Part 80 (2/2)
I AM, G.o.d said to Moses, that which Is, Was and Shall forever Be. But the Very G.o.d, in His unmanifested Essence, conceived of as not yet having created and as Alone, has no Name. Such was the doctrine of all the ancient Sages, and it is so expressly declared in the Kabalah.
[Hebrew: ????] is the Name of the Deity manifested in a single act, that of Creation, and containing within Himself, in idea and actuality, the whole Universe, to be invested with form and be materially developed during the eternal succession of ages. As G.o.d never WAS NOT, so He never THOUGHT not, and the Universe has no more had a beginning than the Divine Thought of which it is the utterance,--no more than the Deity Himself. The duration of the Universe is but a point halfway upon the infinite line of eternity; and G.o.d was not inert and uncreative during the eternity that stretches behind that point. The Archetype of the Universe did never not exist in the Divine Mind. The Word was in the BEGINNING with G.o.d, and WAS G.o.d. And the Ineffable NAME is that, not of the Very Essence but of the Absolute, manifested as Being or Existence.
For Existence or Being, said the Philosophers, is limitation; and the Very Deity is not limited nor defined, but is all that _may possibly be_, besides all that is, was, and shall be.
Reversing the letters of the Ineffable Name, and dividing it, it becomes bi-s.e.xual, as the word [Hebrew: ??], _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, ”G.o.d 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, G.o.ddess 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 G.o.d, without s.e.x 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 COMPa.s.s, 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 COMPa.s.s 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 Compa.s.s 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 ent.i.tled ”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 _Compa.s.s_, 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 G.o.ds. They were deified also among the Phnicians; 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 gra.s.s, 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 a.s.signed 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 Compa.s.s, 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 COMPa.s.s, 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 G.o.d, not of the individual Soul, which is susceptible both of knowledge and ignorance, of pleasure and pain; therefore G.o.d 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 pa.s.sions; 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 G.o.d, 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 const.i.tute, 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 n.o.blest 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 pa.s.sions that prompt to evil, and the sensual appet.i.tes. ”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 G.o.d, they are the sons of G.o.d.” ”The flesh l.u.s.teth 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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.
<script>