The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

witnessed a surprising incident in Mendēs: a goat had intercourse with a
woman, in full view of everybody. 247 Perhaps Herodotus is really telling
us that he attended an initiation ceremony where the initiate was the goat.
This may explain the much clichéd Freemason’s joke about the goat at an
initiation ceremony.
In Assyrian, Persian, Dionysian, Pythagorean and Orphist
initiation rites, the initiate bathes in the milk of the hidden doctrine. The
initiate discovers that Love is the luminous principle of Light, while Light
is the radiance of Love or Goodness, Charity and Truth. 248
When the Initiate reaches Hades, the guardians of the dead
challenge him to give the pass-phrase: 249
Like a kid, I have fallen into milk.
At the end of an initiation, the candidate is one with the god,
Dionysus for example. He drinks a cup of goats' milk and honey. New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art displays many of the two handled
cups used in the Greek ceremonies. Some of these cups bear golden sun
images.
In the seventh and final degree of all ancient Mysteries, which is
the fourth degree of the Greater Mysteries, adepts partook of the
ambrosial beverage Oimellas as a sign they had arrived at the final
threshold of all mysteries (see Appendix 7). 250
Zoroaster achieved his immortality through the Mysteries where
he drank something that resembled honey, after answering thirty-three
questions over a period of three days.
Plato drinks of the Oimellas before the last phase of his initiation
in the play Initiation of Plato: 251
It is the beverage of the lotus; drink and forget all sentiments of
hatred, envy, and intolerance; and put on this robe in sign of devotion to
science and virtue. Thou goest to be initiated into the last mysteries.
Honey was one important component of the heavenly soma
believed to intoxicate the divine beings. The Odyssey gives the Vedic
recipe: Circe blended cheese, meal and honey with Pramnian wine to
make a kind of brown beer. 252 Herodotus tells us that burial ceremonies
of the nobles often included embalming in honey. 253 Its sweetness relates
to the human hope of another life that would be eternally happy.
The bee was universally revered. In Egypt, the Pharaoh’s title of
Beekeeper was one of his main designations. The double image of the
bee and the reed symbolized the Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt. The
Egyptians believed that when the Pharaoh died, his soul joined Osiris in
79