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Through Temple Doors
Let the genius of Freemasonry preside over our conduct, and, under her sovereign sway, let us
preserve a nobleness and justness of understanding, politeness of manners, and evenness of
temper. Let our recreations be innocent and pursued with moderation; and never let us suffer
irregular indulgences to expose our character to derision and contempt.
Greatness of mind; that elevation or dignity of soul, which encounters danger and trouble with
tranquility and firmness, which raises the possessor above revenge, and makes him delight in
acts of benevolence,
which makes him disdain injustice and meanness, and prompts him to sacrifice personal ease,
with unhesitating cordiality, so far as shall be in your power, every Brother who shall need your
assistance; that you have promised to remind him, in the most tender manner, of his failings, and
aid his reformation; to vindicate his character when wrongfully traduced; and to suggest in his
behalf the most candid, favorable, and palliating circumstances, even when his conduct is justly
reprehensible. If you faithfully observe these duties, the world will observe how Freemasons
love one another, in obedience to the will of God.
Through Temple Doors: studies in occult Masonry
Roy Mitchell was a Freemason who wrote on comparative religion, philosophy, and the
mystical content of the world’s great literature. Mitchell spoke of the great Secret hidden
in the ritual of the Craft and Inner significance of the Mystery Dramas of Greece, where
Masonry follows the deeper meaning underlying the work - which is a guide to
the "complete" process of towards the physical, mental and spiritual regeneration of the
soul.
There is a reminder that there are inner secrets which cannot be written down or
communicated but which must be learned through the awakened intuition of the
disciple. A document only rewards the reader in the measure in which they bring
something to it. If they seek to get at the meaning by a mere scrutiny of the words, they
must go away as empty as they came.
Welcome To The Age of Aquarius
The Egyptian Thot-Hermes, himself a symbol of a pouring down of spiritual light from the realm
of spirit, and called in Greece the messenger of the Gods, was "the One who pours the rain of
Righteousness.” Hermes was the custodian, the myths say, of a Sacred Word. The utterance for
words of power was his peculiar attribute. In Hinduism, mantra vidya is the attainment to vision
through sacred words. With the Jews, the Shemhamphorash was the word of power, which is the
72 divided names for each angel of righteous intelligence.
Many have pointed the way. Gautama Budha taught a handful of those near to him; so also did
Krishna, Lao-tsze, Hermes, Zoraster; so did Pythagoras; so did Kapila, Patanjali, Sankara, Plato;
so did the founders and hierophants of the mysteries of Isis, Eleusis and Mithra; so did the
Gnostics, the Neo-Platonists and the Rosicrucians; and so also do the Masons of today.
The answer they all offer is but one; that man can be privy to teachings concerning his soul – its
origin, its destiny and the means for awakening its powers.
The fundamental doctrine of the ancient schools is that of the immortality of the soul in the past
as well as in the future. Since the Dark Ages, when the torch of philosophy in Europe all but
went out, we have adhered to the Traducian doctrine of the creation of the soul at birth. But the
Ego cannot think of itself as beginning any more than it can think of itself as ending. When it
tries to think of itself as being created it is compelled to say, “Where was I before?” Ultimately
we are forced to think of immortality as extending infinitely in both directions. What then are the
modifications of this infinite life of the soul, of which the present earthly existence is not the
beginning but the middle point? Does the soul but once in all this infinite contact the physical
earth? Why at all? Why not many times in a rhythmic pulsation – the pulsation we find in
flowers, in breathing, in the passage of the planets in their courses? There is nothing complete
about this tattered, broken, fragment which we call life. This one maimed, that insane, this dying
in his prime, that scarcely living at all, this one a genius, that one dull and vicious. And the reply
of all the great mystery systems is: A life is only one of many contacts with earth, many days at
school; one of many grips with matter, a recurrent episode in the pilgrimage of the soul, until
knowing the fullness of its power it stands up in the complete stature of the god. The soul of man
is the candidate, they said, who enters the world of labor, withdraws for refreshment and returns
to labor again, properly clothed for his task, the building of a Temple for the Most High.
With this in mind, we must see humanity anew. It is no longer a welter of writhing, distorted
bodies, but a stream of souls, and there comes a time, say the ancient mysteries, when the soul of
a person, having reached mature age, having become free by birth, having attained sound
judgment and strict morals, is passed into the vestibule of the arcane schools and given a
symbolic glimpse of the raising into a higher life. It is but a hard won reward which all will share
when the occasion presents itself.
THE WORD
The Yoga system of Patanjali follows that a purity of life, which gives the aspirant strength, then
by aspiration, which gives them the assurance that God will establish Himself within the
candidate – they strive, with all their mental faculties concentrated upon the Supreme, to attain to
a vision of the True Word, the shabda, or Testimony. That is what we are in the body to bring
about. The Hindu mantra vidya is an actual process of prayer by the use of which the aspirant
employs specific sounds to induce spiritual moods, or, as he would say, to elicit vision. In the
earlier stages there are many words used. The Vedas are said to be mantramic,; so are the Iranian
Gathas. Gregorian plain chant is mantramic, and mantram lingers in the older Celtic keens,
notably the celebrated Irish Cry of Galway. It is said, also, that our own Lord’s Prayer is
mantramic on the inner planes when they are uttered, and they may well do so, because Chladni
and Glaserna have demonstrated by laboratory methods that musical notes make patterns in
thinly spread sand and lycopodium.
Patanjali, the Hindu sage, has said that separation of Ego from animal can be gained by holy
mutterings. The Chinese said the first degree in their mystery was Keng, or perfect words.
The Tower of Babel failed for lack of unity of tongues; a word is the object of all Masonic
search.
Speech is the peculiar power of the Ego over the animal nature. Without speech there can be no
concepts; without thought we can have no speech. Conversely, with perfect thought we attain
perfect words. Of old, it was thought that to know the true name of a thing was to have power
over it and to-day, with the French Psychologist Emile Coue (The application of his mantra-like
conscious autosuggestion), many are demonstrating the power of words over the unconscious or
animal mind (mind debased by disease), we are coming again to a realization of the old doctrine
of words of power.
PURIFICATION
Purification must be seen as a process by which forces latent within us are by patient effort
brought forth into full play; purifications by which voltages that would destroy our impure
bodies if they were released too soon can be energized with safety; the lighting up of new centres
of vision in our bodies; perhaps the attainment of consciousness of a fourth dimension in space a
correspondingly increased insight into the mysteries of motion and time; certainly a vastly
increased capacity for affection, for devotion and for sacrifice, and an at-one-ment with out
fellow men on the four planes of matter in which we have our existence.
It is to be wondered that because it releases so many high potencies which require a
corresponding high purity or it will destroy the body, it cannot be given to the fool and the
knave? The fact that it is above mind is Masonic symbolism. Every mystery system warns
against rushing forward and being accessory to one’s death by strangling ,against gazing upon
the unveiled Isis, against eating and drinking of a communion unworthily. These potencies, if
they are aroused before purity and power of mind and faith in the stabilizing power of the Great
Architect, can strangle and can blind and they can admit the selfish person into selfish magic
which is, for a cycle, condemnation to their own soul.
THE 5th ELEMENT: HEART
The Heart is the peculiar centre of the animal – the human elemental. It is symbolized in Greek
religion as the labyrinth, the tortuous dwelling of the Minotaur to whom so many were sacrifice
and into it Theseus must penetrate to destroy the adversary. It is the Mithraic cave which the bull
had to be slain by Mithra and his life-blood spilled to fertilize the growing corn. It is the
Crocodilopolis of Egyptian myth and the Sattapanni cave of the Buddhist story. When, after the
first work of discriminating between Self and Not-self the Ego is required to do battle for
possession of the centre of affections to drive out impurities and to develop the rich powers that
come with control over the passional nature. Here in the cave of the heart Gautama Buddha sat in
meditation making himself master of the lower forces and instructing the ‘race of men’ until he
had filled the cave with the radiance of the Solar Self. There is an old tradition that a tower, or
pillar mount of vision must be erected or ascended in the heart and from that vantage point all the
field of the lower self can be seen. We have a tradition in Masonry that Jephthah did the same
thing in his valley. There in his tower – the tower of the pure Danae in the Perseus story, and of
Balor in the old Irish one – the aspirant in the true mystery, must complete the work of the
second degree making the modifications of mind – the Solar Self – stand still until the work is
done, and stability attained. It will not do merely to go into the realm of mind. If you do, you will
lose the hear to the enemy. The work must be done in the heart symbolically as well as
physically. The process of cleansing the emotions is the one which will enable the heart centres
to stand that new and powerful current without which illumination on earth is not possible. To
raise the spiritual potencies in yourself, one must cleanse their sexual, psychic, noetic and
spiritual correspondences to your chakra centers. This is Kundalini.
THE MASON
If we were really operative masons or practicing occultists, instead of being merely Speculative
Masons or philosophical students, our method of research in this degree would be experimental.
We might, for example, make an effort to analyze the impulses of the lower animal nature, to
remember its phantasmagoric dreams, to set it tasks of a devotional nature, to reduce its food, to
change its food and note the results, to reduce its sleep or change its hours of sleep, to examine
its fears, its doubts, its nameless terrors, its pleasurable reactions. We might record and study its
sex cycles, its peculiar affinity for the moon pulses – the period of the month, the metonic period
of nineteen years in which the moon returns to its original position with regard to a given point
on the earth, as well as that cycle of twenty-eight years each, so important in human affairs. We
might examine the peculiar functions of the endocrines, the ductless glands, so long as factor in
occultism and so recently discovered by physiologists. We might examine the flow of the
polarity or breath from one nostril to the other in its cycle of a little less than two hours. We
might examine the phenomena of coldness on the palms of the hands when the life currents
change polarity during the night. We might study the lower man in the phenomena of psychism,
lucidity, hypnotism, insanity, and we might investigate and tabulate the laws of the cycles of
return of emotions, thoughts and impulses at regular intervals.
As Speculative Masons we content ourselves with reading about these things, if indeed we do as
much as that. Of course, without the doctrine of reincarnation, which requires that we return
again until we solve the riddle and succeed in transmuting the dross of the lower man into gold,
as the alchemists said, there is no incentive to any such activity. There is really no reason to
know any more about Masonry than mere curiosity dictates.
For the man who has learned, however, to value the processes of the soul and its activity in this
lower self as mattering greatly in all the functions of life, the consensus of tradition about the
lower self will be a subject of great moment.
The lower self is of the vehicle of desire, and bears the same relation to the combined etheric and
physical bodies as water does to a solid, and is called by the ancients the water body. It is here, in
this water or desire body, that the animal soul dwells, the Fallen One. He stands at the threshold
of mind; he is the real master of the body and of the lower vehicles; he has a close affinity to the
moon and its cycles. It is he who maintains the bodily processes. He is called subconscious mind
by the later psychologists; he is the water reptile of Egyptian myth, the half-man and half animal
of the Greek story. (Peter Pan movie, Clock holding in mouth Alligator, Robin Williams?) He is
the tempter to lower actions and the thwarter of higher aspirations. When he gets partially out of
hand we have the phenomena of dissociation of personality; completely, and we have insanity. It
is he who doubts and fears, who gets angry or jealous, who covets, who wants things, who is
forever in revolt against the Master Builder and for long times so overcomes the Builder as to
leave the Builder dead.
Our first task is not to conquer him. Occultism proceeds only one step at a time. The initial work
is merely to understand the lunar being and to discriminate between ourselves as solar beings and
him as the adversary. It is to create a habit of mind which the Bhikshu, or Apprentice, in every
system is required to create. It is first to watch our moods and say whether the impulses arise in
us or in the animal soul. Do I want a drink of water or does he? Have I doubt of the value of this
effort or has he? This is called the path for discrimination, and is the true moral work of the first
stage.
The sages have said to keep mind clear of him; to carry on our processes of thought without his
constant interference. Any new effort arouses him, and if it be quite unfamiliar will move him
adversely. Let my reader try him on this article and see how many hoary resentments and
bigotries the so-called “subconscious mind” will bring up against it. He is the real barrier
between mind and mind. We must learn to keep the body quiet, without twitching and squirming.
We must next learn to control the astral body, the real seat of the senses, and refuse to hear, see,
taste, smell or feel anything we will not to. We must control the vital essence through its vehicle
of breath, keeping it quiet and rhythmical and as little disturbed as possible. If breath is not quiet,
mind cannot be. We must ignore the desires, doubts, resentments and fears of the animal. Then
we can stand still and think, or as the ancient symbols have it, we can make the Solar Self, or the
sun, stand still until we complete the overthrow of the enemies of God. When we have
understood the lower nature we are proficient enough in the Art to go on with the next step,
which is that of attaining stability in the realm of mind.
THE MIND CHAMBER
From the viewpoint of the occultist, mind itself is a function of a plane of matter. It is
symbolized as air, and occupies the same relation to desire as air does to water, and to the
physical plane as air does to a solid. It is none the less matter on its own place, and is a subtle
medium out of which thoughts are made. The yoga school of Patanjali begins with the statement
“all thought is a modification of the thinking principle,” which means literally that when the Ego
contemplates a thing it makes a form or eidolon of it in the subtle matter of mind. Such a form
remains poised for an instant, then slips over into the desire world and becomes the prey of the
animal nature in whose vehicles our Egos live. This is not something to be believed, but to be
tested by practice. A new-born thought form is immaculate at the time it is made. An instant
later, when the animal seizes it, it becomes theirs, and tinged with their desires it lies in the
animal’s current in space, capable of being revived in reproductive memory. So the Ego goes on
from instant to instant coining forms, each of which is united magnetically with the preceding
one. Our thinking, then is a process of making a long thread of thoughts in the matter of mind.
This the Eastern occultists call the Sutratma, or jewel thread – our time consciousness. The test
of this is to be found in Lipp’s theory of Empathy, or Einfuhlung, by which one seems to enter
into an object and feel it as a body. It is one of the tests of great art. Actually, the occultist says,
what the beholder enters into is his own mind-plane eidolon of the object viewed. The magnetic
tie between thought forms is the explanation of the association of ideas, as also of the processes
of recollective memory, by which a whole train of thought can be recalled and revivified.
One powerful exercise the Rosicrucians suggest, in order to strengthen and collect energy into
your astral etheric soul body, is this: when laying down to go to bed, make time to go over your
whole days experience. This video explains how at about 4 minutes into it, but the beginning of
this part 10 clip should be viewed too, the trick this Rosicrucian shares really works!
For a long period we only create forms thus at the demand of the lower animal nature. He
wakens and evokes our forgotten powers, as Chiron the Centaur, half man and half animal, trains
the young Greek heroes, Actaeon, Jason, castor, Polydeuces, Hercules, Achilles and Asclepios,
all types of the Ego in varying crises of life; as the sub0human Silenus trains the young saviour
Dionysus; or as, in the Teutonic story, the dwarfed Mimi trains Siegfried to forge the sword
Nothung with which Siegfried eventually slays him. These are a few of the many myths of the
education of the soul to its task by the very creature he must ultimately subdue.
Every demand of the animal is answered by a thought form until the lower self has been encased
in a complex of forms which give pain and must be broken up to give freedom and a new start.
The Greek call these forms eidolons, the Buddhist call them skandhas. They are our past, and
remain in their broken, unrelated state until we transmute them and weld them into our
experience. They are the sub-conscious mind about which psychologists talk so much these later
days; they are, until they are transmuted, the animal mind. They are the rubbish at the building of
the Temple, and it is not until we organize and re-shape them that we become sculptores lapidum
liberorum, Free Masons, or makers of free stones. Until then, whatever our nominal degrees, we
are the users of un-squared and hollow stones.
However there comes a time when one enters the first degree of Masnry and realizes their self as
separate from the lower being; then when having made this discrimination one stands up in the
realm of mind intent upon controlling the powers of mind and turning them upon the mysteries
of life instead of feeding swine, as the Prodigal story phrases it.
It is all a habit of mind.
If one will first think of their self and what they are, they will find one constant factor. That is the
Ego or “I” or self – what the Hindu calls the spectator. The mystery systems call it the candidate.
It is the witness of life, the enduring thing which cannot think itself out of existence, either as
having begun or as ever ending. That is the fundamental fact in consciousness. The Ego remains
permanent through all vicissitudes, a silent, curious watcher of all its functions.
Below in the world of sensation is the welter of emotions, passions, attractions, repulsions, likes
and dislikes, hopes and fears, a world from which it is separate, and from which it may withdraw
its attention, but in which it must work. This is the cave of so many rituals, the lower self, the
place of shades, the field of action. Above this lower realm is the state of pure mind in which the
Ego has its home, the place between heaven and earth, the middle chamber of so many rituals.
Beyond and above mind again is a third world, vaguely known to most of mankind, but none the
less the point of interest in all the traditions, a heaven world, a hidden place wherein lies the true
source of life. That such a state, superior to mind, does exist within a man, is the constant
contention of saint, of saviour, of philosopher and creative artist alike, and the attainment of it
the immediate end of human aspiration.
We’re talking here about cosmic consciousness, a higher and veiled state which gives rise to the
qualities of love, devotion, brotherhood, altruism, the quest of beauty and the loftier moods of
men, and which is capable of being brought into active manifestation under certain conditions.
One can describe the cosmic state of mind as being as much superior to the slow moving and
clumsy mental world as the latter is to the passional consciousness of the animal.
The mystical systems say that the Ego, in order to bring about the purpose of life upon earth,
must perform a threefold task. First of one must learn to discriminate between the Ego and the
lower world in which it is plunged, or, as it is symbolically stated, one must go down into the
lower world, learn its powers and purify it. Secondly, one must learn to perform the functions of
mind to their full, in spite of the disturbance of the lower self. Then, having done so, one must
enter the spiritual world and draw its powers down into the now purified vessel and thereby bring
the Kingdom of Heaven to pass upon earth, or, as the Hindu would say, attain yoga, or union
with the supreme.
It is implicit in all schools of mysticism that the three realms are to be understood as of this life
on earth, and can only exist when the soul is in the body. It is here only that the spiritual, mental,
and lower powers are assembled for the Great Work.
The same is true of the three ealms of Egyptian religion: Am-Tuat, the under world, is the lower
man; Amentet, with its gates, is the place of effort or purification, and Sekhet-Aanru, the fields
of the blest, the place of spiritual sustenance, and all three show undoubted signs of having been
mystical grades, and not the material hells and heavens which Egyptologists have made of them.
The Persian Sufis called the spiritual realm the Temple, or place of prayer; the home of the Ego,
the Caravanserai, or place of coming and going, and the lower vehicles of consciousness the
Tent, because it had, in their doctrine, to be pitched and struck again and again.
Turning to another type of symbolism, one finds the Ego symbolized as a man engaged in a
magical work, an arduous quest, or a symbolic office for the bringing of the mystical elements of
spirit and matter together. In alchemy, the alchemist was required to bring the Elixir into the vas
alchemicum, or the spiritual power into the lower vehicle, as a means of gaining everlasting life.
The alchemist was described, in another operation, as brining a certain tincture, or a stone, to
play upon base metal or dross, which thereby was turned to precious metal. In the Grail tradition,
Parsifal, the stainless knight, sets out in a quest of the Sang Real, or True Blood to bring it into a
mystical chalice. In our Christian communion, as in those of other religions, there is a fusion f
the Blood, symbolized as wine, and the Body symbolized as bread, brought about by the
communicant. With the Rosicrucian, as with the Gnostic, the union was figured in the bringing
together of the Stauros, or upright of the cross, and the Batos, or horizontal piece, and fixing the
ineffable mystery of the Rose, the symbol of man, thereon.
These are a few of many threefold devices all used to the same end, enough to demonstrate the
constantly recurring use of a threefold symbolism of the relation of the Ego to its higher and
lower elements, and of a union of the three by its agency. This union is the subject matter of all
religion – the very word re-ligio means a binding back of something that has been broken – and
it is with this binding back or reunion that the ancient mysteries are concerned.
THE FALL
The Fall of Man myth, summarized, says that the evolving human race was endowed with the
power of sex before it possessed mental powers adequate for the proper use of sex, and,
floundering in the abyss thereby created, it crossed with lesser creatures and so defiled its
incipient mental powers as to be incapable of further progress without aid. Then it was, says
tradition, that a great order of beings who had long passed the stage of the fallen ones was
assigned the task of entering into the stricken lunar race to purify it and carry it through its crisis.
The redeeming entities, called the solar evolution, are described as having at first refused, and
then, under compulsion, as having entered one into each of the fallen ones and in their
unwillingness as having fallen asleep in the bodies of those they came to save. For this reason
they are described in the tradition as being mystically dead and must remain so until they cease
to identify themselves with the animals whom they should govern, and rise, like the prodigal son
in the Christian story, and go unto their Father. It sounds very fantastic – as all myths do. It is the
least common multiple of all the other stories and its value lies in its alchemical power to
transmute.
The story of the fall of man means nothing unless it can be demonstrated within the individual,
and the process of testing its validity is a personal process. The first step is the one which
Freemasonry enjoins upon us – to go to our centre, the point from which a Mason cannot err.
At this stage I would recommend an exercise of this sort to my reader as a means of
understanding what follows: Close your eyes and feel yourself at the centre of a great sphere of
darkness. Then say, “What am I?” and proceed to strip away the things which you know you are
not. Then say, “My possessions, I am not these. My body, I am not that. My passions and
desires, I am not these. They are mine, but they are not I. Even my mind is something I can feel
as ‘mine’ and as separate from me, an instrument by which I work. I have a good mind, a bad
mind, a mind capable of this, incapable of that. What then am I at the centre of my being? –
curious, watchful, sometimes paying little attention, sometimes intensely active. Then years ago I
was in a certain set of conditions which passed away. But I remain. Five years ago new
conditions, new moods surrounded me. They passed, but I remain. Today, there is a new set of
cares and hopes and problems – but I remain. Ten years hence, where will I be? New cares, new
hopes, and still I go on. Ever new ideas, new mind forms about me, new things to remember.
Ever I I, I, going on.”
When my reader has done this, they have found the ego - the Self. It is not the mind, although it
makes mind work. it is not emotions, not body. it is the eternal pilgrim, the maker of forms, the
real Builder. It is not here on earth evolving in what we call the human stage. It is here to
perform a work of redemption. It is the saviour, the redeemer, the rebinder of a broken thing. It is
the Lucifer, or light-bearer, the fallen Son of the Morning in the old story. It is Prometheus, the
bringer of fire from Olympus, who, for his failure, is bound to earth for an eternity – an ageturning. It is the saviour of whom all the great saviours in mankind are the exemplars and types.
“For ye are Gods,” says Jesus. “Ye are Breaths,” says Plato. “do not weep for me,” says Hermes,
thrice-greatest, to his disciples, “This is not my true country. I go to my true country, where
every one of you must go in your turn.”
There is an ancient Eastern myth which says that this race is under the guidance of three
purushas, or spiritis. One ordains the building of a race; one supplies the matter of the building,
and one is charged with the work of fitting together the fragments. And as in all other myths,
these three are to be understood as operative within the individual.
The first purusha is that high thing within us which we call god. It plays through us as
spirituality, that great sense of abundance, of willingness to give, of love, of devotion to others.
That is the thing from which the erring human has become separated.
The second is the lower self, the fallen one. He is the complex of passions, desires, hopes, fears,
of vitality and of body, who has defiled himself and cannot go on without the aid of the Builder
of the Great Work. He is the rebellious one whom we can find in ourselves any hour of the day.
The ancients would have it that he is an entity, a real being. They call him Satan, Set, Typhon,
Mara, Khansa, Moloch, Tiamat, Rerit, the adversary the opposer, the personal devil. He is called
the Dweller on the threshold, and our psychologists of to-day, after a long study of abnormal
phenomena, have been compelled to acknowledge him as the “subconscious self.” He is also
called the Human Elemental.
THE TREE OF LIFE
Masonry is merely a name for a world-wide search for the secret of the regeneration and
liberation of the soul. This is about the curious muddle on the subject of life everlasting. One’s
soul is immortal in the past as in the future and we cannot think it out of existence. We can,
however, have great gaps of loss of memory of it. Anyone who looks back on their physical life,
even for a few days, will see how enormous those gaps are. We lose part of it In sleep, part in the
dullness that follows a meal, part in flurry and excitement, and at the best what we call our lives
are mere fragments of what our lives really are. The everlasting or unbroken life that the
mysteries offer is a continuous and complete consciousness, unbroken by the fitful excitements
of the outer world, unbroken by sleep and, they say, unbroken by the gaps between incarnations.
In all systems the awakening of the third eye has been the physical step in the making of the
uninterrupted life, the bringing to fruit of the vital principle which is called in the old books ‘the
witness.’ And when we have learned to conquer the lower self and turn our attention from the
outer world to the inner one, we will have attained what the Sages tell us is the only true peace
we can know. There mere fact that is passes our present understanding does not argue that it does
not exist. It only argued what it says, that we do not get peace by mental processes but by a
higher power that we must develop in fullness of time. On one thing all the great Teachers seem
agreed, that this lighting up of the star of the morning of a new day is the great process towards
it. This is the jeweled Tree of Life; in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book VI, it is the golden branch that
admits Aeneas into the inner world of being where he converses with his father Anchises and
sees the host of souls awaiting re-birth. In the legend of the Argonauts it is the oracular oak
branch Jason sets up on the prow of his ship. In the Assyrian steles it is the vine on a trellis,
called Iz-tin the wood of life, and in Greek myth it is the Dionisiac vine. In Druidic lore it is the
mistletoes that must be severed with a golden sickle. This setting free or drawing out of the tree
is a universal rite.
This is the acacia tree, a curiously intricate one, although we have little of our own about it. It
links up however, with so many revealing traditions that it is worth examination in all its
bearings. Undoubtedly it is one with the other Trees of Life, heath, ivy, oak, ash, alder and with
those mystical trees ashvattha, banyan and papal under which Gautma meditated. They must all
have something to offer for the understanding of it. Undoubtedly also it is like the others, a
device for the luminous core of an immortal body which can be brought into independent and
eternal being and when we rise up and it comes easily away as we are told it does, we receive
again not only the memory of our long past but also the power to bring about the anastasis or
upstanding of the Master within, who has been slain.
And who is the Master? What is the doctrine or the initiator or saviour? Who is the Masonic
Builder? Necessarily, of course, the work of freeing the stricken builder – or any candidate –
from his mystical grave of flesh must come about by their own effort, by the operation of divine
powers which they must rouse by long and strict adherence to a regimen of purification, by a
moral work that would free their mind from the dominion of the lower nature, by an intellectual
work that would quicken mind to the perception of the secrets of nature and science and establish
it under the control of the Ego itself. Finally, such a raising must be the reward of an endeavor to
make operative in the self the forces of Nature. One of these forces is that serpent-force, as it is
called, that in all esoteric schools is depicted as rising out of the earth, passing through the legs
into the body and lying coiled around the epigastic plexus, the speirema, or serpect-coil of Greek
Gnosticism, the ophis of the Ophite sects, the Naga or great serpent of Hindu and Buddhist, the
dragon of the Chinese and the water-reptile of the Egyptians. It is the serpent we saw coiled up
around the roots of the Tree of Life in the IRgalla story of the Akkadians. It is also, as we have
seen, the cabletow. This is the Demiurge, the earth-force, the God Without, or what Allen
upward calls The Strength Outside. There is, however, and must be, a Strenght Inside to meet
this Strength Outside, a God Within, as it were, the power of divine man. Pythagoras says of the
Babylonian Magi that they called the magnetic currents of the earth-serpents and that they
possessed the power to direct them. The incorpeal fire of the inner person they called the
Celestial Lion. These two, the ascending Serpent and the descending Lion, they said, generated
by their meeting, the forces that freed the candidate. Lest anybody fall into the mistake of
thinking this is merely the animal fetishism of pagan peoples, and unworthy of attention, I should
here remind you that in the Old Testament there is a story of a Chosen People cured of their
torments by the lifting up of a great serpent, and in our New Testament an assurance that the
Lion of Judah will prevail to open up a seven-sealed book. Also, Moses raised a serpent upon a
bronze staff. There is a mystery doctrine concealed somewhere in the imagery.
The Mithraic mysteries, so closely akin to Masonry, have among their symbolic figures one of
special interest to us here – the figure of Kronos. He is a tall, majestic and forbidding figure.
From his feet up he is wrapped round and round in the coils of a serpent, and he has a lion’s
head. He is the type of the master over time and space, the lord of cycles. He is the symbol of the
full union of the Inner and Outer Strengths in man. More to our immediate purpose, he is the
master in whom this union has been brought to pass. He is a man, who possessing the power
which is the heritage of all candidates in the mysteries, stands ready to communicate it. He is the
Initiator.
MORE SEARCH: for the age old doctrines regarding man’s origin and destiny:
Symbols of the pilgrimage of the soul are enduring, and their identical recurrences among men
are too frequent to be assigned to accident.
-Rock carvings of Yucatan
-The Tibetan “Stanzaz of Dyzan”
-Chinese tradition of ‘three steps’
-Threefold system of the “sutras of Patanjali”
-Three initiations of the Druids
-Greek and Gnostic fragments of early Christianity
Thank you for reading this blog entry. This has been typed up by hand from me, SHD, due to
Roy Mitchell's work being not in an online format until now. All gratitude should be given to
Roy Mitchell, for showing the way. I will continue to edit this file with links to wiki's and stories
for the Greek heroes, so we may walk the path of Initiation together. It would be amazing to have
us all come together to share what we find. Feel free to comment and I invite you to try your
hardest at achieving the luminous light body. This presentation has been strongly presented in
theory, but I as a seeker have many documents on the actual practices to raise the immortal body.
I think the last photo above, when peering deeply into its figures, succintly tells the story to
opening the seven seals of the mind body and soul. Thank you - SHD.
P.S: Here follows some of my favorite links found on the web which have taught me more about
the secrets of the human psychology and the powers within, than anywhere else. Enjoy:
http://deoxy.org/8brains.htm
http://deoxy.org/cirtable.htm
This video is by Robert Anton Wilson, and it WOKE ME UP to every potential!