FREEMASONRY AND THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES

FREEMASONRY AND THE ANCIENT

MYSTERIES
The theory whiFREEMASONRY AND THE ANCIENT
MYSTERIES
The theory which ascribes the origin of Freemasonry as a secret
society to the Pagan (Mysteries of the ancient world) , and which
derives the most important part of its ritual and the legend of its
Third Degree . From the initiation practiced in these religious
organizations , It connects itself with the Legend of the Temple
origin, because we can only link the initiation in the Mysteries
with that of Freemasonry by supposing that the one was in some
way engrafted on the other, at the time of the building of the
Temple by the Tyrian and Jewish workmen . Nevertheless, before
we can properly appreciate the theory, which associates
Freemasonry with the Pagan Mysteries, we must make ourselves
acquainted with the nature and the design as well as with
something of the history of those mystical societies. Among all the
nations of antiquity in which refinement and culture had given an
elevated tone to the religious sentiment, there existed two systems
of worship, a public and a private one. "Each of the pagan Gods,"
says Warburton, "had (besides the public and open) a secret
worship paid unto him, to which none were admitted but those who
had been selected by preparatory ceremonies, called INITIATION.
This secret worship was called the MYSTERIES."
The public worship was founded on the superstitious polytheism
whose numerous gods and goddesses were debased in character and
vicious in conduct. Incentive to virtue could not be derived from
their example, which furnished rather excuses for vice. In the
Eunuchus of Terenie, when Choerea is meditating the seduction of
the virgin Pamphila, he refers to the similar act of Jupiter, who in
a shower of gold had corrupted Danae, and he exclaims, "If a god,
who by his thunders shakes the whole universe, could commit this
crime, shall not I, a mere mortal, do so also?" Plautus, Euripides
and other Greek and Roman dramatists and poets repeatedly used
the same argument in defense of the views of their heroes, so that it
became a settled principle of the ancient religion. The vicious
example of the gods thus became an insuperable obstacle to a life of
purity and holiness. The assurance of a future life of compensation
constituted no part of the popular theology. The poets, it is true,
indulged in romantic descriptions of an Elysium and a Tartarus,
but their views were uncertain and unsatisfactory. As to any
specific doctrine of immortality, and were embodied in the saying
of Ovid * that of the four elements which constituted the human
organization, "the earth covers the flesh; the shade flits around the
tomb; the spirit seeks the stars."
Thus did the poet express the prevalent idea that the composite
man returned after death to the various primordial elements of
which he had been originally composed. In such a dim and
shadowy hypothesis, there was no incentive for life, no consolation
in death. And hence Alger, to whom the world has been indebted
for a most exhaustive treatise on the popular beliefs of all nations,
ancient and modern, on the subject of the future life, has after a
full and critical examination of the question, come to the following
conclusion: "To the ancient Greek in general, death was a sad
doom. When he lost a friend, he sighed a melancholy farewell after
him to the faded shore of ghosts. Summoned himself, he departed
with a lingering look at the sun and a tearful adieu to the bright
day and the green earth. To the Roman death was a grim reality.
To meet it himself he girded up his loins with artificial firmness.
But at its ravages among his friends, he wailed in anguished
abandonment. To his dying vision there was indeed a future, but
shapes of distrust and shadow stood upon its disconsolate borders;
and when the prospect had no horror, he still shrank from the
poppied gloom."
Yet as each nation advanced in refinement and intellectual culture
the priests, the poets, and the philosophers aspired to a higher
thought and cherished the longing for and inculcated the consoling
doctrine of an immortality, not to be spent in shadowy and inert
forms of existence, but in perpetual enjoyment, as a compensation
for the ills of life. The necessary result of the growth of such pure
and elevated notions must have been a contempt and
condemnation of the absurdities of polytheism. However, as this
was the popular religion it was readily perceived that any open
attempt to overthrow it and to advance, publicly, opinions so
antagonistic to it would be highly impolitic and dangerous.
Whenever any religion, whether true or false, becomes the religion
of a people, whoever opposes it, or ridicules it, or seeks to subvert it,
is sure to be denounced by popular fanaticism and to be punished
by popular intolerance. Many of the philosophers were, however,
skeptics. The Stoics, for instance, and they were the leading sect,
denied the survival of the soul after the death of the body; or, if
any of them conceded its survival, they attributed to it only a
temporary duration before it is dissolved and absorbed into the
universe. Seneca "Troades," I., 397) says, "There is nothing after
death, and death itself is nothing." Post mortem nihil, est ipsague
mors nihil.
Socrates was doomed to drink the poisoned bowl on the charge that
he taught the Athenian youth not to worship the gods,who are
worshipped by the state, but new and unknown deities. Jesus was
suspended from the cross because he inculcated doctrines which,
however pure, were novel and obnoxious to the old religion of his
Jewish fellow citizens. The new religious truths among the Pagan
peoples were therefore concealed from common inspection and
taught only in secret societies, admission to which was obtained
only through the ordeal of a painful initiation, and the doctrines
were further concealed under the veil of symbols whose true
meaning the initiated only could understand. "The truth," says
Clemens of Alexandria "was taught involved in enigmas, symbols,
allegories, metaphors, and tropes and figures. The secret
associations in which the principles of a new and purer theology
were taught have received in history the name of the MYSTERIES.
Each country had its own Mysteries peculiar to itself. In Egypt
were those of Osiris and Isis; in Samothrace those of the Cabiri; in
Greece they celebrated at Eleusis, near Athens, the Mysteries of
Demeter; in Phoenicia of Adonis and Dionysus; of and in Persia
those of Mithras, which were the last to perish after the advent of
Christianity and the overthrow of polytheism. These Mysteries,
although they differed in name and in some of the details of
initiation, were essentially alike in general form and design. "Their
end as well as nature," says Warburton, "was the same in all: to
teach the doctrine of a future state." * Alger says: "The implications
of the indirect evidence, the leanings and guiding of the entire
incidental clews now left us as to the real aim and purport of the
Mysteries, combine to assure us that their chief teaching was a
doctrine of a future life in which there should be rewards and
punishments." Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, says that : "the
initiated were instructed in the doctrine of a state of future
rewards, and punishments, and that the greater Mysteries
"obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of
the soul both here and hereafter, when purified from the
defilements of a material nature and constantly elevated to the
realities of intellectual vision All the ancient writers who were
contemporary with these associations, and must have been
familiar with their character, concur in the opinion that their
design was to teach the doctrine of a future life of compensation.
Pindar says, "Happy the man who descends beneath the hollow
earth having beheld these Mysteries. He knows the end, he knows
the divine origin of life." Sophocles says that "they are thrice happy
who descend to the shades below, after having beheld these rites;
for they alone have life in Hades, while all others suffer there
every kind of evil." Lastly, Isocrates declares, "those who have been
initiated in the Mysteries of Ceres entertain better hopes both as to
the end of life and the whole of futurity. It is then evident from all
authorities , that the great end and design of the initiation into
these Mysteries , was to teach the aspirant the doctrine of a future
life not that aimless one . Portrayed by the poas and doubtfully
consented to by the people, but that pure and rational state of
immortal existence , in which the soul is purified from the dross of
the body and elevated to eternal life. It was, in short, much the
same in its spirit as the Christian and Masonic doctrine of the
resurrection.
But this lesson was communicated in the Mysteries in a peculiar
form, which has in fact given rise to the theory we are now
considering that they were the antitype and original source of
Speculative Masonry. They were all dramatic in their ceremonies;
each one exhibited in a series of scenic representations the
adventures of some god or hero; the attacks upon him by his
enemies; his death at their hands; his descent into Hades or the
grave, and his final resurrection to renewed life as a mortal, or his
apotheosis as a god. The only important difference between these
various Mysteries was, that there was to each one a different and
peculiar god or hero, whose death and resurrection or apotheosis
constituted the subject of the drama, and gave to its scenes the
changes which were dependent on the adventures of him who was
its main subject. Thus, in Samothrace, where the Mysteries of the
Cabiri were celebrated, it was Atys, the lover of Cybele, who was
slain and restored; in Egypt it was Osiris whose death and
resurrection were represented; in Greece it was Dionysus, and in
Persia Mithras. Nevertheless, in all of these the material points of
the plot and the religious design of the sacred drama were
identical. The dramatic form and the scenic representation of the
allegory were everywhere preserved. This dramatic form of the
initiatory rites in the Mysteries , was as the learned Dr. Dollinger
has justly observed , eminently calculated to take a powerful hold
on the imagination and the heart and to excite in the spectators
alternately conflicting sentiments of terror and calmness , of
sorrow and fear and hope . As the Mysteries were a secret society,
whose members were separated from the rest of the people by a
ceremony of initiation, therefore resulted from this form of
organization, as a necessary means of defense and of isolation, a
solemn obligation of secrecy, with severe penalties for its violation,
and certain modes of recognition known only to those who had
been instructed in them. There was what might be called a
progressive order of degrees, for the neophyte was not at once upon
his initiation invested with knowledge of the deepest arcane of the
religious system. Thus, the Mysteries were divided into two classes
called the lesser and the Greater Mysteries, and in addition, there
was a preliminary ceremony, which was only preparatory to the
Mysteries proper. So that there was in the process of reception a
system of three steps, which those who are fond of tracing
analogies between the ancient and the modern initiations are
prone to call degrees. A brief review of these three steps of progress
in the Mysteries will give the reader a very definite idea of the
nature of this ancient system. So many writers have thought that
they had found the incunabulum of modern Freemasonry, and will
enable him to appreciate at their just value the analogies, which
these writers have found, as they suppose, between the two systems.
The first step was called purification by water. When the neophyte
was ready to be received into any of the ancient Mysteries, he was
carried into the temple or other place appropriated to the
ceremony of initiation, and there underwent a thorough cleansing
of the body by water. This was the preparation for reception into
the Lesser Mysteries and was symbolic of that purification of the
heart that was necessary to prepare the aspirant for admission to
a knowledge of and participation in the sacred lessons that were to
be subsequently communicated to him. It has been sought to find in
this preparatory ceremony an analogy to the first degree of
Masonry. Such an analogy certainly exists, as will here after be
shown, but the theory that the Apprentice's degree was derived
from and suggested by the ceremony of Lustration in the Mysteries
is untenable, because this ceremony was not peculiar to the
Mysteries.
An ablution, lustration, or cleansing by water, as a religious rite
was practiced among all the ancient nations. More especially was
it observed among the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. With the
Hebrews, the lustration was a preliminary ceremony to every act
of expiation or sin offering. Hence, the Jewish prophets continually
refer to the ablution of the body with water as a symbol of the
purification of the heart. Among the Greeks lustration was always
connected with their sacrifices. It consisted in the sprinkling of
water by means of an olive or a laurel branch. Among the Romans,
the ceremony was more common than among the Greeks. It was
used not only to expiate crime, but also to secure the blessing of the
Gods. Thus, fields were lustrated before the corn was put into the
ground; colonies when they were first established, and armies
before they proceeded to battle. At the end of every fifth year, the
whole people were thus purified by a general lustration.
Everywhere the rite was connected with the performance of
sacrifice and with the idea of a moral purification.
The next step in the ceremonies of the ancient Mysteries was called
the Initiation. It was here that the dramatic allegory was
performed and the myth or fictitious history on which the peculiar
Mystery was founded was developed. The neophyte personated the
supposed events of the life, the sufferings, and the death of the god
or hero to whom the Mystery was dedicated, or he had them
brought in vivid representation before him. These ceremonies
constituted a symbolic instruction in the initiation - the beginnings
- of the religious system, which it was the object of the Mysteries to
teach. The ceremonies of initiation were performed partly in the
Lesser, but more especially and more fully in the Greater
Mysteries, of which they were the first part, and where only the
allegory of death was enacted. The Lesser Mysteries, which were
introductory to the Greater, have been supposed by the theorists
who maintain the connection between the Mysteries and
Freemasonry to be analogous to the Fellow Craft's degree of the
latter Institution. There may be some ground for this comparison
in a rather inexact way, for although the Lesser Mysteries were to
some extent public, yet as they were, as Clemens of Alexandria *
says, a certain groundwork of instruction and preparation for the
things that were to follow, they might perhaps be considered as
analogous to the Fellow Craft's degree.
The third and last of the progressive steps or grades in the
Mysteries was Perfection. It was the ultimate object of the system.
It was also called the autopsy, from a Greek word, which signifies
seeing with one's own eyes. It was the complete and finished
communication to the neophyte of the great secret of the Mysteries;
the secret for the preservation of which the system of initiation
had been invented, and which, during the whole course of that
initiation, had been symbolically shadowed forth. The
communication of this secret, which was in fact the explanation of
the secret doctrine, for the inculcation of which the Mysteries in
every country had been instituted, was made in the most sacred
and private place of the temple or place of initiation. As the
autopsy or Perfection of the Mysteries concluded the whole system,
the maintainers of the doctrine that Freemasonry finds its origin
in the Mysteries have compared this last step in the ancient
initiation to the Master's degree. But the analogy between the two
as a consummation of the secret doctrine is less patent in the third
degree, as it now exists, than it was before the disseverance from it
of the Royal Arch, accepting, however, the Master's degree as it
was constituted in the earlier part of the 18th century, the
analogies between that and the last stage of the Mysteries are
certainly very interesting, although not sufficient to prove the
origin of the modern from the ancient systems. But of this more
hereafter. This view of the organization of the Pagan Mysteries
would not be complete without some reference to the dramatized
allegory which constituted so important a part of the ceremony of
initiation, and in connection with which their relation to
Freemasonry has been most earnestly urged. It has been already
said that the Mysteries were originally invented for the purpose of
teaching two great religious truths, which were unknown to, or at
least not recognized, in the popular faith. These were the unity of
God and the immortality of the soul in a future life. The former,
although illustrated at every point by expressed symbols, such, for
instance, as the all-seeing eye, the eye of the universe, and the
image of the Deity, was not allegorized, but taught as an abstract
doctrine at the time of the autopsy or the close of the grade of
Perfection. The other truth, the dogma of a future life, and of a
resurrection from death to immortality, was communicated by an
allegory which was dramatized in much the same way in each of
the Mysteries, although, of course, in each nation the person and
the events which made up the allegory were different. The
interpretation was, however, always the same. As Egypt was the
first country of antiquity to receive the germs of civilization, it is
there that the first Mysteries are supposed to have been invented.
And although the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were introduced
into Greece long after the invention of the Osiriac in Egypt, were
more popular among the ancients, yet the Egyptian initiation
exhibits more purely and more expressively the symbolic idea
which was to be developed in the interpretation of its allegory. I
shall therefore select the Osiriac, which was the most important of
the Egyptian Mysteries, as the exemplar from which an idea may
be obtained of the character of all the other Mysteries of paganism.
(* The first and original Mysteries of which we have any account
were those of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, from whence they were
derived by the Greeks. - Warburton, "Divine Legation," I., p. 194.
Diodorus says the same thing in the first book of his "History," I.,
xxxvii.)
All the writers of antiquity, such as Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus,
and Herodotus, state that the Egyptian Mysteries of Osiris, Isis,
and Horus were the model of all the other systems of initiation
which were subsequently established among the different peoples of
the Old World. Indeed, the ancients held that the Demeter of the
Greeks was identical with the Isis of the Egyptians, and Dionysus
with Osiris. Their adventures were certainly very similar. The
place of Osiris in Egyptian history is unknown to us. The fragments
of Sanchuniathon speak of Isiris, the brother of Chna or Canaan; in
the lists of Manito, he is made the fifth king under the dynasty of
the demigods, being conjoined with Isis; but as the four preceding
kings are named as Hephaestus, Helios, Agathodomon and
Chronos, the whole is evidently a mere mythological fable, and we
have as far to seek as ever. Herodotus is not more satisfactory, for
he says that Osiris and Isis were two great deities of the Egyptians.
Banier, however, in his Mythology thinks that ,he was the same as
Mizraim, the son of Clam, and grandson of Noah. Bishop
Cumberland concurs in this and adds that Cham was the first king
of Egypt, that Osiris was a title appropriated by him, signifying
Prince, and that Isis was simply Ishah, his wife. Lastly, Diodorus
Siculus says that he was Menes, the first King of Egypt. Some later
writers have sought to identify Osiris and Isis with the Iswara and
Isi of India. There is certainly a great deal of etymological
plausibility in this last conjecture. The ubiquitous character of
Osiris as a personality among the ancients is best shown in an
epigram of Ausonius, wherein it is said that in Greece, at Eleusis,
he was called Bacchus ; the Egyptians thought that he was Osiris,
the Mysians of Asia Minor named him Phanceus or Apollo; the
Indians supposed that he was Dionysus; the sacred rites of the
Romans called him Liber; and the Phoenicians, Adonis.
But the only thing that is of any interest to us in this connection is
that Osiris was the hero of the earliest of the Mysteries, and that
his death and apotheosis - his change from a mortal king to an
immortal God - symbolized the doctrine of a future life.
His historical character was that of a mild and beneficent
sovereign, who had introduced the arts of civilization among his
subjects, and had then traveled for three years for the purpose of
extending them into other nations, leaving the government of his
kingdom, during his absence, to his wife Isis. According to the
legend, his brother Typhon had been a rival claimant for the
throne, and his defeat had engendered a feeling of ill will. During
the absence of Osiris, he, therefore, formed a secret conspiracy with
some of his adherents to usurp the throne. On the return of Osiris
from his travels, Typhon invited him to a banquet, ostensibly given
in his honor, at which all the conspirators were present. During the
feast Typhoon produced a chest, inlaid with gold, and promised to
present it to that person of the company, whose body, upon trial,
would be found most exactly to fit it. Osiris tried the experiment,
but as soon as he had laid himself in the chest, Typhoon closed and
nailed down the lid. The chest was then thrown into the river Nile,
whence it floated into the sea, and, after being for some time tossed
upon the waves, it was finally cast ashore at the town of Byblos, in
Phoenicia, and left at the foot of a Tamarisk tree. Isis, the wife of
Osiris, over whelmed with grief for the loss of her husband,
commenced a search for the body, being accompanied by her son,
Anubis, and his nurse, Nepthe. After many adventures, Isis
arrived on the shores of Phoenicia and in the neighborhood of
Byblos, where she at length discovered the body at the foot of the
Tamarisk tree. She returned with it to Egypt. The people with great
demonstrations of joy received it, and it was proclaimed that Osiris
had risen from the dead and had become a god. The sufferings of
Osiris, his death, his resurrection, and his subsequent office as judge
of the dead in a future state, constituted the fundamental
principles of the Egyptian religion. They taught the secret doctrine
of a future life, and initiation into the mysteries of Osiris was
initiation into the rites of the religion of Egypt. These rites were
conducted by the priests, and into them many sages from other
countries especially from Greece, such as Herodotus, Plutarch, and
Pythagoras, were initiated.
In this way it is supposed that the principles and general form of
the Mysteries were conveyed into other countries, although they
everywhere varied in the details. The most important of the
Mysteries besides the Egyptian were those of Mithras in Persia, of
Atys or of the Cabiri in Thrace, of Adonis in Phoenicia, Syria, and
of Dionysus in Greece. They extended even beyond the then more
civilized parts of the world into the northern regions of Europe,
where were practiced the Scandinavian rites of the Norsemen and
the Druidical Mysteries of Gaul and Britain, though these were
probably derived more directly from a primitive Aryan source.
But wherever they existed we find in them a remarkable unity of
design and a similarity of ceremonies from which we are compelled
to deduce a common origin, while the purity of the doctrines which
they taught evidently show that this common origin was not to be
sought in the popular theology. In all of the Mysteries, the
ceremonies of initiation were of a funereal character. They
allegorized in a dramatic form the sufferings, the death, and the
resurrection of some god or hero. There was a death, most
generally by violence, to symbolize, as certain (*Thus Clemens of
Alexandria describes the legend or allegory of the Cabiri Mysteries
as the sacred mystery of a brother slain by his brethren, "fraters
trucidatus a fratribus.") interpreters of the Mysteries have
supposed, the strife of certain antagonistic powers in nature, such
as life and death, virtue and vice, light and darkness, or summer
and winter.
The candidate represented the person thus slain in the allegorical
drama. After the death followes the disappearance of the body,
called by the Greeks the aphanism, and the consequent search for
it. This search for the body, in which all the initiates joined,
constituted what Faber calls "the doleful part," and was succeeded
by its discovery, which was known as the heuresis. * This was
accompanied by the greatest demonstrations of joy. The candidate
was afterward instructed in the apporheta, or secret dogmas of the
Mysteries. In all of the Pagan Mysteries, this dramatic form of an
allegory ,was preserved, and we may readily see in the groans and
lamentations on the death of the god or hero and the
disappearance of the body a symbol of the death of man, and in the
subsequent rejoicings at his discovery and restoration, a symbol of
the restoration of the spirit to eternal life .
In view of the purity of the lessons taught in the Mysteries and
their inculcation of the elevated dogmas of the unity of God and
the immortality of the soul, it is not surprising to read the
encomiums passed upon them by the philosophers of antiquity.
The reader, if he has carefully considered the allegorical drama
which was represented in the ancient Mysteries, and compared it
with the drama which constitutes the principal portion of the
initiation in Freemasonry, will be at no loss to account for the
reasons which have led so many writers to attribute the origin of
the Masonic system to these mystical associations of antiquity.
It has been a favorite theory with several German, French, and
British scholars , to trace the origin of Freemasonry to the
Mysteries of Paganism ; others repudiating the idea that the
modern association should have sprung from them , still find
analogies so remarkable between the two systems as to lead them to
suppose that the Mysteries were an offshoot from the pure
Freemasonry of the Patriarchs . In my opinion there is not the
slightest foundation in historical evidence to support either theory,
although I admit the existence of many analogies between the two
systems, which can , however, be easily explained without
admitting any connection in the way of origin and descent
between them. Of the theory that the Mysteries were an offshoot or
imitation of the pure patriarchal Freemasonry, Hutchinson and
Oliver are the most distinguished supporters. While Hutchinson
strongly contends for the direct derivation of Freemasonry from
Adam, through the line of the patriarchs to Moses and Solomon, he
does not deny that it borrowed much from the initiations and
symbols of the Pagans. Thus he unhesitatingly says, that "there is
no doubt that our ceremonies and Mysteries were derived from the
rites, ceremonies, and institutions of the ancients, and some of
them from the remotest ages." But lest the purity of the genuine
patriarchal Masonry should be polluted by borrowing its
ceremonies from such an impure source, he subsequently describes,
in that indefinite manner which was the peculiarity of his style,
the separation of a purer class from the debasement of the popular
religion, wherein he evidently alludes to the Mysteries. Thus he
says: "In the corruption and ignorance of after ages , those
hallowed places were polluted with idolatry ; the unenlightened
mind mistook the type for the original , and could not discern the
light from darkness . The sacred and hills became the objects of
enthusiastic bigotry and superstition; the devotees bowed down to
the oaken log and the graven image as being divine. Some
preserved themselves from the corruptions of the times ,and we
find those sages and select men to whom were committed, and who
retained the light of understanding and truth, unpolluted with the
sins of the world, under the denomination of Magi among the
Persians; wise men, soothsayers, and astrologers among the
Chaldeans; philosophers among the Greeks and Romans; Brahmins
among the Indians; Druids and bards among the Britons; and with
the people of God, Solomon shone forth in the fullness of human
wisdom.
I have denominated the surreptitious initiations earth-born, in
contradistinction to the purity of Freemasonry, which was
certainly derived from above; and to those who contend that
Masonry is nothing more than a miserable relic of the idolatrous
Mysteries (vide. Fab. Pag. Idol., vol. iii., p. 190), I would reply, in
the words of an inspired apostle, 'Doth a fountain send forth at the
same place sweet water and bitter? Can the fig tree bear olive
berries or a vine figs? So can no fountain both yield salt water and
fresh. The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable,
full of mercy and good fruits' (James iii. 11, 12, 17). I wish to be
distinct and intelligible on this point, as some misapprehensions are
afloat respecting the immediate object of my former volume of
Signs and Symbols; and I have been told that the arguments there
used afford an indirect sanction to the opinion that Masonry is
derived from the Mysteries . In answer to this charge, if it requires
one, I only need reply to the general tenor of that volume, and to
declare explicitly my firm opinion, founded on intense study and
abstruse research, that the science which we now denominate
Speculative Masonry , was coeval , at least, with the creation of
our globe, and the far-famed Mysteries of idolatry were a
subsequent institution founded on similar principles, with the
design of conveying unity and permanence to the false worship,
which it otherwise could never have acquired.
There is another class of Masonic scholars who have advanced the
theory that the Speculative Freemasonry of the present day is
derived directly from and is a legitimate successor of the Mysteries
of antiquity. They found this theory on the very many and striking
analogies that are to be found in the organization, the design, and
the symbols of the two systems, and which they claim can only be
explained on the theory that the one is an offshoot from the other.
The Abbey Robin was, perhaps, the first writer who advanced this
idea in a distinct form. In a work on the Ancient and Modern
Initiations, * published in 1780, he traces the origin of the ancient
systems of initiation to that early period when wicked men, urged
by the terror of guilt, sought among the virtuous for intercessors
with the Deity. The latter, he says, retired into solitary places to
avoid the contagion of the growing corruption, and devoted
themselves to a life of contemplation and to the cultivation of the
arts and sciences. In order to associate with them in their labors
and functions only such as had sufficient merit and capacity, they
appointed strict courses of trial and examination. This, he thinks,
must have been the source of the initiations, which distinguished
the celebrated Mysteries of antiquity. The Magi of Chaldea, the
Brahmins and Gymnosophists of India, the Priests of Egypt, and
the Druids of Gaul and Britain thus lived in sequestered places and
obtained great reputation by their discoveries in astronomy,
chemistry, and mechanics, by the purity of their morals, and by
their knowledge of the science of legislation. It was in these schools,
says the abbe, that the first sages and legislators of antiquity were
formed, where the doctrines taught were the unity of God and the
immortality of the soul, and it was from these Mysteries that the
exuberant fancy of the Greeks drew much of their mythology.
From these ancient initiations, he deduces the orders of Chivalry,
which sprang into existence in the middle Ages, and certain
branches of these, he thinks, produced the institution of
Freemasonry. The theory of the Abbey Robin therefore traces the
institution of Masonry to the ancient Mysteries, but in an indirect
way, through the orders of Chivalry. He might therefore more
correctly be classed among those who maintain the doctrine of the
Templar origin of Freemasonry. However, it is Alexander Lenoir,
the French archaeologist, who has attempted in the most explicit
and comprehensive manner to establish the doctrine of the direct
descent of Freemasonry from the ancient Mysteries, and especially
from the Egyptian. In the year 1814 he published an elaborate work
on this subject. * In this he begins by affirming that we cannot
expect to find in the Egyptian and Greek initiations those modes of
recognition which are used by the Freemasons of the present day,
because these methods, which are only conventional and had been
orally communicated under the obligation of secrecy, can not be
known to us, for they could not have been transmitted through the
lapse of ages. Omitting, therefore, all reference to these as matters
of no real importance, he confines himself to a comparison of the
Masonic with the ancient rites of initiation. In this view he comes
to the conclusion that Freemasonry in all the points that it
essentially comprehends is in direct relation with the Mysteries of
the ancient world, and that hence, abstracting certain particular
usages practiced by the modern Freemasons, it is evident that
Freemasonry in no respect differs from the ancient initiations of
the Egyptians and the Greeks. This theory has been embraced by
nearly all the French Masonic writers except Rebold, who traces
Masonry to the Roman Colleges of Artificers Unfortunately for
the general acceptance of this theory, M. Lenoir has in the first
place drawn his comparisons from the system of ceremonies of
initiation which are practiced in the lodges of France, and
especially from the "proofs and trials" of the Entered Apprentice's
degree. But the tedious ceremonies and painful trials of the
candidate as they are practiced in the French Rite constitute no
part of the original English Masonry whence the French Masonry
derives its existence, and were adopted as a pure innovation long
after the establishment of the Order in France by the Grand Lodge
of England. And again, the Egyptian initiations, with which they
have been compared by Lenoir, were not those which were actually
practiced by the priests of Egypt, or at least we have no authentic
proof of that fact, but were most probably suggested by the
imaginative details given by the Abe Terrasson in his romance
entitled Sethas, in which he pretends to portray the initiation of an
Egyptian prince. The truth is that Lenoir and those writers who
have followed him and adopted his theories have not instituted a
comparison between the original ceremonies of Masonic initiation
and those of the ancient Mysteries, but merely a comparison
between a recent system of ceremonies, certainly not earlier than
the middle of the last century, and a fictitious system indebted for
its birth to the inventive genius of a French abbe, and first
promulgated in a work published by him in the year 1731.
As well might Mr. Turner or any other writer on Anglo-Saxon
history have cited, as authentic materials for his description of the
customs of the Anglo-Saxon, the romantic incidents given by Sir
Walter Scott in his novel of Ivanhoe? Hence all the references of
the voyages of an Entered Apprentice in a French Lodge to the
similar voyages of an Aspirant in the Mysteries of Osiris or Isis
become nothing more than "the baseless fabric of a vision," which
must fade and dissolve like an "insubstantial pageant" when
submitted to the crucial test of authentic historical investigation.
The Rev. Mr. King, the author of a very interesting treatise on the
Gnostics, * has advanced a theory much more plausible than either
of those to which I have adverted. He maintains that some of the
Pagan Mysteries, especially those of Mithras, which had been
instituted in Persia, extended beyond the period of the advent of
Christianity, and that their doctrines and usages were adopted by
the secret societies which existed at an early period in Europe and
which finally assumed the form of Freemasonry. I have said that
this theory is a plausible one. It is so because its salient points are
sustained by historical evidence. It is, for instance, a fact that some
of the Mysteries of Paganism were practiced in Europe long after
the commencement of the Christian era. They afforded a constant
topic of denunciation to the fathers of the church, who feared and
attacked what they supposed to be their idolatrous tendencies. It
was not until the middle of the 5th century that they were
proscribed by an edict of the Emperor Theodosius. But an edict of
proscription is not necessarily nor always followed by an
immediate abolition of the thing proscribed. The public celebration
of the Mysteries must, of course, have ceased at once when such
celebration had been declared unlawful. But a private and secret
observance of them may have continued, and probably did
continue, for an indefinite time, perhaps even to as late a period as
the end of the 5th or the beginning of the 6th century. Mosheim
tells us that in the 4th century, notwithstanding the zeal and
severity of the Christian emperors, there still remained in several
places, and especially in the remoter provinces, temples and
religious rites consecrated to the Pagan deities; that rites instituted
in honor of them were, in the 5th century, celebrated with the
utmost freedom and impunity in the western empire; and that
even in the 6th century remains of the Pagan worship were to be
found among the learned and the officers of state. *During all this
time it is known that secret associations, such as the Roman
Colleges of Artificers, existed in Europe, and that from them
ultimately sprang up the organizations of Builders, which, with
Como in Lombardy as their center, spread over Europe in the
Middle Ages, and whose members, under the recognized name of
Traveling Freemasons, were the founders of Gothic architecture.
There is no forced or unnatural succession from them to the Guilds
of Operative Masons, who undoubtedly gave rise, about the end of
the 17th or the beginning of the 18th century, to the Speculative
Order or the Free and Accepted Masons, which is the organization
that exists at the present day. There is, therefore, nothing
absolutely untenable in the theory that the Mithraic Mysteries
which prevailed in Europe until the 5th or perhaps the 6th century
may have impressed some influence on the ritual, form, and
character of the association of early Builders, and that this
influence may have extended to the Traveling Freemasons, the
Operative Guilds, and finally to the Free and Accepted Masons,
since it can not be proved that there was not an uninterrupted
chain of succession between these various organizations.
The theory of Mr. King cannot, therefore, be summarily rejected. It
may not be altogether true, but it has so many elements of truth
about it that it claims our serious consideration. But, after all, we
may find a sufficient explanation of the analogy which
undoubtedly exists between the rites of the ancient Mysteries and
those of the modern Freemasons in the natural tendency of the
human mind to develop its ideas in the same way when these ideas
are suggested by the same or similar circumstances. The fact that
both institutions have taught the same lessons by the same method
of instruction may be attributed not to a direct and uninterrupted
succession of organizations, each one a link of a long chain leading
consequentially to another but rather to a natural and usual
coincidence of human thought. The believers in the lineal and
direct descent of Freemasonry from the ancient Mysteries have of
course discovered, or thought that they had discovered, the most
striking and wonderful analogies between the internal
organizations of the two institutions. Hence the most credulous of
these theorists have not hesitated to compare the Hierophant, or
the Explainer of the sacred rites in the Mysteries, with the
Worshipful Master in a Masonic Lodge, nor to style the Dadouchos,
or Torch-Bearer, and the Hieroceryx, or Herald of the Mysteries,
Wardens, nor to assign to the Epibomos, or Altar-Server, the title
and duties of a Deacon.
That there are analogies, and that many of them are very curious
can not be denied, but I shall attempt, before leaving; this subject,
to explain the reason of their existence in a more rational way
than by tracing the modern as a succession from the ancient
system. The analogies existing between the ancient Mysteries and
Freemasonry, upon which the theory of the descent of the one from
the other has been based, consist in the facts that both were secret
societies, that both taught the same doctrine of a future life, and
that both made use of symbols and allegories and a dramatic form
of instruction. But these analogies do not necessarily support the
doctrine of descent, but may be otherwise satisfactorily explained.
Whether the belief in a personal immortality was communicated to
the first man by a divine revelation, and subsequently lost as the
intellectual state of future generations declined into a degraded
state of religious conceptions; or whether the prehistoric man,
created but little superior to the wild beast with whom he daily
contended for dominion with insufficient weapons, was at first
without any conception of his future, until it had by chance
dawned upon some more elevated intellect and by him been
communicated to his fellows as a consoling doctrine, afterward to
be lost, and then in the course of time to be again recovered, but
not to be universally accepted by grosser minds, are questions into
which we need not enter here. It is sufficient to know that there
has been no period in the world's history, however dark, in which
some rays of this doctrine have not been thrown upon the general
gloom. The belief in a future life and an immortal destiny has
always been so inseparably connected with elevated notions of God
that the deep and reverent thinkers in all ages have necessarily
subscribed to its truth. It has inspired the verses of poets and
tempered and directed the discussions of philosophers.
As both the Mysteries of the ancients and the Freemasonry of the
moderns were religious institutions, the conceptions of the true
nature of God which they taught to their disciples must of course
have involved the ideas of a future life, for the one doctrine is a
necessary consequence of the other. To seek, therefore, in this
analogy the proof of a descent of the modern from the ancient
institution is to advance an utterly fallacious argument.
As to the secret character of the two institutions, the argument is
equally untenable. Under the benighted rule of Pagan idolatry the
doctrine of a future life was not the popular belief. Yet there were
also some who aspired to a higher thought - philosophers like
Socrates and Plato, who nourished with earnest longing the hope of
immortality. Now, it was by such men that the Mysteries were
originally organized, and it was for instruction in such a doctrine
that they were instituted. But opposed as this doctrine was to the
general current of popular thought, it became, necessarily and
defensively, esoteric and exclusive. And hence we derive the reason
for the secret character of the Mysteries. "They were kept secret,"
says Warburton, "from a necessity of teaching the initiated some
things improper to be communicated to all." * The learned bishop
assigns another reason, which he sustains with the authority of
ancient writers, for this secrecy. "Nothing," he says, "excites our
curiosity like that which retires from our observation, and seems to
forbid our search." ** Synesius, who lived in the 4th century, before
the Mysteries were wholly abolished, says that they owed the
veneration in which they were held to a popular ignorance of their
nature. *** And Clemens of Alexandria, referring to the secrecy of
the Mysteries, accounts for it, among other reasons, because the
truth seen through a veil appears greater and more venerable.
****emasonry also teaches the doctrine of a future life. But
although there was no necessity, as in the Pagan Mysteries, to
conceal this doctrine from the populace; yet there is, for the reasons
that have just been assigned, a proneness in the human heart,
which has always existed, to clothe the most sacred subjects with
the veil of mystery. It was this spirit that caused Jesus to speak to
the Jewish multitudes in parables whose meaning his disciples, like
initiates, were to comprehend, but which would be unintelligible to
the people, so that "seeing they might not see, and hearing they
might not understand."
The Mysteries and Freemasonry were both secret societies, not
necessarily, because the one was the legitimate successor of the
other, but because both were human institutions and because both
partook of the same human tendency to conceal what was sacred
from the unhallowed eyes and cars of the profane. In this way may
be explained the andogy between the two institutions which arises
from their secret character and their esoteric method of
instruction. The symbolic form of imparting the doctrines is
another analogy, which may be readily explained. For when once
the esoteric or secret system was determined on, or involuntarily
adopted by the force of those tendencies to which I have referred, it
was but natural that the secret instruction should be
communicated by a method of symbolism, because in all ages
symbols have been the cipher by which secret associations of every
character have restricted the knowledge which they imparted to
their initiates only. Again, in the Mysteries, the essential doctrine
of a resurrection from death to eternal life was always taught in a
dramatic form. There was a drama in which the aspirant or
candidate for initiation represented, or there was visibly pictured
to him, the death by violence and then the resuscitation or
apotheosis - the resurrection to life and immortality of some god or
hero, in whose honor the peculiar mystery was founded. Hence in
all the Mysteries there were the thanatos, the death or slaying of
the victim; the aphanism, the concealment or burial of the body by
the slayers; and the heuresis, the finding of the body by the
initiates. This drama, from the character of the plot, began with
mourning and ended with joy. The traditional "eureka," sometimes
attributed to Euclid when he discovered the forty-seventh problem,
but most probable to Archimedes when he accidentally learned the
principle of specific gravity, was nightly repeated to the initiates
when, at the termination of the drama of the Mysteries, they had
found the hidden body of the Master.
Now, the recognized fact that this mode of inculcating a religious
or a philosophical idea by a dramatic representation was
constantly practiced in the ancient world, for the purpose of more
permanently impressing the conception, would naturally lead to its
adoption by all associations where the same lesson was to be taught
as that which was the subject of the Mysteries. The tendency to
dramatize an allegory is universal, because the method of
dramatization is the most expedient and has been proved to be the
most successful. The drama of the third or Master's degree of
Freemasonry is, as respects the subject and the development of the
plot and the conduct of the scenes, the same as the drama of the
ancient Mysteries. There is the same thanalos, or death; the same
aphanism, or concealment of the body, and the same heuresis, or
discovery of it. The drama of the Master's degree begins in sorrow
and ends in joy. Everything is so similar that we at once recognize
an analogy between Freemasonry and the ancient Mysteries; but it
has already been explained that this analogy is the result of
natural causes, and by no means infers a descent of the modern
from the ancient institution. Another analogy between the
Mysteries and Freemasonry is the division of both into steps,
classes, or degrees - call them what you may - which is to be found
in both. The arrangement of the Masonic system into three degrees
certainly bears a resemblance to the distribution of the Mysteries
into the three steps of Preparation, Initiation, and Perfection
which have been heretofore described.
But this analogy, remarkable as it may at first view appear, is
really an accidental one, which in no way shows an historical
connection between the two institutions. In every system of
instruction, whether open or secret, there must be a gradual and
not an immediate attainment of that which is intended to be
imparted. The ancient adage that "no one suddenly becomes
wicked" might with equal truth be read that "no one suddenly
becomes learned." There must be a series of gradual approaches to
the ultimate point in every pursuit of knowledge, like the
advancing parallels of a besieging army in its efforts to attain
possession of a beleaguered city. Hence the ladder, with its various
steps, has from the earliest times been accepted as a symbol of
moral or intellectual progress from an inferior to a superior
sphere. In this progress from the simplest to the most profound
arena of initiation - from the inception to the full accomplishment
of the instruction whereby the mind was to be gradually purged of
many errors, by preparatory steps, before it could bear the full
blaze of truth - both the Mysteries and Freemasonry have obeyed a
common law of intellectual growth, independently of any
connection of the one with the other institution. The fact that there
existed in both institutions secret modes of recognition presents
another analogy. It is known that in the Mysteries, as in
Freemasonry, there was a solemn obligation of secrecy, with
penalties for its violation, which referred to certain methods of
recognition known only to the initiates. But this may safely be
attributed to the fact that such peculiarities are and always will be
the necessary adjuncts of any secret organization, whether
religious, social, or political. In every secret society isolated from
the rest of mankind, we must find, as a natural outgrowth of its
secrecy and as a necessary means of defense and isolation, an
obligation of secrecy and methods of recognition. On such analogies
it is, therefore, scarcely worthwhile to dilate. Thus, then, I have
traced the analogies between the ancient Mysteries and modern
Freemasonry in the following points of resemblance. 1. The
Preparation, which in the Mysteries was called the Lustration. It
was the first step in the Mysteries, and is the Entered Apprentice's
degree in Freemasonry. In both systems, the candidate was
purified for the reception of truth by washing. In one it was a
physical ablution; in the other a moral cleansing; but in both the
symbolic idea was the same.
The Initiation, which in the ancient system was partly in the
Lesser Mysteries, but more especially in the Greater. In Masonry it
is partly in the Fellow Craft's, but more especially in the Master's
degree.
The Perfection, which in the Mysteries was the communication to
the aspirant of the true dogma - the great secret symbolized by the
initiation. In Freemasonry it is the same. The dogma
communicated in both is, in fact, identical. This Perfection came in
the Mysteries at the end of the Greater Mysteries. In Masonry, it is
communicated at the close of the Master's degree. In the Mysteries,
the communication was made in the sachem or holiest place. In
Masonry, it is made in the Master's Lodge, which is said to
represent the holy of holies of the Temple.
The secret character of both institutions.
The use of symbols.
The dramatic form of the initiation.
The division of both systems into: 8. the adoption by both of secret
methods of recognition.
These analogies, it must be admitted, are very striking, and, if
considered merely as coincidences, must be acknowledged to be
very singular. It is not, therefore, surprising that scholars have
found it difficult to resolve the following problem:
Is modern Freemasonry a lineal and uninterrupted successor of the
ancient Mysteries? The succession being transmitted through the
.Mithraic initiations which existed in the 5th and 6th centuries; or
is the fact of the analogies between the two systems to be attributed
to the coincidence of a natural process of human thought, common
to all minds and showing its development in symbolic forms?. I can
only arrive at what I think is a logical conclusion which is that if
both the Mysteries and Freemasonry have taught the same lessons
by the same method of instruction, this has arisen not from a
succession of organizations, each one a link of a long chain of
historical sequences leading directly to another, until Hiram is
simply substituted for Osiris , but rather from those usual and
natural coincidences of human thought which are to be found in
every age and among all peoples.
It is, however, hardly to be denied that the founders of the
Speculative system of Masonry, in forming their ritual, especially
of the third degree, derived many suggestions as to the form and
character of their funereal legend from the rites of the ancient
initiations. But how long after Freemasonry had an organized
existence this funereal legend was devised, is a question that must
hereafter be entitled to mature consideration.ch ascribes the origin of Freemasonry as a secret
society to the Pagan (Mysteries of the ancient world) , and which
derives the most important part of its ritual and the legend of its
Third Degree . From the initiation practiced in these religious
organizations , It connects itself with the Legend of the Temple
origin, because we can only link the initiation in the Mysteries
with that of Freemasonry by supposing that the one was in some
way engrafted on the other, at the time of the building of the
Temple by the Tyrian and Jewish workmen . Nevertheless, before
we can properly appreciate the theory, which associates
Freemasonry with the Pagan Mysteries, we must make ourselves
acquainted with the nature and the design as well as with
something of the history of those mystical societies. Among all the
nations of antiquity in which refinement and culture had given an
elevated tone to the religious sentiment, there existed two systems
of worship, a public and a private one. "Each of the pagan Gods,"
says Warburton, "had (besides the public and open) a secret
worship paid unto him, to which none were admitted but those who
had been selected by preparatory ceremonies, called INITIATION.
This secret worship was called the MYSTERIES."
The public worship was founded on the superstitious polytheism
whose numerous gods and goddesses were debased in character and
vicious in conduct. Incentive to virtue could not be derived from
their example, which furnished rather excuses for vice. In the
Eunuchus of Terenie, when Choerea is meditating the seduction of
the virgin Pamphila, he refers to the similar act of Jupiter, who in
a shower of gold had corrupted Danae, and he exclaims, "If a god,
who by his thunders shakes the whole universe, could commit this
crime, shall not I, a mere mortal, do so also?" Plautus, Euripides
and other Greek and Roman dramatists and poets repeatedly used
the same argument in defense of the views of their heroes, so that it
became a settled principle of the ancient religion. The vicious
example of the gods thus became an insuperable obstacle to a life of
purity and holiness. The assurance of a future life of compensation
constituted no part of the popular theology. The poets, it is true,
indulged in romantic descriptions of an Elysium and a Tartarus,
but their views were uncertain and unsatisfactory. As to any
specific doctrine of immortality, and were embodied in the saying
of Ovid * that of the four elements which constituted the human
organization, "the earth covers the flesh; the shade flits around the
tomb; the spirit seeks the stars."
Thus did the poet express the prevalent idea that the composite
man returned after death to the various primordial elements of
which he had been originally composed. In such a dim and
shadowy hypothesis, there was no incentive for life, no consolation
in death. And hence Alger, to whom the world has been indebted
for a most exhaustive treatise on the popular beliefs of all nations,
ancient and modern, on the subject of the future life, has after a
full and critical examination of the question, come to the following
conclusion: "To the ancient Greek in general, death was a sad
doom. When he lost a friend, he sighed a melancholy farewell after
him to the faded shore of ghosts. Summoned himself, he departed
with a lingering look at the sun and a tearful adieu to the bright
day and the green earth. To the Roman death was a grim reality.
To meet it himself he girded up his loins with artificial firmness.
But at its ravages among his friends, he wailed in anguished
abandonment. To his dying vision there was indeed a future, but
shapes of distrust and shadow stood upon its disconsolate borders;
and when the prospect had no horror, he still shrank from the
poppied gloom."
Yet as each nation advanced in refinement and intellectual culture
the priests, the poets, and the philosophers aspired to a higher
thought and cherished the longing for and inculcated the consoling
doctrine of an immortality, not to be spent in shadowy and inert
forms of existence, but in perpetual enjoyment, as a compensation
for the ills of life. The necessary result of the growth of such pure
and elevated notions must have been a contempt and
condemnation of the absurdities of polytheism. However, as this
was the popular religion it was readily perceived that any open
attempt to overthrow it and to advance, publicly, opinions so
antagonistic to it would be highly impolitic and dangerous.
Whenever any religion, whether true or false, becomes the religion
of a people, whoever opposes it, or ridicules it, or seeks to subvert it,
is sure to be denounced by popular fanaticism and to be punished
by popular intolerance. Many of the philosophers were, however,
skeptics. The Stoics, for instance, and they were the leading sect,
denied the survival of the soul after the death of the body; or, if
any of them conceded its survival, they attributed to it only a
temporary duration before it is dissolved and absorbed into the
universe. Seneca "Troades," I., 397) says, "There is nothing after
death, and death itself is nothing." Post mortem nihil, est ipsague
mors nihil.
Socrates was doomed to drink the poisoned bowl on the charge that
he taught the Athenian youth not to worship the gods,who are
worshipped by the state, but new and unknown deities. Jesus was
suspended from the cross because he inculcated doctrines which,
however pure, were novel and obnoxious to the old religion of his
Jewish fellow citizens. The new religious truths among the Pagan
peoples were therefore concealed from common inspection and
taught only in secret societies, admission to which was obtained
only through the ordeal of a painful initiation, and the doctrines
were further concealed under the veil of symbols whose true
meaning the initiated only could understand. "The truth," says
Clemens of Alexandria "was taught involved in enigmas, symbols,
allegories, metaphors, and tropes and figures. The secret
associations in which the principles of a new and purer theology
were taught have received in history the name of the MYSTERIES.
Each country had its own Mysteries peculiar to itself. In Egypt
were those of Osiris and Isis; in Samothrace those of the Cabiri; in
Greece they celebrated at Eleusis, near Athens, the Mysteries of
Demeter; in Phoenicia of Adonis and Dionysus; of and in Persia
those of Mithras, which were the last to perish after the advent of
Christianity and the overthrow of polytheism. These Mysteries,
although they differed in name and in some of the details of
initiation, were essentially alike in general form and design. "Their
end as well as nature," says Warburton, "was the same in all: to
teach the doctrine of a future state." * Alger says: "The implications
of the indirect evidence, the leanings and guiding of the entire
incidental clews now left us as to the real aim and purport of the
Mysteries, combine to assure us that their chief teaching was a
doctrine of a future life in which there should be rewards and
punishments." Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, says that : "the
initiated were instructed in the doctrine of a state of future
rewards, and punishments, and that the greater Mysteries
"obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of
the soul both here and hereafter, when purified from the
defilements of a material nature and constantly elevated to the
realities of intellectual vision All the ancient writers who were
contemporary with these associations, and must have been
familiar with their character, concur in the opinion that their
design was to teach the doctrine of a future life of compensation.
Pindar says, "Happy the man who descends beneath the hollow
earth having beheld these Mysteries. He knows the end, he knows
the divine origin of life." Sophocles says that "they are thrice happy
who descend to the shades below, after having beheld these rites;
for they alone have life in Hades, while all others suffer there
every kind of evil." Lastly, Isocrates declares, "those who have been
initiated in the Mysteries of Ceres entertain better hopes both as to
the end of life and the whole of futurity. It is then evident from all
authorities , that the great end and design of the initiation into
these Mysteries , was to teach the aspirant the doctrine of a future
life not that aimless one . Portrayed by the poas and doubtfully
consented to by the people, but that pure and rational state of
immortal existence , in which the soul is purified from the dross of
the body and elevated to eternal life. It was, in short, much the
same in its spirit as the Christian and Masonic doctrine of the
resurrection.
But this lesson was communicated in the Mysteries in a peculiar
form, which has in fact given rise to the theory we are now
considering that they were the antitype and original source of
Speculative Masonry. They were all dramatic in their ceremonies;
each one exhibited in a series of scenic representations the
adventures of some god or hero; the attacks upon him by his
enemies; his death at their hands; his descent into Hades or the
grave, and his final resurrection to renewed life as a mortal, or his
apotheosis as a god. The only important difference between these
various Mysteries was, that there was to each one a different and
peculiar god or hero, whose death and resurrection or apotheosis
constituted the subject of the drama, and gave to its scenes the
changes which were dependent on the adventures of him who was
its main subject. Thus, in Samothrace, where the Mysteries of the
Cabiri were celebrated, it was Atys, the lover of Cybele, who was
slain and restored; in Egypt it was Osiris whose death and
resurrection were represented; in Greece it was Dionysus, and in
Persia Mithras. Nevertheless, in all of these the material points of
the plot and the religious design of the sacred drama were
identical. The dramatic form and the scenic representation of the
allegory were everywhere preserved. This dramatic form of the
initiatory rites in the Mysteries , was as the learned Dr. Dollinger
has justly observed , eminently calculated to take a powerful hold
on the imagination and the heart and to excite in the spectators
alternately conflicting sentiments of terror and calmness , of
sorrow and fear and hope . As the Mysteries were a secret society,
whose members were separated from the rest of the people by a
ceremony of initiation, therefore resulted from this form of
organization, as a necessary means of defense and of isolation, a
solemn obligation of secrecy, with severe penalties for its violation,
and certain modes of recognition known only to those who had
been instructed in them. There was what might be called a
progressive order of degrees, for the neophyte was not at once upon
his initiation invested with knowledge of the deepest arcane of the
religious system. Thus, the Mysteries were divided into two classes
called the lesser and the Greater Mysteries, and in addition, there
was a preliminary ceremony, which was only preparatory to the
Mysteries proper. So that there was in the process of reception a
system of three steps, which those who are fond of tracing
analogies between the ancient and the modern initiations are
prone to call degrees. A brief review of these three steps of progress
in the Mysteries will give the reader a very definite idea of the
nature of this ancient system. So many writers have thought that
they had found the incunabulum of modern Freemasonry, and will
enable him to appreciate at their just value the analogies, which
these writers have found, as they suppose, between the two systems.
The first step was called purification by water. When the neophyte
was ready to be received into any of the ancient Mysteries, he was
carried into the temple or other place appropriated to the
ceremony of initiation, and there underwent a thorough cleansing
of the body by water. This was the preparation for reception into
the Lesser Mysteries and was symbolic of that purification of the
heart that was necessary to prepare the aspirant for admission to
a knowledge of and participation in the sacred lessons that were to
be subsequently communicated to him. It has been sought to find in
this preparatory ceremony an analogy to the first degree of
Masonry. Such an analogy certainly exists, as will here after be
shown, but the theory that the Apprentice's degree was derived
from and suggested by the ceremony of Lustration in the Mysteries
is untenable, because this ceremony was not peculiar to the
Mysteries.
An ablution, lustration, or cleansing by water, as a religious rite
was practiced among all the ancient nations. More especially was
it observed among the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. With the
Hebrews, the lustration was a preliminary ceremony to every act
of expiation or sin offering. Hence, the Jewish prophets continually
refer to the ablution of the body with water as a symbol of the
purification of the heart. Among the Greeks lustration was always
connected with their sacrifices. It consisted in the sprinkling of
water by means of an olive or a laurel branch. Among the Romans,
the ceremony was more common than among the Greeks. It was
used not only to expiate crime, but also to secure the blessing of the
Gods. Thus, fields were lustrated before the corn was put into the
ground; colonies when they were first established, and armies
before they proceeded to battle. At the end of every fifth year, the
whole people were thus purified by a general lustration.
Everywhere the rite was connected with the performance of
sacrifice and with the idea of a moral purification.
The next step in the ceremonies of the ancient Mysteries was called
the Initiation. It was here that the dramatic allegory was
performed and the myth or fictitious history on which the peculiar
Mystery was founded was developed. The neophyte personated the
supposed events of the life, the sufferings, and the death of the god
or hero to whom the Mystery was dedicated, or he had them
brought in vivid representation before him. These ceremonies
constituted a symbolic instruction in the initiation - the beginnings
- of the religious system, which it was the object of the Mysteries to
teach. The ceremonies of initiation were performed partly in the
Lesser, but more especially and more fully in the Greater
Mysteries, of which they were the first part, and where only the
allegory of death was enacted. The Lesser Mysteries, which were
introductory to the Greater, have been supposed by the theorists
who maintain the connection between the Mysteries and
Freemasonry to be analogous to the Fellow Craft's degree of the
latter Institution. There may be some ground for this comparison
in a rather inexact way, for although the Lesser Mysteries were to
some extent public, yet as they were, as Clemens of Alexandria *
says, a certain groundwork of instruction and preparation for the
things that were to follow, they might perhaps be considered as
analogous to the Fellow Craft's degree.
The third and last of the progressive steps or grades in the
Mysteries was Perfection. It was the ultimate object of the system.
It was also called the autopsy, from a Greek word, which signifies
seeing with one's own eyes. It was the complete and finished
communication to the neophyte of the great secret of the Mysteries;
the secret for the preservation of which the system of initiation
had been invented, and which, during the whole course of that
initiation, had been symbolically shadowed forth. The
communication of this secret, which was in fact the explanation of
the secret doctrine, for the inculcation of which the Mysteries in
every country had been instituted, was made in the most sacred
and private place of the temple or place of initiation. As the
autopsy or Perfection of the Mysteries concluded the whole system,
the maintainers of the doctrine that Freemasonry finds its origin
in the Mysteries have compared this last step in the ancient
initiation to the Master's degree. But the analogy between the two
as a consummation of the secret doctrine is less patent in the third
degree, as it now exists, than it was before the disseverance from it
of the Royal Arch, accepting, however, the Master's degree as it
was constituted in the earlier part of the 18th century, the
analogies between that and the last stage of the Mysteries are
certainly very interesting, although not sufficient to prove the
origin of the modern from the ancient systems. But of this more
hereafter. This view of the organization of the Pagan Mysteries
would not be complete without some reference to the dramatized
allegory which constituted so important a part of the ceremony of
initiation, and in connection with which their relation to
Freemasonry has been most earnestly urged. It has been already
said that the Mysteries were originally invented for the purpose of
teaching two great religious truths, which were unknown to, or at
least not recognized, in the popular faith. These were the unity of
God and the immortality of the soul in a future life. The former,
although illustrated at every point by expressed symbols, such, for
instance, as the all-seeing eye, the eye of the universe, and the
image of the Deity, was not allegorized, but taught as an abstract
doctrine at the time of the autopsy or the close of the grade of
Perfection. The other truth, the dogma of a future life, and of a
resurrection from death to immortality, was communicated by an
allegory which was dramatized in much the same way in each of
the Mysteries, although, of course, in each nation the person and
the events which made up the allegory were different. The
interpretation was, however, always the same. As Egypt was the
first country of antiquity to receive the germs of civilization, it is
there that the first Mysteries are supposed to have been invented.
And although the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were introduced
into Greece long after the invention of the Osiriac in Egypt, were
more popular among the ancients, yet the Egyptian initiation
exhibits more purely and more expressively the symbolic idea
which was to be developed in the interpretation of its allegory. I
shall therefore select the Osiriac, which was the most important of
the Egyptian Mysteries, as the exemplar from which an idea may
be obtained of the character of all the other Mysteries of paganism.
(* The first and original Mysteries of which we have any account
were those of Isis and Osiris in Egypt, from whence they were
derived by the Greeks. - Warburton, "Divine Legation," I., p. 194.
Diodorus says the same thing in the first book of his "History," I.,
xxxvii.)
All the writers of antiquity, such as Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus,
and Herodotus, state that the Egyptian Mysteries of Osiris, Isis,
and Horus were the model of all the other systems of initiation
which were subsequently established among the different peoples of
the Old World. Indeed, the ancients held that the Demeter of the
Greeks was identical with the Isis of the Egyptians, and Dionysus
with Osiris. Their adventures were certainly very similar. The
place of Osiris in Egyptian history is unknown to us. The fragments
of Sanchuniathon speak of Isiris, the brother of Chna or Canaan; in
the lists of Manito, he is made the fifth king under the dynasty of
the demigods, being conjoined with Isis; but as the four preceding
kings are named as Hephaestus, Helios, Agathodomon and
Chronos, the whole is evidently a mere mythological fable, and we
have as far to seek as ever. Herodotus is not more satisfactory, for
he says that Osiris and Isis were two great deities of the Egyptians.
Banier, however, in his Mythology thinks that ,he was the same as
Mizraim, the son of Clam, and grandson of Noah. Bishop
Cumberland concurs in this and adds that Cham was the first king
of Egypt, that Osiris was a title appropriated by him, signifying
Prince, and that Isis was simply Ishah, his wife. Lastly, Diodorus
Siculus says that he was Menes, the first King of Egypt. Some later
writers have sought to identify Osiris and Isis with the Iswara and
Isi of India. There is certainly a great deal of etymological
plausibility in this last conjecture. The ubiquitous character of
Osiris as a personality among the ancients is best shown in an
epigram of Ausonius, wherein it is said that in Greece, at Eleusis,
he was called Bacchus ; the Egyptians thought that he was Osiris,
the Mysians of Asia Minor named him Phanceus or Apollo; the
Indians supposed that he was Dionysus; the sacred rites of the
Romans called him Liber; and the Phoenicians, Adonis.
But the only thing that is of any interest to us in this connection is
that Osiris was the hero of the earliest of the Mysteries, and that
his death and apotheosis - his change from a mortal king to an
immortal God - symbolized the doctrine of a future life.
His historical character was that of a mild and beneficent
sovereign, who had introduced the arts of civilization among his
subjects, and had then traveled for three years for the purpose of
extending them into other nations, leaving the government of his
kingdom, during his absence, to his wife Isis. According to the
legend, his brother Typhon had been a rival claimant for the
throne, and his defeat had engendered a feeling of ill will. During
the absence of Osiris, he, therefore, formed a secret conspiracy with
some of his adherents to usurp the throne. On the return of Osiris
from his travels, Typhon invited him to a banquet, ostensibly given
in his honor, at which all the conspirators were present. During the
feast Typhoon produced a chest, inlaid with gold, and promised to
present it to that person of the company, whose body, upon trial,
would be found most exactly to fit it. Osiris tried the experiment,
but as soon as he had laid himself in the chest, Typhoon closed and
nailed down the lid. The chest was then thrown into the river Nile,
whence it floated into the sea, and, after being for some time tossed
upon the waves, it was finally cast ashore at the town of Byblos, in
Phoenicia, and left at the foot of a Tamarisk tree. Isis, the wife of
Osiris, over whelmed with grief for the loss of her husband,
commenced a search for the body, being accompanied by her son,
Anubis, and his nurse, Nepthe. After many adventures, Isis
arrived on the shores of Phoenicia and in the neighborhood of
Byblos, where she at length discovered the body at the foot of the
Tamarisk tree. She returned with it to Egypt. The people with great
demonstrations of joy received it, and it was proclaimed that Osiris
had risen from the dead and had become a god. The sufferings of
Osiris, his death, his resurrection, and his subsequent office as judge
of the dead in a future state, constituted the fundamental
principles of the Egyptian religion. They taught the secret doctrine
of a future life, and initiation into the mysteries of Osiris was
initiation into the rites of the religion of Egypt. These rites were
conducted by the priests, and into them many sages from other
countries especially from Greece, such as Herodotus, Plutarch, and
Pythagoras, were initiated.
In this way it is supposed that the principles and general form of
the Mysteries were conveyed into other countries, although they
everywhere varied in the details. The most important of the
Mysteries besides the Egyptian were those of Mithras in Persia, of
Atys or of the Cabiri in Thrace, of Adonis in Phoenicia, Syria, and
of Dionysus in Greece. They extended even beyond the then more
civilized parts of the world into the northern regions of Europe,
where were practiced the Scandinavian rites of the Norsemen and
the Druidical Mysteries of Gaul and Britain, though these were
probably derived more directly from a primitive Aryan source.
But wherever they existed we find in them a remarkable unity of
design and a similarity of ceremonies from which we are compelled
to deduce a common origin, while the purity of the doctrines which
they taught evidently show that this common origin was not to be
sought in the popular theology. In all of the Mysteries, the
ceremonies of initiation were of a funereal character. They
allegorized in a dramatic form the sufferings, the death, and the
resurrection of some god or hero. There was a death, most
generally by violence, to symbolize, as certain (*Thus Clemens of
Alexandria describes the legend or allegory of the Cabiri Mysteries
as the sacred mystery of a brother slain by his brethren, "fraters
trucidatus a fratribus.") interpreters of the Mysteries have
supposed, the strife of certain antagonistic powers in nature, such
as life and death, virtue and vice, light and darkness, or summer
and winter.
The candidate represented the person thus slain in the allegorical
drama. After the death followes the disappearance of the body,
called by the Greeks the aphanism, and the consequent search for
it. This search for the body, in which all the initiates joined,
constituted what Faber calls "the doleful part," and was succeeded
by its discovery, which was known as the heuresis. * This was
accompanied by the greatest demonstrations of joy. The candidate
was afterward instructed in the apporheta, or secret dogmas of the
Mysteries. In all of the Pagan Mysteries, this dramatic form of an
allegory ,was preserved, and we may readily see in the groans and
lamentations on the death of the god or hero and the
disappearance of the body a symbol of the death of man, and in the
subsequent rejoicings at his discovery and restoration, a symbol of
the restoration of the spirit to eternal life .
In view of the purity of the lessons taught in the Mysteries and
their inculcation of the elevated dogmas of the unity of God and
the immortality of the soul, it is not surprising to read the
encomiums passed upon them by the philosophers of antiquity.
The reader, if he has carefully considered the allegorical drama
which was represented in the ancient Mysteries, and compared it
with the drama which constitutes the principal portion of the
initiation in Freemasonry, will be at no loss to account for the
reasons which have led so many writers to attribute the origin of
the Masonic system to these mystical associations of antiquity.
It has been a favorite theory with several German, French, and
British scholars , to trace the origin of Freemasonry to the
Mysteries of Paganism ; others repudiating the idea that the
modern association should have sprung from them , still find
analogies so remarkable between the two systems as to lead them to
suppose that the Mysteries were an offshoot from the pure
Freemasonry of the Patriarchs . In my opinion there is not the
slightest foundation in historical evidence to support either theory,
although I admit the existence of many analogies between the two
systems, which can , however, be easily explained without
admitting any connection in the way of origin and descent
between them. Of the theory that the Mysteries were an offshoot or
imitation of the pure patriarchal Freemasonry, Hutchinson and
Oliver are the most distinguished supporters. While Hutchinson
strongly contends for the direct derivation of Freemasonry from
Adam, through the line of the patriarchs to Moses and Solomon, he
does not deny that it borrowed much from the initiations and
symbols of the Pagans. Thus he unhesitatingly says, that "there is
no doubt that our ceremonies and Mysteries were derived from the
rites, ceremonies, and institutions of the ancients, and some of
them from the remotest ages." But lest the purity of the genuine
patriarchal Masonry should be polluted by borrowing its
ceremonies from such an impure source, he subsequently describes,
in that indefinite manner which was the peculiarity of his style,
the separation of a purer class from the debasement of the popular
religion, wherein he evidently alludes to the Mysteries. Thus he
says: "In the corruption and ignorance of after ages , those
hallowed places were polluted with idolatry ; the unenlightened
mind mistook the type for the original , and could not discern the
light from darkness . The sacred and hills became the objects of
enthusiastic bigotry and superstition; the devotees bowed down to
the oaken log and the graven image as being divine. Some
preserved themselves from the corruptions of the times ,and we
find those sages and select men to whom were committed, and who
retained the light of understanding and truth, unpolluted with the
sins of the world, under the denomination of Magi among the
Persians; wise men, soothsayers, and astrologers among the
Chaldeans; philosophers among the Greeks and Romans; Brahmins
among the Indians; Druids and bards among the Britons; and with
the people of God, Solomon shone forth in the fullness of human
wisdom.
I have denominated the surreptitious initiations earth-born, in
contradistinction to the purity of Freemasonry, which was
certainly derived from above; and to those who contend that
Masonry is nothing more than a miserable relic of the idolatrous
Mysteries (vide. Fab. Pag. Idol., vol. iii., p. 190), I would reply, in
the words of an inspired apostle, 'Doth a fountain send forth at the
same place sweet water and bitter? Can the fig tree bear olive
berries or a vine figs? So can no fountain both yield salt water and
fresh. The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable,
full of mercy and good fruits' (James iii. 11, 12, 17). I wish to be
distinct and intelligible on this point, as some misapprehensions are
afloat respecting the immediate object of my former volume of
Signs and Symbols; and I have been told that the arguments there
used afford an indirect sanction to the opinion that Masonry is
derived from the Mysteries . In answer to this charge, if it requires
one, I only need reply to the general tenor of that volume, and to
declare explicitly my firm opinion, founded on intense study and
abstruse research, that the science which we now denominate
Speculative Masonry , was coeval , at least, with the creation of
our globe, and the far-famed Mysteries of idolatry were a
subsequent institution founded on similar principles, with the
design of conveying unity and permanence to the false worship,
which it otherwise could never have acquired.
There is another class of Masonic scholars who have advanced the
theory that the Speculative Freemasonry of the present day is
derived directly from and is a legitimate successor of the Mysteries
of antiquity. They found this theory on the very many and striking
analogies that are to be found in the organization, the design, and
the symbols of the two systems, and which they claim can only be
explained on the theory that the one is an offshoot from the other.
The Abbey Robin was, perhaps, the first writer who advanced this
idea in a distinct form. In a work on the Ancient and Modern
Initiations, * published in 1780, he traces the origin of the ancient
systems of initiation to that early period when wicked men, urged
by the terror of guilt, sought among the virtuous for intercessors
with the Deity. The latter, he says, retired into solitary places to
avoid the contagion of the growing corruption, and devoted
themselves to a life of contemplation and to the cultivation of the
arts and sciences. In order to associate with them in their labors
and functions only such as had sufficient merit and capacity, they
appointed strict courses of trial and examination. This, he thinks,
must have been the source of the initiations, which distinguished
the celebrated Mysteries of antiquity. The Magi of Chaldea, the
Brahmins and Gymnosophists of India, the Priests of Egypt, and
the Druids of Gaul and Britain thus lived in sequestered places and
obtained great reputation by their discoveries in astronomy,
chemistry, and mechanics, by the purity of their morals, and by
their knowledge of the science of legislation. It was in these schools,
says the abbe, that the first sages and legislators of antiquity were
formed, where the doctrines taught were the unity of God and the
immortality of the soul, and it was from these Mysteries that the
exuberant fancy of the Greeks drew much of their mythology.
From these ancient initiations, he deduces the orders of Chivalry,
which sprang into existence in the middle Ages, and certain
branches of these, he thinks, produced the institution of
Freemasonry. The theory of the Abbey Robin therefore traces the
institution of Masonry to the ancient Mysteries, but in an indirect
way, through the orders of Chivalry. He might therefore more
correctly be classed among those who maintain the doctrine of the
Templar origin of Freemasonry. However, it is Alexander Lenoir,
the French archaeologist, who has attempted in the most explicit
and comprehensive manner to establish the doctrine of the direct
descent of Freemasonry from the ancient Mysteries, and especially
from the Egyptian. In the year 1814 he published an elaborate work
on this subject. * In this he begins by affirming that we cannot
expect to find in the Egyptian and Greek initiations those modes of
recognition which are used by the Freemasons of the present day,
because these methods, which are only conventional and had been
orally communicated under the obligation of secrecy, can not be
known to us, for they could not have been transmitted through the
lapse of ages. Omitting, therefore, all reference to these as matters
of no real importance, he confines himself to a comparison of the
Masonic with the ancient rites of initiation. In this view he comes
to the conclusion that Freemasonry in all the points that it
essentially comprehends is in direct relation with the Mysteries of
the ancient world, and that hence, abstracting certain particular
usages practiced by the modern Freemasons, it is evident that
Freemasonry in no respect differs from the ancient initiations of
the Egyptians and the Greeks. This theory has been embraced by
nearly all the French Masonic writers except Rebold, who traces
Masonry to the Roman Colleges of Artificers Unfortunately for
the general acceptance of this theory, M. Lenoir has in the first
place drawn his comparisons from the system of ceremonies of
initiation which are practiced in the lodges of France, and
especially from the "proofs and trials" of the Entered Apprentice's
degree. But the tedious ceremonies and painful trials of the
candidate as they are practiced in the French Rite constitute no
part of the original English Masonry whence the French Masonry
derives its existence, and were adopted as a pure innovation long
after the establishment of the Order in France by the Grand Lodge
of England. And again, the Egyptian initiations, with which they
have been compared by Lenoir, were not those which were actually
practiced by the priests of Egypt, or at least we have no authentic
proof of that fact, but were most probably suggested by the
imaginative details given by the Abe Terrasson in his romance
entitled Sethas, in which he pretends to portray the initiation of an
Egyptian prince. The truth is that Lenoir and those writers who
have followed him and adopted his theories have not instituted a
comparison between the original ceremonies of Masonic initiation
and those of the ancient Mysteries, but merely a comparison
between a recent system of ceremonies, certainly not earlier than
the middle of the last century, and a fictitious system indebted for
its birth to the inventive genius of a French abbe, and first
promulgated in a work published by him in the year 1731.
As well might Mr. Turner or any other writer on Anglo-Saxon
history have cited, as authentic materials for his description of the
customs of the Anglo-Saxon, the romantic incidents given by Sir
Walter Scott in his novel of Ivanhoe? Hence all the references of
the voyages of an Entered Apprentice in a French Lodge to the
similar voyages of an Aspirant in the Mysteries of Osiris or Isis
become nothing more than "the baseless fabric of a vision," which
must fade and dissolve like an "insubstantial pageant" when
submitted to the crucial test of authentic historical investigation.
The Rev. Mr. King, the author of a very interesting treatise on the
Gnostics, * has advanced a theory much more plausible than either
of those to which I have adverted. He maintains that some of the
Pagan Mysteries, especially those of Mithras, which had been
instituted in Persia, extended beyond the period of the advent of
Christianity, and that their doctrines and usages were adopted by
the secret societies which existed at an early period in Europe and
which finally assumed the form of Freemasonry. I have said that
this theory is a plausible one. It is so because its salient points are
sustained by historical evidence. It is, for instance, a fact that some
of the Mysteries of Paganism were practiced in Europe long after
the commencement of the Christian era. They afforded a constant
topic of denunciation to the fathers of the church, who feared and
attacked what they supposed to be their idolatrous tendencies. It
was not until the middle of the 5th century that they were
proscribed by an edict of the Emperor Theodosius. But an edict of
proscription is not necessarily nor always followed by an
immediate abolition of the thing proscribed. The public celebration
of the Mysteries must, of course, have ceased at once when such
celebration had been declared unlawful. But a private and secret
observance of them may have continued, and probably did
continue, for an indefinite time, perhaps even to as late a period as
the end of the 5th or the beginning of the 6th century. Mosheim
tells us that in the 4th century, notwithstanding the zeal and
severity of the Christian emperors, there still remained in several
places, and especially in the remoter provinces, temples and
religious rites consecrated to the Pagan deities; that rites instituted
in honor of them were, in the 5th century, celebrated with the
utmost freedom and impunity in the western empire; and that
even in the 6th century remains of the Pagan worship were to be
found among the learned and the officers of state. *During all this
time it is known that secret associations, such as the Roman
Colleges of Artificers, existed in Europe, and that from them
ultimately sprang up the organizations of Builders, which, with
Como in Lombardy as their center, spread over Europe in the
Middle Ages, and whose members, under the recognized name of
Traveling Freemasons, were the founders of Gothic architecture.
There is no forced or unnatural succession from them to the Guilds
of Operative Masons, who undoubtedly gave rise, about the end of
the 17th or the beginning of the 18th century, to the Speculative
Order or the Free and Accepted Masons, which is the organization
that exists at the present day. There is, therefore, nothing
absolutely untenable in the theory that the Mithraic Mysteries
which prevailed in Europe until the 5th or perhaps the 6th century
may have impressed some influence on the ritual, form, and
character of the association of early Builders, and that this
influence may have extended to the Traveling Freemasons, the
Operative Guilds, and finally to the Free and Accepted Masons,
since it can not be proved that there was not an uninterrupted
chain of succession between these various organizations.
The theory of Mr. King cannot, therefore, be summarily rejected. It
may not be altogether true, but it has so many elements of truth
about it that it claims our serious consideration. But, after all, we
may find a sufficient explanation of the analogy which
undoubtedly exists between the rites of the ancient Mysteries and
those of the modern Freemasons in the natural tendency of the
human mind to develop its ideas in the same way when these ideas
are suggested by the same or similar circumstances. The fact that
both institutions have taught the same lessons by the same method
of instruction may be attributed not to a direct and uninterrupted
succession of organizations, each one a link of a long chain leading
consequentially to another but rather to a natural and usual
coincidence of human thought. The believers in the lineal and
direct descent of Freemasonry from the ancient Mysteries have of
course discovered, or thought that they had discovered, the most
striking and wonderful analogies between the internal
organizations of the two institutions. Hence the most credulous of
these theorists have not hesitated to compare the Hierophant, or
the Explainer of the sacred rites in the Mysteries, with the
Worshipful Master in a Masonic Lodge, nor to style the Dadouchos,
or Torch-Bearer, and the Hieroceryx, or Herald of the Mysteries,
Wardens, nor to assign to the Epibomos, or Altar-Server, the title
and duties of a Deacon.
That there are analogies, and that many of them are very curious
can not be denied, but I shall attempt, before leaving; this subject,
to explain the reason of their existence in a more rational way
than by tracing the modern as a succession from the ancient
system. The analogies existing between the ancient Mysteries and
Freemasonry, upon which the theory of the descent of the one from
the other has been based, consist in the facts that both were secret
societies, that both taught the same doctrine of a future life, and
that both made use of symbols and allegories and a dramatic form
of instruction. But these analogies do not necessarily support the
doctrine of descent, but may be otherwise satisfactorily explained.
Whether the belief in a personal immortality was communicated to
the first man by a divine revelation, and subsequently lost as the
intellectual state of future generations declined into a degraded
state of religious conceptions; or whether the prehistoric man,
created but little superior to the wild beast with whom he daily
contended for dominion with insufficient weapons, was at first
without any conception of his future, until it had by chance
dawned upon some more elevated intellect and by him been
communicated to his fellows as a consoling doctrine, afterward to
be lost, and then in the course of time to be again recovered, but
not to be universally accepted by grosser minds, are questions into
which we need not enter here. It is sufficient to know that there
has been no period in the world's history, however dark, in which
some rays of this doctrine have not been thrown upon the general
gloom. The belief in a future life and an immortal destiny has
always been so inseparably connected with elevated notions of God
that the deep and reverent thinkers in all ages have necessarily
subscribed to its truth. It has inspired the verses of poets and
tempered and directed the discussions of philosophers.
As both the Mysteries of the ancients and the Freemasonry of the
moderns were religious institutions, the conceptions of the true
nature of God which they taught to their disciples must of course
have involved the ideas of a future life, for the one doctrine is a
necessary consequence of the other. To seek, therefore, in this
analogy the proof of a descent of the modern from the ancient
institution is to advance an utterly fallacious argument.
As to the secret character of the two institutions, the argument is
equally untenable. Under the benighted rule of Pagan idolatry the
doctrine of a future life was not the popular belief. Yet there were
also some who aspired to a higher thought - philosophers like
Socrates and Plato, who nourished with earnest longing the hope of
immortality. Now, it was by such men that the Mysteries were
originally organized, and it was for instruction in such a doctrine
that they were instituted. But opposed as this doctrine was to the
general current of popular thought, it became, necessarily and
defensively, esoteric and exclusive. And hence we derive the reason
for the secret character of the Mysteries. "They were kept secret,"
says Warburton, "from a necessity of teaching the initiated some
things improper to be communicated to all." * The learned bishop
assigns another reason, which he sustains with the authority of
ancient writers, for this secrecy. "Nothing," he says, "excites our
curiosity like that which retires from our observation, and seems to
forbid our search." ** Synesius, who lived in the 4th century, before
the Mysteries were wholly abolished, says that they owed the
veneration in which they were held to a popular ignorance of their
nature. *** And Clemens of Alexandria, referring to the secrecy of
the Mysteries, accounts for it, among other reasons, because the
truth seen through a veil appears greater and more venerable.
****emasonry also teaches the doctrine of a future life. But
although there was no necessity, as in the Pagan Mysteries, to
conceal this doctrine from the populace; yet there is, for the reasons
that have just been assigned, a proneness in the human heart,
which has always existed, to clothe the most sacred subjects with
the veil of mystery. It was this spirit that caused Jesus to speak to
the Jewish multitudes in parables whose meaning his disciples, like
initiates, were to comprehend, but which would be unintelligible to
the people, so that "seeing they might not see, and hearing they
might not understand."
The Mysteries and Freemasonry were both secret societies, not
necessarily, because the one was the legitimate successor of the
other, but because both were human institutions and because both
partook of the same human tendency to conceal what was sacred
from the unhallowed eyes and cars of the profane. In this way may
be explained the andogy between the two institutions which arises
from their secret character and their esoteric method of
instruction. The symbolic form of imparting the doctrines is
another analogy, which may be readily explained. For when once
the esoteric or secret system was determined on, or involuntarily
adopted by the force of those tendencies to which I have referred, it
was but natural that the secret instruction should be
communicated by a method of symbolism, because in all ages
symbols have been the cipher by which secret associations of every
character have restricted the knowledge which they imparted to
their initiates only. Again, in the Mysteries, the essential doctrine
of a resurrection from death to eternal life was always taught in a
dramatic form. There was a drama in which the aspirant or
candidate for initiation represented, or there was visibly pictured
to him, the death by violence and then the resuscitation or
apotheosis - the resurrection to life and immortality of some god or
hero, in whose honor the peculiar mystery was founded. Hence in
all the Mysteries there were the thanatos, the death or slaying of
the victim; the aphanism, the concealment or burial of the body by
the slayers; and the heuresis, the finding of the body by the
initiates. This drama, from the character of the plot, began with
mourning and ended with joy. The traditional "eureka," sometimes
attributed to Euclid when he discovered the forty-seventh problem,
but most probable to Archimedes when he accidentally learned the
principle of specific gravity, was nightly repeated to the initiates
when, at the termination of the drama of the Mysteries, they had
found the hidden body of the Master.
Now, the recognized fact that this mode of inculcating a religious
or a philosophical idea by a dramatic representation was
constantly practiced in the ancient world, for the purpose of more
permanently impressing the conception, would naturally lead to its
adoption by all associations where the same lesson was to be taught
as that which was the subject of the Mysteries. The tendency to
dramatize an allegory is universal, because the method of
dramatization is the most expedient and has been proved to be the
most successful. The drama of the third or Master's degree of
Freemasonry is, as respects the subject and the development of the
plot and the conduct of the scenes, the same as the drama of the
ancient Mysteries. There is the same thanalos, or death; the same
aphanism, or concealment of the body, and the same heuresis, or
discovery of it. The drama of the Master's degree begins in sorrow
and ends in joy. Everything is so similar that we at once recognize
an analogy between Freemasonry and the ancient Mysteries; but it
has already been explained that this analogy is the result of
natural causes, and by no means infers a descent of the modern
from the ancient institution. Another analogy between the
Mysteries and Freemasonry is the division of both into steps,
classes, or degrees - call them what you may - which is to be found
in both. The arrangement of the Masonic system into three degrees
certainly bears a resemblance to the distribution of the Mysteries
into the three steps of Preparation, Initiation, and Perfection
which have been heretofore described.
But this analogy, remarkable as it may at first view appear, is
really an accidental one, which in no way shows an historical
connection between the two institutions. In every system of
instruction, whether open or secret, there must be a gradual and
not an immediate attainment of that which is intended to be
imparted. The ancient adage that "no one suddenly becomes
wicked" might with equal truth be read that "no one suddenly
becomes learned." There must be a series of gradual approaches to
the ultimate point in every pursuit of knowledge, like the
advancing parallels of a besieging army in its efforts to attain
possession of a beleaguered city. Hence the ladder, with its various
steps, has from the earliest times been accepted as a symbol of
moral or intellectual progress from an inferior to a superior
sphere. In this progress from the simplest to the most profound
arena of initiation - from the inception to the full accomplishment
of the instruction whereby the mind was to be gradually purged of
many errors, by preparatory steps, before it could bear the full
blaze of truth - both the Mysteries and Freemasonry have obeyed a
common law of intellectual growth, independently of any
connection of the one with the other institution. The fact that there
existed in both institutions secret modes of recognition presents
another analogy. It is known that in the Mysteries, as in
Freemasonry, there was a solemn obligation of secrecy, with
penalties for its violation, which referred to certain methods of
recognition known only to the initiates. But this may safely be
attributed to the fact that such peculiarities are and always will be
the necessary adjuncts of any secret organization, whether
religious, social, or political. In every secret society isolated from
the rest of mankind, we must find, as a natural outgrowth of its
secrecy and as a necessary means of defense and isolation, an
obligation of secrecy and methods of recognition. On such analogies
it is, therefore, scarcely worthwhile to dilate. Thus, then, I have
traced the analogies between the ancient Mysteries and modern
Freemasonry in the following points of resemblance. 1. The
Preparation, which in the Mysteries was called the Lustration. It
was the first step in the Mysteries, and is the Entered Apprentice's
degree in Freemasonry. In both systems, the candidate was
purified for the reception of truth by washing. In one it was a
physical ablution; in the other a moral cleansing; but in both the
symbolic idea was the same.
The Initiation, which in the ancient system was partly in the
Lesser Mysteries, but more especially in the Greater. In Masonry it
is partly in the Fellow Craft's, but more especially in the Master's
degree.
The Perfection, which in the Mysteries was the communication to
the aspirant of the true dogma - the great secret symbolized by the
initiation. In Freemasonry it is the same. The dogma
communicated in both is, in fact, identical. This Perfection came in
the Mysteries at the end of the Greater Mysteries. In Masonry, it is
communicated at the close of the Master's degree. In the Mysteries,
the communication was made in the sachem or holiest place. In
Masonry, it is made in the Master's Lodge, which is said to
represent the holy of holies of the Temple.
The secret character of both institutions.
The use of symbols.
The dramatic form of the initiation.
The division of both systems into: 8. the adoption by both of secret
methods of recognition.
These analogies, it must be admitted, are very striking, and, if
considered merely as coincidences, must be acknowledged to be
very singular. It is not, therefore, surprising that scholars have
found it difficult to resolve the following problem:
Is modern Freemasonry a lineal and uninterrupted successor of the
ancient Mysteries? The succession being transmitted through the
.Mithraic initiations which existed in the 5th and 6th centuries; or
is the fact of the analogies between the two systems to be attributed
to the coincidence of a natural process of human thought, common
to all minds and showing its development in symbolic forms?. I can
only arrive at what I think is a logical conclusion which is that if
both the Mysteries and Freemasonry have taught the same lessons
by the same method of instruction, this has arisen not from a
succession of organizations, each one a link of a long chain of
historical sequences leading directly to another, until Hiram is
simply substituted for Osiris , but rather from those usual and
natural coincidences of human thought which are to be found in
every age and among all peoples.
It is, however, hardly to be denied that the founders of the
Speculative system of Masonry, in forming their ritual, especially
of the third degree, derived many suggestions as to the form and
character of their funereal legend from the rites of the ancient
initiations. But how long after Freemasonry had an organized
existence this funereal legend was devised, is a question that must
hereafter be entitled to mature consideration.