Roots
of Ritualism in
Church
and Masonry
By
H
P Blavatsky
THEOSOPHISTS
are very often, and very unjustly too, accused of
infidelity and even of Atheism. This is a grave error, especially with regard
to the latter charge.
In
a large society, composed of so many races and nationalities, in an association
wherein every man and woman is left to believe in whatever he or she likes, and
to follow or not to follow—just as they please—the religion they were born and
brought up in, there is but little room left for Atheism. As for “infidelity,”
it becomes a misnomer and a fallacy.
To show how absurd is the charge, in any
case, it is sufficient to ask our traducers to point out to us, in the whole
civilized world, that person who is not regarded as an “infidel” by some other
person belonging to some different creed. Whether one moves in highly respectable
and orthodox circles, or in a so-called heterodox “society,” it is all the
same. It is a mutual accusation, tacitly, if not openly, expressed; a kind of a
mental game at shuttlecock and battledore flung reciprocally, and in polite
silence, at each other’s heads. In sober reality, then, no theosophist any more
than a non-theosophist can be an infidel; while, on the other hand, there is no
human being living who is not an infidel in the opinion of some sectarian or
other. As to the charge of Atheism, it is quite another question.
What
is Atheism, we ask, first of all? Is it disbelief in and denial of the
existence of a God, or Gods, or simply the refusal to accept a personal deity
on the somewhat gushy definition of R. Hall, who explains Atheism as “a
ferocious system” because, “it leaves nothing above (?) us
to excite awe, nor around us to awaken tenderness” (!) If the former, then most
of our members—the hosts in
Most
of us believe in the survival of the Spiritual Ego, in Planetary Spirits and
Nirmanakayas, those great Adepts of the past ages, who, renouncing their right
to Nirvana, remain in our spheres of being, not as “spirits” but as complete
spiritual human Beings. Save their corporeal, visible envelope, which they
leave behind, they remain as they were, in order to help poor humanity, as far
as can be done without sinning against Karmic law. This is the “Great
Renunciation,” indeed; an incessant, conscious self-sacrifice throughout æons and
ages till that day when the eyes of blind mankind will open and, instead of the
few, all will see the universal truth.
These
Beings, may well be regarded as God and Gods—if they
would but allow the fire in our hearts, at the thought of that purest of all
sacrifices, to be fanned into the flame of adoration, or the smallest altar in
their honour. But they will not. Verily, “the secret heart is fair Devotion’s
(only) temple,” and any other, in this case, would be no better than profane
ostentation.
Now
with regard to other invisible Beings, some of whom are still higher, and
others far lower on the scale of divine evolution. To the latter we will have nothing
to say; the former will have nothing to say to us: for we are as good as
non-existent for them.
The
homogeneous can take no cognizance of the
heterogeneous; and unless we learn to shuffle off our
mortal coil and commune with them “spirit to spirit,” we can hardly hope to
recognize their true nature.
Moreover,
every true Theosophist holds that the divine HIGHER SELF of every mortal man is
of the same essence as the essence of these Gods. Being, moreover, endowed with
free-will, hence having, more than they, responsibility,
we regard the incarnated EGO as far superior to, if not more divine than, any
spiritual INTELLIGENCE still awaiting incarnation. Philosophically, the reason
for this is obvious, and every metaphysician of the Eastern school will
understand it. The incarnated EGO has odds against it which do not exist in the
case of a pure divine Essence unconnected with matter; the latter has no
personal merit, whereas the former is on his way to final perfection through
the trials of existence, of pain and suffering. The shadow of Karma does not
fall upon that which is divine and unalloyed, and so different from us that no
relation can exist between the two.
As
to those deities which are regarded in the Hindu esoteric Pantheon as finite
and therefore under the sway of Karma, no true philosopher would ever worship
them; they are signs and symbols.
Shall
we then be regarded as atheists, only because while believing in Spiritual
Hosts—those beings who have to be worshipped in their collectivity as a personal
God—we reject them absolutely as representing the ONE Unknown? and because we affirm that the eternal Principle, the ALL in
ALL, or the Absoluteness of the Totality, cannot be expressed by limited words,
nor be symbolized by anything with conditioned and qualificative attributes?
Shall we, more over, permit to pass without protest the charge against us of
idolatry—by the Roman Catholics, of all men? They, whose religion is as pagan
as any other of the solar and element worshippers; whose creed was framed out
for them, cut and dry, ages before the year I of Christian era; and whose
dogmas and rites are the same as those of every idolatrous nation—if any such
nation still exists in spirit anywhere at this day. Over the whole face of the
earth, from the North to the South Pole, from the frozen gulfs of Northland to
the torrid plains of Southern India, from Central America to Greece and
Chaldea, the Solar Fire, as the symbol of divine Creative Power, of Life and
Love, was worshipped. The union of the Sun (male element)with
Earth and the Water (matter, the female element) was celebrated in the temples
of the whole Universe.
If
Pagans had a feast commemorative of this union—which they celebrated nine
months ere the Winter Solstice, when
Hence, the worship of the Fire, lights and lamps in the churches.
Why? Because Vulcan, the fire-God, married Venus, the
daughter of the Sea; that the Magi watched over the sacred fire in the East,
and the Virgin-Vestals in the West. The Sun was the “Father”; Nature,
the eternal Virgin Mother: Osiris and Isis, Spirit-Matter, the latter
worshipped under each of its three states by Pagan and Christian. Hence the
Virgins—even in Japan—clothed with star-spangled blue, standing on the lunar
crescent, as symbolical of female Nature (in her three elements of Air, Water,
Earth); Fire or the male Sun, fecundating her yearly with his radiant beams
(the “cloven tongues like as of fire” of the Holy Ghost).
In
Kalevala the oldest epic Poem of the Finns, of the pre-Christian antiquity of
which there remains no doubt in the minds of scholars, we read of the gods of
Finland, the gods of air and water, of fire and the forest, of Heaven and the
Earth. In the superb translation by J. M. Crawford, in Rune L (Vol. II) the
reader will find the whole legend of the Virgin Mary in Mariatta childof
beauty,
Virgin-Mother of theNorthland.
. .
Ukko, the great Spirit, whose abode
is in Yûmäla, the sky or Heaven, chooses the Virgin Mariatta as his vehicle to
incarnate through her in a Man-God. She becomes pregnant by plucking and eating
a red berry (marja), when, repudiated by her parents,
she gives birth to a “Son immortal,” in the manger of a stable.
Then
the “Holy Babe” disappears, and Mariatta is in search of him. She asks a star,
“the guiding star of Northland,” where her “holy baby lies hidden,” but the
star answers her angrily:--
If
I knew, I would not tell thee;
‘Tis
thy child that me created
In the cold
to shine forever. . . .
and tells the
Virgin nothing. Nor will the golden moon help her, because, Mariatta’s babe
having created her, left her in the great sky:--
Here to wander in the
darkness,
All alone at eve towander,
Shining for the good of others. . . .
It is only the “Silver Sun” who,
taking pity upon the Virgin-Mother, tells her:--
Yonder is thy goldeninfant,
There thy holy babe
liessleeping,
Hidden to his belt inwater,
Hidden in the reeds andrushes.She
takes the holy baby home, and while the mother calls him “Flower,”
Others
named him Son of Sorrow.
Is
this a post-Christian legend? Not at all; for, as said, it is essentially pagan
in origin and recognized as pre-Christian.
Hence,
with such data in hand in literature, the ever-recurring taunts of idolatry and
atheism, of infidelity and paganism, ought to cease. The term idolatry,
moreover, is of Christian origin. It was used by the early Nazarenes, during
the 2½ centuries of our era, against those nations who used temples and
churches, statues and images, because they, the early Christians themselves,
had neither temples, statues, nor images, all of which they abhorred. Therefore
the term “idolatrous” fits far better our accusers than ourselves,
as this article will show. With Madonnas on every cross road, their thousands
of statues, from Christs and Angels in every shape down to Popes and Saints, it
is rather a dangerous thing for a Catholic to taunt any Hindu or Buddhist with
idolatry. The assertion has now to be proved.
II
We
may begin by the origin of the word God. What is the real and primitive meaning
of the term? Its meanings and etymologies are as many as they are
various. One of them shows the word derived from
an old Persian and mystic term goda. It means
“itself,” or something self-emanating from the absolute Principle. The root
word was godan—whence Wodan, Woden, and Odin, the Oriental radical having been
left almost unaltered by the Germanic races. Thus they made of it gott, from
which the adjective gut—“good,” as also the term gotz, or idol, were derived.
In ancient Greece, the word Zeus and Theos led to the Latin Deus. This goda,
the emanation, is not, and cannot be, identical with that from which it
radiates, and is, therefore, but a periodical, finite manifestation.
Old
Aratus, who wrote “full of Zeus are all the streets and the markets of man;
full of Him is the sea and the harbours,” did not limit his deity to such a
temporary reflection on our terrestrial plane as Zeus, or even its
antetype—Dyaus, but meant, indeed, the universal, omnipresent Principle.
Before
the radiant god Dyaus (the sky) attracted the notice of man, there was the
Vedic Tad (“that”) which, to the Initiate and philosopher, would have no
definite name, and which was the absolute Darkness that underlies every
manifested
radiancy. No more than the mythical Jupiter—the
latter reflection of Zeus—could Surya, the Sun, the first manifestation in the
world of Maya and the Son of Dyaus, fail to be termed “Father” by the ignorant.
Thus the Sun became very soon interchangeable and one with Dyaus; for some, the
“Son,” for others, the “Father” in the radiant sky; Dyaus-Pitar, the Father in
the Son, and the Son in the Father, truly shows, however, his finite origin by
having the Earth assigned to him as a wife. It is during the full decadence of
metaphysical philosophy that Dyâva-prithivi “Heaven and Earth” began to be
represented as the Universal cosmic parents, not alone of men, but of the gods
also. From the original conception, abstract and poetical, the ideal cause fell
into grossness.
Dyaus,
the sky, became very soon Dyaus or Heaven, the abode of the “Father,” and
finally, indeed, that Father himself. Then the Sun,
upon being made the symbol of the latter, received the title of Dina-Kara
“day-maker,” of Bhaskara
“light-maker,” now the Father of his Son, and vice versa. The
reign of ritualism and of anthropomorphic cults was henceforth established and
finally degraded the whole world, retaining supremacy to the present civilized
age.
Such
being the common origin, we have but to contrast the two deities—the god of the
Gentiles and the god of the Jews—on their own revealed WORD; and judging them
on their respective definitions of themselves, conclude intuitively which is
the nearest to the grandest ideal. We quote Colonel Ingersoll, who Jehovah and
Brahma parallel with each other. The former, “from the clouds and darkness of
Sinai,” said to the Jews:--
Thou
shalt have no other gods before me. . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself to
them nor serve them; for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting
the
iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation of them that hate me.” Contrast this with the words put by the
Hindu into the mouth of
Brahm: “I am the same to all mankind. They who
honestly serve other gods, involuntarily worship me. I am he who partaketh of
all worship, and I am the reward of all worshippers.”
Compare
these passages. The first, a dungeon where crawl the things begot of jealous
slime; the other, great as the domed firmament inlaid with suns. . . .
The
“first” is the god who haunted Calvin’s fancy, when he added to his doctrine of
predestination that of Hell being paved with the skulls of unbaptized infants.
The beliefs and dogmas of our churches are far more blasphemous in the ideas
they imply than those of the benighted Heathen. The amours of Brahmâ, under the
form of a buck, with his own daughter, as a deer, or of Jupiter with Leda,
under that of a swan, are grand allegories. They were never given out as a revelation,
but known to have been the products of the poetic fancy of Hesiod and other
mythologists. Can we say as much of the immaculate daughters of the god of the
Roman Catholic Church—Anna and Mary? Yet, even to breathe that the Gospel
narratives are allegories too, as they would be most sacrilegious were they
accepted in their dead letter, constitutes in a Christian born the acme of
blasphemy!
Verily,
they may whitewash and mask as much as they like the god of Abraham and Isaac,
they shall never be able to disprove the assertion of Marcion, who denied that
the God of Hate could be the same as the “Father of Jesus.” Heresy or not, but
the “Father in Heaven” of the Churches remained since then a hybrid creature; a
mixture between the Jove of the Pagan mobs and the “jealous God” of Moses,
exoterically the SUN, whose abode is in Heaven, or the sky, esoterically.
Does
he not give birth to LIGHT “that shineth in Darkness,” to the Day, the bright
Dyaus, the Son, and is he not the MOST HIGH—Deus Cœlum? And is it not again
Terra, the “Earth,” the ever immaculate as the ever prolific Virgin who,
fecundated by the ardent embraces of her
“Lord”—the fructifying rays of the Sun, becomes, in this terrestrial sphere,
the mother of all that lives and breathes on her vast bosom? Hence,
the sacredness of her products in Ritualism—the bread and the wine.
Hence also, the ancient messis, the great sacrifice to the goddess of harvest
(Ceres Eleusina, the Earth again): messis, for the Initiates, missa for the
profane,1 now transformed into the Christian mass or liturgy. The ancient
oblation of the fruits of the Earth to the Sun, the Deus Aitissimus, “the Most
High,” the symbol of the G. A. O. T. U. of the Masons to this day, became the
foundation of the most important ritual among the ceremonies of the new
religion. The worship offered to Osiris-Isis (the Sun andthe Earth),2 to Bel
and the cruciform Astarte of the Babylonians; to Odin or Thor and Friga, of the
Scandinavians; to Belen and the Virgo Paritura of the Celts; to Apollo and the
Magna Mater of the Greeks; all these couples having the same meaning, passed
bodily to, and were transformed by, the Christians into the Lord God or the
Holy Ghost descending upon the Virgin Mary.
Deus
Sol or Solus, the Father, was made interchangeable with the Son: the “Father”
in his
resurrecting Sun grows, and waxes strong, until the
vernal equinox, when the god Sol begins its annual course, under the sign of
the Ram or the Lamb, the first lunar week of the month. The 1st of
March was feasted throughout all pagan
the Vernal Equinox. With the festivals of the
Pagans, the canonicals of their priests and Hierophants were copied by
Christendom. Will this be denied? In his “Life of Constantine” Eusebius
confesses thus saying, perhaps, the only truth he ever uttered in his life—that
“in order to render Christianity more attractive to the Gentiles, the priests
(of Christ) adopted the exterior vestments and ornaments used in the pagan
cult.” He might have added “their rituals” and dogmas also.
III
It
is a matter of History—however unreliable the latter—for a number of facts
preserved by ancient writers corroborate it, that Church Ritualism and
Freemasonry
have sprung from the same source, and developed hand in hand.
But
as Masonry, even with its errors and later innovations, was far nearer the
truth than the Church, the latter began very soon her persecutions against it.
Masonry was, in its origin, simply archaic Gnosticism, or early esoteric
Christianity; Church Ritualism was, and is, exoteric paganism, pure and
simple—remodelled, we do not say reformed. Read the works of Ragon, a Mason who
forgot more than the Masons of to-day know. Study, collating them together, the
casual but numerous statements made by Greek and Latin writers, many of whom
were Initiates, most learned Neophytes and partakers of the Mysteries. Read
finally the elaborate and venomous slanders of the Church Fathers against the
Gnostics, the Mysteries and their Initiates—and you may end by unravelling the
truth.
It
is a few philosophers who, driven by the political events of the day, tracked
and persecuted by the fanatical Bishops of early Christianity—who had yet
neither fixed ritual nor dogmas nor Church—it is these Pagans who founded the
latter.
Blending
most ingeniously the truths of the Wisdom-religion with the exoteric fictions
so dear to the ignorant mobs, it is they who laid the first foundations of
ritualistic Churches and of the Lodges of modern Masonry. The latter fact was
demonstrated by Ragon in his ANTE-OMNIÆ of the modern Liturgy compared with the
ancient Mysteries, and showing the rituals conducted by the early Masons; the
former may be ascertained by a like comparison of the Church canonicals, the
sacred vessels, and the festivals of the Latin and other Churches, with those
of the pagan nations. But Churches and Masonry have widely diverged since the
days when both were one. If asked how a profane can know it, the answer comes:
ancient and modern Freemasonry are an obligatory study with every Eastern
Occultist.
Masonry,
its paraphernalia and modern innovations (the Biblical Spirit in it especially)
notwithstanding, does good both on the moral and physical planes—or did so,
hardly ten years ago, at any rate.3 It was a true ecclesia in the sense
of
fraternal union and mutual help, the only religion in the world, if we regard
the term as derived from the word religare, “to bind” together, as it made all
men belonging to it “brothers”—regardless of race and faith. Whether with the
enormous wealth at its command it could not do far
more than it does now, is no business of ours.
We
see no visible, crying evil from this institution, and no one yet, save the
Roman Church, has ever been found to show that it did any harm. Can Church
Christianity say as much? Let ecclesiastical and profane history answer the
question. For one, it has divided the whole mankind into Cains and Abels; it
has slaughtered millions in the name of her God—the Lord of Hosts, truly, the
ferocious Jehovah Sabbaoth—and instead of giving an impetus to civilization,
the favourite boast of her followers—it has retarded it during the long and
weary Mediæval ages. It is only under the relentless assaults of science and
the revolt of men trying to free themselves, that it began to lose ground and
could no longer arrest enlightenment. Yet has it not softened, as claimed, the
“barbarous spirit of Heathendom”? We say no, most emphatically.
It
is Churchianity with its odium theologicum, since it could no longer repress
human progress, which infused its lethal spirit of intolerance, its ferocious
selfishness, greediness, and cruelty into modern civilization under the mask of
cant and meek Christianity. When were the Pagan Cæsars more bloodthirsty or
more coolly cruel than are the modern Potentates and their armies? When did the
millions of the Proletariat starve as they do now?
When has mankind shed more tears and suffered than at present?
Yes;
there was a day when the Church and Masonry were one. These were centuries of
intense moral reaction, a transitional period of thought as heavy as a
nightmare, an age of strife. Thus, when the creation of new ideals led to the
apparent pulling down of the old fanes and the destruction of old idols, it
ended in reality with the rebuilding of those temples out of the old materials,
and the erection of the same
idols under new names. It was a universal rearrangement and whitewashing—but
only skin deep. History will never be able to tell us—but tradition and
judicious research do—how many semi-Hierophants and even high Initiates were
forced to become renegades in order to ensure the
survival
of the secrets of Initiation. Prætextatus, pro-consul at Achaia, is credited
with remarking in the IVth century of our era, that “to deprive the
Greeks of the sacred mysteries which bind
together the whole mankind was equivalent to depriving them of their life.” The
Initiates took perhaps the
hint, and thus joining nolens
volens the followers of the new faith, then becoming all domineering, acted
accordingly. Some hellenized Jewish Gnostics did the same; and thus more than
one “Clemens Alexandrinus”—a convert to all appearance, an ardent Neo-Platonist
and the same philosophical pagan at heart—became the instructor of ignorant
Christian Bishops. In short the convert malgré lui blended the two external
mythologies, the old and the new, and while giving out the compound to the
masses, kept the sacred truths for himself.
The
kind of Christians they made may be inferred from the example of Synesius, the
Neo-Platonist. What scholar is ignorant of the fact, or would presume to deny,
that the favourite and devoted pupil of Hypatia—the virgin-philosopher,
the martyr and victim of the infamous Cyril of
privileges guaranteed.
What
the chief clause was, is curious. It was a sine quâ
non condition that he was to be allowed to abstain from professing the
(Christian) doctrines, that he, the new Bishop, did
not believe in! Thus, although baptised and ordained in the degrees of
deaconship, priesthood, and episcopate, he never separated himself from his
wife, never gave up his Platonic philosophy, nor even
his sport so strictly forbidden to every other bishop. This occurred as late as
the Vth century.
Such
transactions between initiated philosophers and ignorant priests of reformed
Judaism were numerous in those days. The former sought to save their
“mystery-vows” and personal dignity, and to do so they had to resort to a
much-to-be-regretted compromise with ambition, ignorance, and the rising wave
of popular fanaticism. They believed in Divine Unity, the ONE or Solus,
unconditioned and unknowable; and still they consented to render public homage
and pay reverence to Sol, the Sun moving among his twelve apostles, the I2
signs of the Zodiac, alias the 12 Sons of Jacob. The hoi polloi remaining
ignorant of the former, worshipped the latter, and in them, their old
time-honoured gods. To transfer that worship from the solar-lunar and other
cosmic deities to the Thrones, Archangels, Dominions, and Saints was no
difficult matter; the more so since the said sidereal dignities were received
into the new Christian Canon with their old names almost unchanged. Thus,
while, during Mass, the “Grand Elect” reiterated, under his breath, his
absolute adherence to the Supreme Universal Unity of the “incomprehensible
Workman,” and pronounced in solemn and loud tones the “Sacred Word” (now
substituted by the Masonic “Word at low breath”), his assistant proceeded with
the chanting of the Kyriel of names of those inferior sidereal beings whom the
masses were made to worship.
To
the profane catechumen, indeed, who had offered prayers but a few months or
weeks before to the Bull Apis and the holy Cynocephalus, to the sacred ibis and
the hawk-headed Osiris, St. John’s eagle4 and the divine Dove (witness of the
Baptism
while hovering over the Lamb of God), must have appeared as the most natural
development and sequence to his own national and sacred zoology, which he had
been taught to worship since the day of his birth.
IV
It
may thus be shown that both modern Freemasonry and Church ritualism descend in
direct line from initiated Gnostics, Neo-Platonists, and renegade Hierophants
of the Pagan Mysteries, the secrets of which they have lost, but which have
been nevertheless preserved by those who would not compromise. If both Church
and Masons are willing to forget the history of their true origin, the
theosophists are not. They repeat: Masonry and the three great Christian
religions are all inherited goods. The “ceremonies and
passwords” of the former, and the prayers, dogmas, and rites of the latter, are
travestied copies of pure Paganism (copied and borrowed as diligently by the
Jews), and of Neo-Platonic Theosophy.
Also, that the “passwords” used even now by Biblical Masons and connected with
“the tribe of Judah,” “Tubal-Cain,” and other Zodiacal dignitaries of the Old
Testament, are the Jewish aliases of the ancient gods of the heathen mobs, not
of the gods of the Hierogrammatists, the interpreters of the true mysteries.
That
which follows proves it well. The good Masonic Brethren could hardly deny that
in name they are Solicoles indeed, the worshippers of the Sun in heaven, in
whom the erudite Ragon saw such a magnificent symbol of the G.A.O.T.U.—which it
surely is. Only the trouble he had was to prove—which no one can—that the said
G. A. O. T. U. was not rather the Sol of the small exoteric fry of the
Pro-fanes than the Solus of the High Epoptai. For the secret of the fires of
SOLUS, the spirit of which radiates in the “Blazing Star,” is a Hermetic secret
which, unless a Mason studies true Theosophy, is lost to him
for ever. He has ceased to understand now, even the little indiscretions of
Tshuddi. To this day Masons and Christians keep the Sabbath sacred, and call it
the “Lord’s” day; yet they know as well as any that both Sunday, and the
Sonntag of Protestant England and Germany, mean the Sun-day or the day of the
Sun, as it meant 2,000 years ago.
And
you, Reverend and good Fathers, Priests, Clergymen, and Bishops, you who so
charitably call Theosophy
“idolatry” and doom its adherents openly and privately to eternal perdition,
can you boast of one single rite, vestment, or sacred vessel in church or
temple that does not come to you from paganism? Nay, to assert it would be too
dangerous, in view, not only of history, but also of
the confessions of your own priestly craft.
Let
us recapitulate if only to justify our assertions.
“Roman
sacrificators had to confess before sacrificing,” writes du Choul. The priests
of Jupiter donned a tall, square, black cap (Vide Armenian and Greek modern
priests), the head dress of the Flamines. The black
soutane of the
Roman Catholic priest is the
black hierocoraces, the loose robe of the Mithraic priests, so-called from
being raven coloured (raven, corax).
The King-Priest of
The ancient pagans used holy water or
lustrations to purify their cities, fields, temples, and men, just as it is
being done now in Roman Catholic
countries.
Fonts stood at the door of every temple, full of lustral water and called
favisses and aquiminaria. Before sacrificing, the pontiff or the curion (whence
the French curé), dipping a laurel branch into the lustral water, sprinkled
with it the pious congregation assembled, and that which was then termed
lustrica and aspergilium is now called sprinkler (or goupillon, in French). The
latter was with the priestesses of Mithra the symbol of the
Universal lingam. Dipped during the Mysteries
in lustral milk, the faithful were sprinkled with it. It was the emblem of
Universal fecundity; hence the use of the holy water in Christianity, a rite of
phallic origin. More than this; the idea underlying it is purely occult and
belongs to ceremonial magic. Lustrations were performed by fire, sulphur, air,
and water. To draw the attention of the celestial gods, ablutions were resorted
to; to conjure the nether gods away, aspersion was used.
The
vaulted ceilings of cathedrals and churches, Greek or Latin, are often painted
blue and studded with golden stars, to represent the canopy of the
heavens. This is copied from the Egyptian temples,
where solar and star worship was performed. Again, the same reverence is paid
in Christian and Masonic architecture to the Orient (or the Eastern point) as
in the days of Paganism.
Ragon
described it fully in his destroyed volumes. The princeps porta, the door of
the World, and of the “King of Glory,” by whom was
meant at first the Sun, and now his human symbol, the Christ, is the door of the
Orient, and faces the East in every church and temple. It is through this “door
of life”—the solemn pathway, through which the daily entrance of the luminary
into the oblong
square6
of the earth or the Tabernacle of the Sun is effected every morning—that the
“newly born” babe is ushered, and carried to the baptismal
font; and it is to the left of
this edifice (the gloomy north whither start the “apprentices,” and where the
candidates got their trial by water) that now the fonts, and in the days of old
the well (piscinas) of lustral waters, were placed in the ancient churches,
which had been pagan fanes. The altars of heathen Lutetia were buried, and
found again under the choir of Notre-Dame of
ancient lustral wells existing to this day in the
said Church. Almost every great ancient Church on the Continent that antedates
the Middle Ages was once a pagan temple in virtue of the orders issued by the
Bishops and Popes of
Sprinkle
them with holy water, place in them relics, and let the nations worship in the
places they are accustomed to.” We have but to turn to the works of Cardinal
Baronius, to find in the year XXXVIth of his Annals his confession.
The
Holy Church, he says, was permitted to appropriate the rites and ceremonies
used by the pagans in their idolatrous cult, since she (the Church) expiated
them by her consecration! In the Antiquités Gaulises (Book II, Ch. 19) by
Fauchet, we read that the Bishops of France adopted and used the pagan
ceremonies in order to convert followers to Christ.
This
was when Gaul was still a pagan country. Are the same rites and ceremonies used
now in Christian France, and other Roman Catholic countries, still going on in
grateful remembrance of the pagans and their gods?
V
Up
to the IVth century the churches knew of no altars. Up to that date the altar
was a table raised in the middle of the temple, for purposes of Communion, or
fraternal repasts (the Cœna, as mass was originally said in the evening). In
the
same way now the table is raised in the “Lodge”
for Masonic Banquets, which usually close the proceedings of a Lodge and at
which the resurrected Hiram Abifs, the “Widow’s Sons,” honour their toasts by
firing, a Masonic mode of transubstantiation. Shall we call their banquet tables altars, also? Why not?
The
altars were copies from the ara maxima of pagan
square
stones, another form of the boundary stones known as the gods Termini—the
Hermeses, and the Mercuries, whence Mercurius quadratus,
quadriceps,
quadrifrons, etc., etc., the four-faced gods, whose symbols these square stones
were, from the highest antiquity. The stone on which the ancient kings of
Shall
the church-going reader feel very indignant if he is told that the Christians
adopted the pagan way of worshipping in a temple, only during the
reign of Diocletianus? Up to that period they
had an insurmountable horror for altars and temples, and held them in
abomination for the first 250 years of our era. These primitive Christians were
Christians indeed; the moderns are more pagan than any ancient idolators. The
former were the Theosophists of those days; from IVth century they became
Helleno-Judaic Gentiles minus the philosophy of the Neo-Platonists. Read what
Minutius Pelix says in the IIIrd century to the Romans:--
You
fancy that we (Christians) conceal that which we worship because we will have
neither temples nor altars? But what image of God shall we raise, since Man is
himself God’s image? What temple can we build to the Deity, when the Universe,
which is Its work, can hardly contain It? How shall we
enthrone the power of such Omnipotence in a single building? Is it not far
better to consecrate to the Deity a temple in our heart and spirit?
But
then the Chrestians of the type of Minutius Felix had in their mind the
commandment of the MASTER-INITIATE, not to pray in the synagogues and temples
as the hypocrites do, “that they may be seen of men.” (
Matthew 6:5. )
They
remembered the declarations of Paul, the Apostle-Initiate, the “Master Builder”
(I Corinthians
precepts, whereas the modern Christians obey but
the arbitrary canons of their respective churches, and the rules of their
Elders. “Theosophists are notorious Atheists,” exclaims a writer in the “Church
Chronicle.” “Not one of them is ever
known to attend divine service . .
. the Church is obnoxious to them”; and forthwith uncorking the vials of his
wrath, he pours out their contents on the infidel, heathen F.T.S. The modern
Churchman stones the Theosophist as his ancient forefather, the Pharisee of the
“Synagogue of the Libertines” (Acts 6:9) stoned Stephen, for saying that which
even many Christian Theosophists say, namely that “the Most High dwelleth not
intemples made with hands” (Ibid. 48); and they “suborn men” just as these
iniquitous judges did (Ibid. II) to testify against us.Forsooth, friends, you
are indeed the righteous descendants of your predecessors, whether of the
colleagues of Saul, or of those of Pope Leo X, the cynical author of the ever
famous sentence: “How useful to us this fable of Christ,” “Quantum nobis
prodest hac fabula Christi!”
VI
The
“Solar Myth” theory has become in our day stale—ad nauseam—repeated as we hear
it from the four cardinal points of Orientalism and Symbolism, and applied
indiscriminately to all things and all religions, except Church Christianity
and state-religion. No doubt the Sun was throughout the whole antiquity and
since days immemorial the symbol of the Creative Deity—with every nation, not
with the Parsis alone; but so he is with the Ritualists. As in days of old, so
it is
now. Our central star is the “Father” for the
pro-fanes, the Son of the ever unknowable Deity for the Epoptai. Says the same
Mason, Ragon, “the Sun was the most sublime and natural image of the GREAT
ARCHITECT, as the most ingenious of all the allegories under which the moral
and good man (the true sage) had ever endowed infinite and limitless
Intelligence.” Apart from the latter assumption, Ragon is right; for he shows
this symbol gradually receding from the ideal so represented and conceived, and
becoming finally from a symbol the original, in the minds of his ignorant
worshippers. Then the great Masonic author proves that it is the physical Sun
which was regarded as both the Father and the Son by the early Christians.
“Oh,
initiated Brethren,” he exclaims. “Can you forget that in the temples of the
existing religion a large lamp burns night and day? It is suspended in
front
of the chief altar, the depository of the ark of the Sun. Another lamp burning
before the altar of the virgin-mother is the emblem of the light of
the moon. Clemens Alexandrinus tells us that
the Egyptians were the first to establish the religious use of the lamps. . . .
Who does not know that the most sacred and terrible duty was entrusted to the
Vestals? If the Masonic temples are lighted with three astral lights, the sun,
the moon. and Episcopes (Wardens, in French
Surveillants), it is because one of the Fathers of Masonry, the learned
Pythagoras, ingenuously suggests that we should not speak of divine things
without a light. Pagans celebrated a festival of lamps called Lampadophorics in
honour of Minerva, Prometheus, and Vulcan. But Lactantius
and
some of the earliest fathers of the new faith complained bitterly of this pagan
introduction of lamps in the Churches; ‘If they deigned,’ writes Lactantius,
‘to contemplate that light which we call the SUN, they would soon recognise
that God has no need of their lamps.’ And Vigilantius adds: ‘Under the pretext
of religion the Church established a Gentile custom of lighting vile candles. while the SUN is there illuminating us with a thousand
lights. Is it not a great honour for the LAMB OF GOD (the sun thus
represented), which placed in the middle of the throne (the Universe) fills it
with the radiance of his Majesty?’ Such passages prove to us that in those days
the primitive Church worshipped THE GREAT ARCHITECT OF THE WORLD in its image
the SUN, sole of its kind.” (The Mass and its Mysteries, pp.
19 and 20.)
Indeed,
while Christian candidates have to pronounce the Masonic oath turned to the
East and that their “Venerable” keeps in the Eastern corner, because the
Neophytes were made to do the same during the Pagan Mysteries, the Church has,
in her turn, preserved the identical rite. During the High Mass, the High-Altar
(ara maxima) is ornamented with the Tabernacle, or the
pyx (the box in which the Host is kept), and with six lighted tapers. The
esoteric meaning of the pyx and contents—the symbol of the Christ-Sun—is that
it represents the resplendent luminary, and the six tapers the six planets (the
early Christians knowing of no more), three on his right and three on his left.
This is a copy of the seven branched candlestick of the synagogue, which has an
identical meaning. “Sol est Dominus Meus” “the Sun is my Lord!” exclaims David
in Psalm 95, translated very ingeniously in the authorized
version by “The Lord is a great God,” “a great King above all Gods” (v.
3), or planets truly! Augustin Chalis is more sincere in Philosophie des
Religions Compareés (Vol. II, p. 18), when writes:
All
are devs (demons), on this Earth, save the God of the Seers (Initiates) the
sublime IAO; and if in Christ you see aught than the SUN, then you adore a dev, a phantom such as are all the children of
night.
The East being the cardinal point whence
arises the luminary of the Day, the great giver and sustainer of life, the
creator of al that lives and breathes on
this globe, what wonder if all
the nation of the Earth worshipped in him the visible agent of the invisible
Principle and Cause; and that mass should be said in the honour of him who is
the giver of messis or “harvest.” But, between worshipping the ideal as a
whole, and the physical symbol, a part chosen to represent that whole and the
ALL, there is an abyss. For the learned Egyptian, the Sun was the “eye” of
Osiris, not Osiris him self; the same for the learned Zoroastrians. For the
early Christians the Sun became the Deity, in toto; and by dint of casuistics,
sophistry, and dogmas not to be questioned, the modern Christian churches have
contrived to force even the educated world to accept the same, while
hypnotising it into a belief that their god is the one living true Deity, the
maker of, not the Sun—a demon worshipped by the “heathen.” But what may be the
difference between a wicked demon, and the anthropomorphic God, e.g., as
represented in Solomon’s Proverbs? That “God,” unless poor, helpless, ignorant
men call upon him, when their “fear cometh as desolation” and their
“destruction as a whirlwind,” threatens them in such words as these “I will
laugh at your calamities, I will mock when your fear cometh!” (Prov. 1:27.)
Identify this God with the great Avatar on whom the Christian legend is hung;
make him one with that true Initiate who said, “Blessed are they that mourn;
for they shall be comforted”: and what is the result? Such identification alone
quite sufficient to justify the fiendish joy of Tertullian, who laughed and
rejoiced at the idea of his infidel next of kin roasting in hell-fire the
advice of Hieronymus to the Christian convert to trample over the body of his
pagan mother, if she seeks to prevent him leaving her for ever to follow
Christ; and it makes of all the Church tyrants, murderers, and omnes gentes of
the Inquisition, the grandest and noblest exemplars of practical Christianity
that have ever lived!
VII
The
ritualism of primitive Christianity—as now sufficiently shown—sprang from
ancient Masonry. The latter was, in its turn, the offspring of the, then,
almost dead Mysteries. Of these we have now a few words to say.
It
is well known that throughout antiquity, besides the popular worship composed
of the dead-letter forms and empty exoteric ceremonies, every nation had its
secret cult known to the world as the MYSTERIES. Strabo, one among many others,
warrants for this assertion. (Vide Georg, lib. 10.) No one received admittance into
them save those prepared for it by special training. The neophytes instructed
in the upper temples were initiated into the final Mysteries in the crypts.
These instructions were the last surviving heirlooms of archaic wisdom, and it
is under the guidance of high Initiates that they were enacted. We use the word
“enacted” purposely; for the oral instructions at low breath were given only in
the crypts, in solemn silence and secrecy. During the public classes and
general teachings, the lessons in cosmogony and theogony were delivered in
allegorical representation, the modus operandi of the gradual evolution of
Kosmos, worlds, and finally of our earth, of gods and men, all was imparted in
a
symbolical way. The great public performances during
the festivals of the Mysteries, were witnessed by the
masses and the personified truths worshipped by the multitudes—blindly. Alone
the high Initiates, the Epoptœ, understood their language and real meaning. All
this, and so far, is well known to the world of scholars.
It
was a common claim of all the ancient nations that the real mysteries of what
is called so unphilosophically, creation, were divulged to the elect of our
(fifth) race by its first dynasties of divine Rulers—gods in flesh, “divine
incarnations,” or Avatars, so called. The last Stanzas,
given from the Book of Dzyan in The Secret Doctrine (Vol. II, p. 21 ), speak of those who ruled over the descendants
“produced from the holy stock,” and . . . “who re-descended, who made peace
with the fifth (race) who taught and instructed it.”
The
phrase “made peace” shows that there had been a previous quarrel. The fate of
the Atlanteans in our philosophy, and that of the prediluvians in the Bible,
corroborates the idea. Once more—many centuries before the Ptolemies—the same
abuse of the sacred knowledge crept in amongst the initiates of the Sanctuary
in Egypt. Preserved for countless ages in all their purity, the sacred
teachings of the gods, owing to personal ambition and selfishness, became
corrupted again.
The
meaning of the symbols found itself but too often desecrated by unseemly
interpretations, and very soon the Eleusinian Mysteries
remained the only ones pure from adulteration and sacrilegious innovations.
These were in honour of (Ceres) Demeter, or Nature, and were celebrated in
It
is to preserve some reminiscence of this “temple,” and to rebuild it, if need
be, that certain elect ones among the initiated began to be set apart. This was
done by their High Hierophants in every century, from the time when the sacred
allegories
showed the first signs of desecration and decay. For the great Elusinia finally
shared the same fate as the others. Their earlier excellency
and purpose are described by Clement of
Alexandria who shows the greater Mysteries divulging the secrets and the mode
of construction of the Universe, this being the beginning, the end and the
ultimate goal of human knowledge, for
in them was shown to the initiated Nature and
all things as they are. (Strom. 8.) This is the
Pythagorean Gnosis,
Epictetus speaks of these instructions in the highest terms: “All
that is ordained therein was established by our masters
for the instruction of men and the correction
of our customs.” (Apud Arrian. Dissert. lib. cap. 21.) Plato asserts in the
Phaedo the same: the object of the Mysteries was to re-establish the soul in
its primordial purity, or that state of perfection from which it had fallen.
VIII
But
there came a day when the Mysteries deviated from their purity in the same way
as the exoteric religions. This began when the State bethought itself, on the
advice of Aristogeiton (510 B.C.), of drawing from the Eleusinia a constant and
prolific source of income. A law was passed to that effect.
Henceforth,
no one could be initiated without paying a certain sum of money for the
privilege.
That
boon which could hitherto be acquired only at the price of incessant, almost
superhuman effort, toward virtue and excellency, was
now to be purchased for so much gold. Laymen—and even priests themselves—while
accepting the desecration lost eventually their past reverence for the inner
Mysteries, and this led to further profanation of the Sacred Science. The rent
made in the veil widened with every century; and more than ever the Supreme
Hierophants, dreading the final publication and distortion of the most holy
secrets of nature, laboured to eliminate them from the inner programme,
limiting the full knowledge thereof but to the few. It is those set apart who
soon became the only custodians of the divine heirloom of the ages. Seven
centuries later, we find Apuleius, his sincere inclination toward magic and the
mystical notwithstanding, writing in his Golden Ass a bitter satire against the
hypocrisy and debauchery of certain orders of half-initiated priests. It is
through him also, that we learn that in his day (IInd century A.D.) the
Mysteries had become so universal that persons of all ranks and conditions, in
every country, men, women, and children all were initiated! Initiation had
become as necessary in his day as baptism has since become with the Christians;
and, as the latter is now, so the former had become then—i.e., meaningless, and
a purely dead-letter ceremony of mere form. Still later, the fanatics of the
new religion laid their heavy hand on the Mysteries.
The
Epoptæ, they “who see things as they are” disappeared one by one, emigrating into regions inaccessible to the Christians. The
Mystæ (from Mystes “or veiled”) “they who see things only as they appear”
remained very soon, alone, sole masters of the situation.
It
is the former, the “set apart,” who have preserved the true secrets; it is the
Mystæ, those who knew them only superficially, who laid the first foundation
stone of modern masonry; and it is. from this half
pagan, half converted primitive fraternity of Masons that Christian ritualism
and most of dogmas were born. Both the Epoptæ and the Mystæ are entitled to the
name of Masons: for both carrying out their pledges to, and the injunction of
their long departed Hierophants and
“Kings” rebuilt, the Epoptæ, their “lower,” and the Mystæ, their “upper
temples.
For
such were the irrespective appellations in antiquity, and are so to this day in
certain regions. Sophocles speaks in the Electra (Act 2) of the foundations of
IX
The
misunderstood allegory known as the Descent into Hades, has wrought infinite
mischief. The exoteric “fable” of Hercules and Theseus descending into the
infernal regions; the journey thither of Orpheus, who found his way by the
power of his lyre (Ovid Metam.); of Krishna, and finally of Christ, who
“descended into Hell and the third day rose again from the dead”—was twisted
out of recognition by the non-initiated adapters of pagan rites and
transformers thereof, into Church rites and dogmas.
Astronomically,
this descent into hell symbolized the Sun during the autumnal equinox when
abandoning the higher sidereal regions—there was a supposed fight between him
and the Demon of Darkness who got the best of our luminary.
Then
the Sun was imagined to undergo a temporary death and to descend into the
infernal regions. But mystically, it typified the initiatory rites in the
crypts of the temple, called the Underworld. Bacchus,
Herakles, Orpheus, Asklepios and all the other visitors of the crypt, all
descended into hell and ascended thence on the third day, for all were
initiates and “Builders of the lower
Every
word of the brilliant satire shows the inner meaning of the poet:
Wake,
burning torches .. . for thou
comest
Shaking
them in thy hand, Iacche, Phosphoric star of the nightly rite.All such final
initiations took place during the night. To speak, therefore, of anyone as
having descended into Hades, was equivalent in antiquity to calling him a full
Initiate. To those who feel inclined to reject this explanation, I would offer
a query. Let them explain, in that case, the meaning of a sentence
in the sixth book of Virgil’s Æneid. What can
the poet mean, if not that which is asserted above, when introducing the aged
Anchises in the Elysian fields, he makes him advise Æneas his son, to travel to
Italy . . . where he would have to
fight in
The
benevolent clericals, who are so apt to send us on the slightest provocation to
Tartarus and the infernal regions, do not suspect what good wishes for us the
threat contains; and what a holy character one must be before one gets into
such
a sanctified place.
It
is not pagans alone who had their Mysteries. Bellarmin (De Eccl. Triumph. lib.
2, cap. 14) states that the early Christians adopted, after the example of
pagan ceremonies, the custom of assembling in the church during the nights
preceding their festivals, to hold vigils or “wakes.” Their ceremonies were
performed at first with the most edifying holiness and purity. But very shortly
after that, such immoral abuses crept into these “assemblies” that the bishops
found it necessary to abolish them. We have read in dozens of works about the
licentiousness in the pagan religious festivals.
When you begin with somuch
pomp and show, Why is the end so little and so low? Primitive
Christianity—being derived from the primitive Masonry—had its grip. pass-words, and degrees of initiation. “Masonry” is an old
term but it came into use very late in our era. Paul calls himself a
“master-builder” and he was one.
The ancient Masons called themselves by
various names and most of the Alexandrian Eclectics, the Theosophists of
Ammonias Saccas and the later
Neo-Platonists,
were all virtually Masons. They were all bound by oath to secrecy, considered
themselves a Brotherhood, and had also their signs of recognition. The
Eclectics or Philaletheians comprised within their ranks the ablest and most
learned scholars of the day. as also several crowned heads.
Says the author of The Eclectic Philosophy:
Their
doctrines were adopted by pagans and Christians in