here is the rest of the chapter:
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,
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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 perfectible 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 heating 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
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[paragraph continues] 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 re-cover 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,
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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 worldly 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 Khu_ru_m, is a type of the spiritual regeneration of man. Psyche (the Soul), like Ariadne, had
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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
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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
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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 con-templates 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.
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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."
See you next week!
Next: XXVI. Prince of Mercy, or Scottish Trinitarian
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