THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

lessons of charity and brotherly love; he established a ceremony of
initiation, to test experimentally the fortitude and worth of the
candidate; adopted modes of recognition; and impressed the obligations
of
duty and principles of morality by means of symbols and allegories.
To the laborers and men of burden, the Ish Sabal, and to the craftsmen,
corresponding with the first and second degrees of more modern Masonry,
but little secret knowledge was confided. Like the aspirants in the
lesser
Mysteries of paganism, their instructions were simply to purify and
prepare them for a more solemn ordeal, and for the knowledge of the
sublimest truths. These were to be found only in the Master's degree,
which it was intended should be in imitation of the greater Mysteries;
and
in it were to be unfolded, explained, and enforced the great doctrines
of
the unity of God and the immortality of the soul. But here there must
have
at once arisen an apparently insurmountable obstacle to the further
continuation of the resemblance of Masonry to the Mysteries of
Dionysus.
In the pagan Mysteries, I have already said that these lessons were
allegorically taught by means of a legend. Now, in the Mysteries of
Dionysus, the legend was that of the death and subsequent resuscitation
of
the god Dionysus. But it would have been utterly impossible to
introduce
such a legend as the basis of any instructions to be communicated to
Jewish candidates. Any allusion to the mythological fables of their
Gentile neighbors, any celebration of the myths of pagan theology,
would
have been equally offensive to the taste and repugnant to the religious
prejudices of a nation educated, from generation to generation, in the
worship of a divine being jealous of his prerogatives, and who had made
himself known to his people as the JEHOVAH, the God of time present,
past,
and future. How this obstacle would have been surmounted by the
Israelitish founder of the order I am unable to say: a substitute
would,
no doubt, have been invented, which would have met all the symbolic
requirements of the legend of the Mysteries, or Spurious Freemasonry,
without violating the religious principles of the Primitive Freemasonry
of
the Jews; but the necessity for such invention never existed, and
before
the completion of the temple a melancholy event is said to have
occurred,
which served to cut the Gordian knot, and the death of its chief
architect
has supplied Freemasonry with its appropriate legend--a legend which,
like
the legends of all the Mysteries, is used to testify our faith in the
resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul.
Before concluding this part of the subject, it is proper that something
should be said of the authenticity of the legend of the third degree.