The History of Initiation - The Masonic Trowel

IN PERSIA. 67
came to hearIlls Lectures ; and, it is said, even Pythagoras
travelled from Greece for initiation by this celebrated
philosopher. 43 His doctrines, however, were a continued
tissue of allegory, which none could understand but those
who were qualified by initiation ; and his system embraced
all sciences, human and divine.
To prepare the candidate for initiation, numerous lustrations
were performed with water, fire, and honey. 44
It is said by some that the aspirant went through forty
degrees of probation, 45
by others eighty,^ which ended
with a fast of fifty days' continuance. 47 These intense
and protracted trials were endured in the gloomy recesses
of a subterranean cavern, where he was condemned to
perpetual silence, wholly secluded from society, and
confined amidst cold and nakedness, hunger and stripes, 43
accompanied with an extreme degree of refined and brutal
torture. 49 The unbending severity of this stern novitiate
50 was in some instances attended with fatal effects; in
others, the candidate suffered a
partial derangement of
intellect but the ;
few, whose robust nerves enabled them
43 "
Sir W. Jones thinks it is barely possible that Pythagoras knew
'*
him. The Grecian sage," says he, must have been far advanced in
years and we have no certain evidence of an intercourse between ;
the
two Philosophers." (Asiat. Res., vol. ii.) On the other hand, Dean
"
Prideaux observes, that they who write of Pythagoras do almost all
of them tell us, that he was the scholar of Zoroastres at Babylon, and
learned of him most of that knowledge which afterwards rendered
him so famous in the West. So saith Apuleius, and so say Jambli-
chus, Porphyry, and Clemens Alexandrinus." (Connect., v. i., p. 228.)
44 45 Luciau in Necyom.
Non. Dion., p. 297.
40
Porph. de Abstin., p. 150.
47
Nicaetas cited by the Abbe Banier. Myth. Vid. Deut. ix. 18.
5
48 Maur. Ind. Ant., vol. v., p. 992.
49 " The dark places
of the earth are full of the habitations of cru-
elty." (Psalm Ixxiv., 20.)
60 When a candidate died under the infliction of these rigid penances,
an event by no means uncommon, his body was cast into an inner
cavern, and he was never more heard of. In the fifth century of
Christianity, according to the report of Socrates, a Christian writer,
(Hist. Eccles., 1. ii.,c. 2.) "the Christians of Alexandria having discovered
a cavern that had been consecrated to Mithras, but for a long
period closed up, resolved to explore it. and examine what remnants
of that superstition it contained when to their ; astonishment, the
principal thing they found in it was a great quantity of human skulls
and other bones of men that had been thus sacrificed which were
;
brought out, publickly exposed, and excited the utmost horror in the
inhabitants of that great city." (Maur. Ind. Ant., vol. v., p. 965.)