Part 33 (2/2)
There was a surprising uniformity in the Temples, Priests, doctrines, and wors.h.i.+p of the Persian Magi and British Druids. The G.o.ds of Britain were the same as the Cabiri of Samothrace. Osiris and Isis appeared in their Mysteries, under the names of Hu and Ceridwen; and like those of the primitive Persians, their Temples were enclosures of huge unhewn stones, some of which still remain, and are regarded by the common people with fear and veneration. They were generally either circular or oval. Some were in the shape of a circle to which a vast serpent was attached. The circle was an Eastern symbol of the Universe, governed by an Omnipotent Deity whose centre is everywhere, and his circ.u.mference nowhere: and the egg was an universal symbol of the world. Some of the Temples were winged, and some in the shape of a cross; the winged ones referring to Kneph, the winged Serpent-Deity of Egypt; whence the name of _Navestock_, where one of them stood. Temples in the shape of a cross were also found in Ireland and Scotland. The length of one of these vast structures, in the shape of a serpent, was nearly three miles.
The grand periods for initiation into the Druidical Mysteries, were quarterly; at the equinoxes and solstices. In the remote times when they originated, these were the times corresponding with the 13th of February, 1st of May, 19th of August, and 1st of November. The time of annual celebration was May-Eve, and the ceremonial preparations commenced at midnight, on the 29th of April. When the initiations were over, on May-Eve, fires were kindled on all the cairns and cromlechs in the island, which burned all night to introduce the sports of May-day.
The festival was in honor of the Sun. The initiations were performed at midnight; and there were three Degrees.
The Gothic Mysteries were carried Northward from the East, by Odin; who, being a great warrior, modelled and varied them to suit his purposes and the genius of his people. He placed over their celebration twelve Hierophants, who were alike Priests, Counsellors of State, and Judges from whose decision there was no appeal.
He held the numbers three and nine in peculiar veneration and was probably himself the Indian Buddha. Every thrice-three months, thrice-three victims were sacrificed to the tri-une G.o.d.
The Goths had three great festivals; the most magnificent of which commenced at the winter solstice, and was celebrated in honor of Thor, the Prince of the Power of the Air. That being the longest night in the year, and the one after which the Sun comes Northward, it was commemorative of the Creation; and they termed it mother-night, as the one in which the creation of the world and light from the primitive darkness took place. This was the _Yule, Juul,_ or _Yeol_ feast, which afterward became Christmas. At this feast the initiations were celebrated. Thor was the Sun, the Egyptian Osiris and Kneph, the Phnician Bel or Baal. The initiations were had in huge intricate caverns, terminating, as all the Mithriac caverns did, in a s.p.a.cious vault, where the candidate _was brought to light_.
Joseph was undoubtedly initiated. After he had interpreted Pharaoh's dream, that Monarch made him his Prime Minister, let him ride in his second chariot, while they proclaimed before him, ABRECH![1] and set him over the land of Egypt. In addition to this, the King gave him a new name, Tsapanat-Paanakh, and married him to Asanat, daughter of Potai Parang, a Priest of An or Hieropolis, where was the Temple of Athom-Re, the Great G.o.d of Egypt; thus completely naturalizing him. He could not have contracted this marriage, nor have exercised that high dignity, without being first initiated in the Mysteries. When his Brethren came to Egypt the second time, the Egyptians of his court could not eat with them, as that would have been abomination, though they ate with Joseph; who was therefore regarded not as a foreigner, but as one of themselves: and when he sent and brought his brethren back, and charged them with taking his cup, he said, ”Know ye not that a man like me practises divination?” thus a.s.suming the Egyptian of high rank initiated into the Mysteries, and as such conversant with the occult sciences.
[Footnote 1: An Egyptian word, meaning, _”Bow down.”_]
So also must Moses have been initiated: for he was not only brought up in the court of the King, as the adopted son of the King's daughter, until he was forty years of age; but he was instructed in all the learning of the Egyptians, and married afterward the daughter of Yethru, a Priest of An likewise. Strabo and Diodorus both a.s.sert that he was himself a Priest of Heliopolis. Before he went into the Desert, there were intimate relations between him and the Priesthood; and he had successfully commanded, Josephus informs us, an army sent by the King against the Ethiopians. Simglicius a.s.serts that Moses received from the Egyptians, in the Mysteries, the doctrines which he taught to the Hebrews: and Clemens of Alexandria and Philo say that he was a Theologian and Prophet, and interpreter of the Sacred Laws. Manetho, cited by Josephus, says he was a Priest of Heliopolis, and that his true and original (Egyptian) name was Asersaph or Osarsiph.
And in the inst.i.tution of the Hebrew Priesthood, in the powers and privileges, as well as the immunities and sanct.i.ty which he conferred upon them, he closely imitated the Egyptian inst.i.tutions; making _public_ the wors.h.i.+p of that Deity whom the Egyptian Initiates wors.h.i.+pped in private; and strenuously endeavoring to keep the people from relapsing into their old mixture of Chaldaic and Egyptian superst.i.tion and idol-wors.h.i.+p, as they were ever ready and inclined to do; even Aharun, upon their first clamorous discontent, restoring the wors.h.i.+p of Apis; as an image of which Egyptian G.o.d he made the golden calf.
The Egyptian Priests taught in their great Mysteries, that there was one G.o.d, Supreme and Unapproachable, who had _conceived_ the Universe by His Intelligence, before He _created_ it by His Power and Will. They were no Materialists nor Pantheists; but taught that Matter was not eternal or co-existent with the great First Cause, but created by Him.
The early Christians, taught by the founder of their Religion, but in greater perfection, those primitive truths that from the Egyptians had pa.s.sed to the Jews, and been preserved among the latter by the Essenes, received also the inst.i.tution of the Mysteries; adopting as their object the building of the symbolic Temple, preserving the old Scriptures of the Jews as their sacred book, and as the fundamental law, which furnished the new veil of initiation with the Hebraic words and formulas, that, corrupted and disfigured by time and ignorance, appear in many of our Degrees.
Such, my Brother, is the doctrine of the first Degree of the Mysteries, or that of Chief of the Tabernacle, to which you have now been admitted, and the moral lesson of which is, devotion to the service of G.o.d, and disinterested zeal and constant endeavor for the welfare of men. You have here received only hints of the true objects and purposes of the Mysteries. Hereafter, if you are permitted to advance, you will arrive at a more complete understanding of them and of the sublime doctrines which they teach. Be content, therefore, with that which you have seen and heard and await patiently the advent of the greater light.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
XXIV.
PRINCE OF THE TABERNACLE.
Symbols were the almost universal language of ancient theology. They were the most obvious method of instruction; for, like nature herself, they addressed the understanding through the eye; and the most ancient expressions denoting communication of religious knowledge, signify ocular exhibition. The first teachers of mankind borrowed this method of instruction; and it comprised an endless store of pregnant hieroglyphics. These lessons of the olden time were the riddles of the Sphynx, tempting the curious by their quaintness, but involving the personal risk of the adventurous interpreter. ”The G.o.ds themselves,” it was said, ”disclose their intentions to the wise, but to fools their teaching is unintelligible;” and the King of the Delphic Oracle was said not to _declare_, nor on the other hand to _conceal_; but emphatically to ”_intimate_ or _signify_.”
The Ancient Sages, both barbarian and Greek, involved their meaning in similar indirections and enigmas; their lessons were conveyed either in visible symbols, or in those ”parables and dark sayings of old,” which the Israelites considered it a sacred duty to hand down unchanged to successive generations. The explanatory tokens employed by man, whether emblematical objects or actions, symbols or mystic ceremonies, were like the mystic signs and portents either in dreams or by the wayside, supposed to be significant of the intentions of the G.o.ds; both required the aid of anxious thought and skillful interpretation. It was only by a correct appreciation of a.n.a.logous problems of nature, that the will of Heaven could be understood by the Diviner, or the lessons of Wisdom become manifest to the Sage.
The Mysteries were a series of symbols; and what was _spoken_ there consisted wholly of accessory explanations of the act or image; sacred commentaries, explanatory of established symbols; with little of those independent traditions embodying physical or moral speculation, in which the elements or planets were the actors, and the creation and revolutions of the world were intermingled with recollections of ancient events: and yet with so much of that also, that nature became her own expositor through the medium of an arbitrary symbolical instruction; and the ancient views of the relation between the human and divine received dramatic forms.
There has ever been an intimate alliance between the two systems, the symbolic and the philosophical, in the allegories of the monuments of all ages, in the symbolic writings of the priests of all nations, in the rituals of all secret and mysterious societies; there has been a constant series, an invariable uniformity of principles, which come from an aggregate, vast, imposing, and true, composed of parts that fit harmoniously only there.
Symbolical instruction is recommended by the constant and uniform usage of antiquity; and it has retained its influence throughout all ages, as a system of mysterious communication. The Deity, in his revelations to man, adopted the use of material images for the purpose of enforcing sublime truths; and Christ taught by symbols and parables. The mysterious knowledge of the Druids was embodied in signs and symbols.
Taliesin, describing his initiation, says: ”The secrets were imparted to me by the old Giantess (_Ceridwen_, or _Isis_), without the use of audible language.” And again he says, ”I am a _silent_ proficient.”
Initiation was a school, in which were taught the truths of primitive revelation, the existence and attributes of one G.o.d, the immortality of the Soul, rewards and punishments in a future life, the phenomena of Nature, the arts, the sciences, morality, legislation, philosophy, and philanthropy, and what we now style psychology and metaphysics, with animal magnetism, and the other occult sciences.
All the ideas of the Priests of Hindostan, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Chaldaea, Phnicia, were known to the Egyptian Priests. The rational Indian philosophy, after penetrating Persia and Chaldaea, gave birth to the Egyptian Mysteries. We find that the use of Hieroglyphics was preceded in Egypt by that of the easily understood symbols and figures, from the mineral, animal, and vegetable kingdoms, used by the Indians, Persians, and Chaldaeans to express their thoughts; and this primitive philosophy was the basis of the modern philosophy of Pythagoras and Plato.
All the philosophers and legislators that made Antiquity ill.u.s.trious, were pupils of the initiation; and all the beneficent modifications in the religions of the different people instructed by them were owing to their inst.i.tution and extension of the Mysteries. In the chaos of popular superst.i.tions, those Mysteries alone kept man from lapsing into absolute brutishness. Zoroaster and Confucius drew their doctrines from the Mysteries. Clemens of Alexandria, speaking of the Great Mysteries, says: ”Here ends all instruction. Nature and all things are seen and known.” Had moral truths alone been taught the Initiate, the Mysteries could never have deserved nor received the magnificent eulogiums of the most enlightened men of Antiquity,--of Pindar, Plutarch, Isocrates, Diodorus, Plato, Euripides, Socrates, Aristophanes, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and others;--philosophers hostile to the Sacerdotal Spirit, or historians devoted to the investigation of Truth. No: all the sciences were taught there; and those oral or written traditions briefly communicated, which reached back to the first age of the world.
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