Mackey A G - Encylopedia of Freemasonry - The Grand Masonic ...

438 LEGEND
LEGEND
that race to whom it has been granted to look,
with exalted countenance, on high ; which
Divine truth is symbolized by the worn .
Thus provided with the word of life, he
occupies his time in the construction of a
spiritual temple, and travels onward in the
faithful discharge of all his duties, laying
down his designs upon the trestle-board of
the future, and invoking the assistance and
direction of God .
But is his path always over flowery meads
and through pleasant groves? Is there no
hidden foe to obstruct his progress? Is all
before him clear and calm, with joyous sunshine
and refreshing zephyrs? Alas! not so .
"Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward
." At every "gate of life "-as the
Orientalists have beautifully called the different
ages-he is beset by peril . Temptations
allure his youth ; misfortunes darken the pathway
of his manhood, and his old age is encumbered
with infirmity and disease . But clothed
in the armor of virtue he may resist the
temptation ; he may cast misfortunes aside and
rise triumphantly above them ; but to the last
-the direst, the most inexorable foe of his
race-he must eventually yield, and, stricken
down by death, he sinks prostrate into the
grave, and is buried in the rubbish of his sin and
human frailty .
Here then, in Masonry, is what was called
the aphanism, concealment or disappearance
in the Ancient Mysteries . The bitter, but
necessary lesson of death has been imparted .
The living soul, with the lifeless body which
encased it, has disappeared, and can nowhere
be found . All is darkness-confusion-despair.
Divine truth-the worn-for a time is
lost, and the Master Mason may now say, in
the language of Hutchinson, "I prepare my
sepulchre . I make my grave in the pollution
of the earth. I am under the shadow of
death."
But if the mythic symbolism ended here,
with this lesson of death, then were the
lesson incomplete. That teaching would be
vain and idle-nay more, it would be corrupt
and pernicious-which should stop short of
the conscious and innate instinct for another
existence . And hence the succeeding portions
of the legend are intended to convey the
sublime symbolism of a resurrection from the
grave and a new birth into a future life . The
discovery of the body, which, in the initiations
of the ancient mysteries, was called the
euresis ; and its removal, from the polluted
grave into which it had been cast, to an
honored and sacred place within the precincts
of the temple, are all profoundly and beautifully
symbolic of that great truth, the discovery
of which was the object of all the
ancient initiations, as it is almost the whole
design of Freemasonry, namely, that when
man shall have passed the gates of life and
have yielded to the inexorable fiat of death,
he shall then (not in the pictured ritual of an
earthly Lodge, but in the realities of that
eternal one, of which the former is but an
antitype) be raised, at the omnific word of
the Grand Master of the Universe, from time
to eternity-from the tomb of corruption to
the chambers of hope-from the darkness of
death to the celestial beams of life-and that
his disembodied spirit shall be conveyed as
near to the holy of holies of the Divine presence
as humanity can ever approach to deity .
Such I conceive to be the true interpretation
of the symbolism of the Legend of the Third
Degree.
I have said that this mythical history of the
Temple Builder was universal in all nations
and all rites, and that in no place and at no
time had it, by alteration, diminution, or
addition, acquired any essentially new or
different form : the myth has always remained
the same .
But it is not so with its interpretation .
That which I have just given, and which I
conceive to be the correct one, has been very
generally adopted by the Masons of America.
But elsewhere, and by various writers,
other interpretations have been made,
very different in their character, although
always agreeing in retaining the general idea
of a resurrection or regeneration, or a restoration
of something from an inferior to a higher
sphere or function.
Thus, some of the earlier continental
writers have supposed the myth to have been
a symbol of the destruction of the Order of
the Templars, looking upon its restoration to
its original wealth and dignities as being
prophetically symbolized .
In some of the high philosophical degrees
it is taught that the whole legend refers to
the sufferings and death, with the subsequent
resurrection of Christ .
Hutchinson, who has the honor of being the
earliest philosophical writer on Freemasonry
in England, supposes it to have been intended
to embody the idea of the decadence of the
Jewish religion and the substitution of the
Christian in its place and on its ruins .
Dr . Oliver thinks that it is typical of the
murder of Abel and Cain, and that it symbolically
refers to the universal death of our
race through Adam and its restoration to life
in the Redeemer, according to the expression
of the Apostle, "as in Adam we all died, so in
Christ we all live ."
Ragon makes Hiram a symbol of the sun
shorn of its vivifying rays and fructifying
power by the three winter months, and its
restoration to prolific heat by the season of
spring .
And, finally, Des Etangs, adopting, in part,
the interpretation of Ragon, adds to it another
which he calls the moral symbolism of the
legend, and supposes that Hiram is no other
than eternal reason, whose enemies are the
vices that deprave and destroy humanity .
To each of these interpretations it seems
to me that there are important objections,
though perhaps to some less so than to others .
As to those who seek for an astronomical
interpretation of the legend, in which the
annual changes of the sun are symbolized,
while the ingenuity with which they press