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

een 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 WORD--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_,[165] 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 this country. 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