Greetings Everyone, and welcome back to our study and opinion of Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma as we continue on with Chapter 25.
This time we will read Pike’s description of the soul as the soul travels through the universe and the constellations.
Masons might wish to take note of the symbolisms representing the cosmos in our lodges as we participate in our rituals. We often travel through these symbols without realizing their meanings.
In another way, we must remember that all of us are traveling through the cosmos on our planet, in these allegories we can find ourselves growing in intellect and experience as we hurl through space RIGHT NOW.
We feel, we think, we observe and we teach and learn as we hurl through the constellations.
Now, LET’S READ PIKE!
The highest and purest portion of matter, which nourishes and constitutes divine existences, is what the poets term nectar, the beverage of the Gods. The lower, more disturbed and grosser portion, is what intoxicates souls. The ancients symbolized it as the River Lethe, dark stream of oblivion. How do we explain the soul's forgetfulness of its antecedents, or reconcile that utter absence of remembrance of its former condition, with its essential immortality? In truth, we for the most part dread and shrink from any attempt at explanation of it to ourselves.
Dragged down by the heaviness produced by this inebriating draught, the soul falls along the zodiac and the milky way to the lower spheres, and in its descent not only takes, in each sphere, a new envelope of the material composing the luminous bodies of the planets, but receives there the different faculties which it is to exercise while it inhabits the body.
In these paragraphs, Pike describes the idea of the soul becoming aware and capable of learning and experiencing long before the soul arrives into the body. Yet, we arrive (or rather the soul arrives) in a state of forgetfulness. This is important to our progression in our bodies so that we are able to learn again and to share in THIS form, outside of any perfection as to serve humanity as equals.
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In Saturn, it acquires the power of reasoning and intelligence, or what is termed the logical and contemplative faculty. From Jupiter it receives the power of action. Mars gives it valor, enterprise, and impetuosity. From the Sun it receives the senses and imagination, which produce sensation, perception, and thought. Venus inspires it with desires. Mercury gives it the faculty of expressing and enunciating what it thinks and feels. And, on entering the sphere of the Moon, it acquires the force of generation and growth. This lunary sphere, lowest and basest to divine bodies, is first and highest to terrestrial bodies. And the lunary body there assumed by the soul, while, as it were, the sediment of celestial matter, is also the first substance of animal matter.
The celestial bodies, Heaven, the Stars, and the other Divine elements, ever aspire to rise. The soul reaching the region which mortality inhabits, tends toward terrestrial bodies, and is deemed to die. Let no one, says Macrobius, be surprised that we so frequently speak of the death of this soul, which yet we call immortal. It is neither annulled nor destroyed by such death: but merely enfeebled for a time; and does not thereby forfeit its prerogative of immortality; for afterward, freed from the body, when it has been purified from the vice-stains contracted during that connection, it is re-established in all its privileges, and returns to the luminous abode of its immortality.
In these paragraphs, Pike expresses exactly what the soul acquires and where the soul acquires it. And after the acquisitions of knowledge and learning, Pike writes about the souls ultimate demise in the body, not ever dying but experiencing death, and again rising into the heavens and into immortality.
Is this not our OWN story? We go along in this lifetime experencing and learning and teaching, and then it seems just as soon as we arrive, we then face our own demise.
Life in this form is indeed very short compared to the immortality of the soul.
We KNOW we will one day perish in this body, yet we also KNOW it is essential to EXPERIENCE all that we can within the bounds of what is culturally acceptable and by what our own morality dictates.
We cannot ever really experince it ALL as we are bound by certain constraints in our own time and place, but we can certainly be EDUCATED about “it ALL”, and hopefully without passing too much judgement on another persons or another culture’s experiences.
This is the root of Freemasonry, in my opinion, and this is exactly why, in my opinion, our rituals borrow from so many different cultures and religions. Masonry is trying to give the intiate the EXPERIENCE of the cultures and religions we may never visit personally, without the dogmatic everyday living that is imposed in those cultures and religions. We become EDUCATED and EXPERIENCED through the rituals of freemasonry, if we only take some time and reflect upon what we have done in lodge and not just go through the motions.
For the non Mason, and in everyone’s daily lives, we should find time to listen to ideals and beliefs that are not our own, and we should take time to at least UNDERSTAND what another is passionate about, it is in this way through understanding, we tend to seek out more experience.
Pike is writing of the experiences of the soul long before the soul reaches the body. In these passages we realize that experiences and education is inherent in the soul, it is what we desire, and experience is what we are here for. We should not shy away from experience as it helps us to expand upon our very humanity.
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On its return, it restores to each sphere through which it ascends, the passions and earthly faculties received from them: to
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the Moon, the faculty of increase and diminution of the body; to Mercury, fraud, the architect of evils; to Venus, the seductive love of pleasure; to the Sun, the passion for greatness and empire; to Mars, audacity and temerity; to Jupiter, avarice; and to Saturn, falsehood and deceit: and at last, relieved of all, it enters naked and pure into the eighth sphere or highest Heaven.
All this agrees with the doctrine of Plato, that the soul cannot re-enter into Heaven, until the revolutions of the Universe shall have restored it to its primitive condition, and purified it from the effects of its contact with the four elements.
This opinion of the pre-existence of souls, as pure and celestial substances, before their union with our bodies, to put on and animate which they descend from Heaven, is one of great antiquity. A modern Rabbi, Manasseh Ben Israel, says it was always the belief of the Hebrews. It was that of most philosophers who admitted the immortality of the soul: and therefore it was taught in the Mysteries; for, as Lactantius says, they could not see how it was possible that the soul should exist after the body, if it had not existed before it, and if its nature was not independent of that of the body. The same doctrine was adopted by the most learned of the Greek Fathers, and by many of the Latins: and it would probably prevail largely at the present day, if men troubled themselves to think upon this subject at all, and to inquire whether the soul's immortality involved its prior existence.
And finally, we learn that it is experience that the soul ascends back into the heavens with, and until the soul is purified again, it cannot enter the highest heaven, according to Plato.
I can understand that some things the soul experiences in the terrestrial state, in the human state, the heavens would not want to accept in its midst.
Sadness, doubt, prejudices, racism, suffering, illness, arrogance, and all of the human shortcomings and ignorant behavior that we experience in our lifetimes have no place in the heavens.
And since the Masonic lodge is a representation of the heavens, we should never allow much of the ignorant behaviors of humanity to be present there, either.
That will be all for today!
Thanks so very much for your time spent reading with me, I hope you are learning as much as I am.
Join me next week as we will continue on with Chapter 25.