The Works of Walter Leslie Wilmshurst
Brief Masonic Biography
The Meaning of Masonry
The Masonic Initiation
The Ceremony of Initiation
The Ceremony of Passing
Notes on Cosmic Consciousness
The Fundamental Philosophic Secrets Within Masonry
The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal
The Mystical Basis of Freemasonry
Reason and Vision
The Working Tools of an Old York Master
Spurious Ecstasy and Ceremonial Magic
Wilmshurst's Tracing Board of the Centre
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This paper was originally delivered to the Masonic Study Society ,
London in 1925
THE FUNDAMENTAL PHILOSOPHIC SECRETS WITHIN MASONRY
By W. L. WILMSHURST, P.M. 275, P.P.G.Reg. West
Yorks.
We are to speak of the fundamental philosophic secrets concealed
within the Masonic system. These our system declares to be many and
invaluable and to be kept by Masons in their hearts. They are
therefore obviously to be distinguished from the merely formal
secrets imparted ceremonially, which are kept in the head and are
neither many nor of any value, though (as we shall see) they are
deeply significant.
By these secrets, then, is not meant some definite precise
information that can be imparted to or withheld from another person
at will, but the arcane truths inherent in the system itself; truths
needing to be extracted from it, like poetry or music from the
printed page, by personal effort and that can be recognised as truths
only by the inward responsiveness of the soul itself after deeply
meditating and assimilating them. Hence we are taught that they are
matters of the heart, and that they are communicable only to brethren
and fellows (that is, to those whose minds have developed a common
measure of spirituality), and then not orally, but only by means of
signs, tokens and perfect points of entrance. By points of entrance
is meant appropriate faculties of perception and understanding. For
just as to enter into perception and understanding of the outer world
we need our five outward-pointing senses, so for perception and
appreciation of the inner world, we need a corresponding inward
sensorium. The pentagram or five pointed star indicates our five
points of entrance into relations with the world of sense and
phenomena by the limited imperfect channels of the senses; and, to
cognise the secret things of supra-sensual life, we must have
developed corresponding, but perfect points of entrance into it in
the form of soul-faculty, inward vision, inward audition. Hence
inward truths and mysteries are inevitably and automatically secret
from those who have not yet acquired perfect points of entrance to
them, not because of any capricious withholding of them by some
better informed person, but because such men are without the
appropriate faculty for perceiving them; their inner vision is as yet
hoodwinked, darkened, and prevented from recognising them.
For all Masons, for all the world, ultimate Truth and all the
mysteries of being are an ever-open secret. But because all the world
isn’t yet ripe for knowing that secret, or doesn’t want
to know it, or imagines either that it isn’t knowable or that
it knows it already, or at least as much of it as is needed for
present pur-poses, it continues secret, refusing to be revealed save
on its own terms, and lying, as the old simile tells, at the dark
bottom of a well, which well is our own soul-depths, from which it
can only be drawn by our own industry and effort. Hence we find
secret orders always existing for initiation into these secrets and
mysteries, and in these days when we see our own Order so little
concerning itself with such things but preferring to direct its
energies rather to social and secular purposes, it is useful to
reflect that the sole justification for a secret Order is that it is
intended to provide specialised instruction and combined fraternal
effort for those desirous to draw apart from these activities of the
outer world and enter a quiet sanctuary where they may contemplate
and, God helping, perchance attain personal realisation of things
which, in their nature, must always remain secret to the uninitiated
and outside their consciousness.
Before reaching the heart of our subject I wish to refer to a
preliminary matter, and to point out that the text of our rituals and
lectures discloses a strange combination of two very different and
easily distinguishable levels of teaching; a lower and common-place
level which is simple and intelligible to everyone; and a higher and
distinctly esoteric level relating to matters of advanced philosophic
wisdom.
To the lower level belong the various charges and counsels to
morality, and such matters as the simple explanations of the cardinal
and other virtues and of the elementary symbolism of building tools.
These are matters of no philosophic significance. They have nothing
about them distinctive of a secret science or an Initiatory Order.
They inculcate only what might be imparted to non-Masons. The ideals
of conduct they proclaim are not higher or other than any uninitiated
man of rectitude and good feeling normally acts upon, whilst their
interpretations of symbolism are adapted to a quite puerile order of
intelligence. Of themselves they do not justify the existence of a
Secret Order and an elaborate organisation to perpetuate them, and
their sole advantage is that they serve as the foothills to the
higher peaks ol doctrine and provide a common basis of elementary
understanding and conduct among the members of a Society the majority
of whom do not look for or aspire to anything more than good
fellowship and pleasant social relations, which could just as easily
he found in the outside world.
To the higher level, however, belong matters of an entirely
different order of instructiveness, matters drawn from and linking us
directly with older and advanced systems of philosophic and
experimental Mysticism beyond the mental horizon of the average
Brother who for want of requisite preparation and instruction (for
which also he too often has neither aptitude nor desire), is not only
at a loss to understand the main features of our system, but is
precluded from vitally benefiting from it. So he remains an initiate
in name only, not in fact, whilst the Order instead of cultivating
the secret science and royal art to which, nevertheless, it pays much
empty lip-service, degenerates into a vast semi-public social and
benevolent institution conducted upon the same lines and in the same
spirit as characterise the outer world, against which our doors are
theoretically meant to be shut and closely tiled. How many Masons
could say what initiation really is and involves? How many could
explain the doctrine of the centre, the meaning of the circle and the
point within it, and the two grand parallel lines bounding it, or the
implications of the structure and contents of a Lodge, of the Blazing
Star or Glory at the centre, or manifest any personal experience of
the mystical death dramatised in our Third Degree? How many could
explain all that is meant by the Star in the East or testify to its
rising in actual spiritual experience and not merely in symbolic
ceremony, bringing with its rising the peace and salvation to which
that Degree alludes and that open vision, cosmic and beatific, which
the Royal Arch ceremony attempts faintly to portray?
Yet all these matters and many more lie enshrined and embedded
within the simpler and more obvious material of our system and in
seeking to disentangle and consider them the question arises how is
this admixture of elementary exoteric teaching with advanced esoteric
references to be accounted for? Was it due to limited knowledge,
clumsiness and muddleheadedness on the part of the compilers of
Speculative Masonry (as has been suggested by some able Masonic
exponents) or was it intentional? The former view is taken for
instance in the admirable Masonic papers in Bro. A. E. Waite’s
Studies in Mysticism, where it is suggested that the 18th century
worthies who framed our rituals and lectures possessed little or no
esoteric knowledge and a very imperfect conception of the real
purpose of an Initiatory system. By some means, into which we need
not now inquire, there had come into their hands from remoter sources
the salient features of such a system, obviously and faithfully
perpetuating the self-perfecting doctrine taught in the philosophic
Mysteries of the past and common to all the secret schools of both
East and West; a system of whose full significance it is suggested
that they were unaware yet one which they were intuitively moved to
preserve, and which they amplified and put forward clothed with some
well-meant but cheap and tawdry garnishings of their own. They were
moralists rather than mystics. Their ideal seems to have been not the
sublime attainments of the perfected initiate who finds and lives
from his centre but, as their ponderous grandiloquence puts
it, merely to “become a worthy member of Society,”
to ‘‘rise in the scale of moral excellence’’
and to “live respected and die regretted.” Not spiritual
Mastership, but smug respectability, seems on the surface to have
been the limit of their ambition, consistently with which they
obsequiously sought the patronage of royalty and aristocracy to give
the Order social dignity and attractiveness and render it free from
suspicion of being a cloak for political intrigue.
To this view of the conduct of our 18th century progenitors, there
is a possible alternative which, in fairness to them, may be advanced
rather because it is possible than that it can now be proved. It is
that, in anticipation of Speculative Masonry proving attractive to
numbers of men not yet likely to appreciate the profounder aspects of
Initiation science, they deliberately diluted the system by weaving
into it a body of simple ethical ideals within the compass of
everyone’s understanding. In this way they conserved the vital
points of the traditional secret doctrine for the benefit of those
who could recognise and profit by them and at the same time they
effectively crypticised and concealed them from those who could not.
To state a personal conviction, I do not believe that Speculative
Masonry was instituted with the intention of becoming the social and
money-raising organisation into which it has since drifted.
Sociability and relief — but not merely financial relief —
were obvious side-consequences of such an institution, but primarily
it was a movement made from behind the scenes of public history
towards perpetuating an ancient secret doctrine for the sake of those
who might discern and profit by it in the epoch of spiritual
sterility, materialism and religious disruption into which we had
fallen and through which we are still passing. As one of our lectures
truly affirms, the world is never left without witness to the ancient
traditional science by following which man may recover “that
which is lost,” the ruined empire of his own soul, and scrutiny
of human events indicates that at all times, behind and within
humanity, there stand watchers, guardians, guides, initiates, charged
with the task of keeping the witness alive, however faintly, and
unobtrusively steering the race towards its destiny of ultimate
spiritual perfection. So closely linked is our Masonic system with
other and far more advanced expressions of that science that the
conclusion is irresistible that it stands in the chain of direct
succession with them and was designed to per-petuate the same
doctrine. If this be so, the movement projected some 250 years ago
has been justified in that it has famliarised vast numbers of minds
with at least an elementary and notional acquaintance with a path of
progress which sooner or later we must all realise in vital
experience, We may regret, though we need not despair, that of those
numbers so few even pass from the foot-hills of the subject to the
heights of its full understanding and personal experiment, but was it
not declared thousands of years ago that “the candidates are
many but the perfected initiates few,’’ and again, still
later, “that Many are called but few are chosen?” Yet
those few are ever ready and anxious to pass on the torch to others
and it is perhaps from its light that is due the increasing desire of
so many in the Order to-day to rise to a fuller appreciation of what
its doctrine holds in concealment and will yield up to those who
truly seek it.
Leaving behind us now the mere elementary ethics and sym-bolism of
the Craft and coming to its fundamental philosophic secrets, we have
first to ask ourselves what has always been and still is the grand
aim and purpose of initiation? Whether in the East, in Egypt, Greece,
or elsewhere, and in all eras, it has been indicated by the formula
“know thyself;” it has been to bring a man to conscious
realisation of that which is the root and basic essence of his being.
It is that and nothing else, and our 3rd Degree refers to this when
it speaks of the chief of all human studies being the “knowledge
of yourself.”
Now to realise a thing is not merely to have notions of it, but to
become it, to make it a living reality, to become wholly identified
with it. And what is the root and basic essence of our being with
which we are to become identified, the self we are advised to get to
know? And here we are at once driven against that which is the
root-cause of all Masonic silence and secrecy. For this basic essence
is something nameless, unspeakable, something beyond all verbal and
mental categories, yet not, thank God, beyond feeling, for the heart
can know and feel what the head fails to comprehend. Yet to cast it
into verbal coinage for the purpose of exchanging ideas, it passes by
several names. The East calls it the “Self” (Atman) the
self-radiant, self-intelligent unitary root of being and deathless
source of all derivative life and multiplicity. ‘The Greek
schools called it Autos, the self-contained or self-subsistent, the
One or the Good. The Hebrews describe it as the sacred and
un-pronounceable name of four letters, Tetragrammaton, or as Adonai,
while Christians personalise it as God in so far as He is immanent in
the soul as its concealed vitalising spirit. And Masonry describes it
variously as the “vital and immortal principle,” as
Adoniram, as the Blazing Star or Glory at our centre, as the Light of
a Master Mason which never goes out even when all our other lights
(or faculties) fail, because it is eternal and immortal whilst our
other faculties are temporal and perishable. But by whatever name we
label it, however shadowy and imperfect our thought of it, that it is
with which we are to become consciously identified by a direct act of
self-knowledge, for, as the teaching uniformly declares, the secret
of all secrets is that ‘‘Thou art THAT.” To realise
this, not merely notionally, but in fulness of direct experience, has
always been and still is the goal of wisdom and the goal of
Initiatory science. It is to become seated and established in the
chair of King Solomon. It is to pass from mere manhood and the carnal
understanding to conscious Godhood whilst we are still in the flesh.
It is the realisation of our fundamental unity and identity with
ultimate of ultimates. It is the ex-perience to which in our Third
Degree the Mason is told to lift his eyes in expectation of realising
it, and which is likened to the glory of a star whose rising brings
peace and salvation, and is still more elaborately dramatised in the
finding of the Lost Word and the great vision attained at the
restoration to light in the Royal Arch ceremony.
If this, then, be the purpose and goal of Initiation, the
fundamental hypothesis and philosophic secret of Masonry is the
solemn fact that God and the human soul are in essence a unity, not a
duality, and the sole intention of our Initiatory-system is, by
instruction and discipline, to bring about in each of us the
conscious realisation of that unity.
Is not such hypothesis of necessity a secret? For if it is to
become realised in personal experience, it is an experience which
must he prepared for in secret, be realised in secret, and remain
secret, incomprehensible, and incommunicable to everyone save those
in the silence of whose breast it becomes experimentally achieved.
Moreover, treating Initiation-science purely from a historical
standpoint, it could be shown that this was always the fundamental
religious and philosophic arcanum of every Initiation-system that has
existed, one, that under pain of dire penalties for its disclosure,
was always rigorously withheld from the uninitiated world with whose
less matured religious outlook it was bound to clash. Whence it comes
that, following this wise practice, Masonry leaves every man to
follow his own religion, in the certain knowledge that every
religion, however crude or imperfect, leads ultimately to the one
centre and is a preparation for what can he realised in its fulness
only by initiation.
Masonry therefore, like every Initiation-system, is not
non--religious, but super-sectarian, and directed to secrets and
mysteries of Being with which popular religion does not deal. It is
ontological and philosophic, but not theological. Indeed it ‘jumps”
all the theologies and so avoids the endless bickerings and
disputations to which in the outer world they have given birth, and
it eschews all credal dogmas — save one. In its Constitutions
Masonry posits and exacts acquiescence in but one sole dogma —
the Being of God. It wisely leaves that dogma unexplained and to be
interpreted by each according to his light. But its acceptance, as
you know, is insisted upon as pre-requisite to membership of the
Order, and the reason for the insistence is that unless God and
conscious union with Him as our divine and basic Principle be
postulated as our object of desire and goal of attainment, there is
no merit, no virtue, no purpose, in initiation rites.
Religious thought and ideas of Deity have, of course, travelled a
long way since the time when the arcanum we are speaking of could
never he breathed outside Temples of Initiation from fear of clashing
with popular religion. To-day, despite the survival in certain
quarters of much that is crude, anthropomorphic and unthinkable, a
sincere and healthy agnosticism has broken up the caked soil of many
former theological notions and made possible the growth of a new and
mystical Gnosis. One might even say that in its great earnest quest
for knowledge of the secrets and mysteries of life, society of
to-day, in so far as it devotes attention to that quest, is
collectively taking as it were a new degree of Initiation, and like a
hoodwinked candidate shuffling along with irregular steps and
uncertainty whither it is going, is slowly and darkly probing its way
towards the Light. The need for disciplined instruction and
initiation into the secrets and mysteries of Being, however, still
exists for all of us as much as it ever did in antiquity, and we in
the Craft possess, therefore, an advantage over those who are not in
it, for if we will but rightly interpret and use it, we have in our
Order a specialised system of guidance upon the path that leads to
the Eternal East and the Master of Life. Shall we not therefore make
the most of our privilege and with gratitude bow to that Master for
the foresight which provided it for us?
Let us now pass on to seeing how the process of attaining
self-knowledge and realisation of the basic essence of our being is
inculcated in our system. Take first the Apron, that prominent, most
personal, and most instructive of all our emblems, since it is the
visible symbol of the constitution of each of us. It consists of a
pyramidal or triangular flap superimposed upon a quadrangular base,
thus representing the two main divisions into which each of us is
separable. The triangular flap stands for the spiritual essence, the
germ of Divine Fire; it expresses man as he subsists in perfection
and in the Divine idea. The quadrangular base stands for material man
as he exists imperfectly and as a personality in the flesh. The
former is our ultimate real, true, immortal self, the latter is a
transient, perishable and therefore unreal self. The normal
uninitiated man knows only this unreal illusory self, and therefore
exists in a state of darkness and blindness to his con-cealed true
being. The object and discipline of Initiation is to reverse this
position by, as it were, turning a man inside out, so bringing
forward into consciousness and function the higher part which has
been obscured and submerged and, as a necessary corollary, repressing
and putting out of action the contrary claims and activities of his
lower ego, the natural Personality.
Our system therefore asks us to think of the triangular flap as
the sacramental sign of the presence in ourselves of the Divine
Essence, an Essence which, because it is Divine, comprises all the
attributes of Divinity--all knowledge, all power, all wisdom,
strength and beauty. In our basic, real self, each of us is all that;
each of us is, as the flame-shaped pyramidal emblem is meant to
indicate, a ‘‘tongue of fire,” a spiritual flamelet
from the primor-dial infinite fire of Universal spirit, but as yet
unconscious of the fact and without realised experience of it. And
the reason of our unconsciousness of it is accounted for by the fact
that this real essential has become imprisoned, obscured and
submerged within a vesture or coating of something alien to it, of
which the emblem is the quadrangular portion of the Apron. The union
of the two parts of the Apron figures the union of the spiritual and
material parts of our organisatjon, and the drawing down of the flap
upon the base testifies to the fall of spirit into matter, a fall
involving loss of consciousness on the part of the spirit through
becoming straightened by the limitations and polluted by the
impurities of sensual existence.
Now the science of initiation was and still is to promote the
separation and eventual emancipation of the spiritual Essence, our
true self, from this material thraldom, and the Craft Degrees are a
dramatisation of the emancipating process. The misconception widely
obtains, even among the Craft, that emancipation becomes
automatically effected upon the death of the material body. But this
is not the teaching of the ancient science, which declares that
somatic death involves only the dissociation of the lower elements of
our nature without ensuring the liberation of the enthralled Divine
Essence, unless that liberation has been previously effected by
initiation during physical life. Hence the supreme importance always
attached to awaking that Essence into self-consciousness whilst we
are still in the flesh and the requisite mechanism of all our parts
and faculties is present. For the physical body is the “tomb of
transformation” in which the great change-over has to be
effected and, “the night cometh when no man can work” at
this task of emancipation and, as the teaching runs, further physical
incarnation will be necessary as opportunity to resume it.
The process of Initiation is therefore one of regeneration and
bringing forward the inmost essence first to birth and eventually to
full growth, and of necessity it involves a corresponding
degeneration, renunciation, and mystical death of all the lower
principles that obstruct the transformation. It is outlined for us
with utmost clearness in our three Degrees, and progress in it is
signified by changes and elaborations in the Apron. The first stage
involves the purification and subdual of the gross sense-nature and
the killing out of desire for all material attractions and
indifference to the allurements of the outer world. The second
involves the discipline and clarifying of the mind till it becomes
pure and strong enough to respond to a supernatural order of life and
wisdom, and it is therefore in our Second Degree that in the
discovery of a sacred symbol in the centre of the building is
indicated the first glimpsing of the presence of the Divine Essence
at our personal centre, and the desire to eradicate from the heart
all obstacles to complete union with it. The third stage, the “last
and greatest trial,” involves the voluntary dying down of the
entire natural self-hood and even the destruction of our sense of
ego-ism in separation from the Universal Life-Essence, until that
Essence displaces the former limited personal Ego and rises into
permanent consciousness as a bright morning star, one of those stars
or self-radiant beings which, it is written, ‘‘sang
together” in the dawn of creation, and that will once more sing
together in eternal union and harmony when the great work of
emancipation of our spirits from material bondage has been
consummated.
Turn now to a few minor secrets that still further illustrate what
has been said and consider the concealed significance of the official
signs of the Craft and Arch Degrees. In the surface explanation of
those signs they are made to allude to penalties attached to breaches
of our obligations, and it is well known that those penalties
correspond with those formerly prescribed for high treason and other
crimes against the State. This surface explanation, however, is but
camouflage. The real significance lies deeper.
Take the sign of the 1st Degree. It is obviously a sign of
decapitation, but a decapitation to be understood not physically but
mystically. Its meaning is that the head (or natural human reason)
being an inadequate faculty for apprehending the sublime supernatural
facts of the spirit must be content to renounce its powers and
become, as it were, cut off, beheaded, before ultimate supreme
verities can be cognised. Among the spiritual alchemists this is
often referred to as “cutting off the head of the black crow,”
that sombre bird being taken as a figure of the natural reason. The
natural mind is adapted solely to the cognition of natural phenomena;
spiritual things, which to it are foolishness and unrealities, must
be spiritually perceived; spirit alone can cognise spirit. It is of
course true that the natural mind, when disciplined and purified,
becomes lit up, illuminated and strengthened by the cognitions of the
spirit; the point is that in virtue of its own natural powers it is
not, and never can be, the appropriate cognising organ; it must
utterly abase itself and evacuate its powers, in other words be cut
off. Summa scientia nihil scire is the maxim here applicable; supreme
knowledge comes only when the mind is emptied of all lesser
knowledge. When therefore in our first Degree the Mason stands to
salute his Worshipful Master let him remember that the gesture
signifies the homage he should pay to what is worshipful in himself,
namely, his own Master-principle, the Divine Essence immanent in
himself, for the Master of a Lodge symbolically personifies that
Master-principle; let him reflect that he must abrogate and behead
his natural reason and understanding if he ever hopes to participate
in that supreme wisdom of which King Solomon and his symbolic
successors are the personified types. And, as the Queen of Sheba
abased herself to the dust before the regal and unparalleled
splendour of that mon-arch, so let him read behind this allegory and
recognise that the visions that open to the awakened spirit in man
utterly transcend the ideas of our natural intelligence and that the
natural eye hath not seen nor ear heard things which nevertheless can
he seen and heard by those who make the necessary self-surrender and
acquire the necessary faculty and points of entrance.* [* In further
illustration, consider the beheading of John the Baptist as
symbo1ising the necessity of renouncing the natural mentality before
the Christ-consciousness can supersede it; “He must increase,
and I must decrease” and see further the pointed allusion in
Rev. xx., 4. W. Bro. Sir Frederick Pollock kindly sends me further
confirmation hy pointing to the frequent allusion in mystical
writings to “headlessness,” as figuring total
self-ahnegation and absorption of the mind in God (the
super-conscious state of ecstasy or Sarnadhi), and by quoting the
following from the great Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi (13th century)]
If the 1st Degree sign relates to the head, that of the 2nd Degree
refers to the heart, and the heart must be kept with all diligence
for out of it are the issues of life; out of it come the wellings
forth of the central, self-radiant, self-knowing Essence. The sign
therefore indicates the necessity of cleansing the affections and the
mind, and casting out their impurities, so that the glory at the
centre may the more effectually shine through. Not to the clever in
head, but to the simple and pure in heart, comes the great experience
of beatific vision disclosed later on in the Royal Arch Degree. The
point is further emphasised in the Masonic steps. Following ancient
tradition, every step is taken with the left foot, the right foot
being then drawn up to it, for the left is the side of the heart as
the right is associated with the head. In the pursuit of the
mysteries of Being, precedence must ever he given to the intuitions
of the heart; the rational understanding must be subordinated to
those instincts, follow in their rear and be brought up into
alignment with them, for “the heart has its reasons, of which
the reason itself does not know.”
When thou see’st in the pathway a severed head
Which is bounding towards our field,
Ask of it, ask of it, the secrets of the heart,
For of it thou wilt learn our hidden mystery.
The Third Degree signs obviously refer to the Centre itself, and
to experiences encountered upon our approach to it; they relate not
only to certain functions of the physical centre (the solar plexus),
but to the Divine Essence centralised within us and constituting the
bidden basis of our being. The sign of the Royal Arch degree is
equally obvious. It is that of those humble sancti-fied souls, the
people who “have received mercy,” in that to them has
been accorded the supreme grace of attaining conscious union with
that which is perfect and all-holy and who shield their eyes before
the overpowering splendour of the vision that has opened out to them.
Next let us turn to that impressive piece of ritual which lends so
much awe and mystery to the closing of the Lodge in the Third Degree.
The genuine secrets of Master Masonry are then declared to have
become lost and, in the intimate posture of the five points of
fellowship, words are uttered telling that ‘‘the Master
is smitten”; an announcement so solemn, so mysterious, that it
is normally permitted to be uttered only beneath the breath. Yet no
sooner has it thus been uttered than the Master directs it to be once
more proclaimed, but this time aloud, so that all may hear and, if
they have ears of inward hearing, realise its gravity and
significance. What genuine secrets have been lost? What Master has
been smitten? Why that hushed whisper and the subsequent proclamation
of the words aloud? And why are those words directed to serve as
substituted secrets and to distinguish all Master Masons until time
and circumstances restore the genuine ones?
If Brethren understood the implication they would surely better
appreciate the purpose of the Craft and put it to higher uses than
they do. For in this incident is not only enshrined the fundamental
doctrine of the Order, but a truth is declared affecting all human
life. It is a pronouncement of cosmic loss and dereliction. Not a
historic Hiram or any allegoric personality is it that is smitten,
but the Divine and Grand Master-principle of our being ‘‘slain
from the foundation of the world,’’ of which Hiram is
used as the personified type. This it is which in our present natural
state is cut off from us, smitten and overpowered by our own ruffian
disorderly wills and sensual effections, so that we live, not by its
light, but in outer darkness of our own making; not in conscious
possession of the genuine secrets of our true being; not in fulness
of wisdom and perfection of faculty, but by virtue only of our
limited natural reason and our illusory senses. As we are now we do
not live front the centre of life, but from its circumference; we do
not know Reality and Being in its wholeness and perfection; we know
only phenomena, relativity and the shadows and husks of real things;
we live but a secondary derivative existence at the periphery —
a life of endless flux and decay, of strife and pain, futility and
death, which are the signs that must and will continue to distinguish
us until time and circumstances restore to us that which is lost,
conscious union with our root of being. And so finding this
peripheral existence one of relative illusion and unsatisfying
vanities, as sooner or later we all do, we recognise that some vital
factor is wanting to us, and we go here and there in our blind
searchings after it, as it were exclaiming M—! M—! and
with bated breath whispering to one another the dread secret that the
Master is smitten and that with him the true secrets of our being are
lost also.
This is the great truth so dramatically testified to in the
closing of the Third Degree, and it is the truth which alone explains
and justifies the existence of Initiation-systems to remedy it. For
the purpose of Initiation ever was, and still is, to effect the
restoration in the individual soul of its candidates of that which
from their heart they recognise they have lost, but desire to regain.
A real initiate is one in whom that restoration has become fully (or
even partially) achieved, as it may be by any of us by our own
industry and the assistance of the Master-principle within us. The
full, complete restoration is graphically depicted for us
ceremonially in the Third Degree in the symbolic act of raising the
candidate from — to — and his becoming then drawn into
identic union and fellowship with his Master-principle, whilst it is
elaborated still farther in the gorgeous rite of the Royal Arch. For
him who has received the mercy of this great experience in fact and
not merely in ceremony, the words ‘The Master is smitten!”
no longer apply, but rather “The Master is risen!’’
for he has reached the soul’s true Easter-day, and that vital
and immortal principle which has risen in him can proclaim through
his regenerated organism “I am he that liveth and was dead and
behold I am alive for evermore, Amen, and hold the keys of hell and
of death!” For that is Mastership, the goal of the excellent
and perfect Mason, and the recovery of both the lost secrets and the
lost powers of our genuine being, for attaining which it is open to
each of us whose desire is ardent enough, to make our own time and
create the requisite circumstances.
This would appear to be the conclusion of our subject. But one
more point must he made, for, far as our Craft Degrees and their
extension in the Royal Arch carry us, there remains one greater
height still. The supreme climax of our system is to he looked for in
the implications of the Ceremony of Installation. This, I regret,
cannot be spoken of adequately or with the fulness it deserves except
inside a Board of Installed Masters. Yet let a word be said upon it
here, for if there be one piece of our ritual more than another that
one would fain see rescued from the misunderstanding that so often
desecrates it, it is that of the enthronement into the chair of King
Solomon.
Blind are the eyes that see in this wonderful and moving rite
merely the induction of an annually chosen new governor of a Lodge.
More darkened still is the mind that treats attainment to the Chair
of Wisdom as a matter of self-satisfaction at the fulfilment of a
private ambition and makes it, after the manner of the secular world,
an occasion for personal glorification and intensified carousal. For
behind all the personal compliment and the formal conventions
necessarily attaching to it as a temporal event, there lurks the
profound and pride-humbling spirtual significance of its symbolism,
the sacramental veils of which our vision should be trained to
pierce.
In that symbolism Royal Solomon is no historic character, but our
latent Master-principle personified; he is the embodiment of the
conjoined wisdom, strength and beauty characterising the root of our
being from which we are now cut off, but to regain which is the end
of the philosophical quest. The “Chair of King Solomon,”
is a metaphor of the perfected soul’s ultimate sedes
gestatoria, and the occasion of installation should he regarded as
the symbol of its Feast of Assumption thereinto. For there, after the
aspirant’s upward toil, the path of Initiation terminates, and
the builder of the house not made with hands enters that rest which
remaineth for those who outgrow the ranks of humanity and pass into
the order of Divinity and Mastership. In words used in another
connection he is made to “sit down at the right of God,”
clothed with all the attributes and executive powers of divine
vice-regency.
Thus behind the personal honour accorded to a Brother called to
the chair of Wisdom is dramatised the enthronement of the soul upon
the utmost height of its being; and when we look up to and salute a
newly installed Master, wearing the regalia of that supreme office,
bearing the symbols of plenary power and entrusted with absolute
control of his Lodge and its property, let us translate this visible
imagery into its spiritual and impersonal value, and lift our eyes
and hearts to contemplation of that sublime moment when the perfected
soul, reaching its throne of rest and peace surpassing understanding,
enters its true kingdom, receives the power, and wears the
self-radiant vesture of glory, for ever and ever.
In these reflections I have tried to dissect some of the deeper
and more vital arcana of the Craft from the mass of superficial moral
teaching amidst which it lies imbedded and, as I think, deliberately
veiled. There remain for contemplation many other valuable
philosophic secrets which would require not one, but a series of
papers to discuss. Some of these would probably startle and even give
offence to the natural mind until it learns to abase and behead
itself and to receive hidden wisdom with the unsophisticated vision
of a child.
Better therefore defer their consideration for the present. When
as the result of the discipline and industry prescribed by our
system, we become conscious of the Blazing Star or Glory at our
centre rising and expanding more and more in us its self-convincing
light will itself disclose to us and justify all that now lies secret
and unexplained, but, as the Great Master of the West enjoined, until
it be risen from the dead in our hearts we are to tell the vision to
no man (see Matthew xvii., 9.), whilst following the same
instruction, Masonry directs us to lock up our secrets in the heart’s
safe, and sacred repository.
Yet what has been said may perhaps suffice to indicate something
of the invaluable light and wisdom concealed within our system, and
since there is nothing hid which shall not be revealed in due course
and to the properly prepared, we may regard the increasing anxiety of
so many Brethren to-day to realise more fully the true content and
purpose of our Order, as a sign that at last, after a long period of
darkness and perversity, the Light of the Centre is gradually
breaking over the Craft and restoring, to at least the more faithful
and zealous of its members, the knowledge of the lost but genuine
secrets of their being.
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