bi-sexual, as the word [Hebrew: יה], _Yud-He_ or JAH is, and discloses
the meaning of much of the obscure language of the Kabalah, and is The
Highest of which the Columns Jachin and Boaz are the symbol. "In the
image of Deity," we are told, "God created the Man; Male and Female
created He _them_:" and the writer, symbolizing the Divine by the Human,
then tells us that the woman, at first contained in the man, was taken
from his side. So Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, was born, a woman and in
armor, of the brain of Jove; Isis was the sister before she was the wife
of Osiris, and within BRAHM, the Source of all, the Very God, without
sex or name, was developed MAYA, the Mother of all that is. The WORD is
the First and Only-begotten of the Father; and the awe with which the
Highest Mysteries were regarded has imposed silence in respect to the
Nature of the Holy Spirit. The Word is Light, and the Life of Humanity.
It is for the Adepts to understand the meaning of the Symbols.
Return now, with us, to the Degrees of the Blue Masonry, and for your
last lesson, receive the explanation of one of their Symbols.
You see upon the altar of those Degrees the SQUARE and the COMPASS, and
you remember how they lay upon the altar in each Degree.
The SQUARE is an instrument adapted for plane surfaces only, and
therefore appropriate to Geometry, or measurement of the Earth, which
appears to be, and was by the Ancients supposed to be, a plane. The
COMPASS is an instrument that has relation to spheres and spherical
surfaces, and is adapted to spherical trigonometry, or that branch of
mathematics which deals with the Heavens and the orbits of the planetary
bodies.
The SQUARE, therefore, is a natural and appropriate Symbol of this Earth
and the things that belong to it, are of it, or concern it. The Compass
is an equally natural and appropriate Symbol of the Heavens, and of all
celestial things and celestial natures.
You see at the beginning of this reading, an old Hermetic Symbol, copied
from the "MATERIA PRIMA" of Valentinus, printed at Franckfurt, in 1613,
with a treatise entitled "AZOTH." Upon it you see a Triangle upon a
Square, both of these contained in a circle; and above this, standing
upon a dragon, a human body, with two arms only, but two heads, one male
and the other female. By the side of the male head is the Sun, and by
that of the female head, the Moon, the crescent within the circle of the
full moon. And the hand on the _male_ side holds a _Compass_, and that
on the _female_ side, a _Square_.
The Heavens and the Earth were personified as Deities, even among the
Aryan Ancestors of the European nations of the Hindus, Zends, Bactrians,
and Persians; and the Rig Veda Sanhita contains hymns addressed to them
as gods. They were deified also among the Phœnicians; and among the
Greeks OURANOS and GEA, Heaven and Earth, were sung as the most ancient
of the Deities, by Hesiod.
It is the great, fertile, beautiful MOTHER, Earth, that produces, with
limitless profusion of beneficence, everything that ministers to the
needs, to the comfort, and to the luxury of man. From her teeming and
inexhaustible bosom come, the fruits, the grain, the flowers, in their
season. From it comes all that feeds the animals which serve man as
laborers and for food. She, in the fair Springtime, is green with
abundant grass, and the trees spring from her soil, and from her teeming
vitality take their wealth of green leaves. In her womb are found the
useful and valuable minerals; hers are the seas the swarm with life;
hers the rivers that furnish food and irrigation, and the mountains that
send down the streams which swell into these rivers; hers the forests
that feed the sacred fires for the sacrifices, and blaze upon the
domestic hearths. The EARTH, therefore, the great PRODUCER, was always
represented as a _female_, as the MOTHER,--Great, Bounteous, Beneficent
Mother Earth.
On the other hand, it is the light and heat of the Sun in the Heavens,
and the rains that seem to come from them, that in the Springtime make
fruitful this bountifully-producing Earth, that restore life and warmth
to her veins, chilled by Winter, set running free her streams, and
_beget_, as it were, that greenness and that abundance of which she is
so prolific. As the procreative and generative agents, the Heavens and
the Sun have always been regarded as _male_; as the generators that
fructify the Earth and cause it to produce.
The Hermaphroditic figure is the Symbol of the double nature anciently
assigned to the Deity, as Generator and Producer, as BRAHM and MAYA
among the Aryans, Osiris and Isis among the Egyptians. As the Sun was
male, so the Moon was female; and Isis was both the sister and the wife
of Osiris. The Compass, therefore, is the Hermetic Symbol of the
Creative Deity, and the Square of the productive Earth or Universe.
From the Heavens come the spiritual and immortal portion of man; from
the Earth his material and mortal portion. The Hebrew Genesis says that
YEHOUAH formed man of the dust of the Earth, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life. Through the seven planetary spheres,
represented by the Mystic Ladder of the Mithriac Initiations, and it by
that which Jacob saw in his dream (not with _three_, but with _seven_
steps), the Souls, emanating from the Deity, descended, to be united to
their human bodies; and through those seven spheres they must re-ascend,
to return to their origin and home in the bosom of the Deity.
The COMPASS, therefore, as the Symbol of the _Heavens_, represents the
spiritual, intellectual, and moral portion of this double nature of
Humanity; and the SQUARE, as the Symbol of the _Earth_, its material,
sensual, and baser portion.
"Truth and Intelligence," said one of the Ancient Indian Sects of
Philosophers, "are the Eternal attributes of God, not of the individual
Soul, which is susceptible both of knowledge and ignorance, of pleasure
and pain; therefore God and the individual Soul are distinct:" and this
expression of the ancient Nyaya Philosophers, in regard to Truth, has
been handed down to us through the long succession of ages, in the
lessons of Freemasonry, wherein we read, that "Truth is a Divine
Attribute, and the foundation of every virtue."
"While embodied in matter," they said, "the Soul is in a state of
imprisonment, and is under the influence of evil passions; but having,
by intense study, arrived at the knowledge of the elements and
principles of Nature, it attains unto the place of THE ETERNAL; in which
state of happiness, its individuality does not cease."
The vitality which animates the mortal frame, the Breath of Life of the
Hebrew Genesis, the Hindu Philosophers in general held, perishes with
it; but the Soul is divine, an emanation of the Spirit of God, but not a
_portion_ of that Spirit. For they compared it to the heat and light
sent forth from the Sun, or to a _ray_ of that light, which neither
lessens nor divides its own essence.
However created, or invested with separate existence, the Soul, which is
but the creature of the Deity, cannot know the mode of its creation, nor
comprehend its own individuality. It cannot even comprehend how the
being which it and the body constitute, can feel pain, or see, or hear.
It has pleased the Universal Creator to set bounds to the scope of our
human and finite reason, beyond which it cannot reach; and if we are
capable of comprehending the mode and manner of the creation or
generation of the Universe of things, He has been pleased to conceal it
from us by an impenetrable veil, while the words used to express the act
have no other definite meaning than that He caused that Universe to
commence to exist.
It is enough for us to know, what Masonry teaches, that we are not all
mortal; that the Soul or Spirit, the intellectual and reasoning portion
of ourself, is our Very Self, is not subject to decay and dissolution,
but is simple and immaterial, survives the death of the body, and is
_capable_ of immortality; that it is also capable of improvement and
advancement, of increase of knowledge of the things that are divine, of
becoming wiser and better, and more and more worthy of immortality; and
that to become so, and to help to improve and benefit others and all our
race, is the noblest ambition and highest glory that we can entertain
and attain unto, in this momentary and imperfect life.
In every human being the Divine and the Human are intermingled. In every
one there are the Reason and the Moral sense, the passions that prompt
to evil, and the sensual appetites. "If ye live after the flesh, ye
shall die," said Paul, writing to the Christians at Rome, "but if ye
through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For
as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God." "The
flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh," he
said, writing to the Christians of Galatia, "and these are contrary the
one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." "That
which I do, I do not willingly do," he wrote to the Romans, "for what I
wish to do, that I do not do, but that which I hate I do. It is no more
I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. To will, is present with me;
but how to perform that which is good, I find not. For, I do not do the
good that I desire to do; and the evil that I do not wish to do, that I
do. I find then a _law_, that when I desire to do good, evil is present
with me; for I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see
another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and
bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members ...
So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh
the law of sin."
Life is a battle, and to fight that battle heroically and well is the
great purpose of every man's existence, who is worthy and fit to live at
all. To stem the strong currents of adversity, to advance in despite of
all obstacles, to snatch victory from the jealous grasp of fortune, to
become a chief and a leader among men, to rise to rank and power by
eloquence, courage, perseverance, study, energy, activity, discouraged
by no reverses, impatient of no delays, deterred by no hazards; to win
wealth, to subjugate men by our intellect, the very elements by our
audacity, to succeed, to prosper, to thrive;--thus it is, according to
the general understanding, that one fights well the battle of life. Even
to succeed in business by that boldness which halts for no risks, that
audacity which stakes all upon hazardous chances; by the shrewdness of
the close dealer, the boldness of the unscrupulous operator, even by
the knaveries of the stock-board and the gold-room; to crawl up into
place by disreputable means or the votes of brutal ignorance,--these
also are deemed to be among the great successes of life.
But that which is the greatest battle, and in which the truest honor and
most real success are to be won, is that which our intellect and reason
and moral sense, our spiritual natures, fight against our sensual
appetites and evil passions, our earthly and material or animal nature.
Therein only are the true glories of heroism to be won, there only the
successes that entitle us to triumphs.
In every human life that battle is fought; and those who win elsewhere,
often suffer ignominious defeat and disastrous rout, and discomfiture
and shameful downfall in this encounter.
You have heard more than one definition of Freemasonry. The truest and
the most significant you have yet to hear. It is taught to the entered
Apprentice, the Fellow-Craft, and the Master, and it is taught in every
Degree through which you have advanced to this. It is a definition of
what Freemasonry is, of what its purposes and its very essence and
spirit are; and it has for every one of us the force and sanctity of a
divine law, and imposes on every one of us a solemn obligation.
_It is symbolized and taught, to the Apprentice as well as to you, by
the_ COMPASS _and the_ SQUARE; upon which, as well as upon the Book of
your Religion and the Book of the law of the Scottish Freemasonry, you
have taken so many obligations. As a Knight, you have been taught it by
the Swords, the symbols of HONOR and DUTY, on which you have taken your
vows: it was taught you by the BALANCE, the symbol of all Equilibrium,
and by the CROSS, the symbol of devotedness and self-sacrifice; but all
that these teach and contain is taught and contained, for Entered
Apprentice, Knight, and Prince alike, by the Compass and the Square.
For the Apprentice, the points of the Compass are beneath the Square.
For the Fellow-Craft, one is above and one beneath. For the Master, both
are dominant, and have rule, control, and empire over the symbol of the
earthly and the material.
FREEMASONRY _is the subjugation of the Human that is in man by the
Divine; the Conquest of the Appetites and Passions by the Moral Sense
and the Reason; a continual effort, struggle, and warfare of the
Spiritual against the Material and Sensual._ That victory, when it has
been achieved and secured, and the conqueror may rest upon his shield
and wear the well-earned laurels, is the true HOLY EMPIRE.
To achieve it, the Mason must first attain a solid conviction, founded
upon reason, that he hath within him a spiritual nature, a soul that is
not to die when the body is dissolved, but is to continue to exist and
to advance toward perfection through all the ages of eternity, and to
see more and more clearly, as it draws nearer unto God, the Light of the
Divine Presence. This the Philosophy of the Ancient and Accepted Rite
teaches him; and it encourages him to persevere by helping him to
believe that his free will is entirely consistent with God's Omnipotence
and Omniscience; that He is not only infinite in power, and of infinite
wisdom, but of infinite mercy, and an infinitely tender pity and love
for the frail and imperfect creatures that He has made.
Every Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, from the first
to the thirty-second, teaches by its ceremonial as well as by its
instruction, that the noblest purpose of life and the highest duty of a
man are to strive incessantly and vigorously to win the mastery of
everything, of that which in him is spiritual and divine, over that
which is material and sensual; so that in him also, as in the Universe
which God governs, Harmony and Beauty may be the result of a just
equilibrium.
You have been taught this in those Degrees, conferred in the Lodge of
Perfection, which inculcate particularly the practical morality of
Freemasonry. To be true, under whatever temptation to be false; to be
honest in all your dealings, even if great losses should be the
consequence; to be charitable, when selfishness would prompt you to
close your hand, and deprivation of luxury or comfort must follow the
charitable act; to judge justly and impartially, even in your own case,
when baser impulses prompt you to do an injustice in order that you may
be benefited or justified; to be tolerant, when passion prompts to
intolerance and persecution; to do that which is right, when the wrong
seems to promise larger profit; and to wrong no man of anything that is
his, however easy it may seem so to enrich yourself;--in all these
things and others which you promised in those Degrees, your spiritual
nature is taught and encouraged to assert its rightful dominion over
your appetites and passions.
The philosophical Degrees have taught you the value of knowledge, the
excellence of truth, the superiority of intellectual labor, the dignity
and value of your soul, the worth of great and noble thoughts; and thus
endeavored to assist you to rise above the level of the animal appetites
and passions, the pursuits of greed and the miserable struggles of
ambition, and to find purer pleasure and nobler prizes and rewards in
the acquisition of knowledge, the enlargement of the intellect, the
interpretation of the sacred writing of God upon the great pages of the
Book of Nature.
And the Chivalric Degrees have led you on the same path, by showing you
the excellence of generosity, clemency, forgiveness of injuries,
magnanimity, contempt of danger, and the paramount obligations of Duty
and Honor. They have taught you to overcome the fear of death, to devote
yourself to the great cause of civil and religious Liberty, to be the
Soldier of all that is just, right, and true; in the midst of pestilence
to deserve your title of Knight Commander of the Temple, and neither
there nor elsewhere to desert your post and flee dastard-like from the
foe. In all this, you assert the superiority and right to dominion of
that in you which is spiritual and divine. No base fear of danger or
death, no sordid ambitions or pitiful greeds or base considerations can
tempt a true Scottish Knight to dishonor, and so make his intellect, his
reason, his soul, the bond-slave of his appetites, of his passions, of
that which is material and animal, selfish and brutish in his nature.
It is not possible to create a true and genuine Brotherhood upon any
theory of the baseness of human nature: nor by a community of belief in
abstract propositions as to the nature of the Deity, the number of His
persons, or other theorems of religious faith: nor by the establishment
of a system of association simply for mutual relief, and by which, in
consideration of certain payments regularly made, each becomes entitled
to a certain stipend in case of sickness, to attention then, and to the
ceremonies of burial after death.
There can be no genuine Brotherhood without mutual regard, good opinion
and esteem, mutual charity, and mutual allowance for faults and
failings. It is those only who learn habitually to think better of each
other, to look habitually for the good that is in each other, and
expect, allow for, and overlook, the evil, who can be Brethren one of
the other, in any true sense of the word. Those who gloat over the
failings of one another, who think each other to be naturally base and
low, of a nature in which the Evil predominates and excellence is not to
be looked for, cannot be even friends, and much less Brethren.
No one can have a right to think meanly of his race, unless he also
thinks meanly of himself. If, from a single fault or error, he judges of
the character of another, and takes the single act as evidence of the
whole nature of the man and of the whole course of his life, he ought to
consent to be judged by the same rule, and to admit it to be right that
others should thus uncharitably condemn himself. But such judgments will
become impossible when he incessantly reminds himself that in every man
who lives there is an immortal Soul endeavoring to do that which is
right and just; a Ray, however small, and almost inappreciable, from the
Great Source of Light and Intelligence, which ever struggles upward amid
all the impediments of sense and the obstructions of the passions; and
that in every man this ray continually wages war against his evil
passions and his unruly appetites, or, if it has succumbed, is never
wholly extinguished and annihilated. For he will then see that it is not
victory, but the struggle that deserves honor; since in this as in all
else no man can always command success. Amid a cloud of errors, of
failure, and shortcomings, he will look for the struggling Soul, for
that which is good in every one amid the evil, and, believing that each
is better than from his acts and omissions he seems to be, and that God
cares for him still, and pities him and loves him, he will feel that
even the erring sinner is still his brother, still entitled to his
sympathy, and bound to him by the indissoluble ties of fellowship.
If there be nothing of the divine in man, what is he, after all, but a
more intelligent animal? He hath no fault nor vice which some beast hath
not; and therefore in his vices he is but a beast of a higher order; and
he hath hardly any moral excellence, perhaps none, which some animal
hath not in as great a degree,--even the more excellent of these, such
as generosity, fidelity, and magnanimity.
Bardesan, the Syrian Christian, in his Book of the Laws of Countries,
says, of men, that "in the things belonging to their bodies, they
maintain their nature like animals, and in the things which belong to
their minds, they do that which they wish, as being free and with power,
and as the likeness of God"; and Meliton, Bishop of Sardis, in his
Oration to Antoninus Cæsar, says, "Let Him, the ever-living God, be
always present in thy mind; for thy mind itself is His likeness, for it,
too, is invisible and impalpable, and without form.... As He exists
forever, so thou also, when thou shalt have put off this which is
visible and corruptible, shalt stand before Him forever, living and
endowed with knowledge."
As a matter far above our comprehension, and in the Hebrew Genesis the
words that are used to express the origin of things are of uncertain
meaning, and with equal propriety may be translated by the word
"generated," "produced," "made," or "created," we need not dispute nor
debate whether the Soul or Spirit of man be a ray that has emanated or
flowed forth from the Supreme Intelligence, or whether the Infinite
Power hath called each into existence from nothing, by a mere exertion
of Its will, and endowed it with immortality, and with intelligence like
unto the Divine Intelligence: for, in either case it may be said that in
man the Divine is united to the Human. Of this union the equilateral
Triangle inscribed within the Square is a Symbol.
We see the Soul, Plato said, as men see the statue of Glaucus, recovered
from the sea wherein it had lain many years--which viewing, it was not
easy, if possible, to discern what was its original nature, its limbs
having been partly broken and partly worn and by defacement changed, by
the action of the waves, and shells, weeds, and pebbles adhering to it,
so that it more resembled some strange monster than that which it was
when it left its Divine Source. Even so, he said, we see the Soul,
deformed by innumerable things that have done it harm, have mutilated
and defaced it. But the Mason who hath the ROYAL SECRET can also with
him argue, from beholding its love of wisdom, its tendency toward
association with what is divine and immortal, its larger aspirations,
its struggles, though they may have ended in defeat, with the
impediments and enthralments of the senses and the passions, that when
it shall have been rescued from the material environments that now prove
too strong for it, and be freed from the deforming and disfiguring
accretions that here adhere to it, it will again be seen in its true
nature, and by degrees ascend by the mystic ladder of the Spheres, to
its first home and place of origin.
The ROYAL SECRET, of which you are Prince, if you are a true Adept, if
knowledge seems to you advisable, and Philosophy is, for you, radiant
with a divine beauty, is that which the Sohar terms _The Mystery of
the_ BALANCE. It is the Secret of the UNIVERSAL EQUILIBRIUM:--
--Of that Equilibrium in the Deity, between the Infinite Divine WISDOM
and the Infinite Divine POWER, from which result the Stability of the
Universe, the unchangeableness of the Divine Law, and the Principles of
Truth, Justice, and Right which are a part of it; and the Supreme
Obligation of the Divine Law upon all men, as superior to all other law,
and forming a part of all the laws of men and nations.
--Of that Equilibrium also, between the Infinite Divine JUSTICE and the
Infinite Divine MERCY, the result of which is the Infinite Divine
EQUITY, and the Moral Harmony or Beauty of the Universe. By it the
endurance of created and imperfect natures in the presence of a Perfect
Deity is made possible; and for Him, also, as for us, to love is better
than to hate, and Forgiveness is wiser than Revenge or Punishment.
--Of that Equilibrium between NECESSITY and LIBERTY, between the action
of the DIVINE Omnipotence and the Free-will of man, by which vices and
base actions, and ungenerous thoughts and words are crimes and wrongs,
justly punished by the law of cause and consequence, though nothing in
the Universe can happen or be done contrary to the will of God; and
without which co-existence of Liberty and Necessity, of Free-will in the
creature and Omnipotence in the Creator, there could be no religion, nor
any law of right and wrong, or merit and demerit, nor any justice in
human punishments or penal laws.
--Of that Equilibrium between Good and Evil, and Light and Darkness in
the world, which assures us that all is the work of the Infinite Wisdom
and of an Infinite Love; and that there is no rebellious demon of Evil,
or Principle of Darkness co-existent and in eternal controversy with
God, or the Principle of Light and of Good: by attaining to the
knowledge of which equilibrium we can, through Faith, see that the
existence of Evil, Sin, Suffering, and Sorrow in the world, is
consistent with the Infinite Goodness as well as with the Infinite
Wisdom of the Almighty.