captivity of Pius
VI., carried a prisoner to Valence, and dying of fatigue and sorrow, but
the successors of the Ancient Knights of the Temple perished,
overwhelmed in their fatal victory.
MORALS AND DOGMA.
CONSISTORY.
[Illustration]
XXXI.
GRAND INSPECTOR INQUISITOR COMMANDER.
[Inspector Inquisitor.]
To hear patiently, to weigh deliberately and dispassionately, and to
decide impartially;--these are the chief duties of a Judge. After the
lessons you have received, I need not further enlarge upon them. You
will be ever eloquently reminded of them by the furniture upon our
Altar, and the decorations of the Tribunal.
The Holy Bible will remind you of your obligation; and that as you judge
here below, so you will be yourself judged hereafter, by One who has not
to submit, like an earthly judge, to the sad necessity of inferring the
motives, intentions, and purposes of men [of which all crime essentially
consists] from the uncertain and often unsafe testimony of their acts
and words; as men in thick darkness grope their way, with hands
outstretched before them: but before Whom every thought, feeling,
impulse, and intention of every soul that now is, or ever was, or ever
will be on earth, is, and ever will be through the whole infinite
duration of eternity, present and visible.
The Square and Compass, the Plumb and Level, are well known to you as a
Mason. Upon you as a Judge, they peculiarly inculcate uprightness,
impartiality, careful consideration of facts and circumstances, accuracy
in judgment, and uniformity in decision. As a Judge, too, you are to
bring up square work and square work only. Like a temple erected by the
plumb, you are to lean neither to one side nor the other. Like a
building well squared and levelled, you are to be firm and steadfast in
your convictions of right and justice. Like the circle swept with the
compasses, you are to be true. In the scales of justice you are to weigh
the facts and the law alone, nor place in either scale personal
friendship or personal dislike, neither fear nor favor: and when
reformation is no longer to be hoped for, you are to smite relentlessly
with the sword of justice.
The peculiar and principal symbol of this Degree is the Tetractys of
Pythagoras, suspended in the East, where ordinarily the sacred word or
letter glitters, like it, representing the Deity. Its nine external
points form the triangle, the chief symbol in Masonry, with many of the
meanings of which you are familiar.
To us, its three sides represent the three principal attributes of the
Deity, which created, and now, as ever, support, uphold, and guide the
Universe in its eternal movement; the three supports of the Masonic
Temple, itself an emblem of the Universe:--Wisdom, or the Infinite
Divine Intelligence; Strength, or Power, the Infinite Divine Will; and
Beauty, or the Infinite Divine Harmony, the Eternal Law, by virtue of
which the infinite myriads of suns and worlds flash ever onward in their
ceaseless revolutions, without clash or conflict, in the Infinite of
space, and change and movement are the law of all created existences.
To us, as Masonic Judges, the triangle figures forth the Pyramids,
which, planted firmly as the everlasting hills, and accurately adjusted
to the four cardinal points, defiant of all assaults of men and time,
teach us to stand firm and unshaken as they, when our feet are planted
upon the solid truth.
It includes a multitude of geometrical figures, all having a deep
significance to Masons. The triple triangle is peculiarly sacred, having
ever been among all nations a symbol of the Deity. Prolonging all the
external lines of the Hexagon, which also it includes, we have six
smaller triangles, whose bases cut each other in the central point of
the Tetractys, itself always the symbol of the generative power of the
Universe, the Sun, Brahma, Osiris, Apollo, Bel, and the Deity Himself.
Thus, too, we form twelve still smaller triangles, three times three of
which compose the Tetractys itself.
I refrain from enumerating all the figures that you may trace within it:
but one may not be passed unnoticed. The Hexagon itself faintly images
to us a cube, not visible at the first glance, and therefore the fit
emblem of that faith in things invisible, most essential to salvation.
The first perfect solid, and reminding you of the cubical stone that
sweated blood, and of that deposited by Enoch, it teaches justice,
accuracy, and consistency.
The infinite divisibility of the triangle teaches the infinity of the
Universe, of time, of space, and of the Deity, as do the lines that,
diverging from the common centre, ever increase their distance from each
other as they are infinitely prolonged. As they may be infinite in
number, so are the attributes of Deity infinite; and as they emanate
from one centre and are projected into space, so the whole Universe has
emanated from God.
Remember also, my Brother, that you have other duties to perform than
those of a judge. You are to inquire into and scrutinize carefully the
work of the subordinate Bodies in Masonry. You are to see that
recipients of the higher Degrees are not unnecessarily multiplied; that
improper persons are carefully excluded from membership, and that in
their life and conversation Masons bear testimony to the excellence of
our doctrines and the incalculable value of the institution itself. You
are to inquire also into your own heart and conduct, and keep careful
watch over yourself, that you go not astray. If you harbor ill-will and
jealousy, if you are hospitable to intolerance and bigotry, and churlish
to gentleness and kind affections, opening wide your heart to one and
closing its portals to the other, it is time for you to set in order
your own temple, or else you wear in vain the name and insignia of a
Mason, while yet uninvested with the Masonic nature.
Everywhere in the world there is a natural law, that is, a constant mode
of action, which seems to belong to the nature of things, to the
constitution of the Universe. This fact is universal. In different
departments we call this mode of action by different names, as the law
of Matter, the law of Mind, the law of Morals, and the like. We mean by
this, a certain mode of action which belongs to the material, mental, or
moral forces, the mode in which commonly they are found to act, and in
which it is their ideal to act always. The ideal laws of matter we know
only from the fact that they are always obeyed. To us the actual
_obedience_ is the only evidence of the ideal rule; for in respect to
the conduct of the material world, the _ideal_ and the _actual_ are the
same.
The laws of matter we learn only by observation and experience. Before
experience of the fact, no man could foretell that a body, falling
toward the earth, would descend sixteen feet the first second, twice
that the next, four times the third, and sixteen times the fourth. No
mode of action in our consciousness anticipates this rule of action in
the outer world. The same is true of all the laws of matter. The ideal
law is known because it is a fact. The law is imperative. It must be
obeyed without hesitation. Laws of crystallization, laws of proportion
in chemical combination,--neither in these nor in any other law of
Nature is there any margin left for oscillation of disobedience. Only
the primal will of God works in the material world, and no secondary
finite will.
There are no exceptions to the great general law of Attraction, which
binds atom to atom in the body of a rotifier visible only by aid of a
microscope, orb to orb, system to system; gives unity to the world of
things, and rounds these worlds of systems to a Universe. At first there
seem to be exceptions to this law, as in growth and decomposition, in
the repulsions of electricity; but at length all these are found to be
special cases of the one great law of attraction acting in various
modes.
The variety of effect of this law at first surprises the senses; but in
the end the unity of cause astonishes the cultivated mind. Looked at in
reference to this globe, an earthquake is no more than a chink that
opens in a garden-walk of a dry day in Summer. A sponge is porous,
having small spaces between the solid parts: the solar system is only
_more_ porous, having larger room between the several orbs: the Universe
yet more so, with spaces between the systems, as small, compared with
_infinite_ space, as those between the atoms that compose the bulk of
the smallest invisible animalcule, of which millions swim in a drop of
salt-water. The same attraction holds together the animalcule, the
sponge, the system, and the Universe. Every particle of matter in that
Universe is related to each and all the other particles; and attraction
is their common bond.