10. The Key Of Occultismb

The sphinxes of Ezekiel are identical with those of the sanctuary and the ark, being a fourfold reproduction of the Egyptian Tetrad; the wheels revolving in one another are the harmonious spheres of Pythagoras; the new temple, the plan of which is given according to exact kabalistic measures, is the type of the labours of primitive Masonry. St. John in his Apocalypse reproduces the same images and the same numbers, and reconstructs the Edenic world ideally in the New Jerusalem; but at the source of the four rivers the Solar Lamb replaces the mysterious tree. Initiation by toil and blood has been accomplished, and there is no more temple because the light of truth is diffused universally and the world has become the Temple of Justice. This splendid final vision of the Holy Scriptures, this divine Utopia which the Church has referred with good reason for its realization to a better life, has been the pitfall of all ancient arch-heretics and of many modern idealists. The simultaneous emancipation and absolute equality of all men involve the arrest of progress and consequently of life; in a world where all are equal there could no longer be infants or the aged; birth and death could not be therefore admitted. This is sufficient to demonstrate that the New Jerusalem is no more of this world than the Primeval Paradise, wherein there was no knowledge of good or evil, of liberty, of generation or of death. The cycle of our religious symbolism begins and ends therefore in eternity. Dupuis and Volney lavished their great erudition to discover this relative identity of all symbols and arrived at the negation of every religion. We attain by the same path to an affirmation diametrically opposed; we recognize with admiration that there have never been any false religions in the civilized world; that the Divine Light, the splendour of the Supreme Reason of the Logos, of that Word which enlightens every man coming into the world, has been no more wanting to the children of Zoroaster than to the faithful sheep of St. Peter; that the permanent, the one, the universal revelation, is written in visible Nature, explained in reason, and completed by the wise analogies of faith; that there is, finally, but one true religion, having one doctrine and one legitimate belief, even as there is but one God, one reason and one universe; that revelation is obscure for no one, since the whole world understands more or less both truth and justice, and since all that is possible can only exist analogically to all that is. BEING IS BEING, The apparently bizarre figures presented by the Apocalypse of St. John are hieroglyphics, like those of all oriental mythologies, and can be comprised in a series of Pantacles. The Initiator clothed in white, standing between seven golden candlesticks and holding seven stars in His hand, represents the unique doctrine of Hermes and the universal analogies of the light. The Woman clothed with the Sun and crowned with twelve stars is the celestial Isis, or the Gnosis; the serpent of material life seeks to devour her child, but she takes unto herself the wings of the eagle and flies away into the desert - a protestation of the prophetic spirit against the materialism of official religion. The mighty angel with the face of a sun, a rainbow for nimbus and a cloud for vestment, having pillars of fire for his legs, and setting one foot upon the earth and another on the sea, is truly a kabalistic PANTHEA.