"23rd Degree - Chief of the Tabernacle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pike Albert)

MORALS and DOGMA by Albert Pike

XXIII CHIEF OF THE TABERNACLE

AMONG most of the Ancient Nations there was, in addition to their public worship, a private one styled the Mysteries; to which those only were admitted who had been prepared by certain ceremonies called initiations.

The most widely disseminated of the ancient worships were those of Isis, Orpheus, Dionysus, Ceres and Mathias. Many barbarous nations received the knowledge of the Mysteries in honor of these divinities from the Egyptians, before they arrived in Greece and even in the British Isles the Druids celebrated those of Dionysus, learned by them from the Egyptians.

The Mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated at Athens in honor of Ceres, swallowed up as it were, all the others. All the neighboring nations neglected their own, to celebrate those of Eleusis; and in a little while all Greece and Asia Minor were filled with the Initiates. They spread into the Roman Empire, and even beyond its limits, "those holy and august Eleusinian Mysteries," said Cicero, "in which the people of the remotest lands are initiated." Zosimus says that they embraced the
whole human race and Aristides termed them the common temple of the whole world.

There were, in the Eleusinian feasts, two sorts of Mysteries, the great, and the little. The latter were a kind of preparation for the former; and everybody was admitted to them. Ordinarily there was a novitiate of three, and sometimes of four years. Clement of Alexandria says that what was taught in the great Mysteries concerned the Universe, and was the completion and perfection of all instruction; wherein things were seen as they were, and nature and her works were made known.

The ancients said that the Initiates would be more happy after death than other mortals ; and that, while the souls of the Profane on leaving their bodies, would be plunged in the mire, and remain buried in darkness, those of the Initiates would fly to the Fortunate Isles, the abode of the Gods.

Plato said that the object of the Mysteries was to re-establish the soul in its primitive purity, and in that state of perfection which it had lost. Epictetus said, "whatever is met with therein has been instituted by our Masters, for the instruction of man and the correction of morals."

Process held that initiation elevated the soul, from a material, sensual, and purely human life, to a communion and celestial intercourse with the Gods ; and that a variety of things, forms, and species were shown Initiates, representing the first generation of the Gods.

Purity of morals and elevation of soul were required of the, Initiates. 'Candidates were required to be of spotless reputation and irreproachable virtue. Nero, after murdering his mother, did not dare to be present at the celebration of the Mysteries and Antony presented himself to be initiated, as the most infallible mode of proving his innocence of the death of Avidius Cassius.
The Initiates were regarded as the only fortunate men. "It is upon us alone," says Aristophanes, "shineth the beneficent daystar. We alone receive pleasure from the influence of his rays we, who are initiated, and who practice toward citizen and stranger every possible act of justice and piety." And it is therefore not surprising that, in time, initiation came to be considered as necessary as baptism afterward was to the Christians ; and that not to have been admitted to the Mysteries was held a dishonor.

"It seems to me," says the great orator, philosopher, and moralist, Cicero, "that Athens, among many excellent inventions, divine and very useful to the human family, has produced none comparable to the Mysteries, which for a wild and ferocious life have substituted humanity and urbanity of manners. ‘It is with good reason they use the term initiation; for it is through them that we in reality have learned the first principles of life; and they not only teach us to live in a manner more consoling and agreeable, but they soften the pains of death by the hope of a better life hereafter."

Where the Mysteries originated is not known. It is supposed that they came from India, by the way of Chaldaea, into Egypt, and thence were carried into Greece. Wherever they arose, they were practiced among all the ancient nations and as was usual the Thracians, Cretins, and Athenians each claimed the honor of invention, and each insisted that they had borrowed nothing from any other people.

In Egypt and the East, all religions even in its most poetical forms, was more or less a mystery; and the chief reason why, in Greece, a distinct name and office were assigned to the Mysteries, was because the superficial popular theology left a want unsatisfied, which religion in a wider sense alone could supply. They were practical acknowledgments of the insufficiency of the popular religion to satisfy the deeper thoughts and aspirations of the mind. The vagueness of symbolism might perhaps reach what a more palpable and conventional creed could not. The former, be its indefiniteness, acknowledged the abstruseness of its subject; it treated a mysterious subject myopically ; it endeavored to illustrate what it could not explain; to excite an appropriate feeling, if it could not develop an adequate idea and shade the image a mere subordinate conveyance for the conception, which itself never became too obvious or familiar.

The instruction now conveyed by books and letters was of old conveyed by symbols and the priest had to invent or to perpetuate a display of rites and exhibitions, which were not only more attractive to the eye than words, but often to the mind more suggestive and pregnant with meaning.

Afterward, the institution became rather moral and political, than religious. The civil magistrates shaped the ceremonies to political ends in Egypt; the sages who carried them from that country to Asia, Greece; and the North of Europe, were all kings or legislators. The chief
magistrate presided at those of Eleusis, represented by an officer styled King and the Priest played but a subordinate part.

The Powers revered in the Mysteries were all in reality Natured Gods; none of whom could be consistently addressed as mere heroes, because their nature was confessedly super-heroic. The Mysteries, only in fact a more solemn expression of the religion of the ancient poetry, taught
that doctrine of the Theocracia or Divine Oneness, which even poetry does not entirely conceal. They were not in any open hostility with the popular religion, but only a more solemn exhibition of its symbols; or rather a part of itself in a more impressive form. The essence of all Mysteries, as of all polytheism, consists in this, that the conception of an inapproachable Being, single, eternal, and unchanging, and that of a God of Nature, whose manifold power is immediately revealed to the senses in the incessant round of movement, life and death, fell asunder in the treatment, and were separately symbolized. They offered a perpetual problem to excite curiosity, aqd contributed to satisfy the all-pervading religious sentiment, which if it obtain no nourishment among the scruple and intelligible, finds compensating excitement in a reverential contemplation of the obscure.

Nature is as free from dogmatism as from tyranny and the earliest instructors of mankind not only adopted her lessons, but as far as possible adhered to her method of imparting them. They attempted to reach the understanding through the eye and the greater part of all religious teaching was conveyed through this ancient and most impressive mode of "exhibition" or demonstration. The Mysteries were a sacred drama, exhibiting some legend significant of
Nature's change, of the visible Universe in which the divinity is revealed, and whose import was in many respects as open to the Pagan, as to the Christian. Beyond the current traditions or sacred recitals of the temple, few explanations were given to the spectators, who were left, as in the school of nature, to make inferences for themselves.

The method of indirect suggestion, by allegory or symbol, is a more efficacious instrument of instruction than plain didactic "language; since we are habitually indifferent to that which is acquired without effort: "The initiated are few, though many bear the thyrsus." And it would have been impossible to provide a lesson suited to every degree of cultivation and capacity, unless it were one framed after Nature's example, or rather a representation of Nature herself, employing her universal symbolism instead of technicalities of language, inviting endless research, yet rewarding the humblest inquirer, and disclosing its secrets to every one in proportion to his preparatory training and power to comprehend them.

Even if destitute of any formal or official enunciation of those important truths, which even in a cultivated age it was often found inexpedient to assert except under a veil of allegory, and which moreover lose their dignity and value in proportion as they are learned mechanically as dogmas, the shows of the Mysteries certainly contained suggestions if not lessons, which in the opinion not of one competent witness only, but if many, were adapted to elevate the character of the spectators, enabling them to augur something of the purposes of existence, as well as of the means of employing it, to live better and to die happier.

Unlike the religion of books or creeds, these mystic shows performances were not the reading of a lecture, but the opening of a problem, implying neither exemption from research, nor hostility to philosophy: for on the contrary, philosophy is the great Mystagogue or Arch-Expounder of symbolism : though the interpretations by the Grecian Philosophy of the old myths and symbols were in many instances as ill-founded, as in others they are correct.

No better means could be devised to rouse a dormant intellect than those impressive exhibitions, which addressed it through the imagination: which, instead of condemning it to a prescribed routine of creed, invited it to seek, compare, and judge. The alteration from symbol to dogma is as fatal to beauty of expression, as that from faith to dogma is to truth and wholesomeness of thought The first philosophy often reverted to the natural mode of teaching; and Socrates, in particular, is said to have eschewed dogmas, endeavoring, like the Mysteries, rather to awaken and develop in the minds of his hearers the ideas with which they were already endowed or
pregnant, than to fill them with ready-made adventitious opinions.

So Masonry still follows the ancient manner of teaching. Her symbols are the instruction she gives ; and the lectures are but often partial and insufficient one-sided endeavors to interpret those symbols. He who would become an accomplished Mason must not be content merely to hear or
even to understand the lectures, but must, aided by them, and they having as it were marked out the way for him, study, interpret, and develop the symbols for himself.