9. The Ceremonial Of Initiatesb

Taken literally and understood materially, such books could be only an inconceivable tissue of absurdities and scandals, as the school of Voltaire has demonstrated but too well. It is the same with all the ancient dogmas, the brilliant theogonies and poetic legends. To say that ancient Greece believed in the love-adventures of Jupiter, or that Egypt worshipped the cynocephalus and sparrow-hawk, is to exhibit as much ignorance and bad faith as would be shown by maintaining that Christians adore a triple God, composed of an old man, an executed criminal and a dove. The ignorance of symbols is invariably calumnious. For this reason we should be on our guard first and foremost against the derision of that which we do not know, when its enunciation seems to involve some absurdity or even singularity, as a course no less wanting in good sense than to admit the same without discussion and examination. Prior to anything which may please or displease ourselves, there is a truth -that is to say, a reason - and by this reason must our actions be regulated rather than by our desires, if we would create that intelligence within us which is the raison d'etre of immortality, and that justice which is the law thereof. A man who is truly man can will only that which he should reasonably and justly do; so also he silences lusts and fears, that he may hearken solely to reason. Now, such a man is a natural king and a voluntary priest for erring multitudes. Hence it was that the end of the old initiations was termed indifferently the Sacerdotal Art and the Royal Art. The antique magical associations were seminaries for priests and kings, and admission could be obtained only by truly sacerdotal and royal works - that is, by transcending all weakness of Nature. We will not repeat here what is found everywhere concerning Egyptian Initiations, perpetuated, but with diminished power, in the Secret Societies of the Middle Ages. Christian radicalism, founded upon a false understanding of the words: “Ye have one father, one master, and ye are all brethren,” dealt a terrible blow at the sacred hierarchy. Since that time, sacerdotal dignities have become a matter of intrigue or of chance; energetic mediocrity has managed to supplant modest superiority, misunderstood because of its modesty. Yet, and notwithstanding, initiation being an essential law of religious life, a society which is instinctively magical formed at the decline of the pontifical power and speedily concentrated in itself alone the whole strength of Christianity, because, though it only understood vaguely, it exercised positively the hierarchic power by recourse to the ordeals of initiation and the omnipotence of faith in passive obedience. What, in fact, did the candidate in the old initiations? He abandoned his life and liberty entirely to the masters of the temples of Thebes or Memphis; he advanced resolutely through unnumbered terrors, which might have led him to imagine that there was a premeditated outrage intended against him; he ascended funeral pyres, swam torrents of black and raging water, hung by unknown seesaws over unfathomed precipices. . . . Was not this blind obedience in the full force of the term? Is it not the most absolute exercise of liberty to abjure liberty for a time so that we may attain emancipation? Now, this is precisely what must be done, and what has been done invariably, by those who aspire to the SANCTUM REGNUM of magical omnipotence. The disciples of Pythagoras condemned themselves to inexorable silence for many years; even the sectaries of Epicurus comprehended the sovereignty of pleasure only by the acquisition of sobriety and calculated temperance.