The Meaning of Masonry
W. L. Wilmshurst
Frontspiece
INTRODUCTION - The Possibilities of the Masonic Order
CHAPTER I - The Deeper Symbolism of Masonry
CHAPTER II - Masonry as a Philsophy
CHAPTER III - Further Notes on Craft Symbolism
CHAPTER IV - The Holy Royal Arch
CHAPTER V - The Relation of Masonry to the Ancient Mysteries
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Chapter IV
THE HOLY ROYAL ARCH OF JERUSALEM.
Freemasonry, under the English Constitution, reaches its
climax and conclusion in the Order of the Holy Royal Arch. There
exists a variety of other degrees ramifying from the main stem of the
Masonic system which either elaborate side-points of its doctrine or
re-express its teachings in alternative symbolism. These, while of
greater or less merit and interest, are beyond our present
consideration, and, indeed, are superfluities tending rather to
diffuse the student's attention than to deepen his insight into the
central purpose of the Craft. The taking of additional higher degrees
may be indulged in almost indefinitely, but to what purpose if the
initial ones, which contain all that is necessary for the
understanding of the subject, remain imperfectly assimilated? It is a
fallacy to suppose that the multiplying of degrees will result in the
discovery of important arcane secrets which one has failed to find in
the rites of the Craft and the Royal Arch. The higher degrees indeed
illustrate truths of much interest and often set forth with
impressive ceremonial beauty, the appreciation of which will be the
greater after and not before the meaning of the preliminary ones has
been thoroughly absorbed; whilst the pursuit of "secrets"
is certain to prove illusory, for the only secrets worth the name or
the finding are those incommunicable ones which discover themselves
within the personal consciousness of the seeker who is in earnest to
translate ceremonial representation into facts of spiritual
experience.
It was accordingly a sound instinct that prompted those who
settled the present constitution of the Order to exclude these
supplementary refinements and to declare that "Masonry consists
of the three Craft Degrees and the Holy Royal Arch and no more",
for within that compass is exhibited, or at least outlined, the
entire process of human regeneration; so that after the Royal Arch
there really remains nothing more to be said, although what has been
said is of course capable of elaboration.
The completeness of regeneration theoretically postulated in those
four stages is marked, it should be observed, by the very significant
expression used in connection with a Royal Arch Chapter, which is
interpreted as meaning "My people having obtained mercy",
which in its further analysis signifies that all the parts and
faculties ("people") of the candidate's organism have at
last, and as the result of his previous discipline and ordeals,
become sublimated and integrated in a new quality and higher order of
life than that previously enjoyed in virtue of his merely temporal
nature. In a word, he has become regenerated. He has achieved the
miracle of "squaring the circle" - a metaphorical
expression for regeneration, as shall be explained presently.
Although but an expansion and completion of the Third Degree, of
which at one time it formed part, there were good reasons for
detaching the Royal Arch portion from what now forms the Degree of
Master Mason. The two parts in combination made an inconveniently
long rite, whilst a change in the symbolic appointments and officers
of the temple of initiation was necessary, as the ceremony proceeded,
to give appropriate spectacular representation to the further
points calling for expression. Despite this re-arrangement the Royal
Arch is the natural conclusion and fulfillment of the Third Degree.
The latter inculcates the necessity of mystical death and dramatizes
the process of such death and revival therefrom into newness of life.
The Royal Arch carries the process a stage farther, by showing its
fulfilment in the "exaltation" or apotheosis of him who has
undergone it. The Master Mason's Degree might be said to be
represented in the terms of Christian theology by the formula "He
suffered and was buried and rose again", whilst the equivalent
of the exaltation ceremony is "He ascended into heaven".
The Royal Arch Degree seeks to express that new and intensified
life to which the candidate can be raised and the exalted degree of
consciousness that comes with it. From being conscious merely as a
natural man and in the natural restricted way common to every one
born into this world, he becomes exalted (whilst still in his natural
flesh) to consciousness in a supernatural and illimitable way. As has
been said in previous papers, the purpose of all initiation is to
lift human consciousness from lower to higher levels by quickening
the latent spiritual potentialities in man to their full extent
through appropriate discipline. No higher level of attainment is
possible than that in which the human merges in the Divine
consciousness and knows as God knows. And that being the level of
which the Order of the Royal Arch treats ceremonially, it follows
that Masonry as a sacramental system reaches its climax and
conclusion in that Order.
As has also been already shown, to attain that level involves as
its essential prerequisite the total abnegation, renouncement
and renovation of one's original nature, the surrender of one's
natural desires, tendencies and preconceptions, and the abandonment
and nullifying of one's natural self-will, by such a habitual
discipline and self-denial and gradual but vigorous opposition to all
these as will cause them gradually to atrophy and die down. "He
that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in
this world shall keep it unto life eternal. Except a corn of wheat
fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die it
bringeth forth much fruit". As with a seed of wheat, so with
man. If he persists in clinging to the present natural life he knows,
if he refuses to recognize that a higher quality of life is here and
now possible to him, or is unwilling to make the necessary effort to
attain it, he "abideth alone", gets nowhere, and only
frustrates his own spiritual evolution. But if he is willing to "die"
in the sense indicated, if he will so re-orientate his will and
silence his natural energies and desires as to give the Vital and
Immortal Principle within him the chance to assert itself and
supersede them, then from the disintegrated material of his old
nature that germ of true life will spring into growth in him and bear
much fruit, and by the steppingstones of initiation he will rise
from his dead self to higher things than he can otherwise experience.
This necessity of self-dying is not, we repeat, the physical death
of the body but a mystical death - in life of everything except the
body- is the first and fundamental fact to be grasped before one may
hope to realize or even to understand the mystery of the Royal Arch
Degree. "Mors janua vitae"; death to self is the
portal to true life. There is no other way. It is the unescapable law
and condition of the soul's progress.
But since it is a process involving a "most serious trial of
fortitude and fidelity" and a grapple with oneself from which
the timorous and self-diffident may well shrink, the Mystery-systems
have always exhibited an example for the instruction, encouragement
and emulation of those prepared to make the attempt and the necessary
sacrifice. To hearten them to the task the Initiatory Colleges have
held up a prototype in the person of some great soul who has already
trodden the same path and emerged triumphant therefrom. It matters
nothing whether the prototype be one whose historic actuality and
identity can be demonstrated, or whether he can be regarded only as
legendary or mythical; the point being not to teach a merely
historical fact, but to enforce a spiritual principle. In Egypt the
prototype was Osiris, who was slain by his malignant brother
Typhon, but whose mangled limbs were collected in a coffer from which
he emerged reintegrated and divinized. In Greece the prototype
was Bacchus, who was torn to pieces by the Titans. Baldur in
Scandinavia and Mithra in Graeco-Roman Europe were similar
prototypes. In Masonry the prototype is Hiram Abiff, who met his
death as the result of a conspiracy by a crowd of workmen of whom
there were three principal ruffians. In the Christian and chief of
all systems, since it comprehends and re-expresses all the
others, the greatest of the Exemplars died at the hands of the mob,
headed also by three chief ruffians, Judas, Caiaphas and Pilate. If
in Masonry the mystical death is dramatized more realistically than
the resurrection that follows upon it, that resurrection is
nevertheless shown in the "raising" of the candidate to the
rank of Master Mason and his "reunion with the companions
of former toils", implying the reintegration and resumption of
all his old faculties and powers in a sublimated state, just as the
limbs of the risen Osiris were said to reunite into a new whole and
as the Christian Master withdrew His mutilated body from the tomb and
reassumed it, transmuted into one of supernatural substance and
splendour.
We have, therefore, now to consider how the Royal Arch Degree
exhibits the attainment of a new order of life. But it may be as well
to say in advance that for those unhabituated to looking beyond
surface-values and material meanings the exposition about to be
given, dealing as it will with the profound spiritual truths and
advanced psychological experience allegorized by the external
ceremonial, is likely to present some difficulty of comprehension and
acceptance. The Royal Arch, however, would not be the Supreme Degree
it is did it not move upon a supremely high level of thought and
instruction. It was not compiled to accommodate the elementary
intelligence theoretically characterizing the philosophically
untrained neophyte. It presupposes that its candidate has passed
through a long, strenuous period of purification and mental
discipline, in the course of which his understanding has become very
considerably widened and deepened, whilst his fidelity to the high
inward Light which has conducted him safely so far, has induced in
him a humility and docility fitting him for what still awaits him -
the attainment of that Wisdom which is concealed from this world's
wise and prudent, but is revealed unto babes. It is a rite of
initiation dealing less with his gross corporeal nature and his
ordinary temporal mentality (which have been the subject of
purification in the earlier degrees) than with the higher reaches and
possibilities of his understanding and consciousness. As it is,
what can be said here can at best be but a partial and incomplete
exposition of a theme calling rather for disciplined imagination and
reverent reflection than for reasoned argument. Certain things
must perforce be omitted from explanation entirely, whilst others are
mentioned with diffidence and at the risk of their being
misunderstood or rejected by such as do not yet realize that in these
matters "the letter killeth, the spirit vivifieth" and that
"spiritual truths must be spiritually discerned."
Before interpreting the Ceremony itself it is desirable first to
indicate four noteworthy features connected with this Supreme Order
and distinctifying it from the three grades leading to it. In
speaking even of these incidentals the before mentioned
difficulties of both exposition and apprehension will already make
themselves felt.
First, no one can be received into a Chapter without first having
attained Master Mason's rank.
Second, the circular symbol of the Grand Geometrician, which in
the Second Degree shone high above in the ceiling of the Temple, and
in the Third Degree had moved downwards and burned as a glimmering
ray in the East to guide the candidate's feet into the way of
peace, has now descended completely to the chequer-work floor, where
it rests as the centre and cubical focus of the entire organism and
bears the Sacred and Ineffable Name, as also those of Solomon and the
two Hirams.
Third, the constitution of the Assembly is no longer one of seven
officers, but of nine, who are grouped in three triads about the
Central Sacred Symbol.
Fourth, the Assembly, regarded as a unity, is no longer designated
a Lodge, but a Chapter.
The first of these points - that none but a Master Mason can enter
the Royal Arch - has already been accounted for. It is not feasible,
nor is it within the law governing the process of spiritual
evolution, for any who has not experienced the stage of mystical
death to have experience of that which lies beyond that death. As an
unborn physical infant can know nothing of this world, in which
nevertheless it exists, until actually initiated into it by birth, so
the embryonic spiritual child cannot be born into conscious
function upon the plane of the Spirit until it has become entirely
detached from the enfolding carnal matrix and tendencies to which it
has been habituated.
The second and third points can be considered together. The
re-arrangement of the factors constituting the ceremonial temple
are symbolic of a structural re-arrangement which has occurred in the
candidate's own psychical organization. This has undergone a
repolarization as the result of the descent into it of that high
central Light which at first but shone as it were in his "heavens",
afar off and above him, illumining the dormer-window of his natural
intelligence. Consider deeply what this change implies. The Day-star
from on high has now visited him; the fontal source of all
consciousness has descended into the very chequerwork material
of his transient physical organism, not merely permeating it
temporarily with light, but taking root and becoming grafted there
substantially and permanently. In theological language, God has
become man, and man has become divinized, in virtue of this descent
and union. In Masonic terms, the Vital and Immortal Principle
resident in the candidate has at last superseded his temporal
life-principle and established him upon a new centre of incorruptible
life. Now, and perhaps only now, becomes thoroughly appreciable the
necessity for the earlier purifications, discipline, self-crucifixion
and death of all the lower nature. How could the purity of the Divine
Essence tabernacle in the coarse body of the sensualist? How could
the Eternal Wisdom unfold its treasures in a mind benighted or caring
for nothing but base metals and material pursuits? How could the
Universal Will co-operate with and function through the man whose
petty personal will blocks its channel, antagonizing it at every turn
with his selfish preferences and disordered desires? A Master Mason,
then, in the full sense of the term, is no longer an ordinary man,
but a divinized man; one in whom the Universal and the personal
consciousness have come into union. Obviously the quality of
life and consciousness of such an one must differ vastly from that of
other men. His whole being is differently qualitated and geared upon
another centre. That new centre is described as the Grand
Geometrician of man's personal universe, inasmuch as its action upon
the organism of whoever surrenders himself to its influence causes a
redisposition of functional and conscious faculty. The knowledge of
this fact was with the wise ancients the true and original science of
Geometry (literally "earthmeasuring"; determining the
occult potentialities of the human earth or temporal organism under
spiritual stresses). "God geometrizes" wrote Plato, with
intimate knowledge of the subject. Many of the Euclidean and
Pythagorean theorems, now regarded merely as mathematical
demonstrations, were originally expressions, veiled in
mathematical glyphs, of the esoteric science of soul-building or true
Masonry. The well-known 47th Proposition of the First Book of Euclid
is an example of this and in consequence has come (though few modern
Masons could explain why) to be inscribed upon the Past Master's
official jewel. Again, the squaring of the circle - that problem
which has baffled so many modern mathematicians - is an occult
expression signifying that Deity, symbolized by the all-containing
circle, has attained form and manifestation in a "square"
or human soul. It expresses the mystery of the Incarnation,
accomplished within the personal soul.
Under the stress then of the Geometrizing Principle now found
symbolically integrated within the candidate's temporal organism, a
re-distribution of his component powers has become effected. His
repolarized condition is symbolized by an equilateral triangle
with a point at its centre, and such a triangle will be found, worked
in gold, upon the sash worn by the Companions of the Order. The
significance of this triangle is that the tripartite aspects of him
who wears it (that is, the spiritual, psychical and physical parts of
him) now stand equalized and equilibrated around their common
Life-Principle at the centre, fitted and equipped for Its purpose.
Yet each of these three divisions, though in itself unitary, is
philosophically triadic in composition when subjected to intellectual
analysis. " Every monad is the parent of a triad " is
another maxim of the Ancients, who anticipated the modem Hegelian
proposition of metaphysics that thesis, antithesis and synthesis are
the essential ingredients of a given truth. Hence it comes about that
the three aspects of each of the three sides of our equilateral
triangle are ceremonially personified by the nine officers of the
Chapter-three in the East representing the spiritual side, three in
the West figuring the soul or psychical side, and three subordinate
links connecting these other two. (These will be further and more
conveniently treated of later when the symbolic nature of the
officers is dealt with).
The fourth point to be noticed was the change of designation from
"Lodge" to "Chapter". The word "Chapter"
derives from Caput, head. The reason for the change of name
lies, however, much deeper than in the fact that the Royal Arch
stands at the head or summit of the Craft. It has reference in a
twofold way to the capitular rank and consciousness of the Arch
Mason himself. In virtue of his headship or supremacy over his
material nature he has passed beyond mere Craftwork and governing the
Lodge of his lower nature, which he has now made the docile
instrument and servant of his spiritual self. Henceforth his energies
are employed primarily upon the spiritual plane. The "head"
of the material organism of man is the spirit of man, and this spirit
consciously conjoined with the Universal Spirit is Deity's supreme
instrument and vehicle in the temporal world. Such a man's physical
organism and brain have become sublimated and keyed up to a condition
and an efficiency immensely in advance of average humanity.
Physiological processes are involved which cannot be discussed
here, beyond saying that in such a man the entire nervous system
contributes to charge certain ganglia and light up certain
brain-centres in a way of which the ordinary mind knows nothing. The
nervous system provides the storage-batteries and conductive medium
of the Spirit's energies just as telegraph wires are the media for
transmitting electrical energy. But the true Master Mason, in virtue
of his mastership, knows how to control and apply those energies.
They culminate and come to self-consciousness in his head, in his
intelligence. And in this respect we may refer to a very heavily
veiled Scriptural testimony, the import of which goes quite
unperceived to the uninstructed reader. The Gospels record that the
Passion of the Great Exemplar and Master concluded "at the place
called Golgotha in the Hebrew tongue; that is, the place of a skull";
that is to say it terminated in the head or seat of intelligence and
in a mystery of the spiritual consciousness. The same truth is also
testified to, though again under veils of symbolic phrasing, in the
reference to the sprig of acacia planted at the head of the grave of
the Masonic Grand Master and prototype, Hiram Abiff. The grave is the
candidate's soul; the sprig of acacia typifies the latent akasa (to
use an Eastern term) or divine germ planted in that soil and waiting
to become quickened into activity in his intelligence, the "head"
of that plane. When that sprig of acacia blooms at the head of his
soul's sepulchre, he will understand at one and the same moment the
mystery of Golgotha, the mystery of the death of Hiram, and the
meaning of the Royal Arch ceremony of exaltation. It is a mystery of
spiritual consciousness, the efflorescence of the mind in God, the
opening up of the human intelligence in conscious association with
the Universal and Omniscient Mind. It is for this reason that the
cranium or skull is given prominence in the Master Mason's Degree.
With this premised we proceed to considering the Ceremony of
Exaltation.
THE CEREMONY OF EXALTATION
Again the candidate is in a state of darkness. But the reason of
this darkness differs entirely from that which existed at the Entered
Apprentice stage. Then he was but an ignorant beginner upon the
quest, making his first irregular benighted efforts towards the
light. Now, he has long passed beyond that stage; he comes with all
the qualifications and equipment of a Master Mason. Long ago he found
the light he first sought, and for long he has been directing his
steps and nourishing his growth by its rays. And more; after all this
intimacy with it he has known it recede from him and disappear in the
great ordeal of dereliction of the Third Degree, when, in the "dark
night of the soul" and utter helplessness of all his powers, he
learned how strength could be perfected out of weakness by the potent
efficacy of the Vital and Immortal Principle within him, in whose
presence the darkness and the light are both alike. His present
initial deprivation of light is the darkness of the Third Degree
carried over into this further experience. It betokens rather a
momentary failure to adjust his perception to the new quality of life
he is now entering upon, just as a new-born child is unable at first
to coordinate its sight to objects before it. For a while, but
only for a brief while, the candidate feels himself in darkness; but
he is really blinded rather by excess of light than by lack of it.
In this condition he undertakes the opening out of a certain place
which he proceeds to enter and explore, keeping touch meanwhile with
his companions by a cord or life-line. The symbolism of all this
is singularly rich in allusion to certain interior processes of
introspection well defined in the experience of the contemplative
mystics and well attested in their records. The place entered
emblematizes once again the material and psychical organism, a dense
compact of material particles coating the more tenuous
interior spirit of man as a shell surrounds the contents of an egg.
"Roll away the stone", it will be recalled, was the first
injunction of the Master at the raising of Lazarus. This obstruction
removed, the psychical organism becomes detached from the physical
and the mind is free to become introverted and work exploratively
upon its own ground, to search the contents of its own unplumbed
depths, to probe deeper and deeper into itself, eradicating defects
and removing rubble, pushing in and in by the energy of a persistent
will, yet retaining contact the while with the outer physical nature
by a subtle filament or life-line which prevents their entire
separation. The position is the same as when the body sleeps
whilst the mind is dreaming and vividly active, save that in dreams
the will is not functioning as a consciously directive instrument as
is hypothetically the case with one who, having attained Mastership,
has all his faculties under volition and control. Yet all this
interior work, so rapidly summarized and symbolically enacted in the
Ceremony, is not the work of a day nor the casual task of a weakling.
The ancients referred to it as the twelve labours of Hercules, whilst
its arduousness is further graphically described by the initiate
poet Virgil in the sixth Aeneid and by more recent illuminates. Nor,
even when its nature is fully apprehended, is it a work to be lightly
undertaken. Throughout the Ceremony the utmost humility is enjoined
upon the candidate as the essential qualification for entering upon
this process of self-exploration. He is bidden to draw nigh to the
Centre, but to halt and make obeisance at three several
stages, at each of which he is told he is approaching more nearly to that central Essence, that holy ground
of his being upon which only the humble can walk, that “earth"
which only the meek shall inherit.
It is in this state that the introverted mind, groping for its own
foundation and centre, reaches at length the bedrock of its being. As
the symbolic ceremony exhibits the grasping of an emblem embodying
the Word of Life, so literally and in fact the questing mind, in
coming upon the Vital and Immortal Principle animating it, "lays
hold on Eternal Life". It discovers the Lost Word, the divine
root of its being, from which it has hitherto been so long
dissociated. It fails to realize the fact at first, for "the
Light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not".
Presently that darkness will disappear; when "the day (the new
consciousness) dawns and the shadows (the old mentality) flee away".
Therefore it is that this work of the introverted mind and the
discovery it makes, are exhibited as taking place darkly and amid
subterranean gloom. There remains, therefore, one concluding
psychological process - to extrovert that knowledge and bring it
forward into formalized brain-consciousness, so that what the spirit
and the soul already know interiorly the outer mind may also know
exteriorly. Subjective awareness does not become knowledge until it
has been cerebrated and passed through the alembic of the brain and
the logical understanding. When it has so passed through and become
formalized, a reciprocal and reflex action between the inner and
outer natures is set up resulting in the illumination of the
whole. This extroversion of subjective perceptions is symbolically
achieved by the return of the candidate from the subterranean depths
to the surface and there rejoining his former companion-sojourners
and effecting a unification of all his component parts.
It is then that the Mystery is consummated. The Great Light
breaks. The Vital and Immortal Principle comes to self-consciousness
in him. The Glory of the Lord is revealed to and in him, and all his
flesh sees it.
So far as it is possible for symbolic ceremonial to portray it
this consummation is represented by the restoration to light and the
revelation that then meets the candidate's gaze. His condition
differs now from any that has preceded it. It is not merely one of
illumination by the Supernal Light. It is one of identification with
It. He and It have become one, as a white-hot iron is
indistinguishable from the furnace-flame engulfing it. At the outset
of his Masonic quest the predominant wish of his heart was Light. The
impulse was not his own; it was that of the Light Itself - the primal
Light of light, the Divine Substantial Word-seeking self-development
in him. Consciousness is that Light become self-perceptive by
polarization within an efficient physiological organism. Man provides
the only organism adapted to the attainment of that self-perception;
but only when that organism is purified and prepared sufficiently for
the achievement. In the Royal Arch that achievement is
hypothetically effected.
The condition attained by the illumined candidate is the
equivalent of what in Christian theology is known as Beatific Vision
and in the East as Samadhi. It is also spoken of as universal
or cosmic consciousness, since the percipient, transcending all sense
of personal individualization, time and space, is co-conscious with
all that is. He has entered the bliss and peace surpassing that
temporal understanding which is limited to perceiving the
discords, antinomies and contrasts characterizing finite existence;
he has risen to that exalted state where all these find their
resolution in the blissful concord of the Eternal. He is in conscious
sympathy and identity of feeling with all that lives and feels, in
virtue of that universal charity and limitless love which is the
corollary of perceiving the unity of all in the Being of Deity, and
which at the outset of his progress he was told was the summit of the
Mason's profession. He sees too that there is a universe within as
well as without him; that he himself microcosmically sums up and
contains all that manifested to his temporal intelligence as the vast
spacial universe around him. He is himself conscious of being the
measure of the universe; he realizes that the earth, the heavens, and
all their contents, are externalizations, projected images, of
corresponding realities present within himself. As the perfected head
of creation, he beholds how he sums up in himself all the lower forms
of life through which his organism has passed to attain to that
perfection. The four symbolic standards exhibiting the lion, ox, man
and eagle are a very ancient glyph, declaring among other things the
story of the soul's evolution and its progress from the passional
wild-beast stage to one which, while still sensuous and animal, is
docile and disciplined for service, and thence to the stage of human
rationality, which at length culminates in upward-soaring
spirituality. Similarly the displayed banners of the twelve
Israelitish tribes are again but figures of their prototypes, the
twelve zodiacal sections of those heavens which could not exist or be
discernible to the outward eye were they not also the phenomenalized
aspect of a reality cognizable by the inward eye; whilst, gathered
beneath these emblems, are those who represent the tribes of no
terrestrial nation, but are the "tribes of God", the
heavenly hierarchies that constitute an archetypal canopy or holy
royal arch above the visible creation and that mediate to it the
effluences of that all embracing triune Spirit of Power, Wisdom
and Love in which the entire composite structure lives, moves and has
its being.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and
the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face
of the deep. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light."
With these words begins the Sacred Script which is the sacramental
token of that Living Word by whom all things were made, and are still
in the making, and whose life is the light of men. The candidate who
recovers that lost Word, in the sense of regaining vital organic
integration into it, and who, therefore, is one with its Life and its
Light, is able to verify this old creation-story in its personal
application to himself. He stands in the presence of his own "earth"
- the stone vault or dense matrix out of which his finer being has
emerged and of his own "heavens" or ethereal body of
substantialized radiance which (as the iridescent sash of the Order
is meant to denote) now covers him with light as with a garment. He
is able to discern that it was himself who at first was "without
form and void" and who in virtue of that Fiat Lux! has at
last become transformed from chaos and unconsciousness into a form so
perfect and lucid as to become a co-conscious vehicle of Divine
Wisdom itself.
With this symbolic attainment of Beatific Vision at the
restoration to light, the effective part of the Royal Arch Ceremony
as an initiatory rite concludes. What follows upon it is anti-climax
and allegorical exposition of a similar nature to the traditional
history in the Master Mason's Degree. This takes the form of a mythos
or dramatic narrative by the three sojourners, describing their
release from captivity in Babylon, their return to Jerusalem under an
impulse to assist in rebuilding the destroyed national temple, their
work among its ruins and the discovery of an ancient and apparently
important archive. The perspicacious mind will not fail to perceive
in this historical or quasi-historical narrative an allegory of the
spiritual process which has been going on within the candidate
himself. It is he, as it is every human soul, that has been in
Babylonian bondage, in captivity to the Babel-confusion of mundane
existence, the tyranny of material interests, and the chaos of his
own disordered nature. It is he who, in revolt from these, has in
reflective moments "sat down and wept by the waters of Babylon"
- the transient flux of temporal things and "remembered
Zion", in a yearning for inward freedom and permanent peace of
heart. It is he who finds the temple of his old natural self
worthless and in ruins, and realizes that upon its site he must
rebuild another and worthier one. From within himself comes the urge
of the inward Lord (Kurios) which (under the mask of Cyrus the king)
bids him forthwith depart from his captivity and go up to his true
native-land and re-erect the Lord's house. It is himself who
discovers among the rubble of his old self the plans and the material
for the new structure. And ultimately when that new structure is
completed and, when from natural man he has become reorganized into
spiritual man, it is he who is able to perceive the wonders of his
own constitution, to behold his own "earth" and his
own "heavens" now fused into a unity to which both his
material and his spiritual nature were necessary contributors.
The constitution of the Chapter as first revealed to the candidate
is, therefore, a symbol of his perfected organism. He sees that it is
polarized East and West; the East occupied by the three Principals,
signifying his spiritual pole; the West, occupied by the three
Sojourners, his psychic and materialized pole; each triad being the
reflex of the other, yet each triad being an organic unity in itself.
St. John testifies to this (and the ceremonial rite is made
conformable to the teaching of that great Initiate) when he writes :
" There are three that bear record in heaven, and these three
are one.
And there are three that bear witness in earth, and these three
agree in one. The meaning of this metaphysical assertion is that,
just as a ray of white light splits up (as in the rainbow) into three
primary colours which still remain organically united, so both the
self-knowing Spirit in man and his psychical nature, although monadic
essentially, are prismatically dissociable into a trinity. The Spirit
in man in its triple aspects is, therefore, appropriately typified by
the three Principals. They represent the three high attributes of the
Spirit - Holiness, Royal Supremacy, Functional Power - referred to in
the title of the Order; Holy-Royal-Arch. The middle and neutral term
of these three must be considered as differentiating itself into a
passive and an active, or a negative and a positive aspect; although
all three act conjointly and as one (as is in fact the case with the
three Principals of a Chapter). These three aspects of monadic Spirit
are personified as Haggai (passive), Joshua (active), with Zerubabel
as the middle term from which the other two issue and into which they
merge. For the central Majesty is in one of its aspects silent and
withdrawn and in the other functionally active and compulsive.
So too, with the triad of Sojourners at the other pole. They
represent the unitary human Ego or personality also in its threefold
aspects. They are the incarnated antitype or physicalized reflex of
man's archetypal unincarnated and overshadowing Spirit. Hence they
are designated Sojourners, as being but transient consociated
pilgrims or wayfarers upon a plane of impermanence, in contrast
with the enduring life of the deathless spirit whose projection upon
this lower world they are. Psychologically, human personality is
distributed into a passive negative subconsciousness and an active
positive intelligence, linked together by a central co-ordinating
principle, the combined three constituting man's unitary
individuality. My ego with its central and directive power of will is
my principal sojourner; my subconsciousness with its passive
intuitional capacity, and my practical intelligence with its active
and connecting powers of thought and understanding, are my assistant
sojourners. Let me see to it that, like their symbolic
representatives, they are kept clothed in white and so able to
reflect and react to their correspondences in the eastern or
spiritual pole of my being.
The nexus or connecting medium between man's spiritual and bodily
poles is represented by a third triad impersonated by the two Scribes
and the Janitor. The more important of these scribes is attached to
the East pole and is as it were its emissary towards the West; the
other is associated with the Western pole and his activities are
directed Eastwards; whilst the Door-keeper is the point of
contact with the world without. In one of their many significances
they typify the middle term between Spirit and Matter-the astral
medium or psychic bridge, in virtue of which contact between them is
possible.
Heavily veiled beneath the sacramentalism of a council of the
Jewish Sanhedrim, the Royal Arch Ceremony therefore exhibits in a
most graphic manner the psychologic rationale of the final stage of
regeneration. To the literalist, unacquainted with the fact that, in
both Sacred Writ and the teaching of the Mysteries, surface
appearances are always intended to be transposed into spiritual
values and that quasi-historic characters are meant to be
impersonations of philosophic facts or principles, some
difficulty may be felt on being asked to translate the
quasi-historicity of the ceremonial text into the spiritualized
interpretation here offered. The education and enlightenment of the
understanding is, however, one of the deliberate intentions of
Initiatory Rites, and until the mind is able to rise above merely
material facts and habituate itself to functioning in the truer realm
of ideas which materialize into facts and make facts possible, there
is small chance of its profiting from Rites like those of Masonry,
which are of wholly negligible value but for the spiritual force and
vitalizing energy of their inherent ideas. It may, therefore, be both
helpful and a corroboration of what has been said if we scrutinize
the Hebrew names of a Chapter's officers; what they yield upon
analysis will demonstrate that those officers impersonate ideas
rather than represent persons.
1. Zerubabel,
prince of the people." The name literally means "a
sprouting forth from Babel, or from among the people". "Babel"
and "people" are two forms of expressing the same idea and
the English word is almost identical with the Hebrew one. Society as
a whole, the multitude, "the people" ("bebeloi"
as it is in Greek), at all times of the world's history constitutes a
Babel of confused aims and interests. But there are always
individuals intellectually or spiritually in advance of the crowd and
whose ideas, teachings or example shoot ahead of it, and to such
leaders the name Zerubabel would apply. But this illustration does
not express the deeper sense in which the word must be construed,
which is one of personal application. The individual is himself a
mob, a chaos, a multitude of confused desires, thoughts, passions,
until these are brought into discipline. But, present even amidst
these and sprouting up from among them, the ordinary man is conscious
of a higher and spiritual element in him, which he may cultivate or
disregard, but which in his best moments flames up above his lower
disordered nature, convinces him of the errors of his ways, and
entices him to live from that higher level. That loftier element is
expressed by the word "Zerubabel"; it is the apex and focus
point of his spirituality as distinguished from his ordinary carnal
intelligence; the summit of all his faculties, the "prince"
of his "people". Those same faculties or "people"
are referred to in the word meaning "My people having obtained
mercy" (or become regenerate), and in the text "The people
that sat in darkness have seen a great light".
2. "Haggai the Prophet.” As has been shown
before, the spiritual principle differentiates into a passive and an
active aspect. "Haggai" represents the passive aspect and
signifies at once the blissful and self-contemplative nature of the
spirit. It is called "the prophet" because of the power of
insight and omniscience characterizing that which transcends the
sense of time and abides eternally, and because it projects into the
lower intelligence intuitions, foreglimpses and intimations of a
prophetic nature. From the same word is derived the Greek word "
hagios," holy.
3. "Joshua, the son of Josedek, the high priest,"
personifies the active executive aspect of spirit. Literally Joshua
means the "divine saviour", and Josedek "divine
righteousness", whilst the "high priest" connotes a
mediatorial factor between man and Deity. The title in its entirety
therefore intimates that the human spirit or divine principle in man
functions intermediately between Deity and man's lower nature to
promote the latter's salvation and perfection. We have previously
shown how the Master Mason must be his own high priest and "walk
upon" the chequered floor-work of his elementary nature by
learning to trample upon it. Thus the Three Principals form a unity
figuring man's spiritual pole in its triple aspects; they represent
the summit of his being as it lives on the plane of the Spirit -
holy, royal, supreme - blissful because in a state of holiness or
wholeness; royal because a son of the King of all; powerful because
of its power to subdue, transmute and redeem all that is below its
own purity and perfection.
4 & 5. Ezra and Nehemiah. In the great Mystery system
of Egypt, which long anteceded the Hebrew system, the regenerate
candidate, who had achieved the highest possible measure of
self-transmutation of his lower nature, was accorded the title of
Osiris. It was the equivalent of attaining Christhood. The nature of
the perfectioning process and the rituals in connection therewith
are, thanks to certain modern scholars, available to us and are
recommended to the student who desires to know how arduous and real
that process was and the extremely high degree of regeneration aimed
at. In Hebrew the title Osiris became changed into Azarias (and
sometimes Zeruiah) and still further corrupted into Esdras and Ezra,
the name of the senior Scribe of the Royal Arch. To understand the
significance of the two Scribes Ezra and Nehemiah it is necessary to
recall that, in the Biblical account of the return from Babylonian
captivity, these two were leading men. Transposing this historicized
narrative into its spiritual implication, Ezra and Nehemiah personify
two distinct stages of the mystical progress made by the candidate
who essays to renounce the Babel of his lower nature and, by
reorganizing himself, regain his native spiritual home and condition.
"Nehemiah" (whose place in the Chapter is in the South
West) is a figure of a certain measure of that reorganization and
return. Like his Biblical prototype, he symbolizes the candidate
engaged in rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, and occupied in the
great work of self-reconstruction, from which he will not be beguiled
into coming down by the appeals and blandishments of the outer world.
"Ezra" (whose position is in the North East) indicates a
much more advanced measure of progress from West to East. The
discerning student who will peruse the Biblical books of Nehemiah and
Ezra (including the Apocryphal books of Esdras) in this light, and
with this key to their true purport, will not fail to profit by the
instruction they will yield. Hence too they are called "scribes";
both of them are recorders of, and testifiers to, distinct but
representative experiences encountered in the inner man at different
stages of the "great work" of self-integration and
journeying from a Babylon condition to the spiritual Jerusalem.
Here we bring to an end our examination of the true meaning and
purpose of the Royal Arch Ceremony. Dealing as it does with a supreme
human experience which none can fully appreciate without undergoing
it, it is the greatest and most momentous rite in Masonry, and no one
who studies it comprehendingly and in its sacramental significance
will withhold admiration either for the profound knowledge and
insight of the now unidentifiable mystic and initiate who
conceived it or for the skill with which he compiled it and cast his
knowledge into dramatic expression. The pity of it is that those who
practise the rite make no effort to penetrate its meaning and are
content with the unenlightened perfunctory performance of a ritual
which even exoterically is singularly striking, beautiful and
suggestive. The least reflection upon it must suggest that Masonry is
here dealing with the building-work of no outward structure, but with
the re-erection of the fallen, disordered temple of the human soul;
and that even assuming that it but memorialized some long past
historic events, those events can have no vital bearing upon the
life, character or conduct of anyone to-day and would not justify the
existence of an elaborate secret Order to perpetuate them. But if
those events and this rite be symbolic of something deeper and
something personal; if they sacramentalize truths perpetually valid
and capable of present realization in those who ceremonially re-enact
them, then they call for fuller and more serious attention than is
usually accorded. Moreover, if the Royal Arch be the symbolic
representation of a supreme experience attained and attainable only
in sanctity and by the regenerate, it follows that the Craft Degrees
leading up to and qualifying for it will take on a much deeper sense
than they commonly receive and must be regarded as solemn
instructions in the requisite preparation for that regenerate
condition. The Craft work is unfinished without the attainment forth
shadowed in the Royal Arch. That attainment in turn is impossible
without the discipline of the preliminary labours, the purification
of mind and desire, and that crucifixion unto death of the self-will
which constitute the tests of merit qualifying for entrance to that
Jerusalem which has no geographical site and which is called the
"City of Peace" because it implies conscious rest of the
soul in God. For many, the suggestion that the attainment of such a
condition is possible or thinkable whilst we are still here in the
flesh may be surprising or even incredible. But such doubt is
unwarranted, and the Masonic doctrine negates it. As has been already
shown to the contrary, that doctrine postulates not the absence
but the possession of the material organism as a necessary factor in
advancing the evolution of the human spirit; that organism is the
vessel in which our base metal has to be transmuted into gold; it is
the fulcrum furnishing the resistance requisite for the spirit's
energizing into unfoldment and self-consciousness. Physical death is
therefore not an advancement of, but an interference with, the work
of regeneration. "The night cometh when no man can work,"
and when the soul merely passes from labour to refreshment until
recalled to labour once more at the task of self-conquest. It is but
figurative of that necessary dying to self which implies the
voluntary decreasing assertiveness of our temporal nature to permit
of a corresponding ascendancy of the spiritual.
But if in the hands of its present exponents Masonry is now rather
a dead letter than a living effectual Initiatory Rite capable of
quickening the spirituality of its candidates, it still remains for
the earnest and perspicuous aspirant to the deeper verities an
instructive economy of the science of self-gnosis and regeneration.
For such these papers are written, that they may both learn something
of the original design of the Order and educate their imagination in
the principles of that science. And to such, in conclusion, may be
commended that Temple-hymn of the Hebrew Initiates, which of all the
Psalms of David refers with most pointed reference to the
subject-matter of the supreme Order of the Holy Royal Arch of
Jerusalem and the personal attainment of the blessed and perfected
condition which that title implies :
I was glad when they said unto me,
let us go up into the house of the Lord ;
Our feet shall stand within thy
gates, 0 Jerusalem. Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact
together; Thither the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord. .. .
For there are set thrones of
judgment, the thrones of
the house of David.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem !
they shall prosper that love it.
Peace is within her walls and
plenteousness within her
palaces.
For my brethren and companions' sake
I will say,
Peace be within thee. (Psalm CXXIL)
In those few lines is sketched all that is implied in the symbolic
spectacle that greets the eyes of the Royal Arch Mason at the supreme
moment of his restoration to light. Exalted into and become
identified with the supreme bliss, peace and self-consciousness
of the All-Pervasive and Omniscient Spirit, he sees how he has "gone
up" out of the Babylon of his old complex and disordered nature
and upon its ruins has built for himself an ethereal body of glory, a
"house of the Lord". He sees how this ecstatic condition
and this new-made celestial body are the sublimated products of his
former self and its temporal organism. He sees how each separate part
and faculty of that old nature, or as it were each of the zodiacal
divisions of his own microcosm, has contributed its purified essence
to form a new organism, "a new heaven and a new earth"; and
how these essences, like twelve diversified tribes, have assembled
convergently and finally coalesced and become fused into a unity
or new whole, "a city that is compact together". And it is
this "city", this blessed condition, which mystically is
called "Jerusalem", within whose walls is the peace which
passeth understanding and whose palaces reveal to the enfranchised
soul the unfailing plenteousness and fecundity of the indissoluble
trinity of Wisdom and Love and Power from which man and the universe
have issued and into which they are destined to return.
The antithesis of this "heavenly-city" is the confused
Babylon city of this world, of which it is written to all captives
therein, "Come out of her, My people, that ye be not partakers
of her sins and that ye receive not of her plagues!" (Rev.
xviii. 4). And, in a word, the Royal Arch Ceremony sacramentally
portrays the last phase of the mystical journey of the exiled soul
from Babylon to Jerusalem as it escapes from its captivity to this
lower world and, passing the veils" of matter and form, breaks
through the bondage of corruption into the world of the formless
Spirit and realizes the glorious liberty of the children of God.
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