MYSTERIA HISTORY OF THE SECRET DOCTRINES and MYSTIC RITES of ANCIENT RELIGIONS AND Medieval and Modern Secret Orders
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By
Dr. OTTO HENNE AM RHYN
State Archivist of St. Gall
SWITZERLAND
STOCKHAM PUBLISHING COMPANY, Inc.
Chicago, Illinois
Copyright, 1895,
By J. FITZGERALD
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.
iii
The Mysteries of the Ancient Grecian religions; the
cryptic teachings and occult interpretations of the popular
religious beliefs communicated to disciples by the
priests in the temples of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and
India: the interesting, half fabulous, half historical episode
of Pythagoras and the Pythagorean League in
Magna Graecia; the mystic, ascetic, and semi-monastic
communities of the Therapeutae and the Essenes in Palestine
a century before the birth of Jesus Christ; the
later developments of Mysticism in the time of the
Roman Empire, as seen in the history of Apollonius of
Tyana and in Isis worship, Mithras worship, worship of
the Great Mother, etc.; the secret creed and rites of the
Knights Templar and the usages of the lodges of the
Stonemasons in the Middle Age; the constitution and
procedure of the Femgerichte of Westphalia in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries; the origin and history and
the aims of Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Illuminism,
and a swarm of honest and fraudulent secret organizations
in modern times: all these topics have before been
made subject matter of numerous learned tractates or of
popular compends; but hitherto these doctrines, rites,
associations, have not been studied in their unity, in
ivtheir mutual relation. One service which the author of
this work renders to the student of this particular phase
of human psychology—the longing for mystery and
secret associations—is that he develops this relationship,
thus enabling the reader to get a clear understanding of
the whole subject.
But the author does very much more than to co-ordinate
the facts of mystic associations. He is both a
scholar and an artist. Having amassed whatever information
regarding the Mysteries and allied phenomena
is accessible in universal literature, he handles
his materials with the skill of a consummate master of
style and of the art of popular exposition. The result
is a history of the ancient Mysteries and of their counterparts
and imitations in later times, as authentic as the
most painstaking research could make it, yet possessing
all the charm and grace of a literary masterpiece.
JOSEPH FITZGERALD.
CONTENTS. — PART FIRST. Mysteries of the East and of Barbarous Nations. — 1. INTRODUCTION. — 2. THE GODS. — 3. EGYPT. — 4. THE HIGHER DEVELOPMENT OF EGYPTIAN RELIGION. — 5. A REFORMATION IN THE LAND OF NILE. — 6. THE EGYPTIAN REALM OF THE DEAD — 7. THE SECRET TEACHING OF THE PRIESTS OF NILELAND. — 8. BABYLON AND NINIVE. — 9. ZOROASTER AND THE PERSIANS. — 10. BRAHMANS AND BUDDHISTS. — 11. SECRET LEAGUES OF BARBAROUS PEOPLES.
v
PART FIRST.—MYSTERIES OF THE EAST AND OF BARBAROUS NATIONS.
In all ages mystery has had a special attraction for
mankind. Curiosity is innate in us. The child asks
about everything, What is this, what is it for, why is it
made so, or so? The child fairly harries its parents with
questions, never wearies of raising new ones, often so unexpected
and so difficult, that it would puzzle the wisest
philosopher to answer them. And this instinct of inquiry
is dominant in the adult, too. The grown man
wants to know what is to be found behind every curtain,
every locked door, in every sealed letter. And when
sated with such trifles he must push inquiry further, into
the infinite; must lift the veil that hides the wondrous
image at Sais; must pluck from the forbidden tree of
knowledge the tempting golden fruit. He would with
the Titans storm heaven, and ascend to heights “where
stirs no breath of air, where stands the boundary-stone
of creation.” At last when Faust, after manifold crosses
and disappointments, sees that “we can know nothing,”
the thought “consumes the heart within him.”
And so we must ever be worried by the reflection
2that the great riddle of existence will not be solved; nay,
never can be solved. Why, we ask, why does anything
exist at all? and what does exist, whence comes it, and
whither does it go? And though oceans of ink were
written on worlds of paper to define the relation between
the Here and Beyond, we should not know, after it all,
the lot of the thought-endowed tenant of the narrowest
human brain-case after its term of living is reached. Never
shall we be able to comprehend Being as having a beginning
and an end, but neither shall we ever understand
how, without beginning or end, it may endure for ever,
and extend limitless ever farther and farther into the
shoreless ocean of the All. The thinker must by force
refrain himself from such inference, lest his brain should
be seized by delirium; and the progressive man of action
turns to what is sure and clear and understandable, while
the listless disciple of Buddha, despairing of ever comprehending
existence, longs for nirvana, the soul’s state
of everlasting rest and freedom from cares.
Mankind, then, is encompassed by a vast mystery
which never has been discovered, though it presses upon
us with force all around, and though we know it exists
and are conscious that it attends us at every step we take.
But man is too proud to endure the thought that anything
is beyond his powers: man must in all things do what
the primordial creative power does. The Eternal Incomprehensible
created worlds that no mortal eye can
see: man with the help of glasses sees them. The Eternal
set worlds circling around worlds in such wise that for
long we mortals were led into error, and took the
earth to be the centre of the universe: but men made calculations
and measurements, and discovered that their
giant sphere was but a grain of sand among colossal
3worlds. The Eternal caused mountains to rise and rivers
to flow, man, too, piled up mountains and scooped out
river-beds and seas. Immense oceans separated the continents:
man navigated the oceans and discovered shores
never seen before. The lightning, issuing from the
clouds, rends asunder great trees that have stood for centuries:
man imitates the lightning, and employs the electric
current for sending messages across continents and
oceans, and for illumination. Steam, vapor of water, he
harnesses to his car, or employs it to propel ships across
the seas. He takes the sun’s rays and makes of them a
limner’s pencil. Even the Eternal himself man fashions
after his own thoughts, and gives to him a name and attributes,
a throne and a court, a form, and even a son.
And lest he should in any point fail of acting like the
Unsearchable, man sets over against the grand everlasting
mystery of creation and eternity, which he cannot
comprehend, other mysteries of his own invention—the
mystery of the Incarnation, the Resurrection, Redemption,
the Trinity, and the rest; and requires his fellow men
to acknowledge and reverence these things as mysteries,
and to worship as truth what man’s own self-conceit has
devised in rivalry with the Eternal.
Thus are mysteries of man’s invention propagated
from generation to generation. The love of mystery is
contagious; the one who hears of mysteries will himself
invent more, and with them impose upon others. And
the Initiates shut themselves up in secret chambers, swear
fearful oaths never to betray to anyone what others know
already, employ emblems which they interpret in one
sense or another, speak in language peculiar to themselves,
exchange special signs with one another, whisper
to each other mysterious words, admit persons to their
4secret associations with direful or with harmless tests and
rites, and form aristocracies of intellect, of creed, or of
benevolence, of art or of science, even of humor and of
folly. Such is the origin of mystic teachings and secret
societies, the teachings designed to hold the societies
together, and the societies to propagate the teachings:
one hand washes the other. In all ages, among all races
we find these mysteries existing under the most various
forms, and for ends the most diverse, but they all have
this in common that they shut out the profane (outsiders),
and that their end is to win and hold power and influence.
But they have also had secondary aims such as could
be attained without secret doctrines or secret association;
and these aims have been of all kinds. Now the purpose
may be to promote social freedom and religious or
scientific enlightenment, anon to repress these; again, it
may be to enrich the members, or, on the other hand,
to stimulate them to self-sacrificing charity; or a society
will have for its object the Beautiful, and will create works
of art to glorify the Eternal, but another society will despise
whatever is ideal, professing contempt for the world
and themselves; or the aim may be nothing short of the
destruction of all human society and a return to Chaos.
A variegated picture and full of life! At the head
of the moving procession stalk priests in long robes,
begarlanded, carrying the sacred image of Isis or chanting
hymns to the Eleusinian Demeter. Then come the
wild-eyed troops of the Bacchantes, and in sharp contrast
to these, philosophers of the Pythagorean League, in
white cloaks, looking down on the populace with a smile
of mild scorn; after these the unpretending Essenes, who
shoulder the cross of suffering, the Roman brotherhoods
(collegia), and then the English and German gilds of
5stonemasons, with hammer, compass, and square; the
Knights Templar, in white cloaks blazoned with the red
cross, their haughty mien betraying contempt of all authority;
the Fathers of the Company of Jesus, in black
cassock and four-cornered hat, eyes sanctimoniously
downcast, every man of them a corpse in the hands of
his superiors; then come seigneurs and scholars and men
of every condition, in white aprons and blue ribbons, and
last of all an indistinguishable multitude of variously-clad
figures. Let us contemplate the several groups of this
picture. First, the priests of the so-called heathen religions
of antiquity. Here we have men using a twofold
manner of speech. To the people they gave out a teaching
different from that communicated to the Initiates of
their secret associations, their mysteries. How came
that about, how is it accounted for, and how can it be
justified?
To answer these questions we must study the origin
of religious ideas and the forms they assumed in different
periods. Here we meet a phase of thought which stands
related to the vain attempts to fathom the Eternal, to
scrutinize the Unsearchable, and which, therefore, is
necessarily connected with the earliest expression of man’s
love of the mysterious.
In the dim ages before the dawn of civilization, when
the cave-dweller, or the lake-dweller, had completed his
day’s work, and his children were in safety for the night,
and their hunger stilled, then, in the glad consciousness
of duty discharged, he would rise above mere sense, and
would contemplate his surroundings with greater attention
than would be possible amid his hard labors as breadwinner.
6Then, surely, what most profoundly impressed
his imagination was the blue vault of the sky across
which by day the sun, source of light and warmth, or of
blazing and scorching heat, and at night the mild-faced
moon, diffusing her witching beams, and the innumerable
twinkling stars glided in strange unalterable series. Beneath
the arch lay extended the surrounding country, and
the man gazed on the diversified panorama of snow-decked
alp, roaring cataract, mirror-like lake, and verdant
daisy-gemmed prairie. Or he contemplated the
tossing billows of the sea, the dread phenomena of the
thunder clap and the lightning flash, the ravages of the
hurricane, the crash of mountains rent by internal forces,
the pitiless, headlong sweep of the river that has overflowed
the plain.
These manifestations of the forces of nature, whether
winsome or fearsome, impressed the man; and acknowledging
his nothingness and impotence he prostrated
himself before them and worshiped them. But in worshiping
the forces of nature, he must needs think of them
as a personality; and the process of personification necessarily
began with the phenomena which possess the most
pronounced individuality, viz., on the earth, rocks, mountains,
trees, animals, rivers, lakes; in the sky, the sun,
moon, and stars; between earth and sky, the clouds, winds,
thunder, and lightning; finally, fire, the production of
which was the first step in human culture.
The further observation of nature led man from
particular to general concepts: those were formed more
easily, these were hard to compass, and to understand
their import required a greater power of reflection.
Mythology had its origin in the simple worship of nature,
and in this wise.
7In the mind of the man who knows nothing of the
true relations of the heavenly bodies, all existence must be
divided into two principal categories, heaven overhead,
earth underfoot. Heaven and Earth—that is the beginning
of all mythologies and cosmogonies. Heaven and
Earth are for the Israelite the first works of the Eternal;
for the Chinese they are “father and mother of all things”;
for the Hellenes and the Teutons the first divine beings
(Uranos and Gaea, Wodan and Ertha). As men further
considered the question how this whole scene of nature,
both in its grateful and in its terrible aspects, came to be,
Heaven and Earth were regarded as sexed beings, Heaven
as fructifying, noble, lofty, male, controlling the lightning
and thunder; Earth as prolific, conceptive, passive, female.
Heaven and Earth formed a union, and Sun, Moon, and
Stars were reputed their children. Among the heavenly
bodies the first place is held by the Sun, god of day, who,
at his rising in the East by magic power compels his
brother and sister deities to obey him: he reigns alone in
a sea of light and splendor. Sister and consort of the
Sun is the Moon, and the course of these two across the
heavens, their rising and their setting, their shining and
their obscuration are the source of endless fanciful myths:
in these myths, however, there are frequent transformations,
the same hero being now the Sun, again Heaven,
and the same heroine being now the Moon, anon the
Earth. And phantasy discovered in Sun and Moon so
many diverse properties that it separated these from one
another, and by degrees formed out of them distinct personalities.
The Sun, rising out of the ocean and again
sinking into it, became Poseidon (Neptune), and the invisible
Sun that through the night tarries in the underworld
became god of the world of shades, Pluto; and so
8with other phenomena of the sun. The Moon, too, in
her different forms of waxing, full, and waning moon,
rising and setting moon, gives rise to groups of three or
four sisters (Graces, Fates, Furies), and to many other
forms of goddesses, and these are sad, austere, chaste, or
alluring, winsome, complaisant; or the Moon assumes the
form of some fair daughter of man, who, being loved by
some god, becomes mother of gods and heroes. Hence
god-descended races and dynasties, whose fortunes and
wars are the subject of epics, tragedies, and romances, and
the innumerable host of the stars, in the fanciful shapes
in which imagination grouped them, afforded inexhaustible
material for story and myth. Here was seen a
herd faithfully guarded by the herdsman, there a chase
conducted by bold hunters, or a company of daring mariners
going to win the golden fleece, or the golden apples
of the Hesperides, or the thousand eyes of the watchful
Argus. On the mantle of the goddess of night phantasy
saw pictured Aries, Taurus, Capricornus, Capella, Ursus
Major, Orion, Bootes, Draco, Hercules, and all the other
figures of the endless web of poesy in which are told the
wondrous deeds of gods and heroes.
Such is the light in which mythology appeared when,
in the beginnings of scientific inquiry, the forces of nature
were personified. As centuries passed the true sense of
these myths, transmitted from father to son, was lost, and
the whole was taken to be actual fact. But the master
minds discerned the true state of the case, and soon regained
the real meanings. Such men as Aristotle, Plutarch,
and others often told in their writings what they
thought regarding the traditions, but not so the wily
priests within the walls of the temples. Their secret doctrines
doubtless conveyed a more or less rationalistic interpretation
9of the myths and a purer theology, though
it must be admitted that, in order to guard the mysteries
of the secret associations, and to save the priesthood
from becoming superfluous, this teaching was tricked out
in mysticism, symbolism and allegory; and above all that
it was accompanied by certain dramatic representations
and certain moralizing ceremonies.
The countries of antiquity whereof we know with
certainty that they possessed “mysteries,” i. e., secret associations
under priestly guidance, are Egypt, Chaldaea,
and Greece.
As the sources of the Nile were undiscovered till a
very recent date, so do the sources of Egyptian civilization
remain hidden still. We know fairly well how the
population of Egypt was made up. It consisted of an
aboriginal stock, whose physical characters, as given in
writings or in sculptures, show that it was of negro origin,
and of a conquering people belonging to the same race
as the inhabitants of Europe in high antiquity: this race
invaded the Nile land probably from Asia, made themselves
masters of it, and in time mingled with the aborigines.
The great moving cause of Egyptian civilization
was always the Nile, called in Egypt Hapi; for the
Nile was the essential factor, by the annual overflow of
its fertilizing waters in Summer and Autumn, in determining
the conformation of the land, the climate, the seasons,
and, consequently, the manners and usages of the
inhabitants. Hence in the language of the natives,
Egypt was called Kemt, the dark land, because of the
rich deposits of loam left after the floods of the Nile.
But this name attached only to the Nile valley,
10bounded on the East and West by stony deserts, which
the Egyptians did not reckon as belonging to their country.
The Semites called the land Misr, or Misraim; the
Greeks gave first to the river, then to the region, the name
Egypt (on what grounds we know not), and finally to
the river the name Neilos. It has ever been a land of
enigmas, this Nileland. Whence comes its river? Why
does it overflow the country in Summer and Autumn?
Why those mighty pyramids? What were the doings in
those temples, planted so close together? What mean
those strange characters, the hieroglyphs? Why do the
gods wear heads of animals, and why, on the other hand,
have the sphinxes a human head on a lion’s body?
In order to exercise undisputed mastery over the
country the conquerors divided among themselves all
the land and all the authority. They formed two hereditary
classes or estates—Priests, who controlled the minds,
and Warriors, who controlled the bodies of the conquered
people. Of the subject race there were several classes,
most probably six, though the accounts we have are
mutually contradictory. These classes are: Artists, mechanics,
traders, mariners, agriculturists, herdsmen; in
the latter class of the swineherds, most despised of all
Egyptians, because of the unclean animal which they
tended.
Now, while the warrior class had the management
of military affairs and the executive government, and as a
rule supplied the occupants of the throne, the priests possessed
the legal lore and the scientific knowledge, and
prescribed to the people what they must believe, while
among themselves and in the company of Initiates they
thought very differently.
The Egyptian religion has its foundation in astronomy.
11The regular overflow of the Nile, which involved
a precise division of the year into seasons, must at an
early period have led to a diligent observation of the
course of the stars, in order to make timely preparation
for the floods; and the splendor of the starry sky in that
region, near the tropics, where hardly a single constellation
is out of sight through the whole year, favored
the study of astronomic science. The Egyptians contemplated
the glories of the heavens, not with the stolidity
of the Chinese, who therein see only objects to be counted
and measured; nor yet with the idealist imagination of
Europeans. Hence their personifications of the world
of stars are uncouth, confused, without grace or charm.
The heavenly body that for us is mightiest of all,
the sun, must have been for the Egyptians the most ancient
and the mightiest of gods. Their sun-god was
named Re. But even as among the Hellenes, so in
Egypt the several attributes of the sun were assigned
to different personalities. Thus, the rising sun, as the
youthful warrior-god Horos, was early distinguished from
Re; over against Horos stood his opposite and his twin-brother,
Set, spirit of darkness. For mothers the sun-god
had Isis, Hathor, and Neit, goddesses of heaven. To
these deities were added Aah, the moon-god, and the gods
of the several stars and constellations. Besides these
gods of the whole land, particular places and regions had
their own gods; thus Ptah was lord and god of Memphis,
Amon of Thebes, and so on.
Very often certain worshipful objects, as trees and
animals inhabited by spirits, were developed into local
deities. In this way the fetichism of the black aboriginal
people got entry into the more cultured religion of the
light-complexioned conquerors, and had a very powerful
12influence on it. Few were the indigenous animals that
were not worshiped in one place or in many as the wrappages
of deities. That worship was paid to animals not
for their own sake, is best seen from the way in which
the gods are portrayed, namely, for the most part with a
human body and the head of the animal sacred to them,
though in some cases entirely in human form. Thus
Amon, god of Thebes, has the head of a ram, Hathor of
Anut the head of a cow, Anubis that of a jackal, Bast
that of a cat, Sechet of a lioness, Sebak of a crocodile,
and so on. And inasmuch as it was believed that gods
dwelt in them, such animals were themselves made objects
of worship; for example, the ox Hapi (Gr. Apis) at
Memphis, the goat at Mendes, and so forth. This honor
belonged to the entire species, and as representing the
species, certain individual animals were maintained in the
temples by the contributions of the faithful, and had servitors
to wait upon them. Any harm done to these
fetiches was sternly punished: to kill one of them was
death. Not so when a god did not grant the prayers of
the faithful, e.g., for rain: in that case the priests made
the fetich pay the penalty. First, they threatened the animal,
but when menaces were vain, they killed the sacred
beast, though in secret; the people must not know of it.
As Egypt advanced in civilization and the government
became more concentrated, the local deities and
zoolatry were less regarded, while the light-gods, the sun-gods,
Re and Horos, with their associate deities, became
more prominent. The lives and fortunes of these light-gods,
13and in particular their wars with the powers of
darkness, became the subject of myths. The inhabitants
of the Nile valley imagined to themselves the sun’s course
not as the progress of a chariot like that in which the
Mithra of the Persians and the Helios of the Greeks
were borne, but as the voyage of a Nile bark on which
Re navigates the ocean of the heavens. In the battle with
dark Set he falls and drops into the netherworld in the
West, but the youthful Horos, sun-god of the coming
day, takes his place and begins his career across the sky.
This ever-rejuvenescent sun-god, who through all transformations
remained still the same deity, so that the self-same
goddess was now his mother, anon his consort, was
so truly the supreme god, nay, the sole god of Egypt,
that his hieroglyph, the sparrowhawk, came to be the
sign of the idea “god,” and in writing that sign was attached
to the names of gods to indicate that they were
such. On the other hand, the names of the mothers and
consorts of the sun-gods had appended to them the sign
for a cow.
From this it is seen that the religion of Nileland—that
is to say, the religion of the priests—was slowly progressing
toward monotheism. Unlike the beliefs of the
commonalty, the secret teachings or mysteries of the
priests, as gradually developed, regarded not simply the
existence of the gods, but, above all, what the gods stood
for. For a while this development halted at the sun-god,
and reached its first stage in the city Anu (in lower Egypt),
called by the Greeks Heliopolis (city of the sun), where
they incorporated the god of the place, Tum, in the sun-god
Re. This took place under the fourth dynasty,
whose monarchs built the great pyramids of Ghizeh at
Memphis. But one of the greatest of these transformations
14was in giving the name of Osiris, god of the city
Abdu (Gr. Abydos) in upper Egypt, to the god of the
sunset, ruler of the netherworld and of the kingdom of
death. Isis became his sister and consort, Set at once
his brother and his slayer, Horos his son, who, as a new
sun, takes his place after sunset, and also his avenger on
Set. Horos gives Set battle, but as he cannot destroy
him utterly, leaves to him the desert as a kingdom, while
Horos himself holds the Nile valley. This story of gods
was represented scenically on public holidays, but only
the Initiated, i. e., the priests and their followers who had
been let into the secret, knew the meaning of the representation.
Even the name of Osiris and his abode in the
realm of the dead were kept secret, and outsiders heard
only of the “great god” dwelling in “the West.” Besides
the mysteries of Osiris, the most famous of all, there were
other mysteries of local Egyptian gods transformed into
sun-gods; and so the sun mythos was further developed.
Thus Thot, god of Hermopolis, whose sacred animal
was the bird Ibis, became Horos’s auxiliary in the war
with Set, and also became the moon-god, the god of chronometry
and of order, inventor of writing, revealer of
the sacred books. Memphis alone, capital of the ancient
kingdom, held her god Ptah too exalted a being to share
in the transformation of the rest; for Ptah was regarded
by his worshipers as father of all gods, creator of the
world and of men, and more ancient than Re; besides, he
was the god of the royal court. Nevertheless, he did not
escape the fate of becoming a sun-god. The most celebrated
object of Egyptian zoolatry was sacred to Ptah,
namely, Apis (Hapi), the sacred bull of Memphis, symbol
of the sun and also of the fructifying Nile. This bull
must be black with a white spot on the forehead, and with
15a growth under the tongue having the form of the sacred
beetle. The bull was kept in the temple at Memphis
from calfhood till death; the body was then mummified,
laid out in state, and honored with inscriptions as a god.
The behavior of Apis in various conjunctures and circumstances
was reputed to be oracular.
Another form of the sun-god was the Sphinx, a half-human,
half-brute figure in stone, repeated a thousand
times in the Nile valley. The most famous sphinx of all
is seen at the great pyramids of Ghizeh. Regular avenues
flanked by sphinxes formed the approaches of the great
temples. In Egypt the sphinx was thought of as male;
the head was that of some king, and the whole figure
represented the sun-god Harmachis, a name compounded
of Re and Horos (Ra-Harmchuti). In later times the
sphinx was introduced in Asia and Greece; the Grecian
sphinx is always female.
When the local deities of Egypt were reduced to
system, Re was still supreme, but now Re had a father,
Nunu, god of Chaos, source of all being—clearly a product
of priestly meditation, quite alien to the popular mind.
Re was the first divine ruler of the earth. The stars
were his companions. He was succeeded by his son Shu
(represented with a lion’s head), god of air, who made the
props that sustain the sky. Shu was followed by the god
Keb and the goddess Nut, parents of Osiris and Isis, who
then became the earth’s rulers. To them, after Set’s
usurpation, succeeded Horos the avenger and the goddess
Hathor. A second class comprises the inferior gods, as
Thot, Anubis, etc.; and in a third class are the local
deities. The number of gods and of daemons subordinate
to them was enormous. But in their gods the Egyptians
looked not at all for the perfection of goodness, nor did
16they regard right behavior as essential for gaining heavenly
favor; they rather looked on the practices of religion
frankly as a means of advancing their individual interests
with the gods.
Now, the greater the number of gods the less was the
difference between them, and the easier became the
transition to the belief in the sun-god as supreme and
only true deity—a belief entertained by the priesthood,
not by the people. Re became for the priests the one
god, creator of the universe; and this was due to the fact
that the priests of the foremost cities, following the example
of those of Heliopolis, praised the local god as
supreme over all, and at the same time made him
identical with Re, whose name was appended to the
original name, thus, Tum-Re, Amon-Re. When Thebes
became the capital of the kingdom its god Amon naturally
took the foremost place, and while Thebes flourished,
in the beginning of the so-called new empire, it was
known to all Initiates that the sun-god was the one true
god, self-created, sole object of the worship paid to the
innumerable host of other gods. Nay, the evil deity
Set came to pass for a form of Re, and was allowed a
place in the Sun’s bark. Self-creation was also attributed
to the moon-god. The king, as lord of the whole country,
prayed in identical words in every place to the local deity
as lord of heaven and earth.
But now the secret doctrine of the priests was to be
published to the people. The pharao Amenhotep IV., of
the 18th dynasty (about 1460 B. C.), saw in the power of
the priesthood a menace to the dignity of the crown.
17He therefore proclaimed as the sole god the sun, not
under any human form, as had been the custom, but in
its own proper shape of a disk (in Egyptian, aten), as
had been the usage at Heliopolis. Amenhotep ordered
all images of other gods associated with the sun to be
destroyed, assumed for himself the name Chuenaten,
“Splendor of the Sundisk,” quit Thebes, and built in
middle Egypt, east of the Nile, a new royal seat, Chutaten,
“abode of the Sundisk.” The priests of the deposed
gods in Thebes and in certain other cities (not in
all) lost their places, and the great estates of the priestly
corporations were confiscated. Of course the court officers
and civil functionaries loyally followed the example
of their master; but only a very small fraction of the priesthood
gave up their convictions for the sake of livelihood.
Hardly was Chuenaten gathered to his fathers after
a reign of twelve years, when his reform was undone.
His sons-in-law, who succeeded him, returned step by
step to the religion of Amon, and again fixed the royal
seat at Thebes; nevertheless, they were held to be heretics
by the priests, now reinstated in their ancient power.
The temples erected to the Sundisk were leveled with the
ground, the half-completed city of the sun was obliterated,
the confiscation of the estates of priestly corporations reversed,
and the temples, images, and priesthood of Amon
reinstated. The intellectual life of Egypt was thenceforth
paralyzed, and the ancient mystic teachings of the
priests were never again disturbed by any wave of movement
or progress. The people went back to stupid formalism,
and sank even deeper into daemonism and sorcery.
To draw them away from the true god the priests taught
them to worship deceased kings and queens, at the same
time amusing them with gorgeous sacrifices, processions,
18and festivals. The distance separating the priesthood
from the people—and the Pharaos were, though not of
the priestly class, reckoned as compeers of the priests—was
signalized by the temples with their various compartments
in the inmost of which, the holy of holies
(adyton), were guarded the mysteries of the priests, while
the people were admitted only to the temple proper and
its forecourt. In all probability the famed Labyrinth near
Lake Moeris, at Crocodilopolis, was designed for priestly
ends. The labyrinth was an underground maze of chambers.
Herodotus tells that there were 1,500 chambers
above ground and as many under the surface, and that
the underground chambers were not shown to the profane,
for they contained the remains of Pharaos and of
sacred crocodiles. Not Herodotus only, but Diodorus,
Strabo, and Pliny celebrate the glory of this vast palace,
in whose hidden compartments, no doubt, fit quarters
were found for the mysteries.
Finally, the secret teaching of the priests played a
part in the people’s ideas regarding death and the other
life. According to the Egyptian teaching, man is made
up of three constituent parts, viz., besides the body, the
soul (ba), conceived to be of purely material essence,
which at death quitted the body in the form of a bird;
and the immaterial spirit (ka), which held to the man the
same relation a god held to the animal in which he dwelt:
at death the spirit departed from the body like the image
of a dream. The gods, too, had their ka and their ba.
The continued existence of both soul and spirit was contingent
on the care the corpse received; if the ka and the
19ba were to live on, the body must be embalmed and laid
in a chamber hollowed in a rock, or in a sepulchral edifice
(of such buildings the pyramids were the most notable),
and the relatives must supply to the dead meat and drink
and clothing. The spirit of the deceased went to Osiris,
lord of the other world—a luxuriant plain (Aaru) in the
West, where the earth’s products required no toil, but
grew spontaneous. By means of the magic formula with
which Horos recalled to life the slain Osiris, the dead is
not only in like manner revivified, but is even made one
with Osiris; and hence in the formulas of funeral service
which constitute the so-called “Book of the Dead,” the
deceased is addressed as Osiris with addition of his own
name. Therefore, he may now sail in the sun-bark, and
lead a glorious life in the other world, and walk amid the
stars like other gods. The pictures on the walls of the
sepulchral chambers show that the Egyptians conceived
the other life to be much like the present, only pleasanter
and fuller. The deceased is portrayed surrounded by
such enjoyments as were attainable in Nileland—banquets,
property, the chase, voyaging, music, and the like.
But from the texts of the “Book of the Dead,” which used
to be laid with the dead in the sepulchre, we see that
these representations had a more spiritual import in the
“middle” than in the “old” empire. In these texts the
deceased himself speaks, identifying himself with some
god, or with one god after another; no longer with Osiris
only, for according to the developed teaching of that time
all the gods are one god. The route of the dead toward
the other world is the sun’s track from East to West; but
on his journey he needs the help of the sorcerer’s art
against the host of daemons and monsters that threaten
him. Arrived there, he acquires the power of revisiting
20the earth at will in the form of god, man, or animal, or
even, should he so choose, in his own former body. At
this period puppets made of wood or of clay, and sundry
tools and utensils, were laid in the grave with the dead
for their service. Under the “new empire” the representations
of the other life and of the way thither are
more detailed and more fanciful. Here, too, we find
representations of the famous “judgment of the dead,” an
event belonging to the life beyond, and not, as the Greeks
mistakenly supposed, to the present state and to the time
immediately before burial. Osiris presides over the tribunal
with two-and-forty assessors, in whose presence the
newcomer has to prove himself guiltless of any one of
two-and-forty sins, thus, for example: “Never have I done
an injustice, never have I stolen, never have I craftily
compassed the death of any man, never have I killed any
sacred animal,” etc. Yet all this was rather a magic
formula for attaining blessedness according to Egyptian
notions than a truthful protestation of guiltlessness in
order to establish the postulant’s moral purity. Nevertheless,
in a picture of the Judgment of the Dead in the
“Book of the Dead” the deceased is brought by the goddess
of truth and righteousness (Ma) into the palace of
Osiris, and his sins and his good deeds are weighed in a
balance. The hippopotamus is present as accuser and the
god Thot as defender.
Though from the foregoing we get a general notion
of the relation between the priests and the people, still
we are not clear as to the nature of the secret teaching
21and the mode of its organization. Here we have to depend
almost entirely on the accounts given by Greek
writers, not always trustworthy, and on conjecture or inference.
Unquestionably the secret doctrine necessitated a
species of secret society which presumably consisted of
the higher orders of priests, and which comprised subdivisions
only loosely held together. It is stated positively
that the pharao for the time being was always
admitted to membership. Hence the king was the only
Egyptian outside of the priestly order that was acquainted
with the secret doctrine, and thus was all danger of betrayal
at home most effectually averted. But as the priests
had less to fear in this regard from foreigners, because
foreigners went away again; and as in the indoctrination
of foreigners the priests saw an opportunity for cultivating
their own reputation for erudition, therefore they
often willingly admitted to initiation men of distinction
from abroad, and especially Greeks. Among the fabulous
personages who were believed to have been impelled by
thirst for knowledge to visit Egypt, there to learn the
secret wisdom of the priests, were the bards Orpheus,
Musaeus, and Homer; among the historic characters were
the lawgivers Lycurgus and Solon, the historian Herodotus,
the philosophers Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Democritus,
the mathematician Archimedes, and very many more.
But it was not always easy for these to lift the veil
that hid the mysteries. Pythagoras, for example, though
recommended by King Aahmes (Amasis), applied in vain
to the priests of Heliopolis and Memphis, and only after
he had submitted to the circumcision prescribed for postulants
did he receive from the priests of Diospolis instruction
in their recondite sciences.
22In the form of admission to this secret doctrine were
long and tedious but significant ceremonies, and the
Initiates had at certain intervals to ascend a number of
degrees, or stages of knowledge, till they mastered the
sum of the wisdom taught by the priests. But with regard
to the mode of this progression and the difference
between the degrees we have unfortunately no reliable
testimony.
Of the contents of the Egyptian secret teaching we
know little more than we do of its forms, for all Initiates
were pledged to strictest silence regarding the subject matter
of instruction. Yet we are not without scattered
hints from competent authorities, and in the light of these
we cannot go seriously astray. According to the Greek
historian Diodorus, who lived in the time of Julius Caesar
and Augustus, and who had himself been initiated in
Egypt, Orpheus, or rather the Orphic mystae named after
him, owed the Grecian mysteries to the priests of Egypt;
and to the same source were Lycurgus and Solon beholden
for their legislation, Pythagoras and Plato for
their philosophical systems, and Pythagoras furthermore
for his mathematical knowledge, and Democritus for his
astronomical doctrine. Now, as for the exact sciences
here mentioned, the Egyptian secret teaching could not
have comprised anything thereanent which was not attainable
by anybody with the scientific helps of the time;
nor anything in the way of astronomic knowledge not relating
to the calculation of time; and if with regard to this
knowledge nothing fundamental was taught to the people,
then that was a base huckstering of mysteries and not a
secret teaching. As for legislation, the systems of Lycurgus
and Solon differ so much from each other, and are
so pronouncedly Spartan and Athenian, respectively, in
23spirit, that from them we cannot infer what the teaching
was in that department. The probability is that the two
Grecian lawgivers merely used the Egyptian laws as a basis,
and for the rest adapted their ideas to the needs of their
respective countries. Nor is it to be assumed that because
the Egyptian priests were also judges, therefore
their ideas on legislation, which assuredly they must have
applied freely and above board, belonged to their
mysteries.
From the hieroglyphic remains, however, it appears
that there existed in Egypt high-grade schools conducted
by the priests, and hence we may infer that in these institutions
the Greek searchers after knowledge obtained
instruction in lawgiving and in the exact sciences of the
Egyptians.
It is true that the hieroglyphs, a species of Egyptian
writing which consisted of figures of actual objects, were
known only to the priests; but in early times that was so
only because the rest of the people could not read and
write. Afterward there was a special popular form of
writing (demotic) derived from the hieroglyphs and resembling
an earlier abbreviated form of hieroglyphic
writing, the hieratic or writing of the priests.
It is different with philosophical and religious speculation,
in which positive, unimpeachable conclusions such
as may be had in the exact sciences, are out of the question,
and which has no practical application as in jurisprudence
and diplomatics; which, in fact, gives play
rather to hypothesis and arbitrary opinion, to mysticism
and symbolism. This, therefore, was the subject matter
of the teaching conveyed to Initiates in the Egyptian
mysteries, but for good reasons then withheld from the
vulgar, because here the very existence of the priestly
24class was at stake: the priesthood would lose all its importance
once the people were aware that the priests had
no regard for the received religion.
Hence there is no doubt that the secret doctrine of
the Egyptian priests was at once philosophic and religious;
that is, that it tested the traditional belief, analyzed
it, and accepted what it found to be reasonable and rejected
what appeared irrational; and it was sharply distinguished
from the popular belief, which took tradition
for absolute and indubitable truth.
What, then, were the principles underlying the philosophic
religion of the Egyptian priests? Putting aside
all arbitrary and fine-drawn theories, we infer from various
clear indications that it was of a monotheistic character,
i. e., that it postulated one personal god, and that it rejected
polytheism and zoolatry, as well as the materialistic
conceptions of the popular creed with regard to what
takes place after death. Indeed, we hold it not improbable
that the secret doctrine was often more radical than
the views of the royal reformer Amenhotep IV., or Chuenaten,
and that, unlike him, the priests believed the true
god to be, not a material thing, the sun’s disk, but the unseen
creator himself, called by them Nunu, father of Re,
and source of all things. Thus we find in the “Book of
the Dead” and in later writings mention of a “demiurge
(or architect) of the universe,” to whom no special divine
name is given. Plutarch, too, in his ingenious work,
“Of Isis and Osiris” (cc. 67, 68), says: “The godhead
is not any mindless or soulless creature subject to man,”
an allusion to zoolatry; and again: “There is only one
rational being that orders all things, but one ruling providence,
and subordinate powers which are set over the several
things and which in different nations receive through
25traditional usage, distinctive worship and distinctive appellations.
And hence Initiates employ now symbols obscure,
anon more obvious, whereby they guide the understanding
to the divine being, yet not without danger of falling into
the mire of superstition or the abyss of unbelief. Therefore
must one take philosophy for his mystagogue (guide
to the mysteries), in order to have a true understanding
of all the teachings and all the rites of the mysteries.”
The belief in one personal creator having been accepted,
the Egyptian mythology was naturally declared
erroneous, and its true signification was expounded by
the priests to the initiated. That this interpretation of
the myths as allegorical accounts of personified natural
phenomena was the essential part of the mysteries appears
from the testimonies of learned Greeks, some of them
Initiates, e. g., Plutarch (“Isis and Osiris,” c. 3) writes:
“Not the white vesture and the shaven beard make the
servant of Isis: he alone is truly that, who receives due
instruction upon the rites and ceremonies used in that
divine service, who investigates judiciously, and meditates
upon the truth therein contained.” Again (c. 8):
“There is in the rites of the Egyptian priests nothing irrational,
nothing fabulous or superstitious. Instead of
irrationality we find principles and precepts of morality;
instead of fable and superstition, authentic history and
facts of nature.” And c. 9: “The image of the goddess
Neit at Sais, regarded also as the image of Isis, bears this
inscription: ‘I am the All that was, that is, that is to be;
my veil no mortal has ever raised.’” Finally, c. 11: “When
we hear the Egyptian myths of the gods, their wandering
about, their dismemberment and sundry other like incidents,
we must recall the remarks already made, so as to
understand that the stories told are not to be taken
26literally as recounting actual occurrences.” The more
cautious Herodotus (II., 61) agrees with Plutarch, though
he expresses himself more enigmatically: “On the festival
of Isis in the city of Bubastis, after the sacrifice all, both
men and women, thousands of them, beat themselves. But
for me to name the one for whose sake they beat themselves
were impiety.”
All the traditions and rites of the Egyptian popular
religion then were explained in a rationalist sense to the
initiated. Many particulars of this explanation have been
lost, but what has been lost can hardly have been of any
real value for us, and is little to be regretted.
In the traditions of classic antiquity the secret wisdom
of the Egyptian priests was not held in greater esteem
than that of their fellow-priests in Chaldaea or Babylonia,
the enlightened empire on the lower Tigris and
Euphrates, of which Assyria, land of the upper Tigris,
was only a colony. Recent research has brought up the
question which civilization was the earlier, that of the Nileland
or that of Western Asia, in the region of the twin
rivers. But as we possess with regard to the Babylonian
religion even less information than with regard to the
Egyptian, we must be content with a brief account of it.
The Chaldaean religion beyond a doubt had its
origin in the country around the lower Tigris and Euphrates
among a people of Turanian or Ural-Altaic stock
(akin to the Turks), called Sumerians, or Akkadians: its
root was Shamanism, a form of religion peculiar to the
Turkic races. The most ancient religious writings of
this people (among whom cuneiform writing originated)
27consist in formulas for exorcising evil spirits; these spirits
are usually represented as coming from the desert in
groups of seven. Over these daemons presided the spirit
of the heavens (In-lilla, afterward called Anu, i. e., sky);
after Anu greatest reverence was paid to the spirit of the
earth (In-kia or Ea), who was afterward spirit of the
waters also. From the higher spirits were evolved gods
and goddesses innumerable. The most ancient goddess
was Ba-u, a name signifying “primordial water,” or chaos.
After Ba-u came the “daughter of the heavens,” named
at first Anun, later Ninni or Ninna, and afterward Istar.
The Sumerian groundwork of Chaldaean civilization
and religion was built upon by a Semitic people, the
Babylonians and Assyrians proper, traces of whom are
found nearly 4000 years B. C., and whose domination
seems established B. C. 2500. The highest god of this race
was called simply “God” (in their language Ilu), or “Lord”
(Baal). Sun and moon were worshiped as his images.
The scene of the life after death was laid in the realm of
shades (shualu, in Hebrew Sheol). This religion was
blended with that of the Sumerians. The gods Anu and
Ilu became one god of the sky, Bel; and Istar became
Bel’s wife. Other Sumerian gods were associated with
the planets worshiped by the Semites: Marduk with Jupiter,
Nindar with Saturn, Nirgal with Mars, Nabu with
Mercury, while Istar was specially related to Venus.
There was a sort of trinity made up of Samas (sun), Sin
(moon), Ramman (god of storms). Similarly, Anu, spirit
of the sky, and Ea, spirit of the earth, were placed side by
side with Bel. This system was completed about 1,900
B. C., and it remained unchanged in Assyria, save that
there the autochthonous god Assur held the first place
among the gods.
28Among the Babylonians and Assyrians the priests
were held in great reverence. In Assyria they stood next
after the king, and the king was high priest; in the Babylonian
kingdom they occupied a more independent and
more influential station. Like the priests of Egypt, they
probably had a secret doctrine withheld from the vulgar.
From the meanings of the Babylonian deities’ names, as
given above, it is easy to infer the nature of this secret
doctrine. The Chaldees were throughout all antiquity
known as observers of the heavenly bodies. And though
probably they were astrologers rather than astronomers,
at least they knew enough about the stars, the heavens,
and the facts of meteorology to regard them for what
they were instead of holding them to be gods. We therefore
believe that the Chaldaean priests among themselves
looked on the objects which before the people
they held to be gods as simply sky, sun, moon, planets,
lightning, thunder.
Besides the early cuneiform writings already mentioned
(forms of exorcism), there have been found amid
the ruins of Babylon great “libraries” of writings on tiles,
in the cuneiform characters. Among these are “penitential
psalms” and hymns to gods. In the following
psalm, deciphered from the tile tablets, a priest, in the
name of a penitent sinner, entreats the goddess:
O Lady, for thy servant the cup is full.
Speak the word to him, “Let thy heart be tranquil.”
Thy servant—evil have I done—
Give him assurance of mercy.
Turn thy countenance himward.
Consider his entreaty.
Thy servant, thou art angry with him,
Be to him gracious.
O Lady, my hands are tied.
I cling to thee.
29Many of the mythological poems, indeed, most of
them, and great part of the less sacred literature of the
tablets, are so obscure and unintelligible that for their
understanding a “key” was necessary, and the priests held
the key. Of special interest are the fragments containing
portions of the Babylonian cosmogony; and as our
Bible (Gen. xi., 31) tells that Abraham was of Ur
in Chaldaea, his descendants would inherit from him
(supposing him to have been an historical personage)
some portions of the ancient traditions and folklore of
the Chaldaeans. Here is a fragment of the Babylonian
story of the Creation:
When the sky above was not yet named,
Earth beneath had yet no name,
and the watery deep, the never-beginning,
was their producer,
the chaos of the sea, genderess of them all,
for her waters united together in one.
The darkness was not yet done away,
not a plant had yet budded.
As of the gods none had yet gone forth,
and they yet had no name,
then the great gods, too, were created, etc.
The Chaldee Noah, called Samas-Napishtim (sun of
life), tells the story of the deluge in this form: The god
Ea having made known to him the punishment decreed
for mankind on account of their sins, he built a great
ship at the god’s command, and into it brought all his
possessions, his kinsmen, his servants, also domestic and
wild animals. Then the gods let a great tempest loose,
and with the spirits entered the combat to destroy all
living things. But the flood rose up to the sky and
threatened even the lower gods, who had to take refuge
with the higher gods. The gods, therefore, repented of
30what they had done. But after seven days the storm was
quieted, and the waters were abated; Samas-Napishtim
opened the window of his ship, now resting on the mountain
Nizir, and after other seven days freed a dove, but
the dove found no resting place. Then a swallow, which
did in like manner; then a raven, which preyed on the
bodies of the drowned. It was now possible for Samas-Napishtim
to let the animals out; he erected an altar and
offered sacrifice, whereto the gods gathered “like masses
of flies.” Then the god Bel, who had ordered the flood,
became reconciled with the other gods, who were angry
with him on that account; he led Samas-Napishtim forth
with his wife, and made a covenant with them and the
people. But the pair were taken afar to live for evermore.
This Chaldaic history of the deluge is but one section
of a great poem, an epos contained in twelve earthen
tablets, wherein are recounted the fortunes and exploits of
a hero, apparently the Nimrod of the Hebrew Bible.
This poem is reputed to date from the twenty-third century,
B. C. The deeds of this hero, Gishdubarra, or Namrassit,
as he is called, forcibly recall the story of the Hellenic
Herakles, and the Heraclean myth, perhaps, had its
origin in the Chaldaean epos. Gishdubarra is a descendant
of Samas-Napishtim, whom he seeks out in his retreat
to obtain a cure of his disease, and who takes that
occasion to narrate to him the history of the flood. Now,
his disease was a visitation of the goddess Anatu, because
that he had spurned the love of the goddess Istar. A
short poem graphically and effectively tells of how Istar
in her distress over this repulse sought help in the netherworld.
“Istar’s Descent into Hell” impresses one like
Dante’s “Inferno”; indeed, in the opening verses it employs
31nearly the same words as the great Florentine.
Istar goes, says the poet,
To that house whence none comes forth that enters,
On that path that allows advance, but regress never;
To that house whose inmates light shall see nevermore,
To that place where dust is their victual and ordure their meat, etc.
In the netherworld the goddess Allatu reigns as
queen. She is Istar’s counterpart: as Istar (daughter of
the moon-god) is the rising moon, or the morning-star,
so is Allatu the setting moon, or the evening star. The
two are the mutually conflicting opposite sides of one
being; and here, perhaps, we have an intimation of a
deeper ethical interpretation, according to the secret doctrine
of the Chaldaeans. The hell of the Chaldaean theology
is divided into seven compartments separated by
gates. At each gate Istar must surrender to its keeper
some portion of her paraphernalia; at the first the crown,
at the second the earrings, at the third the necklace, at
the fourth the mantle, at the fifth the girdle, crusted with
precious stones, at the sixth the armlets and anklets, and
at the seventh the last vesture. Possibly, we have here
a symbolic allusion to the Chaldaean mystic teaching,
which may have had seven degrees of initiation into as
many orders of mysteries, till all were disclosed. The
queen of the nether world not only renders to Istar no
assistance, but, contrariwise, treats her as an enemy, and
heaps bodily injuries upon her. Meanwhile on earth,
Istar being the goddess of love, all union of the sexes,
whether among men or animals, ceases, and at last the
gods request of Allatu the liberation of Istar. Reluctantly
she consents. Istar is made whole and set free,
32and at each gate gets back again what had been taken
from her. The poem was intended to be recited by the
priest at the obsequies of the dead, to give assurance to
the mourning survivors that the gates of the netherworld
are not unconquerable, but that there is still a possibility
for the shades to reach the land of the blest, the
abode of Istar.
If in Chaldaea the traces of actual secret teaching
seem faint and indistinct, they quite disappear the further
we go from the centres of ancient culture in Northern
Africa and Western Asia, though analogies are found
everywhere. In Persia, whose culture for the rest was an
offshoot of that of Chaldaea, the priests (athravan) of Zarathustra’s,
or Zoroaster’s, religion were the highest of the
three classes of the population, and the priestly class was
considered further removed from the other two (warriors
and farmers) than they from each other. Sprung originally
from a Median stock, the priests married only women
of their own race, and alone of the population possessed
high culture. As in Egypt, the King was adopted into
the priestly class. The priests went about the country
as teachers, but gave religious instruction only to those
of their class. The chief priest was styled Zarathustrotema,
i. e., the one nearest to Zarathustra, and had his
see in the holy city Ragha (now Rai), whose inhabitants,
like those of modern Rome, had the name of being unbelievers.
The priests alone held rule in Ragha, and no
secular power had right to give orders. Even elsewhere
throughout the kingdom the priests regarded themselves
as subject only to the commands of the Zarathustrotema.
33Further, they were physicians, astrologers, interpreters
of dreams, scribes, judges, officers of state, etc.
The duties they sought to impress upon the minds of
the people were these exclusively: That they should reverence
the holy fire, listen to the reading of passages from
the sacred books, and perform no end of ceremonies of
purification on account of their sins against the precepts
of their religion. All this points to the existence of a
mystic gild of the priests, which withheld the real teachings
of their religion from the uninitiated, and the members
of which alone understood what was the original of
the strife between the good world of Ormuzd and the
evil of Ahriman, namely, in all probability, the alternation
of night and day, Summer and Winter.
The case was much the same in India. There the
priests, then as now, the highest caste (Brahmans), were
separated from the people by even a deeper gulf than in
Persia. They can have no communication with people
of any other caste, and can take nothing from any one
not belonging to their own caste. They stand outside
of the state and its laws, and have laws of their own.
By the people they are regarded as gods: they and their
pupils, the Bramatsharin, as is said in the “Atharva-Beda”
(book of ceremonial laws), give life to both worlds;
nay, they it is that made sky and earth fast on their
foundations, that introduced religion, the gods, and immortality,
that produced the world, that brought the
daemons into subjection. Thus they indoctrinated the
people; but as they themselves of course knew that things
34were not so, a secret doctrine naturally sprung up among
them, and so they instituted a mystic society, whose
members alone knew how the matter really stood, and
that the people were hoodwinked. Accordingly, the
basis of religion was totally different for the Brahmans
from what it was for the rest of the people. The latter
were idolaters, the former pantheists. This pantheism
is taught in all their sacred books; but these books the
second and third castes (warriors and farmers) did not
understand, and the fourth caste, the servile (which was
also the most numerous), durst not read them at all.
According to this doctrine, all gods and the whole
creation are sprung from Eternity (Aditi). Penitents and
solitaries were esteemed by the Brahmans above kings and
heroes, even above gods. But the life of a hermit was
not perfect enough for them, for that was attained by the
next two castes. Therefore, as their own peculiar specialty,
they concocted the idea of a sort of a soul of the
universe, the Atman-Brahman (the All-Me, or Me-All).
This dogma was originated by the Brahman Yadshnavalkya:
but Brahmans themselves say that no man can
comprehend it, and that no man can instruct another in
it. Thus, despairing of a solution of life’s enigma, the
Brahmans hit upon the idea that the universe is only a
phantasm, a Dream of the Soul of the Universe, and as a
consequence that the earth, with all that it contains, is
nothing: this is pessimism. They imagined enormous
aeons of time, in the lapse of which the world grew ever
worse and creatures were born only to suffer, to die, and
either to awaken to suffering in the soul’s migration, or
to do penance in the unspeakable torments of hell. Now,
as of all this the people could understand only what was
said about the hell torments, the Brahmans contrived for
35them also a supreme deity under the same name as their
own Soul of the Universe, Brahma, and for Brahma they
provided a wife, Sarasvati. Brahma they made the
creator, but the part played by him was only passive and
the people, not content with such a do-nothing, paid
more attention to other gods, specially to resplendent
Vishnu and dread Siva. Long afterward the three gods
were united in a sort of trinity, or, rather, were represented
by a three-headed figure, which had neither temple nor
sacrificial worship. Thus the Brahmans went on refining
and refining in their theological speculations, while the
people became divided into parties, Vishnuites and Sivaites,
and the religion of the Hindus reached at last the
state of debasement in which we find it to-day.
Before degeneration had gone so far Buddha, in the
sixth century, B. C, endeavored to save the Hindu religion.
Buddhism was not a new religion, only a reform
of Brahmanism. Though it failed to strike root
deep in its native soil, the more westerly countries of
India, on the other hand it won a great following in
farther India, Tibet, China, and Japan: it has since assumed
a peculiar composite character by fusion with the
ancient religions of those countries. It grew out of a
monastic society founded by Siddhartha, afterward Buddha,
surnamed the Perfect One. His doctrine was
wholly ethical, and its profoundest principle was that only
in complete renunciation of all things can man find safety
and peace. Buddha himself was rather strict with postulants
for admission to the society, so that in his time the
teaching was in many respects a secret doctrine. But
after the death of Buddha, when first himself, then several
other Buddhas believed to have lived before him, and expected
to come after him, had been raised to the rank of
36gods; and when to these had been added the Hindu gods
and the gods of other peoples; the religion of the founder
having thus degenerated into a polytheism, the learned
began to interpret the original doctrine now in one sense,
again in another, opinions differing on the question
whether the Nirvana (literally, extinguishment) preached
by Buddha meant Death and Nothingness, or a Blest
State. Thus the Buddhism of the priests assumed a strong
likeness to a secret doctrine, though we know not of any
formal organization to that end.
Even among Savages so-called are found secret doctrines
and secret societies of priests analogous to those
of more cultured peoples. The priests of Hawaii, who
in this respect perhaps rank highest among savage
races, had a theory of their own regarding creation which
shows great elevation of thought. The sorcerers, or
priests, of savage races wherever they still remain, are
banded in secret societies, which withhold from the people
all knowledge of their tricks. The Angekoks of the
Eskimos, the Medicine Men of the North American
aboriginals, the Shamans of Siberia, as well as the sorcerers,
however named, of African and other races, nearly
all form close castes, hand down their pretended arts of
weather-making, of healing disease, discovering thieves,
counteracting spells, etc., to their successors, and prepare
themselves for their office by undergoing strange tests and
performing outlandish rites; they also wear fantastic togs.
Among the Zulu Kaffirs the one who desires to become
a sorcerer (usually a descendant of a sorcerer) gives
up the customary mode of life, has strange dreams, seeks
37solitude, hops and jumps about, utters cries, handles serpents
that other Kaffirs will not touch, at last receives
instruction from some aged sorcerer, and is formally admitted
by the assembly of those charlatans. There are
also witches, or sorceresses, who go through a like form
of consecration.
There exist also among savages other species of
secret societies. In the Society Islands the chiefs, called
Areoi or Erih, form an association, the origin of which
they trace to Oros, god of war. They are divided into
twelve classes under as many grandmasters, each class
distinguished by a peculiar tattoo, the members are united
by the firmest ties, show unbounded hospitality to one
another, live without marriage, kill their own children,
and refrain from all work. There are similar societies
in Micronesia, called Klobbergoll, which assemble in
special houses, and serve their chiefs in war as bodyguard.
On the isle of New Britain (now a German possession,
and named New Pomerania) there exists a secret society
called the Duk-Duk, whose members, wearing frightful
masks, care for the execution of the laws, collect fines,
and inflict punishment on incendiaries and homicides.
They are known to each other by secret signs, and outsiders
are denied admission to their festivals under pain
of death. In West Africa there are many secret societies
whose members are distinguished by a chalk line, with
which they are marked at their initiation. Their office
is to pursue and punish criminals, and to collect the
tribute. In each locality these associations possess
houses for their special use, and their members are bound
to the strictest secrecy. Thus even savages have their
secret police and their privy tribunals.
PART SECOND. The Grecian Mysteries and the Roman Bacchanalia. — 1. HELLAS. — 2. HELLENIC DIVINE WORSHIP. — 3. THE HELLENIC MYSTERIES. — 4. THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. — 5. THE MYSTERIES OF SAMOTHRACE. — 6. THE MYSTERIES OF CRETE. — 7. THE DIONYSIA. — 8. THE ROMAN BACCHANALIA. — 9. DEBASED MYSTERIES FROM THE EAST.
38
Grecian religion is worship of the beautiful. Its
origin was as that of the other polytheistic religions: its
basis was a personification of nature’s forces and of the
heavenly bodies, but in its evolution it differed essentially
from the religions of the Oriental peoples, who had
no sense for the beautiful, and who ascribed to their gods
forms quaint, or unnatural, or hideous. In the dawn of
their history the Hellenes did, undoubtedly, worship the
forces of nature under the form of animals, especially of
serpents. In time the human and animal forms were
united, and there were deities with heads of animals or
the bodies of horses (centaurs) or the hoofs of goats
(satyrs). But the native genius of Greece asserted itself
at an early period, and the figures of gods came by degrees
to express the highest physical perfection with
which they were acquainted—the human form. True,
the Hellenes, like the Easterns, forgot the astronomic
and cosmic signification of their myths; but, whereas, for
their neighbors oversea—at least for the mass of the people—the
natural powers transformed into gods were
simply fetiches existing only in the matter out of which
they were made—objects of dumb reverence or of mad
terror; for the man of Hellas they became changed into
39moral forces, into ideas which he represented to himself
in beautiful forms that were to him not objects of fear
at all, but beings with whom he might converse as with
fellowmen, and of whom his poets sang as though of
mortal heroes. Here we have the distinguishing characteristic
of Grecian religious worship.
The Hellenes knew nothing of dogma, creeds, catechising,
or revelation. In their eyes, if a man did but honor
the gods as representing the groundwork of morality, he
satisfied all the requirements of religion: the how, the
when, the where, the how often, were matters left to the
discretion of each one; and nobody else judged him concerning
them. Of course, we must not apply our modern
ethical yardstick to the principles of morality for
which the gods stood sponsor, after the origin of the
gods had been forgotten. The Greeks were, with regard
to matters that we nowadays hold to be within the sphere
of ethics, not at all scruple-ridden; and in truth we need
to bear in mind their great services on behalf of the
beautiful if we would look with some measure of allowance
on their shortcomings with regard to virtue. In
two points, specially straightforwardness (honesty, candor,
truthfulness) and chastity, they left much to be desired;
but what else was to be expected, seeing that in
their gods, as in course of time they came to conceive of
them mistakenly, they had by no means edifying exemplars
of the moral principles to which those deities were supposed
to give sanction. Nevertheless, history will, even
to the Hellenes, forgive much, because they loved much.
Of so little obligation was the Grecian belief regarding
the gods, that the several divisions of the Hellenic
race were by no means agreed as to the number of the
gods and their respective ranks. Of the twelve gods of
40Olympus, one would be disowned here, another there. In
one place greater honor would be paid to this god, in
another place to that; the case is exactly that of the saints
in Catholic countries to-day. Nay, local deities, e. g.,
Athene in Athens, often received more homage than Zeus,
father of the gods and lord of the thunderclouds. The
worship of the beautiful went even so far as to multiply
gods, and to divide them among the different localities
that possessed renowned statues of them: these statues
then came to be regarded as distinct individuals, so that
even a Socrates could be in doubt whether the Aphrodite
Urania (Aphrodite in the sky) and Aphrodite Pandemos
(the popular Aphrodite) were or were not one person.
Nay, when the known gods did not suffice, they made
gods that had no name: thus we find a “greatest” god,
also “pure”, and “reconciling”, and “ruling”, and, as we
learn from the “Acts of the Apostles”, “unknown” gods.
And now as regards the character of all these deities: for
the Greeks, who in all things studied the beautiful, they
were neither monsters like the gods of Egypt, India, and
Phoenicia, nor incorporeal spirits like the gods of the
Persians and the Israelites, but human existences that
never could die, mighty beings with human feelings, inclinations,
and passions. The Greeks knew no Yahve:
but then neither did they know any Devil. Their gods
were neither faultless nor virtueless, just like the Greeks
themselves. Of course there are to be found in Hellenic
religion survivals from that period of mythology in which
human and beast forms were mingled. This we see in
the Centaurs, the Chimaera, the Minotaur, the Satyrs, etc.;
but such beings were become merely figures in folk-tales,
and there they enacted parts ranging from terror to farce:
they no more received divine honors. And the same is
41to be said of daemons and malign spirits, relegated to the
domain of superstition and the realm of poesy.
Grecian religion was a function of state. Its adogmatism,
it is true, abated the apprehension this fact
might inspire for freedom of thought: but, on the other
hand, religion came to be a cloak for the designs of political
parties. Thus, for example, Socrates was put out
of the way by the party opposed to him on the pretext
that he had apostatized from the religion of the state.
Heresy trials, except as stirred up by politicians, had no
place among the Greeks. Philosophers and Initiates of
the mysteries fearlessly expressed their convictions, however
much opposed the same might be on one side or the
other to the official theology: nay, comedy, and even the
comedies of the tory Aristophanes introduced the gods in
the most ridiculous and most disgraceful situations on
the stage. It was enough for the state if the public worship
of the gods, whose festivals were commanded, and
whose sacrifices were prescribed by public authority, went
on: for the state what individuals thought was of no consequence:
the state cared neither for the upholding of
positive nor for the putting down of negative beliefs.
The public worship was regarded as a sort of legal
transaction between the gods and the people: the gods
were entitled to sacrifices, and the people to divine aid,
and the two parties were held to make faithful exchange.
Violation of temples and profanation of sacred things
were, therefore, grievous crimes. One need not believe
in miracles wrought by images of gods: but one must
leave the images alone. And, inasmuch as the gods
were officially recognized as vested with rights before the
42law, therefore, upon complaint made—and then only—denial
of their existence, scoffing, and blasphemy were
punished with banishment as the worst sort of crimes.
Nor was there in this any fanaticism or any intolerance,
simply an idea of right and wrong. That this is so is
proved by the fact that there was no prohibition of the
bringing in of alien gods or of the worship of such, provided
only the customs of the land were not infringed;
nay, alien gods, if their religion gained vogue, might be
adopted into the religion of the state.
Such freedom of religion could, of course, exist only
where no priestly caste existed, nor, in fact, any special
priestly class. It was competent for persons in various
walks of life to perform religious ceremonies. In the
name of the state, the king (or other head of the government)
“transacted business” with the gods, for example,
conducted the sacrifices. Only in temples and
other localities consecrated to divine worship were priests
as such employed: but outside the walls of these they had
nothing to do; for instance, they had nothing to do with
men’s consciences. In Hellas the priest had no privileges,
no influence such as he had in Egypt, and priestly
societies and priestly secret doctrine were out of the
question. The service of some of the gods was conducted
by women, and in the worship of certain deities
only unmarried priests could engage; there were also
certain other restrictions put on the priest’s mode of life.
Among the Greeks religious ministration was no
more restricted to certain places than to certain persons.
The gods were everywhere, the highest inhabiting Olympus,
others the sea, the netherworld, certain groves, trees,
streams, mountains, grottoes, etc. Not in temples alone,
but everywhere stood altars: in houses, in the streets,
43in forests. All consecrated places, whether temples or
sacred groves, etc., were Asyla, places of refuge for offenders
against law. The honor done to the gods consisted
in:
1. Invocation, comprising Prayers addressed,
whether to the images of the gods or to their supposed
abode, and pronounced low or loud or in song; Oaths,
summoning the gods as witnesses of truth—this at times
degenerated into a species of Ordeal; Imprecations, calling
on the gods to punish evildoers.
2. Votive Offerings (anathemata), objects of all kinds
laid at the feet of the gods’ images: the offering might be
an animal, fattened specially for the god, or it might be
a person dedicated for life to the service of the god by
himself, his father, or his master.
3. Sacrifices, mostly meat and drink offerings, but
sometimes living animals immolated to the gods, in
atonement for sin, or to ratify treaties, or to obtain an intimation
of the divine will or foreknowledge. In the
earliest times human victims were immolated.
If religion consists in a belief in superterrestrial
powers and in worship of them, so, on the other hand,
the belief in miracle has its root in the conviction that
this worship is answered by action of the heavenly powers
on the physical world. One instance of this action of the
supersensual world is called Revelation. Here the
Grecian religion was distinguished from other forms of
belief in that it accepted no official standing revelation
which every one was required to believe, while it maintained
the possibility of a revelation from the gods for
emergencies. This belief was firmly held even by the
most eminent Grecian philosophers, in particular by Socrates
and the Stoics. And if the granting of prayers
44and the decision of questions by ordeals was a first feeble
step toward revelation, the same mistaken belief led to
still further degeneration of the religious idea in the
forms of Seership, Oracles, and Conjuration.
Seership (in Greek, mantike, seer’s art) was unintentional
or intentional. Unintentional seership we see in
dreams, and in trance. Intentional seership was practiced
by interpretation of signs or omens (sign-reading).
A seer (mantis) was one who practiced sign-reading,
whether self-deluded or simply pretending to be under
divine inspiration. Folklore and history tell of famous
seers who foretold the future from observation of the
flight of birds, atmospheric phenomena, the position of
constellations, and the entrails of animals; or who interpreted
dreams and on occasion had ecstasies and
visions. Then there were unprofessional practicers of
the art who divined the future by other means; thus one
would write the letters of the alphabet in a circle on the
ground, lay on each letter a grain of corn, then let a
cock pick up the grains, the operator meanwhile carefully
noting the order in which the grains were picked
up: this was known as alectromancy (Gr., alektor, cock;
manteia, seership, divination).
Oracles are properly divinations obtainable only in
particular places (as temples and other sanctuaries), and
practiced only by duly qualified persons. There were
several kinds of oracles, viz.:
1. Oracles from Signs. The most ancient oracle of
this class was that of Zeus at Dodona, in Epirus, mentioned
by Homer. The priests of the sanctuary at Dodona
divined by observation of the rustling of the leaves
of the sacred oak; they also cast lots on the altar, or questioned
a sacred bronze basin.
452. Sententious Oracles. These were all sanctuaries
sacred to Apollo, and were numerous in Hellas and Asia
Minor. The most notable of them was one at Delphi.
The minister of the oracle of Delphi, a virgin priestess
called the Pythia, while questioning the oracle sat on a
tripod which stood over a crevice in the ground; thence
issued a gas, and, intoxicated by inhaling this, the Pythia
uttered words which the priests dressed up in verse or
in sententious form.
3. Dream Oracles. Of these there were many, in
sanctuaries dedicated to Asklepios (Aesculapius, god of
leechcraft) to which the sick were taken in order that
through interpretation of the dreams they had on the
spot they might obtain from the priests of Asklepios
counsel upon the healing of their complaints. The most
renowned of this class of oracles was at Epidaurus, in
Argolis.
Conjuration, which developed into magic, was much
used in ancient Greece, especially after the Greeks had
come in contact with the Oriental world; but the gods
and daemons concerned in this practice were all taken
from foreign mythologies. People believed in conjuration
of the weather, in transformation of men into animals,
in love potions, etc., and employed magic formulas
expressed in words that no one understood and that belonged
to no earthly language.
Such was the theology, and such the thaumatology[1]—image
and reflection—of Grecian religion. The two
46elements constitute the popular religion, the religion of
feeling, worship of the gods, as far as sensibility is concerned.
But in the most ancient times there stood over
against the popular religion (in Greece as in Egypt) a religion
of priests, their Initiates, and Elect; over against
the religion of feeling a religion of reflection; over
against the naif, sensorial view, the sentimental, romantic,
mystical one, the one which aims to acquire for belief
an ethical side, and to subordinate that to faith. This
phase of religion results from the mystic consideration
that the individual is essentially different from the divine
nature, subject thereto, and dependent on it; in short, it
results from the idea of “alienation from God,” toward
which the superstitions of seership, oracles and magic were
already showing the way. It was the impulse, given by
reflection, to “seek the lost god” that led to the
institution of mysteries in Greece: men were no
longer satisfied with gods that were but man’s
equals. The mysteries contradict the origin of religion
in feeling, they deny its dependence on art
and the beautiful; they ponder and brood over the lost
god, and are ever seeking him. They would subordinate
life and all its interests to his service; they would regulate
all man’s acts, and hence morality, according to faith;
they hold in contempt either man’s power or his knowledge.
The Grecian mysteries, indeed, borrowed from
the popular religion its art, and turned it to account, but
in them art was not cultivated for itself, and science
was completely ignored. As science was free in Hellas
and not tied to any priestly order, the mysteries could
47there render no service: there was nothing for them to
do. Of all the many philosophers of Greece, not one
employed the doctrines of the mysteries in his system:
not one showed any regard for them. The mysteries
were then what they had ever been, and still are, to wit,
self-introspection, interpretation of divine things, a
mourning over the lost god, and search after the same,
an endeavor for union with God, for grace and salvation,
a sensible delight in the thought of a god suffering
and dying, in meditation on the soul’s state after death,
on revelation, incarnation, and resurrection; and a representation
of all these ideas in dramatic forms and ceremonies
the main effect of which is to make an illusive
and blinding impression on the senses.
1. The original has Goetterglaube, belief in gods, and Wunderglaube,
belief in miracles, in allusion to the preceding section
2. Goetterglaube is of course equivalent to “theology,”
and if so, then Wunderglaube is equivalent to “thaumatology”
from Greek thaumata, miracles, and logos, discourse.
Thus, the Grecian mysteries were the exact opposite
of genuine Hellenism. Cheerfulness, joyousness, clearness
of perception and of thought, absence of all mists
and vapors, were the notes of your true Hellene: his
statues of gods with their grand, bold, full, rounded
contours to this day demonstrate this; and his superstition
even took things just as they looked to him. On
the other hand, gloom, ruefulness, a morbid, overweening,
owlish phantastry, symbolry, mysticism, with every
shallow trick of strained interpretation, and all the smugnesses
of pharisaic piety are the earmarks of your mystic.
On the one side day on the other night, there action here
quest and longing, there fact here makebelieve, there
alertness here moping, there a hearty meal off what is at
hand here a hungering and thirsting after truth that never
can be attained. The mysteries were therefore in every
way ungrecian, outlandish, and abnormal. They had no
fit place on Hellenic soil, nor in that age; they were the
propaedeutic of a future age when one should come upon
48the scene who was to hurl Olympos, Okeanos, and Hades
into the everlasting night of oblivion.
And yet from the difference between the Grecian
mysteries and the ordinary life of the people it by no
means follows that the Initiates did not find satisfaction,
at least a partial satisfaction, in these mystic exercitations.
The man who nurses the feeling of a want for something
other than what his times and his surroundings
afford, finds at the last in his very brooding the satisfaction
of his need. Sentimental, romantic, fanciful, and
mystical characters, therefore, must find uncommon delight
in mysteries, while practical, clear-sighted, undistorted,
and strictly logical minds are unmoved by them.
Let us then listen to the testimony of two celebrated
mystae, a Grecian and a Roman, both, it is true, living in
a time when their respective nations had begun to decline.
The tragic poet Euripides sings: “O blest is he
whose fortune it is to have learned the divine initiations;
he sanctifies his life.” And Cicero (De Legibus II., 14)
makes Marcus say to Atticus: “Of all the grand, and as
I fain would think, the divine elements imported by thy
Athens into human life, there is nought better than those
Mysteries whereby we have been developed out of rudeness
and savagery and trained to the human manner of
life. And we, too, even as the Mysteries are called Initia
(beginnings) so in them have found the principles (a play
on words, “initia” and “principia,” principles, being
homonyms) of right living, and have learned not only to
live joyously, but also to die with better hope.” Then, as
shadow follows light, he adds: “The thing I do mislike
in the nocturnal rites, is told in the comic poets. Were
such liberties permitted in Rome, what had not that infamous
wretch (Clodius) done, who brought lewdness
49into the presence of certain sacred rites upon which ’twere
sin even to glance unwittingly.”
The Grecian mysteries were no monopoly of the
priests or of any other class: no man was excluded except
such as by their life proved themselves unworthy of
initiation. The origin of these mysteries is found in the
rites of Purification and Atonement. In the earliest times
the purifications were nothing but bodily cleansings prescribed
to those who took part in religious ceremonies:
later they took on a moral significance, as the sense of
alienation from God gained ground. With the consciousness
of sin, with the need of obtaining forgiveness,
and, to that end, of knowing a deity free from all sin, and
hence totally unlike man, mysticism begins and develops.
Expiations came into vogue little by little, especially for
bloodguiltiness, and were used in the popular religion.
These consisted of certain ceremonies in which the blood
of animals and incense were employed; in the case of individuals
such rites might lessen the punishment under
mitigating circumstances; they might, in the case of cities
and states, efface the stains of murderous crimes committed
during revolts or civil strifes. In all the mysteries
purifications and expiations played a great part. Whatever
has been handed down with regard to these mysteries
is found in the sections following.
The most ancient, most celebrated, and most venerable
among the Grecian mysteries were those instituted
at Eleusis, in Attica, in honor of the goddess Demeter
(called by the Latins Ceres) and her daughter Persephone
(Proserpina), and later of a male deity also, known
50in the mysteries under the name of Iacchos; and though
there is no affinity between the letters I and B, Iacchos
came in time to stand for Bacchus. The original Iacchos
would seem to have been a god in the people’s religion,
and this name is probably related to Jao (found in Jovispater,
Jupiter) and to the Hebrew Yahve. Diodorus (I.,
94) gives the name Jao to the God of the Hebrews; and
an oracular utterance of the Apollo of Claros says:
Know thou that the highest of all the gods is named Jao,
and In Winter Aides, and Zeus in opening Spring,
then Helios in Summer, and once more Jaos in Fall.
The fact that Jaos was the harvest-god tended strongly
to identify him with Bacchus, personification of the
sun which ripens the grape; and, besides, Bacchus was
allied to Demeter (originally Gemeter—Earthmother) who
was the patroness of husbandry. The name of the city,
Eleusis, means in Greek “advent”, and it commemorates
the stay of Demeter there in the course of her wandering
in search of her daughter: a like story is told of Isis in
Egypt. In gratitude for their hospitality, Demeter bestowed
on the people of Eleusis the bread-grain and the
mysteries. From Eleusis the cult of the two deities
spread all over Greece and part of Asia Minor, and in a
modified form passed into Italy: in several places arose
affiliated institutions resembling that at Eleusis, having
the same festivals and the same secret cult; but Eleusis
always held the supremacy. The buildings at Eleusis, in
the pure Doric style, consisted of the temple of Demeter
and the Mystic House, in which the secret festivals were
held. They were connected with Athens by the “Sacred
Way”, a road flanked by temples and sanctuaries: in
Athens itself was an Eleusinian building (Eleusinion)
51in which a portion of the mysteries was celebrated. In
front of the city gate toward the Piraeus was also a
sanctuary dedicated to this cult, and furthermore an
Eleusinion at Agrae. The buildings at Eleusis stood
till the fourth century of our era: they were then destroyed
by the Goths under Alaric, at the instigation of
monkish fanatics.
The Eleusinia were always under the direction of the
Athenian Government. When Athens became a democracy
the functions till then performed by the King, as
protector of the Eleusinia, devolved on the head of the
executive, the Archons, who, therefore, bore the title
Basileus (king) because the most important duties of the
King had been concerned with Eleusis and its Mysteries.
The Basileus was assisted by four councilors (epimeletae),
of whom two were chosen from among the Athenians,
and other two from the two Eleusinian gentes,
Eumolpidae, and Kerytae. The report on the celebration
of the Mysteries was always rendered to the Grand
Council (Boule) of Athens, assembled in the Eleusinion.
The function of priest in the institutions at Eleusis was
always the exclusive privilege of the Eumolpidae and
Kerytae. The chief of the priests was the hierophant,
and with him was associated a hierophantess. Next to
these in dignity were the torchbearer (daduchus), the
sacred herald (hierokeryx), and the “altar-priest.” These
officials constituted the Sacred Council, which had the
immediate direction of the mysteries.
It would be a great mistake to regard the Eleusinian
Mysteries as a result of illuminism or rationalism. Rather
were they an institution not less religious, not less faithful
to the ancient traditions than the popular religion
itself; with this difference only, that the latter contented
52itself with honoring the gods contemplated in the human
form, while the mysteries emphasized the infinite pre-eminence
of the divine nature over the human. Hence
the mystic religion was guarded by the state authorities
with the same zeal as the anthropomorphic religion of the
vulgar.
No one saw in the one any danger to the other. The
two forms of religion were branches of one tree, Pantheism,
and herein only differed, that the one saw the Divine
in all earthly things, the other sought for it there and
strove for union with it. It is equally vain to look in
the Eleusinia for either Rationalism or Monotheism.
Monotheism, i. e., absolute severance of the earthly from
the divine without hope of union, was a purely Oriental
idea, quite incomprehensible to the Grecian mind: no ancient
Greek writer ever dreamed of a creative demiurgus,
in the Egyptian sense, nor of an angry and revengeful
Yahve, like the Hebrews.
So great was the veneration for the Eleusinia among
the Grecian states, that during the mystic festivals
hostilities were suspended between opposing armies;
and despisers of the mysteries, betrayers of the secret
doctrine, and unbidden witnesses of the rites, were punished
capitally or with lifelong banishment. In the year
411 B. C. the poet Diagoras of Melos, who threw a figure
of Herakles into fire, to put the hero to his thirteenth
labor, and who had betrayed the mysteries, was banished
for his irreligion. Even after the death of Hellenic
liberty the Roman emperors took an interest in maintaining
the Eleusinian sanctuaries. Hadrian sought and
obtained the initiation, Antoninus erected edifices at
Eleusis, nay, some of the early Christian emperors, as
Constantius II. and Jovian, in their decrees forbidding
53nocturnal festivals made an exception of the Eleusinia;
and after the destruction of the sacred buildings, the rites
seem to have been still practiced.
The sum of all that is known of the doctrine taught
at Eleusis is as follows: The myth underlying these
mysteries was the rape, by Pluto, of Persephone, daughter
of Demeter. Pluto, god of the netherworld in the popular
belief, lord of the abode of the damned, in other terms,
the personification of the sun that goes down in the west,
hence of the sun of the nighttime, or of the Wintertime,
carries off Persephone (personification of the world of
plants), as she is plucking flowers (for as the cold season
comes on the flowers wither and die), and takes her with
him to the realm of shades, where she occupies the throne
with him. But her mother Demeter, being, as goddess of
the earth, the mother of the plant-world, and so too protectress
of husbandry, wanders about lamenting, for indeed
the earth loses its adornments, its loveliest features, in Winter.
But at last the gods take pity on the hapless wanderer
and bring about an agreement between her and Pluto,
whereby Persephone is permitted to live in the upperworld
in Summer, returning to the netherworld for Winter: here
is signified the fecundity of the soil, and also the resurrection
of man after his body has been dropped like a grain
of corn in the earth. The union of Persephone with
Bacchus, i. e., with the sun-god whose work is to promote
fruitfulness, is an idea special to the mysteries, and means
the union of humanity with godhead, the consummation
aimed at in the mystic rites. Hence in all probability
the central teaching of the mysteries was Personal Immortality,
analogue of the return of the bloom to plants
in Spring.
Now the festivals at Eleusis have reference to this
54myth. Of these festivals there were two, the Lesser Eleusinia
in Spring (the month Anthesterion, March), when the
ravished one came up out of the netherworld into the
sunlight; these festivals were observed at Agrae; and the
Greater Eleusinia in Autumn (the month Boedromion,
October), when she must follow her sullen spouse again to
Hades; they were observed at Athens and Eleusis. There
was a preliminary celebration at Athens, and at Eleusis the
high celebration. The preliminary solemnity lasted six
days, Boedromion 15th to 20th. On the first day Initiates
from every region wherever the Greek language was heard
and Grecian hearts beat for the gods, assembled in the
Poecile at Athens and there heard the order of the exercises
proclaimed by the Hierophant, after his aides had
first in a loud voice bidden the bloodguilty to depart. On
the second day the mystae were summoned to go down to
the seashore and to perform in the sacred brine the act of
purification, requisite for a worthy observance of the
solemnity. The remaining days were spent in performing
the prescribed sacrifices, sharing in the sacrificial banquets,
and making the customary solemn processions.
On the sixth day came the grand Iacchus Procession,
numbering thousands of mystae, of both sexes; these, issuing
from the Sacred Gate, wended along the Sacred Road
to Eleusis. They wore crowns of parsley and myrtle, and
in their hands carried ears of corn, implements of husbandry
and torches; for though the procession set out
betimes it moved slowly, and reached the destination late,
to celebrate the festival in the hallowed night. Iacchus
himself was believed to be the leader of the procession,
which was headed by his image in the form of a babe with
costly toys and cradle. The line of march lay along the
brink of the sea over the same flowery fields and grassy
55meadows of the Thriasian plains, which had been the scene
of the rape of Persephone. The route was fourteen miles
long, but to the participants in their festive mood it was
short, and besides they made frequent halts at the various
sanctuaries on the way, practicing mystic rites and offering
sacrifices. The rude wild chorus of the Hymn to Iacchus
resounded, with intervals of animated dances and flute-playing,
and frequent shouts of Io, Iacchus, hail! But as
we learn from the “Frogs” of Aristophanes, the processionists
meanwhile indulged freely in merriment, chaffing
their fellows, and making love to the women and girls. It
was customary for women to make the journey in wains
till a demagogue in the time of Demosthenes procured the
abolition of this “privilege of the rich.”
In the evening of the first day at Eleusis the mystae
in common drank of the sacred potion Kykeon, by
which Demeter was comforted at Eleusis during her wandering.
It was a decoction of barley, wine, and grated
cheese; to these afterward were added, one by one, honey,
milk, certain herbs, salt, and onions. During the three
succeeding nights the performing of the mystic rites and
the initiations took place, the principal feature being the
torch-processions representing Demeter’s search for Persephone:
during the day the Initiates seem to have fasted.
After the initiations the festival was transformed into a
scene of merriment and gymnastic competition. Probably
the mystae returned to Athens processionally, and there
the report on the festival was made to the Boule, whose
non-initiated members had first to retire.
It was at these festivals that the rites of initiation
into the Eleusinian mysteries were performed. Initiation
was in two degrees, viz., that of the Lesser, and that of
the Greater mysteries. Initiation into the Lesser mysteries
56took place during the preliminary festival, and that
into the Greater mysteries either at the greater festival
next ensuing or at the greater festival of a subsequent year.
The Initiates of the Lesser mysteries were called Mystae,
those of the Greater mysteries, Epoptae (those who have
seen). It is probable that at both of the annual festivals
the mystae took part only in the external ceremonies, and
that only the Epoptae (or adepts) were admitted into the
Sacred House at Eleusis, or inducted into the occult meaning
of the festivals and ceremonies: this we infer from the
exceedingly large number of the mystae.
The one who wished to be admitted to the mysteries
had to apply to an initiated citizen of Athens, who by
appointment of the authorities served as mediator between
him and the priests: hence he was called Mystagogos,
guide or sponsor of the postulant. As a rule the postulant
was required to be a Hellene. Foreigners were admitted
only when they were men of distinction, such, for
example, as the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis. After
the conquest of Greece by the Romans, Roman citizens
stood on equality with Hellenes. There was no discrimination
on the ground of sex. But no one stained
with bloodguiltiness could be admitted.
Those who came up for admission to the degree of
Epoptes, and who, as we suppose, had never entered
the “Mystic House,” were left to wander through its
mazes, in profound darkness, meeting toils and hindrances
and dangers. Then followed rites in which the courage
of the candidates was subjected to the severest tests, so
as to fill them with “fear and trembling and dread amaze.”
It is very probable that the terrors of the test were borrowed
from the Grecian ideas of the netherworld. But
after the darkness came brightness, after Tartarus Elysium,
57the Field of the Blest. The epoptes was suddenly
gladdened by a miraculous light; smiling plains and
meadows invited his footsteps, whence we must infer
that the Mystic House was furnished forth with most
ingenious scenic mechanisms, as trapdoors, magic lanterns,
and other optical contrivances. Celestial voices
and harmonies were heard, charming dances were executed,
eye and ear were flattered by a display of the uttermost
resources of Grecian art; and last came the most impressive
scene of all, when the hierophant threw open the
door of the inmost shrine of Demeter, bade the epoptae
enter in, withdrew the veils from the images of the gods
(whose true meaning was thus made known), and showed
godhead in its most radiant splendor.
That the Initiates of the mysteries regarded their
chances in the netherworld as better than those of the profane
we learn not only from the sarcastic Aristophanes,
who in the “Frogs” scores the mystae as in myrtle groves
they revel amid fluting and dancing, while the profane
wander in darkness and mire, lapping water like dogs;
but the serious-minded Sophocles tells us the same thing
in a fragment quoted by Plutarch: “O, thrice blest the
mortals who have witnessed these solemn rites, when they
go down to Hades: for them alone is there life in the
netherworld; for all others bootless affliction and misery.”
Next after the Eleusinia, the most ancient and renowned
of the Grecian mysteries were those of the
Cabiri in the island of Samothrace. Who the Kabeiroi
were—men, or intermediate beings half human, half
divine, also how many they were, no satisfactory conclusion
58has yet been reached on these points. But they
date from very high antiquity, before the evolution of the
several Grecian deities. In Egypt, according to Herodotus
(III., 37), they were “worshiped as sons of Hephaestus
(he means Ptah, god of Memphis); and were, like
their father, figured in the shrine as Pygmies.” That in
the language of Phoenicia Kabirim means “the great, the
mighty ones,” is of no consequence, for here “great” is
not used in the sense of bodily largeness. Neither is it
any objection that in Greece the Kabeiroi are regarded
as beings subordinate to the gods: for the earlier gods
ever do take second place when new gods get footing.
In early Egyptian mythology and religion the Cabiri were
personifications of the stars; and the mysteries of Samothrace
were originally an astromythology, though in time
their astral significations were forgotten. From a remark
of Herodotus (II., 51) that the Athenians got from the
Pelasgians inhabiting the island of Samothrace their custom
of figuring Hermes with the Phallus (and everyone
who has acquaintance with the secret cult of the Cabiri
knows what that means), we are led to infer that in the
Cabiric mysteries the reproductive forces of nature played
an important part: the symbol of those forces, the Phallus,
was employed by the nations of the East and from them
passed to the Greeks, who originally had no leaning
toward such obscene imaginings. The same inference is
suggested by Juvenal’s remark that in love affairs it was
the fashion to swear by the Cabiri. For initiation into
the Samothracian mysteries the novice was required to
submit to a purification by fire and to fumigation, and to
make a sort of confession. Plutarch tells of a Spartan
who at his initiation inquired of the priest whether he
should confess his sins to him or to the gods; and on the
59priest replying, “To the gods.” “Then,” said the penitent,
“give way, I will tell it to the godhead alone.” Men,
women, even children were initiated, and the professed
received a purple band, which they wore around the body,
in the assurance that by this means they would be safe
against perils by sea.
The Greeks used to tell of their fabled heroes, Orpheus,
Agamemnon, Odysseus, etc., that they were Initiates
of these mysteries; and Philip II. of Macedon and
his queen Olympias, parents of Alexander the Great,
underwent this initiation. There were Cabirian mysteries
also in several other Grecian islands, and in several places
on the continent, both in Greece and in Asia Minor.
In the island of Crete were celebrated the mysteries
of Zeus. According to the myth, the father of
the gods and lord of all the world, to foil the designs of
his father Cronos, who had devoured all his other children,
was, while yet a child, taken by his mother Rhea to
that island for refuge, and there guarded in a grotto of
Mt. Ida and nourished with milk and honey by the people,
who meanwhile, by dealing blows on each other’s shields,
kept up such a din as drowned the wailing of the babe.
In Crete was also shown a sepulchre of Zeus. Regarding
the Cretan mysteries we know this only, that in the Springtime
the birth of the god was commemorated at the grotto
and his death at the sepulchre, and that the while the
young people (who represented the Curetae), in armor,
with dance and song and with loud beating of cymbals
and drums, enacted the story of the childhood of Zeus.
60
An ancient national cult among the Hellenes, into
which a mystic element was imported from without, was
the worship of Dionysos or Bacchus, i. e., of the sun as
promoting the growth of the vine: its end was plainly to
glorify the physical world, the material world, in all its
manifestations of life and force. Hence the Bacchus cult
is one predominantly materialistic, addressed to the sense
of bodily pleasure, the appetite for food and the sexual
desire; and yet, inasmuch as viticulture, like agriculture,
is one of the factors of civilization, and as the Drama had
its origin in these Dionysiac festivals, it cannot be denied
that for many elements of our intellectual and spiritual
culture we are indebted to this cult. Of the festivals of
Dionysos some belonged exclusively to the popular religion,
but others were connected with mysteries. Those
of the former class had their chief seat in Attica, the others
elsewhere. Of these non-mystic festivals of Dionysos in
Attica there were seven, occurring in different months of
the year, from the season of the vintage in Autumn till
toward Spring, or while the new wine was in fermentation;
and some of these festivals were held in the country,
others in the city. On such occasions gymnastic sports
of a ludicrous sort were carried on, as dancing on one leg,
leaping on a leathern bag blown up with air and greased
with oil outside, and trying to maintain equilibrium, etc.
At the head of a procession composed of men and women
of all ranks and degrees were borne the sacrificial implements,
then followed the victim, a he-goat, and soon
came the image of the Phallus, borne aloft with great
pomp. So little did the Greeks possess of our peculiar
sense of shame that they looked on this symbol as something
61entirely proper, not scrupling even to sing satirical
verses about it. After the sacrifice came jesting, banter,
travesty, and with travesty pantomime, in which was
enacted the history of the god, including of course his
fabled adventures. The stage had its rise in such festivals
as these. The Spring festival, held in the month Anthesterion
(month of flowers) was kept with special solemnity.
It marked the time when the wine was racked off into the
earthen pots. It was at this festival that the Basilissa
(wife of the Basileus), accompanied by fourteen other
women, entered the holy of holies of the ancient temple
of Dionysos (at all other times women were forbidden to
enter it), and there made a secret offering with mystic rites
and vows.
But we have the genuine “mysterium” in the Dionysia
Trietera, or triennial festival of Dionysos. Festivals of
this class seem to have originated in Thrace, and hence
among a people of Pelasgian stock. The spirit of the
Thracians, which was naturally of a gloomy cast, but
when their slumbering passions were awakened became
wildly enthusiastic, seemed in these festivals, or rather
these transports of moral frenzy, to pass into the persons of
the lighthearted and selfcontrolled Hellenes. The mad
extravaganza of this phenomenon in the history of man
and his ways is seen in the Grecian hero-myth, which tells
of the great singer Orpheus and Pentheus, king of Thebes,
being torn limb from limb by the furious Maenads at
festivals of Bacchus, the former because after the death of
his beloved Eurydice he never more would hear of woman’s
love, and the latter because he had spied on the festivals.
For these festivals were observed by women exclusively,
who, drunken with wine, knew no restraints of reason
or humanity: they were called maenades (madwomen)
or Bacchae, and their festivals Orgia (orgies). The orgies
62were conducted on mountain sides or in mountain gorges
at night under the light of torches, the fair participants,
clothed in fawnskins, armed with the thyrsus wreathed
with ivy and vine leaves, with hair disheveled, and, as the
story goes, snakes tangled with its locks, or held in the
bacchantes’ hands. This festival, which occurred in the
mild midwinter of Hellas, the time of shortest days and
longest nights, continued over several days, during which
the maenads, shunning all association with the male sex,
sacrificed, drank, danced, jubilated, made noise with the
double-pipe and the brazen tymbal, nay, as the (manifestly
improbable) story runs, with their own hands tore
asunder the bull, symbol of the god, and destined to the
sacrifice, and gloated over the victim’s bellowing for pain.
This feat was to show forth the death of Zagreus, one of
the forms under which Dionysos appeared, and in which
he was torn asunder by the Titans because he had been
chosen by Zeus for his successor as ruler of the universe.
The flesh of the bull was torn in shreds with the teeth by
the maenads and devoured raw. Then the raving Bacchae
invented a fable about the death of their god, and
how he was lost and how he must be found again. But
all the anxious searching was vain, and hope was centered
in the finding again of the all-quickening Springtide. The
observance of the Dionysia was not marked with these extravagances
everywhere: in Attica such excesses were
never seen. But Athenian women would attend the secret
festival on Parnassus near Delphi, heedless of the mantle
of snow on the summit.
The worst disorders of Bacchus worship, as practiced
in Greece, would seem to have been equaled, or even
63surpassed, in the Roman Commonwealth. The historian
Livy (xxxix., 8–20) compares the introduction of the cult
into the city and its rapid spread to a visitation of plague.
According to Livy the cult was brought to Rome from
Etruria. In its Etruscan and Roman form the worship
of Bacchus was simply debauchery, under the thinnest
possible cloak of religion. The festivals or orgies
were at first observed by women; but a certain priestess
of Bacchus, by command of the god, introduced the innovation
of admitting men, and instead of three Bacchic
festivals a year, instituted five festivals for each month;
and whereas in Etruria the rites had been practiced in
the day time, they now began to be held at night. From
considerations of prudence the abominations of the Bacchanalia
were guarded from public view by a hedge of
ceremonial, and postulants for admission were required
to practice for several days the strictest continence. But
the term of probation being over, and the postulant admitted
to the company of the Bacchanals, he or she found
themselves surrounded by all conceivable incitements to
the gratification of lust, in every way that the depraved
instincts of man or woman had ever before, or perhaps
has ever since contrived. According to Livy the Initiates
of these mysteries numbered several thousand persons in
the city, many of them belonging to the most distinguished
families. In addition to the abominations of
their secret meetings the Initiates were charged with conspiring
against the commonwealth, with forgery of last
testaments, with poisonings and assassinations, with the
most revolting rapes. In the year 186 B. C. the Consul
Spurius Postumius Albinus, having privately made inquiries
into the doings of the sect, resolved to employ all
the resources of the state for its suppression. The circumstances
64which led to this resolution were as follows: A
youth of noble birth, Publius Aebutius, whose father was
dead, was the ward of his stepfather, Titus Sempronius
Rutilus. Now Sempronius had mismanaged the estate
of Aebutius, and was unable to give an account of his
guardianship, and therefore wished either to have the
youth put out of the way, or to get him under his power.
The easiest way was by debauching him in the Bacchanalia.
Aebutius’s mother, devoted to her husband, pretended
to the son that during his illness she had made
vow to the gods to consecrate him to Bacchus in the event
of recovery. Aebutius, nothing suspecting, told of this to
one Hispala, a damsel of questionable reputation, with
whom he had for some time been very intimate; but she
entreated him for all the gods’ sake not to have anything
to do with the Bacchanalia: that she herself, as maid, had
been initiated with her mistress, and knew what shocking
deeds were done in those assemblies. Having promised
her that he would not seek initiation, he made his resolution
known to his parents, and was by them turned out
of their house. Aebutius made complaint to his aunt
Aebutia, and by her advice to the Consul Postumius.
The Consul summoned Hispala to his presence, and from
her, not without difficulty, for she feared the vengeance
of the sect, learned what she knew of the proceedings at
the secret assemblies. Then he brought the matter before
the Senate, who gave to him and his colleague,
Quintus Marcius Philippus, full powers for the suppression
of the evil. Rewards were offered for trustworthy
testimony, measures were taken to prevent the escape
of guilty ones, and there were numerous arrests. Seven
thousand persons in all were implicated, and all Italy
awaited the outcome of the prosecution intently and with
65alarm. The ringleaders and a multitude of their accomplices
were put to death, others were condemned to imprisonment
or were exiled. Aebutius and Hispala received
a large money reward; and Hispala furthermore
was admitted to all the rights and privileges of a Roman-born
freewoman, without prejudice from her previous
disreputable career. A decree of the Senate forbade forever
the holding of the Bacchanalia in Rome or in Italy.
The decree provided that if any one should consider such
rites obligatory and necessary, or should think that he
could not omit them without incurring the guilt of irreligion,
he must lay the case before the Praetor Urbanus,
and the Praetor must consult the Senate. If leave were
granted in a senate having not less than one hundred
members present, he (the person desiring to practice the
worship of the god) might perform the rites, provided that
not more than five persons were present at them, and
that there was no common fund, nor any master of the
ceremonies, or priest. All places sacred to Bacchus worship
were ordered to be destroyed, “except there be here
or there an ancient altar or consecrated image” of the god.
But the prohibition of the Bacchanalia could not be kept
in force perpetually. The abuses of the Bacchus cult went
on unchecked outside of Italy, and by degrees sprung up
again even on Italian ground, till they reached the pitch
of absolute shamelessness in imperial times, as when the
notorious Messalina, and other imperial strumpets, celebrated
the most shocking orgies in the very palace.
Near akin to the Dionysos cult, in many points
coinciding with it, as well as with one another, and also,
like the depraved forms of that cult, surreptitiously introduced
66from the Orient into Greece and then into Rome,
we have the mysteries of the mother of the gods Rhea or
Cybele, those of Mithras, and those of Sabazios—cults
and deities that were finally grouped together by the
Orphic sect, of which anon.
Rhea was sister and spouse of Cronos and mother of
the king of the gods, Zeus, whom she took to Crete, as we
have already seen, to save him from his father’s violence.
She is the Earth deified, like her mother Gaea, and is
therefore often confounded with other goddesses answering
to the same element, specially with the earth-goddess
Kybele (Cybele), named after Mt. Kybelos or Kybela
in Phrygia, who, according to Phrygian myth, when exposed
by her father, King Maeon, was suckled by panthers
and brought up by herdsmen, and afterward fell in
love with the youth Attis (afterward Papas, both meaning
“father”), of whom she exacted a vow of chastity as
her priest. Attis having broken his vow for the sake of
a lovely nymph, the goddess in her wrath deprived him of
reason, and in his frenzy he castrated himself. The goddess
thereupon ordained that in future all her priests
should be eunuchs. There are countless other stories told
of Attis and Cybele, but they nearly all agree in telling
that Attis with manhood lost life also, and that Cybele,
frenzied by grief, thereafter roamed about disconsolate and
despairing. Like Dionysos, she was always followed by
a long human and animal retinue (the moon with the
starry host!), and rode in a wain drawn by lions, a mural
crown circling her veiled head; while Attis was always
represented as an ecstatically sentimental youth beneath a
tree, with the Phrygian cap on his head and wearing white
bag trousers. In Phrygia Cybele was worshiped under
the form of a simple stone. The scene of her feats and
67sufferances was laid in gorgeous wildernesses, in fragrant
groves, among the hillsides and glades known to the
shepherd and the hunter. As in Dionysos we see the wild
abandon of a jovial spirit, so in Cybele we have the recklessness
of a soul weary of life; hence at her festivals all
centred in the loss of Attis, and a pine tree was felled, because
his catastrophe took place under a tree of that species.
All this was accompanied by a hubbub of wild music, and
the winding of horns on the second day announced the
resurrection of Attis. In the ecstasy of joy the participants
were seized by a wild frenzy. With shouts and
cries, their long locks disheveled, and in their hands bearing
torches, the priests danced and capered like madmen,
roaming over hill and dale, mutilating themselves, even
emasculating themselves (as the myth required), and bearing
about, instead of the figure of the Phallus, the proofs
of their compliance with the precept of the goddess. The
cult of Cybele was for the first time formally organized as
a mystic society in Rome, but the orgiast frenzy clung to
it at all times. The processions did not move with measured
steps and in orderly ranks, as those of other cults,
but the Initiates ran in confused troops, shouting their
religious songs, through hamlets and towns, armed with
curved blades, tokens of castration. At Rome the priests
of Cybele were called Galli, that is, cocks. In the time of
the emperors purifications in the blood of bulls and rams
were introduced, apparently in honor of the Springtide,
when the sun enters the constellations Taurus and Aries,
and the vegetable powers of nature reappear. That is the
theme of all the ancient mysteries, and indeed of all mysticism
from the earliest times to this day. In all of them
the vicissitudes of the vegetal world, its sickening, decline,
and death in the Fall, its new-birth and resurrection in the
68Spring, are allegorized into the sufferances, the death and
the resurrection of a god. Out of this nature-cult are
little by little developed the feeling of alienation of man
from God, the quest for the god, the finding of him, and
the consequent reunion, with the result of strengthening
the assurance of the soul’s immortality. The excess of sensual
delight found in the Bacchanalia, and the extreme renunciation
of delights by the castrate ministers of Cybele,
are only variations of one same theory of human life.
Now, as this suffering godhead—which was the prime
inspiration of all these sensualists and adventurers—was
an importation from Thrace in the form of Zagreus-Dionysos,
and from Phrygia as Attis, so was Mithras an
importation from Persia. Among the ancient Persians
Mithras was the light, conceived as a personality, and
hence was the highest manifestation of the good god
Ormuzd, while the darkness represented Ahriman, the
evil god. Hence the worship of Mithras is worship of the
light, and, therefore is the purest cult that heathendom
could imagine; in the later times of the Persian empire
Mithras worship was combined with sun-worship, and
Mithras, as sun-god, found a place in the religion of
European peoples. In those later times also came belief
in a female deity called Mithra: but Mithra was unknown
to the primitive Persians, and the name was a transformation
of the Babylonian Mylitta, the moon-goddess.
Of the existence of secret cults among the Persians we
know nothing whatever, hence nothing about any mysteries
sacred to Mithras. To the Greeks Mithras was unknown,
but in the latter days of the Roman empire, among
many mysteries those of Mithras made their appearance
and even gained great pre-eminence, as is proved by
numerous monuments still extant. These monuments all
69consist of representations in stone of a young man in a
cave, wearing the Phrygian cap, in the act of slaying with
a dagger a bull; all around are figures of men and animals,
all symbolical of constellations, as the scorpion, dog, serpent,
etc. The groups have been variously interpreted,
but the most probable view is that the youth stands for
the sun-god, who, on subduing Taurus (in May), begins
to develop his highest power.
The mysteries of Mithras, like their symbolic representation
in the monuments, were celebrated in grottoes,
and had for their original end worship of light and of the
sun, and the glorifying of the sun’s victory over
the darkness; but this lofty idea gave way, in
these as in other mysteries, to vain reveries and
subtilities; and in the corrupt age of the Roman
emperors it had, in all probability, some very ugly
developments, such as were seen in the Bacchanalia.
The rites of initiation were more elaborate than in the
Grecian mysteries. The postulants were subjected to a
long series of probationary tests—eighty in all, it is supposed—which
grew more and more severe till they became
actually dangerous to life. Among the initiatory rites the
principal ones were a baptism and the drinking of a potion
of meal and water. Admission to the highest secrets
was reached through several degrees, probably seven, each
having its special ritual and its special doctrines. At
times the Initiates were required to fast, and those of the
highest degree were vowed to celibacy. Such abstinences
were all unknown to the ancient Persians; on the other
hand human sacrifices came in with Mithraism from the
East, and, despite the decrees of the Emperor Hadrian,
such sacrifices were offered in the Mithras cult. Commodus
with his own hand immolated a man to Mithras,
70and his successors, in particular the monster Heliogabalus,
carried the abomination farther, and made of
the pure god of light a bloodthirsty Moloch. Nay, after
the empire had been christianized, Julian the apostate
consecrated in Constantinople a sanctuary to Mithras.
But after the death of Julian the cult was forbidden in
the empire (A. D. 378) and the grotto of Mithras at
Rome destroyed. Coins were struck in honor of Mithras,
and he was honored with public inscriptions in the
words, Soli Invicto (to the unconquered sun); a festival
also was instituted in his honor, called the Natal Day
of the Unconquered Sun: it fell on December 25th and
was publicly observed: the same day was in Persia New
Year’s. In the monuments already mentioned, which
commemorate the worship of Mithras, are seen inscribed
alongside the neck of the bull the words “Nama Sebesio,”
supposed by some to be a mixture of Sanskrit and
Persian, and to signify Worship to the Pure; but in these
words we have an allusion to a new god and his cult.
In the latter Graeco-Roman time, when the mystery craze
possessed all minds, a combination of Zagreus, Attis, and
Mithras was made, and the result was dubbed Sabazius.
The name Sabazius is given by sundry writers to various
gods and sons of gods, and the word comes probably
from the Greek verb Sabazein (to smash, break to pieces),
indicating the wild disorder of this cult. Diodorus gives
this name to the inventor of the use of oxen in ploughing,
other authors confound Sabazius, as discoverer of the
vine, with Bacchus. There existed in Greece a public
and a secret cult of Sabazius, both resembling the Bacchic
cult, with ludicrous dances, uproarious singing, and loud
thumping of cymbals and drums. The orator Aeschines,
rival of Demosthenes, was an enthusiastic Sabazist. At
71initiation into the Sabazian mysteries the postulant had
snakes dropped into his bosom, was robed in fawnskin,
his face daubed with clay, then washed in token of a
mystic purification; he was now to exclaim: From evil I
am escaped and have found the better. There was much
hocuspocus and absurd jugglery withal, but the real object
was to give opportunity to Initiates of both sexes
to indulge in the most shameless gluttony and lewdness.
The priests of this cult were the most impudent of mendicants.
Aristophanes exhausted on Sabazius, the “trumpery
god,” all the resources of his caustic sarcasm.
And thus in time, as Grecian philosophy began to
undermine the thrones of the Olympian gods, and to
banish the phantoms of the netherworld, and the educated
people to look on the fair forms of the world of gods as
fictions of imagination; simultaneously the mysteries
began to be stript of the glory of a heavenly origin, and
it was seen that their rites were not only of the earth
earthy, but as time went on, that they were become mischievous:
yet the Initiates, lost to all shame and all moral
sense, persisted nevertheless in their sacred hypocrisy, till
heathendom as a whole had passed out of the bloody,
hideous night of the gods.
PART THIRD. The Pythagorean League and Other Secret Associations . — 1. PYTHAGORAS. — 2. THE PYTHAGOREANS. — 3. THE ORPHICI. — 4. MYSTERIOUS PERSONAGES OF ANCIENT TIMES.
72
The mysteries so far considered had for their foundation
the worship of the gods. They were accessible
only to the initiated; but candidates for admission were
not carefully selected; and in Athens anyone of fair
repute was eligible for initiation into the Eleusinia. Nor
do we discern in the mysteries any “end” aimed at—any
idea to be realized, any thought to be embodied in action.
From all that we can learn with certainty regarding the
mysteries, their object was either simply to illustrate or
interpret certain ideas (such as we have already characterized)
by means of elaborate ceremonies; or—in their
state of decay and degeneration—to minister to unbridled
sensuality. For this reason we cannot regard the
mysteries we have been studying as true “secret societies,”
for the distinctive note of such societies is that they make
a special selection of their members, and have a specific
aim. The earliest historic instance of such a secret society
is afforded by the Pythagorean League.
The great philosopher Pythagoras was a sort of
Grecian Moses or Jesus, a Messiah to whom were ascribed
73supreme wisdom, far-reaching plans, ideas of worldwide
reform; who proclaimed new ideas, quite unknown in
the previous history of his nation, and preached a new
system of nature and of life; who gathered around him
disciples that swore in his words and pursued peculiar
ends disconnected from the interests of this world; who
on that account was, with his disciples, persecuted, prisoned,
and martyred for his principles, by a world which
deemed itself outraged; and whose history, because of its
extraordinary character, became deeply incrusted with
fable and fiction, till at last there was left only a figure
in which, if not quite impossible, it is certainly difficult, to
decide how far it conforms to the truth.
Pythagoras was born in the island of Samos B. C.
580, or, according to some authorities, 569. He is represented
as of distinguished presence and imposing stature.
That he possessed uncommon intellectual power is shown
by his scientific discoveries and by his wonderfully organized
discipleship. Even in his youthful years, it is related,
he busied himself with his favorite sciences, mathematics
and music, the mutual relations of which and their mutual
influence he is, in fact, believed to have discovered. His
years of study ended—of them we have no definite knowledge—his
years of travel followed. And whither should
a man in his day, athirst for wisdom, direct his steps if not
to the land of wonders on the Nile, where the veiled
image at Sais sat enthroned, and where the mystic silence
of the priests suggested to the visitant treasures of knowledge
hidden in their temples? Whether the counsel to
visit Egypt came from Thales, first of Grecian philosophers
to seek the land of Nile—tradition, which
gives the glamour to everything, likes to bring renowned
men together; whether Polycrates, tyrannos of Samos,
74commended him to his friend the Pharao Amasis—of
this we have no certainty, though the thing is not improbable,
for the chronology is consistent, especially when
we bear in mind the discrepancies between authors as to
the year of Pythagoras’s birth: at all events, Pythagoras
voyaged to Egypt. The serious difficulties he met with
on the part of the priests of Osiris, then not so complaisant
as they afterward became, we have described
already when giving account of the Egyptian mysteries.
By hook or by crook he obtained, whether at Thebes,
Heliopolis, or elsewhere, we know not, indoctrination in
the theology of the One God. But of what avail could
that be to him? His countrymen had already fashioned
their own ideas of the divine nature. They based their
theology on nature and spiritualized nature: the Greeks
knew nothing of an impassable gulf yawning between
god and world; for them these two were bound together
and pervaded each other: to such a people one could not
preach an “architect of the universe.” Pythagoras, therefore,
fain would communicate to the Greeks of the Egyptian
wisdom whatever seemed adapted to their use; and
he the more willingly complied with the Initiate’s oath to
observe lifelong silence regarding what he had seen and
heard in the temples, as his countrymen would not have
understood even a monotheism specially designed for
them. For the Greeks the intimate association between
god and universe was not only an idea, it was flesh of
their flesh, bone of their bones: it was gloriously immortalized
in the imperishable masterworks of their architecture
and sculpture, and surely Grecian sculptors must
not go to school in Egypt to learn how to carve cows’
horns and hawks’ heads. Nevertheless, the doctrine of
the one god must necessarily have impressed the mind of
75Pythagoras deeply: he must have recognized therein a
profound philosophy, though it may not have satisfied
him completely; and hence it was his task, as it was the
task of Plato and of all other Greeks initiated in the
Egyptian mysteries, to expound the doctrine of the one
god according to Grecian ideas—to couple Oriental wisdom
with Grecian fancy.
The traditional story represents Pythagoras as tarrying
in Egypt when the Persian king Cambyses conquered
the country, and tells how that tyrant had the Grecian
philosopher deported, with other captives, to Babylon,
where Pythagoras became acquainted with Zoroaster, and
to his knowledge of the Egyptian wisdom now added a
mastery of the wisdom of the Persians. Pythagoras was
undoubtedly contemporary with Cambyses; but the time
of Zoroaster is so undecided that the story must be regarded
as fiction.
When he returned to his native Samos, purposing to
set up as a master, he found to his chagrin that independent
science is a plant that does not thrive under
tyranny, and, compelled by force of circumstances to
change his abode, he settled in Magna Graecia—Southern
Italy. On the eastern coast, in what became afterward
Calabria, were two Achaean cities, Sybaris and Crotona.
Pythagoras intended at first to make his home in Sybaris,
but Sybaris could be no congenial home for such a philosopher.
Crotona afforded a more promising field for
his work, and there the labors of Pythagoras before long
were abundantly rewarded. The Greeks ever were eager
for novelties (novarum rerum cupidi), and whoever
brought anything new was welcome. As yet, philosophy
was a thing unknown among the Crotoniats; therefore
they received its apostle with gladness and enthusiasm.
76Pythagoras commenced by giving public lectures in the
council hall; as these awakened more and more interest
every day, the philosopher was employed by the authorities
to give counsel to the citizens; he then established a
school, thus adding to his public functions the duties of a
private instructor. Pythagoras used three agencies in his
work, viz., his Doctrine, his School, and the League instituted
by him.
The Doctrine of Pythagoras holds a distinct place
among the philosophic systems of the Greeks. With regard
to the opposition existing between the spiritual and
the physical, and the uncertainty and obscurity that reigns
as to the relations between them and the true constitution
of each, the doctrine solves all difficulties by the theory
that Number is at once the form and the substance of all
things. All things consist of Numbers, corporeal elements
as well as spiritual (mental, or intellectual) forces,
and henceforth Pythagoras’s philosophy became mathematics.
But the silly tricks with numbers that occupied
the ingenuity of later Pythagoreans possess no interest for
us. It is probable that the master contented himself with
the undeniable fact that the matter and essence of things
rest on mathematical relations—a view of great profundity,
considering the age in which the philosopher
lived. To Pythagoras and his school are credited the distinction
of numbers into even and odd, the decimal
numeration, square and cubic numbers, as also the famous
Pythagorean theorem, the triumph of geometry.
Pythagoras brought music into closest relation with
mathematics. As in numbers he recognized the most
perfect “harmony,” so he must needs regard harmony of
sounds as a necessary part of the harmony of numbers.
By this association he became the discoverer of our present
77scale of seven musical notes—the octave. But his
idea of harmony found most perfect embodiment in the
universal creation, and in astronomy he was the first to
surmise that the earth does not stand still, but has a
revolution around a centre; hence, that it is not the principal
existence in the universal frame of things, that all
things do not exist for its sake, that Earth is not twin
sister of the Heavens. True, Pythagoras had no idea,
nor could have in the then existing lack of astronomical
instruments, how the heavenly bodies were related: that
was the discovery of Copernicus and Kepler. He took
for the mid-point of the universe a “central fire” out of
which were formed all the heavenly bodies—this the seat
of the power that sustains the world, the centre of gravity
of all things. Around this central fire revolve the “ten”
heavenly bodies—farthest off the heaven of the fixed stars,
then the five planets known to antiquity, then the sun,
moon, earth, and lastly the “counter-earth”, which revolves
between the earth and the central fire. Revolving
along with the earth, the counter-earth is always interposed
between the earth and the central fire: light comes
to the earth only indirectly, by reflection from the sun.
When the earth is on the same side of the central fire as
the sun we have day; when it is on the other side, night.
Thus, Pythagoras may be said to have surmised a central
sun, though his theory did not contemplate the actual sun
as that centre. He was also the first to explain the vicissitudes
of the seasons by the obliquity of the earth’s axis
to the ecliptic. Further, he discovered the identity of the
morning and evening star. His school held the moon to
be the home of fairer and larger plants, animals, and human
creatures, than those of earth. In accordance with
his doctrine of harmony he ventured to express the bold
78idea that the heavenly bodies by their movement produce
tones which together constitute a perfectly harmonious
music—the music of the spheres. We do not hear this
harmony, being so wonted to it.
Nor did he fail to apply to the soul of man this doctrine
of harmony. By harmony the opposition between
reason and passion was to be reconciled. But as this
consummation is never to be achieved as long as soul
and body are tied together, the sage of Samos regarded
this union as a measure of probation, destined to endure
till man shall have made himself worthy of liberation
from the same; and when he fails of this during his span
of life, then his soul must migrate through the bodies of
other men and animals till it shall become worthy of
leading, in a higher region of light, an incorporeal life of
purity and perfection. His disciples, furthermore, cherished
the fantastic idea that the master was able to recognize
in another body the man whose soul had transmigrated
into it. That Pythagoras himself ever pretended
or believed that he himself was in his fifth metempsychosis,
or that he was son of Apollo, or that he had
a golden hip, or a golden thigh, are either ridiculous extravaganzas
of imaginative disciples or the sarcastic
stories of his enemies. But noble and beautiful are the
conclusions which he draws from his doctrine regarding
purity of life, namely, the moral precepts which he laid
down for the attainment of the supreme end. They required
an absolutely stainless life. Pythagoras enforced
the duty of reverence toward parents and the aged, fidelity
in friendship, strict self-examination, circumspection in
all our acts, patriotism, etc. Further, his disciples were
required to be cleanly of body and cleanly in attire; they
were to abstain from all “unclean” food, especially fleshmeat,
79and from intoxicating liquors, and hence to live on
bread and fruits only, but beans were an exception to
this rule; for some not fully explained reason beans were
an abomination to the Pythagoreans. And that which
was unfit as food was unfit also as matter for offerings to
God: for the god our philosopher reverenced was a god
of light and purity. His clear intellect rejected polytheism,
though what his view of the unity of godhead
was we know nothing save that his faith was an eminently
pure and exalted one.
The life of Pythagoras was devoted entirely to his
School and his League. The School was the seedfield
or seminary of the League, and the League was the practical
application of the School’s teaching. Thus the
School was preparatory to the League, whose members
were educated in the School.
Pythagoras enjoyed the boundless reverence of his
disciples: when they wished to assert any proposition as
indisputably true, they would say, He himself said it
(Gr., autos ephe, Lat., ipse dixit). And this reverence
for the Master increased as in time the School was
changed from an open institution to a secret one. For
at first everybody, even the most learned and most eminent
of the citizens, attended the lectures of the Philosopher.
Those who were simply hearers of the lectures
were called Acusmatics (akusmatikoi). But those who
were of proper age for receiving a further education, and
who had leisure to devote themselves to learning, were
afforded opportunity for pursuing higher studies under
the personal direction of Pythagoras, and were known,
80not as simple Hearers, but as Students, or Mathematici.
These were the nucleus of the Pythagorean sect. This
class of disciples having grown considerably in numbers
and influence, it became possible for Pythagoras, helped
by the contributions that flowed in, to erect for his
academy a special building, or, rather, group of buildings,
in which he and his disciples might live secluded from
the influences of the outerworld. This institution, called
the Koinobion (coenobium, place where people live in
community) was a world in itself, and embraced all the
conveniences of plain living—gardens, groves, promenades,
halls, baths, etc., so that the student did not regret
the hurlyburly of the world without. Henceforth the
Acusmatici, or Acustici, were no longer persons of all
classes and degrees, admitted to attend the lectures, but
the newly admitted pupils, who received instruction in the
elements of the sciences, and were preparing themselves
for the higher studies. They had to observe strict silence
and to yield blind obedience, and were not permitted to
see the Master’s face: at the lectures a curtain screened
him from view. The advanced students were admitted
behind the screen, and hence were called esoterikoi
(esoterici, insiders): those before the curtain, exoterikoi
(exoterici, outsiders). To gain admission to the esoteric
class a pupil was required to spend from two to five years
in study, and then had to undergo severe tests. If a
student failed to answer the tests he was rejected: but if
he passed successfully, he was no longer required to
observe silence and to be content with listening only:
he might now see the Master face to face, and under his
direction might pursue a study chosen by himself, as
philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, music, etc. Gymnastic
exercise was practiced diligently, and was made
81the cornerstone of the Pythagorean therapeutic, which
for the rest was a science of dietetic.
These approved and tested students formed the core
of the celebrated League, which, in conformity with the
division of the pupils in the School, comprised Exoterics
and Esoterics. The Esoteric members of the League
were, no doubt, the students admitted to the higher
classes, as well as the graduates of the school: probably
the number of these never exceeded 300. But to become
an Exoteric member of the League, anyone was qualified
who was a follower of the Philosopher, and who was
ready to live according to his teaching and to spread the
knowledge of the doctrine abroad: of these there may
have been several thousand. Their mode of life was left
to their discretion, while, on the contrary, the Esoterici
were bound by strict rules. They lived in the Coenobium,
always wore clothes of white linen, washed and bathed
daily in cold water, at their common board abstained from
the meats and drinks forbidden by the Master, and put in
practice his doctrine. They divided the day among their
various duties, meditating, mornings, how they might
employ the hours most profitably, and evenings questioning
themselves how their good resolutions had been kept.
Harmony, that foundation-idea of the Pythagorean doctrine,
was the lodestar of their lives. They studied to be
just toward all men, toward the erring strict and kindly,
faithful to friends and yokemates, to the law submissive,
toward the unfortunate charitable, temperate in their
pleasures; to keep their plighted word, and in their behavior
to set a good example to all men. The League
is said to have comprised several sections, but whether
the sections were “degrees” rising one above another, or
whether they were co-ordinate branches, is not clear. We
82hear of Mathematici, who devoted themselves specially
to the sciences, of Theoretici, who were professors of
ethics, of Politici, concerned with government, of Sebastici,
whose province was religion. The religion of the
Pythagoreans seems to have been compounded of doctrines
of the ancient popular religion of the Greeks, of the
mysteries, and of the monotheism of the Egyptian priests;
and it had a secret cult, with elaborate ceremonial of initiation,
the purpose of which, however, was to enforce
the teaching of the Master.
The political principles of the Pythagoreans favored
a transformation of the Dorian oligarchism into an aristocratism
of culture. Democracy they hated. Their aim
was to acquire for themselves powerful influence in the
state, to fill the public offices with their own members,
and to administer government according to their Master’s
ideas. As matter of fact, they appear to have attained
these ends fully or approximately in Crotona,
Locri, Metapontum, Tarentum, and other cities of Magna
Graecia. There is no doubt that the secrets that the
Pythagoreans were sworn to keep had reference to these
political aims. To bar out the uninitiated the members
are said to have had a badge, a five-pointed star
(pentagrammon, pentalpha) and to have employed a symbolic
form of speech, by means of which they concealed
their secrets under cover of apparently trivial words, or
words not to be understood by outsiders.
But the League of the Sage of Crotona, after a glorious,
though brief, ascendency, had a tragic end. The
cities of Magna Graecia had grown rich by commerce,
and with wealth and ease had come great corruption of
manners. In Sybaris the lower classes of citizens—artisans
and shopkeepers—rose in revolt, and five hundred
83patricians were banished, their property seized by the
people, and the popular leader Telys administered the
government in their stead. The exiles took refuge in
Crotona, and there, according to Grecian custom, sitting
around the altar in the agora, or market-place, implored
the aid of that city, then ruled by the Pythagoreans.
Thus for two reasons the rulers of Crotona were objects
of hate to the tyrannos of Sybaris: they were the enemies
of democracy, and they were protectors of the exiled oligarchs.
He, therefore, demanded of Crotona surrender
of the fugitives. The demand having been refused (at
the urgent instance of Pythagoras it is said), war followed.
A desperate battle was fought, and the Crotoniats,
though inferior in number, were victorious (510
B. C.). Sybaris fell into their hands, and was looted
without mercy, and the town leveled with the ground: in
fact, a stream was made to flow through the once magnificent
city.
This atrocious deed, which though no consequence
of Pythagorean teaching, was nevertheless a consequence
of Pythagorean exclusiveness and Pythagorean contempt
for the people, had its nemesis. The democratic spirit,
so mortally offended, took an equally atrocious revenge.
In Crotona, too, as before in Sybaris, the democracy took
action, and demanded a division of the conquered Sybarite
territory among all the citizens of Crotona, and equal
suffrage for all in the election of the rulers. At the head
of the democracy stood Cylon, an enemy of the Pythagoreans.
The aged Master, because of the hostility manifested
toward him personally, was obliged to flee from
the scene of his great labors. It is supposed that he died
at Metapontum, hard on a hundred years old. In Crotona
the strife of parties went on. The government unwisely
84rejected the demands of the democrats, and thereupon,
about the middle of the fifth century B. C., the
storm burst. The rage of the oppressed and despised
people was vented first upon the Pythagoreans, a great
number of whom were assembled in the house of Milo.
The house was taken by storm, the assemblage butchered
either on the spot or in flight, and their property distributed
among the people. Aristocracy was also overthrown
in Tarentum, Metapontum, and Locri. The
Pythagorean League was annihilated, and its religious
and political labors disappeared, leaving no trace.
The scattered fragments of the Pythagorean League
attached themselves to another association, that of the
Orphici, named after the fabled singer Orpheus. This
curious association, a fantastic compound of the mysteries
and Pythagorism, is rightly credited to Onomacritus, apostle
and reformer of the Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries,
who lived in the time of the Athenian tyrannos Pisistratus:
he was high in the favor of Pisistratus, and enjoyed
much celebrity. By some of his contemporaries, men of
sense and not easily imposed on, he was suspected of
palming off his own compositions for poems of Orpheus
(who never existed); but probably he did this without
intent to deceive, but simply because of his irresistible
passion for the mummery of secret societies and mysteries.
This adventurer and mystic, who understood very well
the meaning of the mysteries and the uses to which they
could be turned, was one of the first to speak out the
thought hidden in them: that man was born in sin and
fallen away from God, and that he cannot be saved till
85grace shall be afforded him. His doctrine was just Pietism,
with this exception, that instead of “the lord Jesus”
we have here the god Dionysos, or the Iacchos of the
mysteries, or Orpheus. Such inane babblement as this,
and such doctrines as that the soul of man is confined
in the body as in a prison, that the world is for it a vale
of tears and a place of banishment, that it is pining and
longing to return to its true home, Heaven, are an offense
to the joyous spirit of Greece, an outrage against
her religion of beauty, truth, and virtue, the last blow
dealt at Grecian art and science. The outcome of them
was a tedious, voluminous “Orphic literature” consisting
of mythological poems full of mysticism and sentimentality.
The Orphic societies were not, like the mysteries,
great assemblages of people in temples, but, after the
Pythagorean pattern, secret schools or clubs; and they
followed, at least ostensibly, the Pythagorean rule of life,
abstaining from fleshmeat, beans, and wine; but with
this they coupled two cults in themselves incompatible,
that of the ideal god Apollo, and that of the sensual deity
Dionysos. But being stript of the semi-public and official
character attaching to the mysteries, and of the philosophic
dignity of the Pythagorean sect, the Orphic societies
became simply nests of swindlers and mendicants;
and vagabond priests, Orpheotelestae, admitted to their
ridiculous degrees, for a consideration, every credulous
aid marvel-gobbeting postulant; there were even victims
who had themselves with wife and children initiated every
month. Other tricksters combined the Orphic cult with
the Phrygian cult of Cybele, mother of the gods, and
with that of Sabazios: these were known as Metragyrtae
(mother-beggars) or Menagyrtae (monthly beggars).
86These and their like were regular mountebanks, giving out
that they had the power of curing the insane, their method
being to dance and caper around the patient to the sound
of timbrels, the while flagellating themselves: for this
they took up a little collection. One of these metragyrtae
was capitally punished at Athens in the middle of the
fifth century B. C.: but the judges, seized by remorse,
questioned the oracle, and got response that in atonement
they should build a temple to the Great Mother: thereupon
the followers of the dead juggler were set free. A
priestess of Sabazios, Ninus by name, was also put to
death for brewing philters: she was the one sole victim of
witchcraft trials in all antiquity. Thus did the Orphic
sect in Greece degenerate to the same low estate as the
mysteries, despised by all honest and enlightened men.
But both the mysteries and the Orphic as well as
Pythagorean societies were links in a chain of phenomena
that reached all through Grecian antiquity, indicating
plainly a reaction against the popular religion, and an effort
to introduce essentially different religious views—views
which in aftertimes, in an improved form, were to
triumph definitely over the Olympian gods.
In antiquity we are able to distinguish three religious
systems, viz., polytheism, monotheism, mysticism. The
first was a deification of nature: and as nature manifests
herself in various forces, the religion, too, had to postulate
a multitude of deities. This is the system of the
Oriental and Graeco-Roman popular religion; and in
these its two branches it is again differentiated by the fact
that on the one side it assumed a gloomy, awe-inspiring
87character, while on the other side it wore a joyous aspect,
inviting to mirth and pleasure. The second system rested
on a total separation of God from nature, and thus it acquired
a monotonous, one-sided character of abstruseness,
without any feeling for form and beauty: it was the
system of the Egyptian priests and of the Israelites, and in
after times passed over into Mohammedanism and some
Christian sects as Unitarianism, etc. The third system
also postulated the separation of God and nature, but it
was not a definitive separation, for there was hope of a
reconciliation; it consisted, therefore, in a sense of alienation
from God, and in an incessant longing for reunion
with him. This system found embodiment in the Grecian
mysteries and the Pythagoreo-Orphic societies, and later
in “positive” Christianity: it was neither absolutely polytheistic
nor absolutely monotheistic, but compact of these
two systems, in that it contemplated many gods embraced
under one form, or one god manifested in sundry
forms. Even in the myths underlying the Eleusinian
mysteries we have a conversion of the gods, especially
Demeter and Dionysos, into human form and a resurrection
and ascension of Persephone; an important part was
played in the same mysteries by the bread and wine employed
for religious purposes, by the purifications in
water, and by the fasts observed; in the Bacchic mysteries
Orpheus, Zagreus, and others appear as suffering and
dying demigods; in the Orphic rites there is allusion to
the natural sinfulness of man, and to grace and redemption;
in the mysteries of Cybele sexual continence is commended
as highly meritorious; in the mysteries and in
the Pythagorean sect, even as in Christianity, the bodily
life is regarded as an evil, an incorporeal immortality
of the soul as true bliss, stress is laid on the soul’s
88delights, and on the punishment of the wicked, whereas, in
polytheism the soul after death is but a shadow; and
many are the other points of contact between those systems
and Christianism, which, being of a more general
nature, have not yet been mentioned in these pages, for
example, certain mysterious and enigmatical personages
who have remained hitherto quite unnoticed, except by
the learned.
Commonly schools and the books give information
only about the officially recognized Olympian gods, and
perhaps the gods of sea and netherworld; but the “Best
God,” in Greek Aristaios, is passed over in silence, just
because one knows not what to make of him. This
Aristaios passed for a son of Apollo the god of light. Held
apart from the “scandalous chronicles” and naughty gossip
that was in circulation around the rest of the gods,
he was represented as inventor of sheep-husbandry, bee-keeping,
the production of oil from the olive, etc., as
man’s helper in drought and aridity, practicer of leechcraft
(like his brother Aesculapius), subduer of the winds,
originator of rites, laws, and sciences. As the little
vogue of his name would indicate, he was less honored
on the Grecian terra firma than in the Hellenic islands and
colonies, and there ofttimes was joined with the father of
the gods, as Zeus-Aristaios (particularly in his role of protector
of the bees), with the god of light as Aristaios-Apollon,
with the god of fertility as Aristaios-Dionysos.
In the island Ceos he was the most highly reverenced of
all the gods. Thus we see in Aristaios a conception of
one almighty, allwise god, transcending all the conceptions
of polytheism, and all the gods in human form worshiped
by ancient Greece.
Now plainly Aristeas and Aristaios are one same
89name. Among the ancient Greeks there was a mythical
personage named Aristeas. He was Apollo’s priest, as
his paronymus was Apollo’s son. According to Herodotus
(IV. 13–15) Aristeas was of Proconnesus, an isle in
the Propontis (sea of Marmora), son of Castrobius; in the
sacred trance received the inspiration of Apollo, journeyed
into Scythia (north of the Black Sea), and died in his
native place, in a fulling-mill. The place having been
closed after his death, a citizen of the neighboring town
of Cyzicus who happened to be passing, declared that he
had just before met Aristeas in that town and spoken
with him. The mill door was then opened, but no trace of
Aristeas was there. Seven years afterward he appeared
again in Proconnesus, there composed poems on his journey
to Scythia (which Herodotus read), and disappeared
a second time. But 340 years later he was seen at
Metapontum, in lower Italy, where he ordered the citizens
to erect to Apollo a statue with his name; then he disappeared
for good. On questioning the oracle at Delphi
what they should do, the burghers of Metapontum were
counseled to obey the precept of Aristeas; which they
did. Herodotus saw the statue surrounded by laurel
trees. This “Best of Men,” ever reappearing, and anon
disappearing, without leaving any vestige of bodily presence,
is no doubt evidence of a pre-Christian need of a
son of god rising from the dead and ascending into
heaven; as far as it goes, it is also an argument for the
reality of resurrection from the dead and for the union
of the divine and human.
But not only occurrences which call to mind the
Christian Son of God, but even his very name appears in
Grecian antiquity; and indeed the name antedates
the occurrences. Homer (Odyssey, V. 125), and Hesiod
90(Theogony 969) mention Jasion or Jasios (names closely
resembling the Hebrew Joshua and Jesus), a son of Zeus,
who had a sister Harmonia, and who with the goddess
Demeter (the earth, or fertility) produced out of a thrice-plowed
field Plutus (wealth): meaning that the discoverer
of husbandry became discoverer of thrift. But in punishment
of his sacrilegious love of a goddess Zeus struck
him dead with a thunderbolt, yet at the same time assigned
him a place among the gods. As beloved of the Eleusinian
goddess, Jasios, after initiation into the mysteries by Zeus
himself, became the indefatigable herald of the mystic
doctrines. Says Diodorus (V. 49): “Wealth is a gift imparted
through the intermediation of Jasios.... It is
known of all that these gods (Demeter, Jasios, and Plutos),
when invoked amid dangers by the initiated straightway
offered them help; and whoso hath part in the mysteries,
the same will be more devout, more upright, and in every
respect better.” Thus does Jasion figure as son of the
highest god, as himself raised to divine honors, as a wandering
apostle of religion, and as the source of all good
fortune. His name is equivalent to “savior,” “healer,”
being from the same root as iatros (healer), and the verb
iaomai (to heal, cure). Compare Iao, the Greek form of
the Hebrew divine name Yahve or Jehova; also Iacchos,
and Jason (i. e., Iason).
Thus in mystic Hellenism we find the basic ideas of
the later system of divine incarnation and human deification,
of redemption, etc.; and there can be no doubt that
we must seek in the Grecian mysteries for one of the
sources of Christianism.
PART FOURTH . Son of Man. Son of God. — 1. HELLENISM AND JUDAISM. — 2. THE ESSENES. — 3. CHRISTIANISM. — 4. JESUS. — 5. THE EARLY CHRISTIANS — 6. THE NEW TESTAMENT. — 7. THE ELEMENTS OF THE CHURCH.
91
If one attends solely to the fact that the founder of
the Christian religion was a Jew, and that not only he
executed his mission in Judea, but took Judaism for the
basis of his teaching, the assertion made in the preceding
section, viz.: that the sources of Christianism are to be
sought in the Grecian mysteries, may appear singular.
But the apparent contradiction disappears at once when
we reflect that long before Christ’s day Judaism was
thoroughly yeasted with Grecian elements; and that after
his death the work of propagating his system was done far
more largely by Greeks and men of Grecian education
than by Jews. We will not only prove that this was so,
but also will show that the Christianism of Christians is
at root and in substance a totally different thing from the
Christianism of Jesus.
Sharper contrast can hardly be than that between the
Grecian and the Jewish character. On one side closest
union between God and world: on the other, widest
divulsion; on one side most untiring research and the
finest sense of art-form: on the other only theology and
religious poetry; on the one side a priesthood that makes
no pretension, and has little or no influence: on the other
a nation ruled by priests; the Greeks maintaining an
active commerce with all the world, their ships traversing
92the seas, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the remotest
angle of the Euxine: Judea sealed against all access from
without, against every ship that touched at Joppa, against
every caravan from the desert; in Greece eager seizing
of everything new and readiness to reject what is antiquated:
in Judea holding fast to what is old and mistrust
of all change.
These fundamentally different elements were fated to
come in mutual contact. Ever since their liberation from
Babylonian captivity by the decree of Cyrus, the Jews,
both those who remained in the region of Euphrates and
Tigris and the small number of them who returned to the
native land, had lived under the Persian sceptre, and
therefore after the conquest of Persia by Alexander, were
exposed to the powerful influence of Grecian culture.
The Jews were scattered still more in consequence of the
wars between Alexander’s successors: soon they were to
be found in every port and every isle of the Mediterranean
as far as Spain; on the edge of the Asian and
African deserts; and after this dispersion (in Greek, diaspora),
they became a shopkeeping or mercantile race.
But nowhere outside Palestine were they so numerous as
in Egypt and its splendid new capital, Alexandria, seat
of Grecian art, literature and learning. They enjoyed
large privileges in Egypt; and they erected at Leontopolis
a temple, after the model of the temple at Jerusalem.
But though the Jews of the Diaspora, thanks to
their laws regarding foods and the Sabbath, their possession
of the Scriptures, their undiminished reverence for
the Temple of Jerusalem, and the obligation laid on
every Jew to pilgrim thither once at least, remained most
firmly attached to the religion of their fathers, nevertheless
in many places they adopted the language (usually
93Greek) of the locality in which they lived, so that a
special “Hellenist” synagogue had to be erected at Jerusalem
for the sake of visiting Jews who understood only
Greek. But nowhere did Jews adopt the Grecian customs
and language so unreservedly as at Alexandria, and
it was there that between the years B. C. 280 and 220 the
Pentateuch was translated into Greek. This translation
still is styled the Septuagint (Latin, Septuaginta, Greek,
Heptekonta, both meaning seventy), in accordance with
the old fable that in the work were employed seventy-two
translators, being six from each of the twelve
Israelitish tribes; and that while each of the seventy-two
translated the whole of the five “books of Moses,” the
several versions agreed verbatim, literatim, punctatim.
In later times the remainder of the Hebrew Bible was
translated (about 125 B. C.).
In Alexandria scholars who were not Jews found in
the Septuagint an introduction to Jewish theology; the
Hellenist Jews, from their acquaintance with the literature
of Greece, became conversant with Grecian philosophy.
Greeks began to admire the wisdom of Moses, Jews to
study Plato and Aristotle; and the enlightened polytheism
of the one concurred with the monotheism of the others,
in developing a new mysticism. In this mysticism of
the Alexandrines it was that the idea of Divine Revelation
had its origin—an idea before unknown, but now suddenly
taken up by these enthusiasts, and applied, on the one
side to the Old Testament, and on the other side to the
Greek philosophers. The Jew Aristobulus, founder of
this school of thought, by means of an allegorical interpretation
of the Old Testament, traced to that source all
the wisdom of the Greeks; and Philo, greatest of the
Jewish philosophers, contemporary with Jesus, though
94he knew nothing of his life or doctrine, so spiritualized the
tradition of his race as to see in the four rivers of Eden the
four cardinal virtues, in the trees of Paradise the other
virtues, in the patriarchs and heroes of Israel only personifications
of various moral conceptions: all in the
Grecian manner. According to Philo, before he created
the world, God made a world of ideas, which found its
centre of unity in his Word (logos); the corporeal world
was made after the model of this ideal world. The logos
was God’s first work, the world his second: this passed
afterward into the gospel called of John: “In the beginning
was the word,” etc. He understood the history of
man’s creation to mean that the first human creature was
immortal, ideal, perfect, but that by the creation of woman
he was made sinful, imperfect. Philo took the idea of
immortality from the Grecian philosophy rather than
from the ancient Jewish doctrines; and with Pythagoras
he regards the soul’s union with the body as a punishment.
He therefore taught that man should free himself
as much as possible from this burdensome association,
that is, should despise sense and live entirely in the
thought of God, that so he might obtain release. One
should think such views are inconsistent with the laws
of man’s nature, and so in truth they are; but nevertheless
in Philo’s day there existed a society that aimed to
fashion their life in accordance with these opinions.
Such a society was the order or sect of the Essenes,
who traced their origin back to high antiquity, but whose
doctrines really were first put forth about the year 100
B. C. The Grecizing Jew Josephus makes them a “third
95party,” standing between the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
But the Essenes, as such, had nothing to do with the
political questions at issue between the two principal
parties. The Essenes constituted a secret society.
The name, Essenes, Essenii, is of unknown derivation.
But as they practiced the healing art they got the name of
Therapeutae (healers, physicians). Josephus says that
they lived in special settlements in the country parts;
Philo, that they lived in the hamlets, avoiding the cities;
Pliny the elder plants them on the western shore of the
Dead Sea, in settlements apart. Their number is stated
at 4,000. Their occupations were husbandry and handicraft,
but they sternly refused to have anything to do with
whatever served the uses of warfare, as the manufacture
of arms; they also declined all trades engaged in for individual
profit, as traffic, seafaring, innkeeping. They
had no private property, but community of goods; among
themselves they neither bought nor sold, but each to each
gave according to the need. They repudiated not alone
servitude, but mastery in general, and whatever in anywise
annuls the natural equality of mankind. Their food
was such as necessity required, and was prepared strictly
according to the rules of the order. On this point we
know with certainty only that they held oil in abomination,
whether for anointing or for use with victuals. But
from the circumstance that they condemned bloody offerings
and always practiced great abstemiousness in food,
we must infer that they abstained totally from fleshmeat
and intoxicating liquors. Sexual love also they condemned,
and a party among them (the leading party), abstained
from marriage and maintained its numerical strength by
adopting outside children; another faction, however, deeming
this strictness to be fatal to the sect, retained the institution
96of marriage, though under severe restrictions.
The members observed the most scrupulous cleanliness,
taking the bath daily in cold water, and wearing white
garments. Their daily tasks were minutely prescribed.
Before rise of sun they spoke no word, only the prayers,
in which they paid honor to the sun as symbol of God.
Then they went about their work, coming thence back
to the common meal, first washing themselves and putting
on clean garments. No one tasted anything till the
priest had made prayer. The meal concluded, they offered
prayer in unison, laid off their clean garments, and
went back to work. At the last meal of the day the same
customs were observed: at meat only one person spoke at
a time. They did nothing without orders from the
superiors, practiced moderation in all things, studied to
control the passions, to be faithful to all obligations, to
be at peace among themselves and with all the world, and
to be helpful to the poor. There was a twelve-month
term of probation prior to admission into the order. During
that time the postulant conformed to the Essenian
rule of life: he received a small hatchet (borne by all
Essenes, as an emblem of labor), a loincloth for the bath,
and a white gown. If the result of probation was satisfactory,
a second term of probation (two years) followed;
if found worthy, the postulant was admitted to membership.
The rite of admission consisted of a meal in common,
preceded by the pronouncing of the vow by the
new brother. The tenor of the vow was that he obligated
himself to be ever faithful to the rules of the order
and to lead a virtuous life; to observe secrecy regarding
the doings of the order and the names of members: this
with reference to the world without; but with regard to
the society itself, to keep nothing secret from the brethren.
97After admission, the Essenes were classed in four degrees.
Unworthy members were expelled—a terrible punishment,
indeed, for the outcasts were not released from their
vow, and yet could not in the world comply with it; and
so were doomed to perish.
Their religious views have been already stated in
part. With Judaism their only bond of union was in
their practice of sending to the temple at Jerusalem offerings;
but by reason of their condemnation of bloody sacrifices
they were self-excluded from the temple. Nor was
their belief in immortality of Jewish origin, for they held
that soul, formed of most tenuous aether, is attracted and
appropriated by a body, within which it lives as a prisoner;
but that after liberation through death it soars to
heaven, where it lives for evermore in a blest land, without
rain, or snow, or heat, while the wicked are tortured
in a remote region of cold and darkness. This recalls
the views of the Pythagoreans. Less honorable to the
Essenes are the frauds practiced by many of them in pretending
to read the future, to interpret dreams, to conjure
disease away, etc. Of later Christian notions we are
reminded by the Essenian nomenclature of the angels,
and the obligation imposed on new members to keep the
names secret. The Essenian order survived till the early
days of Christianism: it then died out, the Christian
asceticism having made it superfluous.
Essenism is one of those phenomena which make
but a small figure in general history, but which have
mighty results, and which reconcile contrarieties in human
nature. For in Essenism we have the middle term between
98the Grecian mysteries and Christianism, as also
between the Grecian philosophy and Judaism. As appears
from what has gone before, the Essenian society
was a Judaic imitation of the Pythagorean league, and that
league, again, represented in philosophy what the Grecian
mysteries represented in religion, namely, humiliation
of man by showing him that there exist higher powers
that far transcend humanity; and then the elevation of
man by inculcation of the thought of immortality and of
future union with the Creator. With this mysticism was
associated, in Greece, the lofty morality of a Socrates, a
Plato, an Aristotle; and in Judea the belief in One God.
The combination of all these elements could have but
one result, to wit, to call forth that great power which
transformed the world—Christianism.
This new power was bound to arise, to reconcile
contraries that confronted each other in that time,
after the Roman Empire had brought under its universal
sway the lands that had cradled all the diverse religions
and philosophies. Those religious and philosophical systems
were no longer, as before, separated: brisk inter-communication
favored by the commerce and the wars
of the vast empire, brought them daily into contact. The
result was twofold: first, a certain indifference for religious
opinions, the diversity of which gave men occasion to
judge that in supersensual things no direct knowledge is
possible; and the mischief of it all was that nothing was
done for the education or enlightenment of the people,
and, in fact, science existed only for the higher orders,
and the people found no substitute for their ancient
belief. But secondly, the result also was that people
began to be conscious of the feeling, implanted by the
Grecian philosophers, and particularly by the Stoics, that
99in spite of national and religious differences, all men are
brothers, and that mankind is one great whole. However
beautiful and noble this idea, it had to lie dormant
so long as no bond of spiritual kinship save that of political
unity held together the peoples who within the
empire jointly obeyed one law and one will. This
missing bond of spiritual union could not be other than
a religious one; for so long as the sciences were so
undeveloped no other spiritual guidance but that Godward
could lead all hearts, however educated, of whatever nation,
to the one end toward which men were being forced
by the consciousness that, above all, they were men.
And if it be asked what sort of a religion that must be
which shall satisfy all nations at once, first of all it
is very clear that it could be no polytheistic religion.
That form of religion had outlived its usefulness. The
various national religions—Egyptian, Chaldaean, Syrian,
Grecian, Roman—had completely exhausted themselves
in the production of deities: polytheism could give forth
no more new shoots, as was shown by the fact that the
Romans, all the forces of nature having been worked up,
had gone and made goddesses of the virtues, e. g., Pudicitia,
Concordia, Pax, Victoria, and the rest, had no recourse
but to admit to their Pantheon all the gods of the
conquered nations, and paid now to Isis, Cybele, Mithras,
and Baal the same worship as before they had paid to
Jupiter and Juno. Into such disrepute had polytheism
fallen in the estimation of all educated men, who if they
were persons of serious character despised such gods; but
if they were frivolous, ridiculed worship and sacrifice and
oracles and priests. The priests themselves smiled when
they met, and by their irregular lives and their superstitious
practices forfeited all respect. At last every honest
100man must have been transported with indignation
when the emperors in the paroxysms of their despotic
frenzy had themselves worshiped as gods and a race of
hounds in human form burned the incense of adulation
before them.
Hence, the new religion for which mankind sought,
to give true expression to the sentiment of a common
humanity, could not be any of the heathen systems.
Rather, by insisting on the oneness of Godhead, it had to
make an end of polytheism, of godmaking, and of Olympian
wantoning, and at the same time, of scorn and
derision of the gods.
Thus, then, what was wanted was a god who should
have vanquished all other gods, and he a god of definite
outline and fixed character—no nebulous, lackadaisical,
inert deity such as the Grecian philosophers preached: no
abstract “world-soul,” signifying nothing to the uneducated
people; but a god like unto man himself, and whom
man should have “made after his own likeness”; one with
human feelings, sentiments, and passions, with human
wrath and human lovingness. And this god must stand
for a doctrine of personal immortality to the end the
precious Ego of every man might have infallible and
trustworthy assurance that his title to a Mansion in the
Skies will stand unchallengeable for ever and for ever.
And again, this god must be no abstract entity, alleged
to have existed somewhere, somewhen, but a personality
associated with definite localities, and possessing very
definite traits. And so the problem was to find this one
god, this doctrine of immortality, to find a personality that
would be the middle term between the two.
Nowhere was a monotheism to be found save in Judaism,
and there it was plain and open to view. We have already
101seen how the Jews were scattered all over the world.
Their synagogues were everywhere, and (noteworthy
fact) they had proselytes in every large city, especially in
Rome. In this we see the first steps in the dissemination
of monotheism: but it could not be propagated on the
large scale by Jews. Few were the persons who took a
liking to the strictness of the Mosaic religion, and the
God of the Jews was too spiritual a being to be grasped;
besides, very many turned away from Judaism because of
the indefiniteness of the Jewish notions of immortality, or
the strange rites and the peculiar usages of the Jewish
people.
From Judaism, then, the idea of monotheism was the
only feature that could be borrowed: what was demanded
else was the mystic element; that is to say, men
wanted a system of religious conceptions that would reflect
back upon them their own sentiments as the infallible
truth. But the material best fitted for that end
was to be found in the mysteries and in the Pythagorean
and Essenian doctrines. The diverse ideas of the several
secret leagues with regard to the separation of the divine
from the human and their reconciliation, must find their
unity in the Jewish God—a thing not difficult to accomplish
in the times immediately preceding the advent of
Christ, because of the intermingling of Grecian and Jewish
ideas: and this unity had to be established by some
personage of imposing figure on the stage of history, who
should impress his seal upon it and surround it with the
prestige of deity.
Now, at that time there was both among the heathen
and the Jews an expectation of some such divine intervention
as this. Thus, in the early years of the Roman
Empire the belief was widespread that a new kingdom was
102to be founded in the East, and that a new Golden Age
was about to begin. More definite was the expectation
entertained by the Jews of a Messiah to come, who would
restore the kingdom of Israel, and the worship of Jehova.
This longing of the Jews coincided with the desire of
heathendom for a new religion to take the place of a
dying and degenerate polytheism.
At this juncture appeared Jesus. He lived and died
in obscurity. Of his career not one word of mention is
found in contemporary Greek and Roman writers, eagerly
as they investigated everything. But this obscurity
wrought no detriment, for it left those who were longing
for a new religion free to make of him whatever they
thought best for their cause; that is to say, they made of
him a personality very different from what he really was.
Out of a circumcised son of a Jewish carpenter, who rose,
indeed, above the bigotry of his people, and who suffered
death for his revolt against the rule of priests and scribes,
was developed the longed for Messiah. He was no
longer merely human, but the Son of God, born of a virgin;
a thaumaturge; his death was formally and intentionally
a sacrifice for the “redemption” of mankind; after
death he rose again, and then ascended into heaven: in
a word, Jesus the man had become a god. And thus on
the Jewish branch were grafted quite unjewish, Graeco-mystical
shoots till the branch was no longer recognizable.
We thus have in the life of the founder of the Christian
Church, as handed down to us, two elements, truth
and fiction. The element of truth is whatever is consistent
with historical research and psychological fact and
103nature’s laws; and the element of fiction comprises whatever
is in conflict with these. Jesus himself never pretended
to be more than a man. Virtue was the burden
of his teaching, and he never propounded a creed. To
the many names of God he added that of “Father”—father
of all mankind. He was no dogmatist, but a moral reformer,
and as such occupied common ground with the
Essenes and with John the Baptist, though he differed
from them, and particularly from the Essenes, with regard
to methods and measures: the Essenes would
save men’s souls by withdrawing them from human society;
Jesus sought to save men living in the world—to
save human society itself.
Jesus taught the people in parables, enforcing his
doctrine of virtuous living by the use of similes that no
hearer could fail to understand. Those who afterward essayed
to write the history of his life and work, in like
manner made a free use of figurative language, and the
personality of Jesus was glorified, and his “mission” magnified
till the world saw in him, indeed, “the desired of
all the nations,” the Messiah longed for by Israel, the
reconciler of the divine and the human, toward whom all
the mysteries had pointed.
The miracles of Jesus, namely, acts and occurrences
that contradict the laws of nature, are not actual events;
for as they are recorded in the New Testament they show
a needless abrogation of natural law—needless, because
the truths which Jesus preached could not be made more
true by miracles. And thus, as the rationalists of the
18th century explained them as actual occurrences indeed,
but yet as in accordance with the natural law, so
now they are held to be quite needless juggleries altogether
unworthy of Jesus. Hence the rational interpretation
104of the miracles is, that they represent the effort of
the evangelists to portray the life and person of the Master
in such colors as their notions of his supereminent
dignity required. We divide these miracles into three
classes—the miracles of the birth, the life, and the death
of Jesus.
The birth of Jesus, as narrated in the gospel story, is
itself a miracle. The legitimate son of Joseph, the carpenter
of Nazareth, and of Mary—for such he was, according
to the genealogy found in Matthew and Luke—had
to be transformed into the Son of God, nay, made
God himself, if his doctrine was to appear as of divine
origin. Of types of such transformation there was no
lack in heathendom. The first Christians, it is true, knew
nothing of the sun-god Buddha, born again of a woman,
but they were acquainted with Grecian and Roman mythology.
Apollo, himself a god, walked on earth as a
shepherd. Herakles, son of Zeus, and Romulus, son of
Mars and of a virgin, were founders of states and cities,
and progenitors of nations; then why should not the
founder of a religion and of a church be also son of God
and of a virgin? Nay, why might not God himself walk
on earth in human form? That such was the actual
origin of the story of the Divine Birth is not doubtful: all
the rest is mere embellishment—as when the angel announces
to the virgin the coming birth of the Son of God;
when another angel, accompanied by the heavenly hosts,
tells the shepherds of his actual birth; when a star conducts
the “wise men of the East” to the wondrous babe,
and they, with the shepherds and Simeon and Anna, pay
him homage; and when Herod, purposing to take the
life of the predestined Messiah, in order to compass that
end orders the slaughter of the innocents.
105The miracles of the life of Jesus are either abrogations
of natural laws, or cures of diseases, or resuscitations
from the dead, or apparitions. All these different
kinds of miracles are fictions with a purpose. We have
already seen how in the Grecian mysteries bread and wine
were employed as consecrated viands for the gods, and
how at Eleusis divine honors were paid to Demeter and
Dionysos as givers of bread and wine. Jesus, too, had
to be made lord and giver of these two sacred viands:
hence the change of water into wine, and the multiplication
of the loaves; and later, in the last supper, bread
and wine were made the object of the Christian Mysteries.
The walking on the waters of the lake of Gennesareth,
the stilling of the winds, the blasting of the
fig tree, the finding of the penny in the fish’s mouth, and
Peter’s draught of fishes are pictures of the imagination
designed to show the power of the Son of God over the
waters, the air, the world of plants and of animals. So,
too, his power over bodily diseases is made something
real for the common understanding by such stories as
the healing of paralytics, lepers, the blind, the deaf and
dumb; over mental diseases by the freeing of the possessed,
over death itself by the raising of the dead. Among
the apparitions we reckon those of the Holy Spirit as a
dove at the baptism of Jesus, of Satan at Jesus’ temptation,
and of Moses and Elias at the transfiguration: this
is all allegory. The “Holy Spirit” is an idea distinct
from God only in thought; the dove is the symbol of
purity and gentleness. The Devil is a personification of
evil, and the failure of his attempt was the triumph of
the good. As for the transfiguration, that typifies the
vast superiority of the new law over the old: the old must
do homage to the new.
106The miracles of Jesus’ death, viz., the darkening of
the sun, the rending of the veil of the Holy of Holies
in the Temple, the resurrection of the dead, were occurrences
quite inomissible at the death of a god; they betoken
the mourning of nature and of religion. But the
miracles that followed his death, the resurrection and the
ascension, together with the apparitions of the Crucified
in the mean time, were imagined purely and plainly to
confirm the belief in an everlasting redeemer and in the
personal immortality of each individual one of the faithful.
Of far greater importance than the miracles of Jesus
are his teachings, and in particular his fine discourse on
the mountain, also his beautiful parables. But his utterances
contain nothing that is essentially new, the same
thoughts having been often expressed by religious teachers
and sages of other times and in other lands; and yet
they possess a charm all their own, by reason of their
unassuming simplicity. It was not the doctrine of the
unity of God and of love for the neighbor that wrought
the propagation of his teachings—the Jews possessed
that doctrine already; nor was it his call to a higher life
than that of sense—the Grecian philosophers preceded
him in that respect; nor his alleged divinity, nor the miracles
ascribed to him—his contemporaries in every land
had had experience of miracles in every shape: it was the
forcefulness, the grandeur, the simplicity of his discourse,
speaking to the heart of man and mastering it, and calming
its unrest. Here he was self-based and individual,
supreme and irresistible. His teaching, and in particular
the sermon on the mount, is the most emphatic, blistering
condemnation of those who, for the last nineteen
hundred years, have called themselves not only Christians,
107but the only Christians; who, nevertheless, in open
contempt of their supposed Master, not only take oaths,
and require an eye for an eye, cherish mortal hate for
their enemies, trumpet their almsgiving abroad, offer
their prayers aloud at the street crossings, fast ostentatiously,
lay up for themselves treasures on earth, which
are eaten by the moth and the rust; serve two masters or
more, see the mote, though blind to the beam, throw the
holy thing to the dogs, when one asks them for a loaf
give him a stone, do not unto others as they would that
others should do unto them: who not only do all this,
but who even enact laws which oblige men to do all
this. He whom they hypocritically call Master, but
whom they never have understood, were he to appear
among them, would anathematize them in the noble
words, I know you not. Depart from me, ye doers of
evil! Such language was unheard before his day; therefore
wondered the people, for he spake with power, and
not like the scribes and pharisees.
What, then, is the difference between the Christianism
of Jesus and the Christianism of Christians? The
former, as seen in the discourses of the New Testament,
and above all in the ever beautiful sermon on the mount,
is a simple and unpretending, yet world-transforming
doctrine of God, Virtue, and Love of Man: a monotheism
borrowed from the Jews for the behoof of all men, but
purified of ceremonialism, sabbatism, sacrifices, high-priesthood:
in short, the Christianism of Jesus meant the
coming “Kingdom of God,” in which the virtuous man
would enjoy happiness and peace. But the Christianism
108of Christians is a Mysticism ingrafted on this monotheism,
comprising the dogmas of the Incarnation, Atonement,
Redemption, Resurrection, and Second Coming, and the
Miracles invented to buttress these dogmas. The Christianism
of Jesus fell when he and his first disciples died:
they had no hair-splitting theology, only a devout heart:
that system was too simple, too unadorned, too little flattering
to sense and to man’s vainglory to cut any figure
in the world. But the Christianism of Christians, which
had for its mother the Grecian mysteries, borrowed from
Jesus, its father (without whose personality and name it
never could have lived at all), what little was known concerning
him, but swaddled it in a thick wrappage of mystic
dogmatism. Let us see how this dogmatic Christianism
succeeded in erecting itself upon the simple ethic-religious
system of Jesus, and in making itself a power in the world
by evolving new mysteries.
Were it not for the grafting on it of the Graeco-mystical
elements, Christianism would never have grown to
be even a church, to say nothing of its prospects of becoming
a power in the world. Its adherents in the beginning
were good, zealous, believing folk, but among
them were no men of education or of commanding ability.
The first congregation in Jerusalem, therefore, unable to
comprehend the lofty views of the Crucified, took their
stand on a narrow ground not essentially different from
that of Judaism; for example, they held that no one was
worthy to be baptized who would not first undergo circumcision,
thus becoming by adoption a Jew. The
Apostle James, a devout ascetic, was the head of this
school, the adherents of which were called Jewish Christians.
The first to demand repudiation of Judaism was
Stephen, a man of Grecian education; but he paid the
109penalty of his ambitious plans by a martyr’s death. The
congregation at Antioch adopted Stephen’s view, according
to which the “Gentile Christians” and the “Jewish
Christians” stood on an equality. The intellectual leader
of the Gentile-Christian school was Paul, a man who,
in talents and in force of character, stood high above all
the original apostles of the Nazarene. Through Paul’s
exertions Christianism overstepped the narrow limits of
Palestine and Syria. Well schooled, both in Grecian
philosophy and Jewish theology, he was at the first a
fanatical persecutor of the Christians, but had a sudden
conversion while journeying to Damascus on a persecuting
raid, and thenceforth was a zealous apostle of the new
religion. Being a victim of epilepsy, Paul had frequent
fits and visions, and he spoke of them often, thus implanting
in the minds of the Christians a firm belief in such occurrences.
Of course, the way was thus made ready for
the introduction of the legends of a resurrection, an ascension,
etc. Furthermore, a foundation was in this way
laid for a great theological superstructure, which very
soon was seen to rise. As the foundation, so was the
superstructure—mystical. Over against the first man,
Adam, representing the sensuous life, sin, servitude, and
death, Paul set up the God-man Christ, representing the
spirit, grace, freedom, and life; man was to crucify the
“old Adam,” and to be born anew in Christ, even to become
one with him. By this union, he said, the law of
Moses is done away, being superseded by “faith,” whereby
alone the sinner is justified and made worthy of God’s
grace. For true faith, he added, carries with it good
works, and the true believer cannot be otherwise than
righteous.
Paul thus stood, in a certain sense, on the Protestant
110ground as contradistinguished from the Judaeo-Christian
(which is partly also the Catholic) ground of Peter, James,
and John, who upheld the Mosaic law, and received into
the Church only circumcised converts. Peter wavered,
being a Jew among Jews, but often forgetting the Mosaic
law in the company of Gentile Christians; but Paul
would never consent that Gentile converts should be
obliged to conform to the Jewish rites: hence Paul was
the real founder of the Christian Church, which, had his
opponents been victorious, would have remained a Jewish
sect. The Church was split into two parties. To the
Jewish-Christian party adhered the numerous converts
from Essenism, with whom the tie of blood was stronger
than the spiritual bond which united them with the school
of Pythagoras. This party did not regard Jesus as God,
but classed him with the angels.
Between the two parties, Judaeo-Christian and Gentile-Christian,
arose a third party, that of the Alexandrine
Christian Jews. Their leader was Apollos (properly
Apollonius), of whom it is related in the Acts of the
Apostles, that he recognized only the baptism of John,
and not that of Jesus, but that he was converted to belief
in the latter by certain of Paul’s disciples at Ephesus.
He it was that imported into Christianism the Alexandrine
doctrine of the Logos or Word.
With such a distribution of parties, the New Testament
literature arose. It may now be affirmed without
hesitation that not one piece of this literature was composed
by any of the disciples of Jesus, who were all uneducated
men. The early Christians had at first no
111Sacred Scripture other than the Old Testament; with regard
to the doctrine of Jesus they depended on oral instruction.
Even the language in which the New Testament
was written, the Hellenistic (or literary dialect of the
Alexandrines) is proof that it was the work of men of
Greek education. As far as can be determined now the
earliest New Testament writer was Paul. The Pauline
epistles that are his indisputably, are those to the
Romans, the Corinthians, and the Galatians; the most
dubious among them are the epistles to Timothy, Titus,
and Philemon. There are epistles of some of the other
apostles, as James, Peter, John, and Jude, and these, of
course, according to the party stand of their writers, represent
views opposed to those of Paul. They are of later
date than Paul’s epistles, and are hardly to be credited to
the apostles whose names are prefixed to them. To the
Alexandrine school is to be referred the epistle to the
Hebrews, distinguished from the Pauline writings by the
fact that it holds the Old and New Testaments to be, not
opposites, but complements of each other.
Apart from the Epistles the Revelation of John (Apocalypse)
is the oldest book of the New Testament. Written
in the spirit of an Old Testament prophet, it expresses
the indignation of a Jew against the Romans during
the siege and shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem,
A. D. 70; it contains the prediction that not Jerusalem,
but the whore of Babylon (Rome), together with the
entire heathen world, will perish amid fire, blood, and
ruin; but that there will be let down from Heaven a new
and glorious Jerusalem, abode of the blest, seat of the
“bride of the lamb.” After the destruction of Jerusalem
the Apocalypse was written anew by an unknown hand, in
the Christian sense. As every one knows, the prophecies
112of the book did not come true; but its fantastic, morbid
imaginings have ever since been interpreted by enthusiasts
as infallible forewarnings of things to come; and many a
searcher of its pages has lost what modicum of sense
they ever had in working out its meaning.
The other historical writings of the New Testament
consist of four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. It
is now evident that, when in the course of time the oral
traditions were committed to writing, Jesus’ discourses,
which, with an admirable simplicity and admirable clearness,
expressed a good deal in a few words, must have
been handed down in far more authentic form than the
history of his deeds; and that among his discourses, those
which contained truths of general application were more
faithfully remembered than those which expressed personal
views—as, for example, those in which he claims to
be Messiah. The oldest written accounts of his life and
work are lost to us forever; they were, without doubt, written
in the language which was used by Jesus and his
disciples, Aramaic, a sister tongue of Hebrew. Of the
existing Gospels, written in Greek, the first three, called
“synoptics” (i. e., agreeing), are based on one older original
gospel or account; the third Gospel, John’s, stands by
itself. The new criticism regards Mark’s Gospel as the
most ancient: it contains almost exclusively narratives of
facts, written down from memory, with the accruing embellishments
and modifications; but Mark gives little of
the discourses of Jesus; he says nothing, knows nothing
of any supernatural birth of Jesus, and regards him simply
as man. Mark’s Gospel is the basis of the other two
synoptics, which draw on him for narrative, while they
both add the discourses. The Gospel according to Matthew
gives the discourses a Judaeo-Christian tinge; that
113according to Luke (who also wrote the Acts) a Gentile-Christian
coloring: but they both waver between the
opinions that Jesus is God and man, and that he is only
man. But the Gospel literature was lifted out of this
state of hesitation by the fourth Gospel. This Gospel
bears the name of the Judaeo-Christian apostle John, but
erroneously, for it had its origin in the Alexandrine
school, and was written probably A. D. 160 to 170. The
Alexandrines, as we have seen, were wont to resolve all
accounts of facts, whether real or fictitious, into mental
concepts, and, therefore, lived in a cloudworld of ideas.
Whereas, the first apostles regarded the Nazarene merely
as man, and while for Paul and the evangelists Matthew
and Luke he was a god-man, the Joannine Gospel makes
him God, and represents his existence on earth in palpable
human form, as a mere passing incident. Hence
it proclaims him the “Word” (logos), which Philo Judaeus
discovered; which Logos not only was “in the beginning”
with God, but was God himself. For the author of the
fourth Gospel the narrative of occurrences in the life of
Jesus is a secondary matter, serving only as a setting
for his own peculiar doctrines. Thus the doctrine of the
godhead of Jesus is the result of Grecian influence.
Besides these four generally received Gospels several
others, in one place or another, at one time or another,
have passed for revealed writings. They are written,
some in Aramaic, some in Greek, some in Latin, and,
since their uncanonical character was decided, have been
classed as Apocrypha. Their contents, barring a few
passages that show some elevation of thought, are mostly
in the jejune and tasteless vein of those trivial accounts of
miracles which we find in the canonical Gospels, such as
the changing of water into wine, the cursing of the figtree,
114Peter’s draught of fishes, etc.; or they are of a still
more paltry sort, and tell of a number of miracles wrought
by Jesus in his childhood. There are also apocryphal
Acts of Apostles, apocryphal Apocalypses, and apocryphal
Epistles, all of them what we should now call “pamphlets”
composed in the interest of parties in the church.
But the “Word” of the Joannine Gospel became the
password for the reunion of all parties. The influences
that had brought thousands of Gentiles into the Church
were all too strong for the resistance of the Judaeo-Christian
party to overcome. The little Judaeo-Christian fold
had no choice, therefore, but either to go back to Judaism
or to become Gentile Christians—unless they were ready
to suffer excommunication by the latter. Only small
fractions of the Jewish-Christian body held out as sects
apart, while the union of the ever-multiplying Gentile
Christians, now styled the “Catholic” church, unchurched
the “heretics,” and set up the “new law” in opposition to
the old, as its own inviolable foundation. Thus came
into being the present collection of New Testament
books, the “Church Catholic” having, about the end of
the second century, separated the apocryphal from the
canonical Scriptures. But still for a long time the character
of individual books was in dispute, and John’s “Revelation,”
together with several of the Epistles, was till
recent times regarded by different persons or parties as
apocryphal. To the decrees of councils and popes alone
is it owing that there exists to-day a canonical collection
of Scriptures, and that the books of the Canon are held to
be inspired.
In this wise was Christianism developed out of the
115secret associations of the ancient world. The early Christians
themselves were, while under persecution, in a certain
sense a secret society. Their worship possessed an
essentially mystic character. It was not so from the beginning.
In Jesus’ teachings there is not one word about
divine service or cults; his surviving disciples knew of no
other cult than the Jewish, and they assembled for “breaking
bread” in their houses without any parade. Not until
the Christians had been excluded from the synagogues
were distinctive rites developed among them. There
arose among them prophets whose inspired words were
the principal feature of the religious service. Psalms
were sung, not yet in the grand, impressive melodies of
the Middle Age, but in “the long-drawn, partly nasal
moaning tones, still usual in Eastern lands—tones that
defy all musical harmony.” Besides, men then “spake
tongues,” or at least uttered “heaven-storming words”
pell-mell in the heat of enthusiasm, which no one,
speaker or hearer, could well understand; and men
“prophesied,” especially about the end of the world, the
too slow oncoming of which caused much wonderment in
those days. All these stupidities, by degrees, gave way
before the efforts of strong-willed men like Paul.
The “words in meeting” and the Lord’s Supper (or Love
Feast), fell into the background, and the supper came to
be simply a souvenir of the Saviour’s death, and at last
was developed into a sacrament possessing the character
of a “mystery;” i. e., a performance that must remain inscrutable
to men, though it was men that contrived it.
Baptism was associated as a sacrament with the supper,
and the mysteries were multiplied. We have already seen
how the mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection
arose, namely, out of the necessity of giving to Jesus the
116stamp of deity, for without that Christianism never would
have attained a commanding place in the world. How
to these mysteries, by the purely human decrees of the
Nicaean Synod, the supreme and most incomprehensible
mystery of all was added, the mystery of the Trinity; how,
because of the impossibility of coming to agreement regarding
this, the Church Catholic was split into the
Roman and Greek, or Western and Eastern churches;
how in the Western Church the bishops of Rome achieved
supremacy; all this belongs, not to the history of the
mysteries, but to the history of the Church.
PART FIFTH. A Pseudo-Messiah. A Lying Prophet. — 1. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA. — 2. ALEXANDER THE FALSE PROPHET.
117
Great must have been the amazement of the Greeks
when of a sudden, in different localities within the broad
Roman Empire, communities arose which announced the
suffering and dying God Jasios as the savior of a new
age—a Jasios who, under the form of a Jew, all unknown
outside his own country, had but lately been crucified;
whereas, Jasios, as all Initiates of the Eleusinia and of
the mysteries of Samothrace well knew, was ages and ages
before slain by the thunderbolt of Zeus. And still populations
were passing day after day over to the crucified
Jew, the Son of God, the wonderworker, who rose from
the grave, who went up to heaven. And, in consequence
of his teaching, though, after all, that did but complement
the teaching of a Pythagoras, a Socrates, a Plato,
the noble statues of the Grecian gods were falling
from their bases. Ought the Beautiful to fall in order
to make room for the Good? Might not both stand
side by side? And if a son of God and a thaumaturge
was required, might not one be found without making of
Zeus the Thunderer a victim to that fearful Jewish Yahve
of Mt. Sinai?
And such a son of God and wonderworker they
found. The heathen prophet Apollonius of Tyana was
118a contemporary of Jesus, and was deeply venerated.
And, as it chanced, a certain learned Greek, Flavius Philostratus,
wrote a heathen gospel of the life of this
Grecian saint, not as one hostile toward the Christians,
nor as one who would prove their doctrine false, but with
intent to come to the aid of decaying heathendom, and
prevent for a time its overthrow by Christianism. To
attain this end there must be no mention of Christianism
or its author, so that Olympus might tower again in all its
ancient glory and triumph over Sinai and Tabor. Philostratus
composed his work, as he states, out of the notes
of a disciple of Apollonius, one Damis, native of Ninive,
by order of Julia Domna, wife of the Emperor Septimius
Severus. What part of his work consisted of matter
drawn from Damis’s notes, and what he added out of his
own fancy, we can never determine. But he showed
true insight in making out his hero to have been a
Pythagorean. He therefore represents Apollonius as deriving
his wisdom indirectly from the most ancient mysteries,
those of Egypt, and from the venerated Grecian
sacred leagues.
Apollonius was born in Tyana, a town in Cappadocia.
Previous to his birth, says Philostratus, the god
Proteus appeared to his mother and told her that the
child soon to see the light was the God himself. This
happened in a meadow, where, after gathering flowers,
she had fallen asleep, while swans gathered round her
and intoned their song. When the child was grown up
he became a strict observer of the Pythagorean rule of
life, abstaining from fleshmeat and wine, and wearing
linen garments. His abode was a temple sacred to Aesculapius,
god of healing. Unworthy offerers of gifts to
the god he drove out, and healed such of the sick as repented
119of their transgressions. He rejected the Grecian
mythology as fabulous, preferring far to it the fables of
Esop, and his only prayer was addressed to the sun. He
refused to take possession of an estate inherited from his
father, and imposed on himself a silence of several years’
duration. During his extensive travels he always lodged
in temples, corrected abuses in the conduct of the divine
service, couched his teachings in brief sentences, gathered
around him disciples, of whom one was false and a
traitor; sided with the persecuted and righted the wrongs
of the oppressed. Everywhere he understood the languages
of the natives without learning them, and even
read the thoughts of men; but the language of the beasts
he learned from the Arabs of Mesopotamia. On entering
that country the publican asked him whether he had with
him anything subject to toll. The answer of Apollonius
was that he carried about righteousness, temperance, a
manly soul and a patient spirit—and many another virtue
named he. The sullen taxman, who had no mind for
anything that lay outside his own duties, took the names
of virtues for names of women, saying: “There, your
maids are all down in the book.” But Apollonius calmly
went his way, with the brief remark: “They are not
maids, but high-born dames;” nor paid he impost on his
ideal goods. In spite of his frankness of speech he was
treated with great distinction by the king of that country.
He told the king that he would best strengthen his
royal power by honoring many and putting trust in but
a few. The king, who was ill, having been comforted
by the prophet, confessed that he had been freed from
anxiety, not only with regard to his kingdom, but also
with regard to death. From Babylon Apollonius bent
his steps toward India, and there, according to the highly
120embellished story, saw men four or five ells in height,
also men who were half white and half black; dragons, too,
of various size he saw. He constantly carried on with
Damis, the one disciple who accompanied him, instructive
conversations about the animals and the people
whom they met. An Indian king, dazzled by the splendor
of the prophet’s genius, would not wear the crown in his
presence. With the Brahmans, many of whose conjurfeats
are recorded, e. g., flitting through the air, or at
touch of their wands causing the earth to spring aloft,
Apollonius swapped wisdoms; and as, in the opinion of
Damis, the wisdom of the Brahmans was derived from
Pythagoras, it was from Pythagoras also, of course, that
they got their doctrine of metempsychosis. We learn that
Apollonius also entertained that curious idea, and that
he imagined himself to have been once an Indian tax-gatherer,
and was wont to tell of many incidents of that
phase of his life. Furthermore, in his presence the
Brahmans cured the possessed, the lame, the blind, and
women in difficult labor, by imposition of hands, and by
giving good counsels—practices resembling those used
in our day by sympathists, so-called. Apollonius returned
to Babylon and Ninive, passing through fabulous
lands, and then journeyed to the Ionians of Asia Minor.
Apollonius banished from Ephesus an epidemic which
was there raging, by requiring the citizens to stone a
beggar in whom he discerned the daemon who was the
cause of the disease; the culprit, under the storm of
stones, was changed into a dog. Voyaging by sea to
Greece, the Sage Apollonius imposed on his shipmates
with the story that Achilles had appeared unto him five
ells in height, and before his eyes had grown to twelve
ells. At Athens, where he arrived during the Eleusinian
121mysteries, the priests refused to initiate him, because he
was a conjurer; whereupon the Sage of Tyana told them
that already he knew more about the mysteries than the
priests. This alarmed them, and they wished to recall
their refusal; but it was Apollonius’s turn now to refuse
them, so he deferred to another time his initiation, but
in public discourses let his light shine before the Athenians.
In Athens, too, there was a youth possessed, who
laughed and cried without cause. Apollonius having detected
the true nature of the ailment, of which no one else
had any suspicion, with stern looks and words of menace
confronted the daemon, who thereupon fled away, and
in token of his passage overturned a statue that no one
had touched. But the youth, rubbing his eyes as though
waking from sleep, was seen to be cured. At Corinth
the Sage detected in the bride of a comely youth a lamia
or empusa; i. e., one of a class of spectral beings that
used to haunt people, and under pretense of being in
love with them, would eat the flesh off their bones. In
the presence of Apollonius all her arts and all her imps
disappeared, and the spectre was unmasked and confessed
her evil intent. At the Olympian Games also this apostle
of the Pythagorean philosophy preached. His following
was increased by the accession of several members with
their slaves; these he called his “congregation.” With
them he went to Rome, where the infamous Nero then
reigned, who had prohibited philosophy, which he classed
with soothsaying. But one who was in the service of
the tyrant, impressed by the wisdom of the traveler, allowed
him to lecture in the temples, and to these lectures
there was great concourse. But one of his disciples who
had accompanied him from Corinth, and who in Rome
had ventured to condemn publicly the conduct of Nero
122and the prevailing immorality, was expelled from the city by
Tigellinus, captain of the emperor’s bodyguard, and
trusty tool of the tyrant, while Apollonius himself was
kept under surveillance. But not only could nothing be
proved against him; his wisdom filled even the sanguinary
minions with admiration, though he spoke to them only
the stern truth. For example, being asked by Tigellinus
why he had no fear of Nero, he answered: “The God
who makes him an object of fear made me fearless.”
Asked what he thought of Nero, “Better than you do,”
he replied; “ye think him gifted for singing, I for silence.”
Whereupon Tigellinus: “Go wherever you please; you
are stronger than any power of mine.” A bride in
Rome having died, the body was on the way to the place
of interment. Apollonius bade the bearers to halt,
touched the damsel, uttering some secret words, and
called her back from death. Philostratus himself is in
doubt whether the death was not apparent only. The
philosopher then journeyed to the Strait of Gibraltar,
whence he traversed Spain, Sicily and Greece, and then
revisited Egypt. At Alexandria he recognized the innocence
of one among eight criminals, interceded for
him and had the man’s execution put off till the last
moment; then arrived the order to spare his life; he had
confessed only under torture. The story is also told that
Apollonius, on paying a visit to Vespasian, in Alexandria,
“made him Caesar,” thus giving to the Roman Empire
once again, after a long interval, a just ruler; but
after Vespasian’s elevation to the throne, the philosopher
frankly spoke the truth to him, when the Emperor annulled,
as an unjust privilege, the liberties of Greece,
which Nero had in a capricious humor granted on the
occasion of the Olympian Games. Leaving Egypt,
123Apollonius journeyed to Ethiopia to visit the Gymnosophists,
who dwelt in a sort of little republic of their
own, on a mountain, and conducted a famous school.
Probably because they were less conceited, went naked,
and performed no magical feats, our Sage deemed them
less wise than the Brahmans, and had resultless controversies
with them about the relative superiority of Grecian
and Egyptian art, the former representing the gods
as resembling man, the latter as resembling animals. In
that region Apollonius exorcised a satyr that was said to
have killed two women. About the time of the taking of
Jerusalem by Titus, Apollonius happened to be in the
neighborhood of that city, and praised the Roman general
for his “moderation” (though it was a curious sort of moderation
which leveled a great city with the ground). Titus
answered: “I have made conquest of Solyma; you have
made conquest of me,” and thereafter employed Apollonius
as his adviser. At Tarsus he not only cured a young
man of hydrophobia, but the dog also that had bitten
him.
Having boldly denounced the Emperor Domitian
at Ephesus, Apollonius was betrayed by his disciple
Euphrates, and a plot was laid against him. Straightway
he took ship for Rome, to confront the tyrant in
his palace. In Rome he was thrown into prison, and
treated with much harshness; but he defended himself
with great spirit against the charges brought by his accuser,
and was acquitted. Thereupon he uttered a tirade
of reproaches against Domitian’s satellites, and suddenly
vanished miraculously from the judgment hall, appearing
the same day in the vicinity of Naples, where he had
friends. From Naples he went to Ephesus; there, in
ecstasy, he saw the assassination of Domitian, at that
124moment taking place in Rome; then he died. None
knew what age he had attained, whether 80 years or 100,
nor the time, nor the place, nor the manner of his death.
According to Philostratus he appeared after his death
to a young man of his native town, Tyana, who doubted
the immortality of the soul, and invoked Apollonius to
explain the matter; but he was invisible to the other
persons present.
It is no matter of surprise that the cold, austere
virtue and wisdom, the rather hollow religion, and the
clumsy miracles of Apollonius neither built up a school
for him nor kept the heathen religion on its feet; and
though the emperors of the third century, from Caracalla
to Diocletian, consecrated temples to him, and one of
them, Alexander Severus, placed his bust, with those of
Moses, Socrates and Jesus, in his private chapel, nevertheless
the Sage of Tyana was soon forgotten, and with
him, alas! the memory of his noble courage in the presence
of tyrants. On the other hand, the charlatanry he
practiced became more and more the order of the day, till
at last it threw off all disguise. Whether this result is
chargeable to his disciples, who, like the disciples of another
master, prized his miracles more than his teachings,
is a question that cannot be decided; but the fact is that
soon after his death (the close of the first century) a
number of impostors, wearing the cloak of religion, began
to ply their trade. The satirist Lucian, who lived in the
second century, and who made sport of everything—religion
and philosophy, gods and men, heathen and
Christians—has immortalized the tomfooleries of these
pseudoprophets.
125Of these the best known was Alexander of Abonotichus,
in Asia Minor, a man greater in fraud, says Lucian,
than his namesake, the son of Philip, in heroism. He
was a large, handsome man, and by scrupulous care of
his complexion, his hair, and his beard, enhanced the
advantage nature had given him. But his character was
“a compound of mendacity, fraud, perjury, and low tricks
of every kind.” In his boyhood he was apprenticed to
a quack of Tyana, a renegade disciple of Apollonius
(whose life, by the way, Lucian, who lived nearer to him
than Philostratus, calls a “comedy”), and by him was instructed
in all the artifices whereby one can outwit and
defraud his fellows. After his master’s death Alexander
went into business on his own account. In Macedonia
he procured one of the large harmless serpents found in
that province and went back to his native town—Abonotichus—there
to set up an “oracle factory,” as Lucian calls
it. At Chalcedon he secretly placed on a roadside a tablet
bearing the inscription that the god Aesculapius, with
his father, Apollo, was soon to be at Abonotichus; the
finding of this tablet caused great excitement. Meanwhile
Alexander, in his native place, went about with his
long, curling locks falling over his shoulders, wearing a
purple robe with white stripes, and armed with a sabre.
His stupid fellow townsmen, though they knew his
parents, who were poor, believed him when he claimed
descent from Perseus, and when they heard of the tablet
set about erecting a temple to Aesculapius. Between the
foundation stones of the temple Alexander secretly placed
a goose-egg shell containing a newly-hatched snake; then
with the wild gesticulations of a god-inspired enthusiast,
hastened to the market-place, and there announced to
the people that Aesculapius had just been born at the
126temple in the form of a serpent. To prove his oracle true
he held up before them the egg with the snake. On the
publication of this wondrous news, the populace flocked
to the market-place. Alexander had a hut of boards
erected, within which he seated himself in a reclining
chair; then taking up the large snake already mentioned,
which he had kept out of sight, he laid it on his breast,
drew over its head a linen mask, painted to resemble a
human face, the mouth of which would open and shut on
pulling a string, and gave out to the people that the
newborn god had already grown to that great size, and
was now ready to give oracles. From all Asia Minor
and Thrace the people came in thousands to witness the
miracle. The mystic semi-obscurity of the hut and the
magical effects of artificial light magnified the impression
that the charlatan and his snake made on the people.
Whoever wished to receive an oracle of the god had to
write his question on a tablet, which was then to be
sealed with wax and handed to the prophet. When the
people had retired he melted the seals, read the questions,
wrote the answers, then sealed the tablets again,
and gave them back (with the answers) the seals apparently
intact. The tariff for oracles was a drachma and
eight oboli (about 25 cents), and the annual receipts
amounted to seventy or eighty thousand drachmas (say
$15,000), but he had out of this sum to pay a host of
assistants and confederates. When the temple was completed
Alexander carried on his business there.
But his title to public regard did not pass unchallenged.
The Epicureans, who detested all trickery, and who believed
that enjoyment was the only end in life worth
thinking of, manifested their hostility to the prophet, and
were, in turn, denounced by him as atheists and Christians.
127To safeguard his reputation he added to his
repertoire. First, he began to give oracles viva voce, a
confederate behind a screen speaking the responses into
a tube terminating at the mouth of the snake’s mask.
But the charge for such oracles was higher, and they
were elicited only for the behoof of persons of eminence.
Alexander’s fame spread even to Rome, and dupes from
that seat of enlightenment came to consult the serpent-god.
One of these addle-pate pilgrims from Rome
asked the oracle what manner of woman he should take
to wife. The oracle named the daughter of Alexander;
so he married her, and offered hecatombs to his mother-in-law,
his bride’s mother, in her capacity of moon-goddess,
for such Alexander gave her out to be. Encouraged
by many successes not inferior to this, the prophet
instituted many mystic festivals, from which he excluded
all unbelievers in God, as Epicureans and Christians. At
these festivals the birth of Aesculapius and the nuptials
of Alexander and the Moon-Goddess were represented
dramatically, though perhaps a trifle too realistically.
The prophet also claimed to be a reincarnation of
Pythagoras, and in proof showed his thigh encased in
gilded leather. His life was a continuous debauch. In
time he began to hold what we should now call “dark
seances;” that is, he would sit in absolute darkness and
make response to questions submitted in writing on
sealed tablets. As he could not read the questions at
all, his answers (the oracles) were expressed for the most
part in unintelligible language. Lucian once tested his
powers by submitting to him the one question, “When
will Alexander be caught at his tricks,” written on eight
tablets; he got eight different answers, all irrelevant. He
missed no opportunity of unmasking the rogue, and of
128teaching the people by the evidence of their own senses
that the man was a vulgar impostor. The knave affected
a mild friendship for his adversary, but he bribed the
helmsman of a vessel on which Lucian sailed to throw
him overboard; this the man had not the courage to do.
Lucian wished to have the impostor put on trial for
this crime, but the proconsul advised him not to invoke
the help of the law, Alexander being too high in favor
with the officials and the public. The city of Abonotichus
had coins struck bearing the effigy of the Aesculapius
serpent, and the pseudoprophet attained the age of
seventy years, enjoying to the end the undiminished respect
of the people.
Many were the impostors that sprang up after Alexander,
and wherever there was any lack of real ones, fictitious
pseudoprophets were imagined by satiric writers,
Lucian’s Peregrinus, for example, a renegade Christian
who devotes himself to a death by fire to win fame. It
was a mad world then. New mysteries were invented in
plenty, and people came in crowds for initiation. The
“Golden Ass” of Apuleius is a striking satire on this
mystery furore. To this period belong the Gnostics,
whose doctrines were a mixture of Judaism, heathenism
and Christianism; the Manichees, who gave a Christian
varnish to the Persian fire worship; the Kabbalists, who
heaped a vast amount of rubbish together, got out of
the Hebrew Bible by juggling with its sentences, words,
letters and numbers. Amid this tangle of doctrines the
heathen religions sank, Judaism lost its native land, and
Christianism fell into an incalculable number of sects—an
evil that was not to be corrected even by the artificial
unity of the Church under the Apostolical See.
PART SIXTH. The Knights Templar. — 1. THE MIDDLE AGE. — 2. THE TEMPLARS. — 3. THE SECRETS OF THE TEMPLARS. — 4. THE DOWNFALL OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR.
129
With the spread of Christianism the heathen mysteries
came everywhere to an end, and the Christian mysteries
took their place. The Christians, it is true, no
longer constituted a secret society, after their faith had
become the creed of the state; but there was plenty of
mystic doctrine, nevertheless, and incessant strife of parties
and sects, Arians and Athanasians, Pelasgians and
Semipelagians, Nestorians, Monophysites and Monothelites,
Adoptionists, Priscillianists, and Donatists, to name
no more, over Christ’s nature, on the question whether
the Holy Ghost proceeds only from the Father or equally
from him and the Son; whether the soul is saved by
good works or by grace of God, and so on interminably.
This wrangling so occupied the minds of all that there
was no longer need of secret societies. Theology, i. e.,
the struggle for creed, and war, i. e., the struggle for
power, were the occupations of the Middle Age. Monks
and knights were the two great classes of that time, with
the Pope as supreme head on one side, and the Emperor
on the other.
All the available knowledge was in the Middle Age
employed in the service of the Church, and hence science
slept from the migration of the barbarians till the invention
130of printing. During that period of a thousand years
no addition was made to the sum of human knowledge.
Arabian and Jewish physicians alone labored to save
the intellectual wealth inherited from the ancient Greeks.
As for Christendom, it was involved in profound intellectual
darkness, and the Doctrine of Light that had been
published by the Carpenter’s Son, was lost amid petty
controversies and inane interpretations, till at last its
strictly monotheistic groundwork was forgotten, and
there remained visible only the superstructure of ethnic
mysticism and of doctrines, as the Trinity, Incarnation,
Resurrection, and Ascension, borrowed from Egyptian
and Grecian mythology.
And this ethnico-mystic structure acquired a splendor
and a power never before equaled, so that the system
was credited to divine intervention, whereas its purely
human origin might easily have been traced. The root
idea of the ethnic mysticism was to seek the supposedly
“lost deity,” to find him, to be unified with him. And the
self-same idea underlay the Christian mysticism, and it
was by calling that idea into play and by giving it expression
in brilliant achievement, that this mysticism won
its highest triumph, and, aided by the Papacy, its widest
influence. This new embodiment of the mystical idea
was seen in the Crusades, in which the Christian mystics
joined, going forth to seek the lost sepulchre of their
God, and to obtain control of it. Possession of the sepulchre
would be the surest guarantee for the unification of
godhead and humanity.
In this undertaking the two most powerful estates
of the Middle Age took part—the monks and the knights.
The monks, under orders from the Pope, joined the
armies of the cross; the knights, commanded by the Emperor,
131marched to the Holy Land and conquered it.
After the conquest, when there was a kingdom of Jerusalem
after the model of the kingdoms of the West, there
arose, as the necessary summit of medieval aspiration,
the union of monkery and chivalry, in the monkish orders
of knights, whose members wore the sword of the knight
and took the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and
obedience.
These organizations had their origin in the gradual
assumption of knightly elements by the monastic orders.
Some merchants of Amalfi, oldest commercial emporium
of Italy, had, as early as 1048, founded a monastery and
a church at Jerusalem, and in conjunction with these a
hospital in honor of John the Baptist. There the monks
cared for pilgrims who were poor or ailing. Pope Paschal
II. granted them a monastic constitution in 1113,
and Godfrey of Bouillon, soon after the capture of Jerusalem,
endowed them with considerable properties.
They took the title of Brothers Hospitalers of Saint
John of Jerusalem; their habit consisted of a black mantle
with a white cross. A few years later (1119) the Knights
Hugo of Payns, and Godfrey of Saint Omers, associated
themselves and six other knights, all French, in a military
league, under the style “Poor Knights of Christ,”
pledging themselves to keep the highways of the Holy
Land safe for pilgrims, and to observe the rule of Saint
Benedict. The members were favored by King Baldwin
I. and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and came to be called
Templars, because their convent stood on the site of the
Solomonic Temple. The Templars received from the
Synod of Troyes in 1128 recognition as a regular order,
a monastic rule, a monastic habit, a special banner, etc.
About the same date the Hospitalers, Johannites, or
132Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, became invested
with the knightly character. After the Hospitalers came
the German Knights, whose theatre of action was principally
the region of the Baltic Sea, but they also saw
service in Spain in the war against the Saracens. Other
knightly orders were those of Calatrava, of Alcantara, of
Santiago de Compostella, in England the order of the
Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, etc.
None of these orders rose to higher distinction than
the order of the Templars, or of “the Poor Companions
of the Temple of Jerusalem,” as it was styled in its rule.
In those days it was full of the spirit of lowliness, but
the time came when the knights were no longer called
themselves “Poor Companions,” but “Knights Templar.”
At first the brethren begged their bread, fasted, were diligent
in attendance on divine worship, performed the duties
of their religion, fed the poor, cared for the sick. Plain
and unadorned was their attire, in color either black,
white or brown; and the brother who tried to get the
finest habit got the shabbiest. The hair and beard were
close cropped. The chase was not permitted, except for
the extermination of beasts of prey. Women were not
allowed to live in the houses of the order; the brethren
might not so much as kiss their female relations. But
their mode of life became in time very different. They
became rich in worldly goods, and so broke the vow of
poverty. As an order and as individuals they followed
their own inclinations, and thus was their vow of obedience
made nought; and their vow of chastity fared not
better; while the specific vow of the order—protection of
pilgrims to the Holy Land—became a nullity through
133their negligence, or even by their treasonable surrender
of posts to the Saracens.
The candidate for admission to the order was required
to be of noble birth, though sometimes illegitimate
sons of knights were received. Furthermore, the
candidate must be unmarried and unbetrothed; but this
rule was circumvented by taking married candidates as
“affiliate” members; they also admitted minors and even
small boys. Lucre was the impelling motive of this disregard
of their rule; money was their god. No other
order of knights was in such disrepute for lewdness, duplicity,
even treason. Originally all Templars were of
one rank and degree—that of knights. But in time ecclesiastics
were admitted to attend to the spiritual affairs,
and these ecclesiastics were made independent of the ordinary
jurisdiction of diocesans. Thus was formed a
second rank or degree, subordinate to the knights, and
mere dummies on festival and ceremonial occasions.
Then was added still another class, Servientes, who were
the personal attendants of the knights, or were otherwise
employed for the benefit of the order, as mechanics, laborers,
etc. The class Affiliates comprised persons of all
ranks in life and of both sexes. They were not bound by
all the vows of the order; they were required to make
the order heir of their property; but they did not live
in the houses of the order. These several classes were
distinguished by their attire. Knights wore a white
mantle with an eight-pointed red cross over the left
breast. Clerics wore the cassock, with brown mantle (the
mantle of the higher clerics was white). Servientes wore
a brown garb. The members called each other Brother,
and indeed they stood by each other like brothers; in
battle their personal bravery was irreproachable.
134All these religious orders of knights possessed great
power in the Middle Age, their grandmasters ranking
next after Popes and monarchs. In fact they recognized
no emperor or king as their lord, but only the Pope.
The orders were favored by the Pontiffs, who loaded them
with praise and privileges, though they feared them. If
the Popes had now the arm of the flesh and not of the
spirit only to defend them against the secular power, they
owed that advantage to the knightly orders. And specially
were they beholden to the Templars in this regard. The
Templars were free from all Church tribute, and by the
Pope’s favor had the right to harbor excommunicated
knights, to conduct divine service in churches that were
under interdict, to found churches and churchyards;
which privileges brought down upon them the enmity of
the clergy. As the order was exempt from all episcopal
jurisdiction and subject only to the Roman See, the
bishops endeavored to have that and other like privileges
abated by the Lateran Council in 1179. At the
time of their suppression the Templars possessed an empire
of five provinces in the East and sixteen in the West,
with 15,000 houses of the order. In possession of such
resources, they aimed at nothing short of making all
Christendom dependent on their order, and to set up a
sort of military aristocratic commonwealth, governed ostensibly
by the Pope, but really by themselves, with their
grandmaster at the head. The grandmaster of the Templars
was elected by a college of eight knights, four servientes
and one cleric. The Grandmaster was only
president of the Council and its representative; but in
war he had supreme command; as the Pope’s deputy he
had jurisdiction over the clerics. A splendid retinue attended
him, and he had a treasury at his disposal. Next
135in rank after him stood the Seneschal, his deputy for
civil affairs, and the Marshal for military, the Treasurer,
the Drapier. The Council (Conventus) consisted of the
Grandmaster, his assistants (i.e., the grand officers just
mentioned), Provincial Masters who might be present,
and such knights as the Grandmaster might summon.
By addition of all eminent Templars the Council became
the General Chapter; this was the legislative body. The
other knightly orders were organized on a plan not essentially
different. What interests us most at present is
those features of the Templar order which marked it as
in some respects a secret society.
The order took its first steps in this direction in the
thirteenth century, moved thereto by desire to safeguard
its riches and power. Its secret doctrines or tenets were
borrowed from the heretical sects of the time—Albigenses
and Waldenses—or were such beliefs as were held in secret
by many of the most enlightened men. Such views
were shared by religious men, scholars, and worldlings
alike, by the first class out of indignation against the
moral degeneration of the rulers of the Church; by the
second, because they suspected that the Church’s dogmas
were but inventions of Popes and councils, and by
the third, because in rejecting the Church’s authority
and accepting the heretical doctrines, they fancied that
they were freed from the obligations of morality. But
the Templars, who were neither pious nor learned,
but of whom many were very worldly indeed, found the
enlightened new opinions to coincide well with their interest,
which prompted them to care rather for their
numerous possessions in the West than for the few they
held in lands occupied by the Moslem. God, said they,
showed his favor to the Mohammedans in the Crusades,
136and evidently willed the defeat of the Christian arms. So
by adopting the more enlightened views, they prepared
the way for a withdrawal from the useless Crusades, and
a return with bag and baggage to Europe, where they
could rest from their glorious but hard and thankless
martial labors, and devote themselves to the service of
princes, or pass the time in the splendid houses of their
order, amid Oriental luxury, and surrounded by gardens
like Fairyland, beguiling the hours with gaming and the
chase, with songs and lovemaking, the while not neglecting
their political interests. But the Templars were
rapidly nearing their downfall.
The Arcana of the Templars consisted of a secret
doctrine and of a cult based on the same. The doctrine,
which had no ground in scientific research, seems to have
been akin to the doctrine of certain sects, specially the
Albigenses, who worshiped a superior god of heaven and
an inferior god of earth, and ascribed to the latter the
origin of evil. For the Templars, Christ was no Son of
God, had worked no miracles, had neither risen from the
dead nor ascended into heaven; he was, in fact, often
spoken of as a false prophet. The Church’s doctrine regarding
the transubstantiation of the bread in the mass
was for them crass superstition, the eucharist only a commemorative
rite, the sacrament of penance a priestly imposture,
the Trinity a human invention, veneration of the
cross an act of idolatry. That the opposition of the order
to the last-mentioned custom led on festival occasions,
and particularly when new members were admitted, to
overt acts of contempt for the cross, to spitting on the
137cross, for example—accusations like that are grave not
only from the point of view of the Church, but even of
common propriety, and they played an important part in
the prosecution of the Templars. That postulants were
compelled by force of arms and other violent means to
perform such highly reprehensible acts is not to be discredited
entirely, for they may have been part of a test
of the postulants’ willingness to obey superiors: and besides,
the objectionable ceremony was not practiced everywhere,
but only in France. More excusable was the offense
of the Templars in looking on the cross broidered
on their mantle, not as the sign of redemption, but as a
double T, the initial letter of the name of their society.
They were said also to have substituted John the Baptist
in the place of Jesus as the order’s patron, because John
did not pretend to miraculous powers nor declare himself
the Messiah. The clerics of the order must have approved
these heretical opinions and practices. There
were at that time many enlightened churchmen, and it is
to be presumed that the Templars would adopt such of
them as were at variance with the hierarchy and took
refuge in the order.
The Templars’ secret rites, introduced in the middle
of the thirteenth century, were practiced as part of their
peculiar religious service, and at the admission of new
members: for though the Catholic liturgy was used in
their chapels, the initiated performed a cult of their own
in the chapter house, or chapel, before break of day. This
consisted of confession and communion, as understood
by Templars. This confession they regarded on the one
hand as an act of brotherly trust, and on the other of
brotherly counsel: hence, they confessed only to the
chaplains of the order; in the latter times of the order
138the members were forbidden to confess to priests that
were not Templars. By them the communion was taken
in the natural species and substance of bread and wine,
and in token of brotherly love, not as commemorative of
any sacrifice.
Two images played a part in the Templar rites. The
image of John the Baptist typified the order’s opposition
to the Church’s creed. The other image, jealously
guarded from the eyes of outsiders, has been called an
“idol.” It was made chiefly of copper, gilt, and represented
now a human skull, anon the countenance of an
old man heavily bearded (makroprosopos), again a very
small face (mikroprosopos), which would be now the face
of a man, then of a woman, anon male and female at
once; it would have now one, again two or three, heads,
with bright shining eyes of carbuncles. The idol was by
some Templars called “Bassomet,” but why, does not appear.
From the statements of members of the order it
would seem that this idol was a kind of talisman that
brought all manner of good fortune; that it was set up
for veneration as rival to the cross, and that they called
it “the savior of the order.”
There were two forms of admission, the general and
the special (or secret) form: the latter was used only at the
admission of postulants that could be trusted with the
secrets of the order. The Scribe, acting as Receptor, first
asked the brethren, in chapter, if they had any objection
to make the admission of the postulant. If none objected
the postulant was led into an adjoining room
and questioned as to his purpose in seeking entrance to
the order, whether he knew of any impediment on his
part, whether he owed debts that he could not pay,
whether he was married or engaged to be married, and
139so forth. The questions having been satisfactorily answered,
and the minutes of the replies reported to the
brethren, the matter was again put to vote. Next, the
candidate was brought before the chapter, and, after
more questioning, took the vows and was formally admitted.
In the secret rite of admission the Receptor
showed to the candidate the Idol, with these words: “Believe
in this, put your trust in this, and all will be well
with you.” Then he girded the candidate with a cord of
white wool fibres, the Baptist’s girdle, as it was called,
which he was to wear over the shirt. The obligation of
secrecy was very sternly enforced. Those who betrayed
any of the secrets of the order were cast into prison, and
the candidate was threatened with dungeons and death
should he communicate to an outsider any information
about the ceremony of initiation.
Thus did the Templars, an order instituted for the
purpose of guarding the Church’s interests, in the end
reject the Church’s doctrines, and adopt principles that
tended inevitably to the overthrow, not only of the Papacy,
but of Christianism itself. Such was the irreconcilable
opposition between the avowed and the secret convictions
of the Templars, and such was the hypocrisy of the
order: for, though they had apostatized from the creeds
of the Church, they would not formally quit her communion;
and though they regarded as true many points
of anti-Christian doctrine, they veiled these with mystery,
or even on occasion made sport of them, instead of publishing
them, as so many poor, unarmed heretics did; and
hence their aspirations were foiled, and the most powerful
association of that time perished, not in glorious battle,
but in ignominious dungeons and at the stake.
140
The Crusades having failed utterly, the Holy Land
having again come under the power of the “infidels,” and
the occupation of the knightly orders having gone, the
Popes cast about for a remedy for this undesirable state
of things. The order of German Knights had already
forestalled the problem by choosing as their theatre of
action the countries on the Baltic Sea, and the Spanish
orders by waging continual wars against the Moors; and
the Knights of Saint John (Hospitalers) later found a
place for themselves by occupying Rhodes. But the Templars
were without any fit employment, and that circumstance
was the occasion of their downfall. About the
year 1305 Pope Clement V. proposed a union of the
Templars with the Hospitalers, and, if possible, with other
orders, but both Templars and Hospitalers rejected the
advice.
Philip IV. (the Fair) of France found in the Templars
a serious obstacle to his ambition, and in the early years of
his reign sought to compel them by force to aid him in his
schemes; but failing in that design, tried to win them by
loading them with favors. Many different explanations
have been offered to account for another change of policy
on the part of Philip, but none of them is historically
sound. Probably the change noticeable in the king’s
attitude toward the order in 1305 was in some way connected
with the outrageous doings of the Inquisition in
the South of France; doubtless rumors of heresy in the
Templar order had come to the omnipresent ear of the
Holy Court. The Inquisitor-General of France, William
Imbert, prior of the Dominicans in Paris, begged the
King to call the Templars to account. The King, on Nov.
14114, 1305, informed Clement V. of the accusation, but
Clement, notwithstanding this, invited not only the
Grandmaster of the Hospitalers, but also the head of
the Templars, to meet with himself in conference about
the project of a new Crusade. Yet in his letter to the
Templars’ Grandmaster, James Molay (who resided in
his palace in Cyprus), he counseled him to come without
escort, “lest the news of his departure should give occasion
to enemies (of the order) to make a sudden onslaught.”
The Master of the Hospitalers was unable to
come, being busied with the siege of Rhodes, and Molay,
contrary to the Pope’s advice, came to France escorted
by his entire council, sixty knights, and bringing the
treasure and the archives of his order. In May, 1307, the
Pope and the King met at Poictiers, and, it is supposed,
discussed thoroughly the question of the Templars: about
the same time the Templars informed the Pope of the
dangers that threatened them, and asked for an investigation
of the charges brought against them: such investigation
the Pope decided to institute. It cannot be determined
whether it was with the Pope’s approval, or
against his wishes, that Philip on Oct. 13, 1307, had all
the Templars in France arrested and their goods seized.
Five heads of complaint were alleged against the
order; viz., profanation of the cross, worship of an idol,
indecent rites of initiation, omission of the sacramental
words (i.e., the words of consecration or of transubstantiation,
Hoc est corpus meum) in masses performed by
priests belonging to the order, and indulgence of unnatural
lusts. Two days after the arrests the people of
Paris, whose partiality for the Templars was feared, were
assembled before the royal palace, and there were labored
with by monks and royal officials, to turn them against
142the order. The King took up his residence in the “Temple,”
the Paris house of the order, in which was hid the
treasure of the Grandmaster (150,000 gold florins, and
twelve horseloads of silver pence). It was not quite
500 years later when the Temple became the prison of a
descendant of the King. In that same building, in presence
of the masters and bachelors of the university, the
trial of the Grandmaster and his brethren was commenced,
and proceeded under the direction of Imbert.
The procedure was the same as in the ordinary trials for
heresy and witchcraft in the court of the Inquisition.
Confessions were obtained by use of the torture, and it is
impossible at this day to tell how much in those confessions
was due to the employment of that peculiar method
of eliciting truth, and how much, if any part, was prompted
by the desire to atone for past offenses by truthful
(even if forced) admission of guilt.
The Pope was not pleased with this turn of affairs.
He claimed for himself the right to proceed against the
Templars, declared that the King was infringing the
privileges of the See of Rome, and attributed the action
taken against the Templars to a desire to get possession
of the order’s treasury and to annihilate a society whose
existence was a cause of anxiety to the King. He, therefore,
protested against the whole proceeding, and demanded
that the arrested Templars and their property
should be surrendered to him as judge of the questions at
issue. The King refused, but he came to an understanding
with the Pope in the matter of the prosecution, and
Nov. 22 the Pope, by the bull “Pastoralis Praeeminentiae,”
ordered the arrest of all the Templars throughout
the Christian world. The King of England, Edward II.
who was Philip’s son-in-law, obeyed this precept, though
143he had previously expressed disbelief of the guilt of the
Templars. A like change of mind was seen in Aragon.
In Cyprus the Templars attempted resistance, but submitted.
Denis, King of Portugal, refused to institute a
prosecution against them.
Inasmuch as the measure was one that affected all
countries, the case of the Templars belonged of right to
the Papal jurisdiction. Even Philip admitted this; but
he mistrusted the Pope, and feared that the Templars
might be acquitted, and then take revenge on the King.
Negotiations were opened. The King demanded the
death of the Templars, but the Pope would not consent
to this till their guilt was fully proven; and again he demanded
the surrender to him of their persons and their
possessions. The King at last acceded to the demand,
for he had need of the Pope’s assistance in procuring
the election of his brother as successor to the assassinated
German King, Albert.
Under the Papal jurisdiction the trials were conducted
with more lenity: torture was not employed. But
the Pope became convinced of the guilt of the accused;
till then he had been in doubt. Molay made, without
compulsion, many very important admissions, as did several
high officials of the order, but on sundry points they
contradicted one another. Nevertheless, the Pope was
still firmly of the opinion that only individual Templars
were on trial, not the order, while for the King the annihilation
of the order was the main thing. August 8,
1308, the bull “Faciens Misericordiam” ordered a prosecution
of the Templars in every country of Christendom;
and on the 12th of the same month, by the bull “Regnans
in Coelis,” a council was summoned for the year 1310, to
determine the question of the Templars. Further ordinances
144of the Pope had to do with the surrender of the
properties of the order to the Church.
Meanwhile the Pope had forgotten to aid the French
King’s brother in his pretensions to the crown of the
Roman Empire. On the contrary, he favored the election
of Henry VII. of Luxemburg, and was glad to find
in him a prince who would strenuously oppose the overweening
ambition of Philip IV. The tension between the
Pope and the French King was increasing, and the trials
of the Templars went on sluggishly for two years more.
There was much arbitrary ill-usage of Templars. The
bishops, to whom the Pope had committed the prosecution
of the individual members of the order, in many
places gave loose rein to their ancient enmity toward the
Templars, and freely used the torture; nevertheless, very
many of the accused maintained the innocence of their
order, and declared the prior confessions false. This can
be explained only by supposing that the abuses in the
order did not extend to all the houses. Molay’s behavior
on his trial was neither firm nor dignified, ever
balancing between self-accusation and vindication. He
was never sure of his ground, sought to retard procedure,
used equivocal and obscure phrases, and continually
protested his orthodoxy; and the other members for
the most part acted in like manner: but their excuse is the
hard usage they endured, and Molay was not permitted to
complain of that.
All the Templars arrested in Paris, numbering 546,
were on the 28th of May, 1310, mustered in the garden
of the Bishop’s palace, and there the accusation was read
to them. Six of the accused—three knights and three
clerics—protested in the name of all against the treatment
they had received, and demanded the release of all
145Templars and arrest of their accusers. In vain! During
the investigation thirty-six members of the order died in
prison at Paris. May 12, 1310, those who had retracted
their confessions, to the number of 54, were burned
alive: to these were afterward added eight more, and at
Rheims nine met the same fate: they all protested their
innocence at the supreme moment. It is worthy of note
that the Pope, who till then had favored delay in the proceedings,
was now for instant action. He sharply reproved
the English authorities for refusing to employ
the torture; and he did his best to accomplish the destruction
of the Templars at Avignon, who had taken up
arms to defend themselves; but, though defeated, they
were adjudged innocent; and it was the same in Castile.
In Germany, where the order, though weak in numbers,
made a resolute stand, the Pope offered no convincing
proof of the charges; and in England, too, nothing could
be proved against the accused members. But throughout
the greater part of Italy the Templars fared as in France,
except that they were not condemned to the stake. In
vain did the celebrated Raymond Lully, at the Council of
Vienne (1312), plead for the preservation of the order by
a consolidation of all the military orders in one, whose
Grandmaster should be that French prince who happened
to be King of Jerusalem: for he hoped thus to conciliate
the good will of Philip. The Pope, who had long been
urged by the King to suppress the order, now made haste
to save the property of the Templars from falling into
secular hands, and so, by the bulls “Vox in Excelso” and
“Ad Providam Christi Vicarii,” published April 3 and
May 2, 1312, respectively, he made over to the Hospitalers
all the estates of the Templars, estates in Spain excepted.
146The unfortunate Grandmaster Molay, who received
a pittance of four sous per diem to alleviate his misery,
bore his imprisonment with great fortitude; but March
11, 1313, he and Godfrey de Charney, an official of the
order, having retracted their confessions, were slowly
burnt to death on an island in the Seine, by order of the
King, without any judicial process. Molay, it is said,
cited the two murderers of his brethren, Philip and
Clement, to appear before the judgment seat of God.
They both died, one of colic, the other in consequence of
a fall from his horse, eight and thirteen months, respectively,
after the death of Molay. The order was suppressed
everywhere except in Portugal, where it took the
name “Order of Jesus Christ,” and continued in existence.
Its Grandmaster, Prince Henry the navigator, a hundred
years afterward, employed its wealth in promoting the
high ends of civilization. In other countries the Templars
either wandered about as fugitives, or entered the
order of Hospitalers. The seizure of the order’s estates
in France was annulled by the bull of suppression, but
Philip, nevertheless, maintained his hold on the house of
the order in Paris, and on the treasure there stored. The
remainder of the property was plundered by the nobility
and the Church; and the Pope surely was not forgetful of
his own interest. The Hospitalers afterward succeeded
to their rights, but that did them hardly less harm than
good, for it cost them a great sum to release the estates
of the Templars from the grasp of the robbers; besides,
many a small piece of property was made away with by
princes, great lords, orders, churches, and monasteries.
PART SEVENTH The Femgerichte. — 1. COURTS OF JUSTICE IN THE MIDDLE AGE. — 2. THE SECRET TRIBUNAL. — 3. THE END OF THE FEME.
147
The wild disorder attending the irruption of the
Gothic nations having subsided, society, which had lost
its bearings, had to organize itself anew. The first step
toward this end was taken when society’s task was distributed
among innumerable fractional parts of itself, each
fraction trying to do its own share of the work; the next
step was the uniting of all these fractional parts under
one religious idea—that of Christianism, and under one
political law—that of feudalism. The Pope and the Emperor
represented the religious and the political ideas respectively.
As long as one was true to Pope and Emperor—i.e.,
was a good Christian and a good subject—all
was well with him, and he might, in all other matters, do
as he pleased. The principle of Justice was not regarded:
no wrong act was punished as violating right, but always
as doing harm. Even murder was not regarded as infringement
of human right to life, but simply as harm
done to the people of the murdered one. If one was
without relatives, his slayer went unpunished; but if
the murdered man left a family or kinsmen, the murderer,
on paying to them a certain sum, went forth free. Thus,
the utmost unrestraint prevailed in the several small aggregations
of people, and the utmost diversity between
148one little community and another. Of bureaucratic, centralized,
cast-iron government there was no faintest
foreshadow; nor was government a function assigned to
any one, but, like the administration of justice, an acquired
right. In a given province this one had acquired
the government, that one the civil and a third the criminal
judiciary; one was obeyed in peace, another commanded
the people in war. Jurisdictions were undefined
and inextricably mixed up—a consequence of the feudal
system, under which the King granted rights now to one
man, again to another, as favors, never inquiring how
these might consist with rights previously granted to
others. In this way it became possible in the Middle
Age for such juristic abnormities as the Femgerichte to
come into existence. The Femgerichte resulted from
the confusion existing in judiciary affairs, just as the
religious abnormity of the monastic orders of knights resulted
from the very opposite condition of things in the
Church—the excess of regulation. For the confusion (absence
of regulation) and the excessive regulation were
near akin; they both sprang out of the unrestraint of
private life in the Middle Age, which unrestraint naturally
produced, under the rule of the Church, a multitude
of monastic rules (e.g., the Rule of St. Augustin, of
St. Benedict, of St. Columba, etc.); while, on the
contrary, the feebleness of the Empire, due to the jealousy
of the Popes and the ambition and avarice of the
feudal lords, was fatal to any organization of the administrative
and judicial functions, and though there were
many codes of law, there could be no standard for distinguishing
right and wrong.
The cause of this difference of development between
State and Church was, that the Church had grown from
149the top downward, from the hierarchy down to the people;
while the State, on the contrary, had grown from
below upward. During the process of migration and settlement,
each nation or horde was self-governed, perfectly
free and independent: hence, the popular, genial,
oftentimes even jovial and humorous cast of Teutonic
law, as compared with the hard, pedantic, abstruse, austere
character of the Jus Romanum. Roman law has
only a corpus juris; Teutonic law has Wise Saws, Juristic
Proverbs, Juristic Drolleries, Juristic Myths (Weistuemer,
Rechtssprichtwoerter, Rechtsschwoernke, Rechtssagen).
Originally, among the Germans, the freemen themselves
were the court and chose their president, the Graf
(graf now equals count). Not until the time of Karl the
Great (Charlemagne) did the grafs become standing officials,
and later an hereditary order and lords proprietary.
As the functions of government were by degrees entrusted
to fewer and ever fewer hands, being transferred from
the people to favored feudal lords, and from them passing
finally into the hands of an individual sovereign—a quite
natural process, for while the people increased in number
they did not become better educated, and therefore grew
ever less fitted for self-government—so, too, judgment,
quitting the open, embowered courts amid the lindens,
with heaven’s breezes whispering among the leaves, and
heaven’s blue dome overarching all, withdrew behind
dank and frowning walls, from the countenance of the
whole people to a meeting of a small bench of stern
judges.
Thus gradually were the rights of the freemen diminished.
The freemen was less and less frequently
called to sit in judgment, for the president of the court,
the graf, was no longer an equal, but a great lord, their
150superior, who made up the court as to him seemed best,
and who even cared nothing for the Emperor.[2]
2. What follows regarding the Femgerichte is based on
Theodor Lindner’s work, “Die Femgerichte,” Münster and Paderborn,
1888. (Whatever may have been the original meaning
of the word “fem” in “femgericht,” it is enough to know that
in usage it is equivalent to “secret”; hence femgericht—secret
judgment, or secret tribunal.)
Westphalia was the original home of the Femgerichte,
and they owed their rise to the fact that there the
royal ban (Koenigsbann), that is to say, the right possessed
by the King alone, of conferring the grafship on
the grafs, was still alive, in modified form indeed, yet
with its substance unimpaired. Owing to the granting
of various privileges to ecclesiastical and secular magnates
the jurisdiction of the grafs was in time divided
up. Besides, there were special courts for freemen, and
special courts for the half-free and the unfree, the former
courts being under the free grafs, and the other under the
gaugrafafs (district grafs). Now, as the majority of the
population were under the gaugrafs, the possession of
a gaugrafship developed into sovereignty; while the position
of the free grafs became peculiar: the office was often
sold and passed from hand to hand. The free grafs, who
were often persons of little means, in order to maintain
their dignity, had to lean on the King’s ban, or warrant,
obtainable from the King alone. But often the free grafships
died out, or they were consolidated with gaugrafships.
But nowhere did they retain so much of their
original character as in Westphalia—a geographical expression
of various meanings, indeed, but in general it
denoted the region between the Rhine and the Weser.
The term Freigraf dates from the twelfth century.
151Not only the King but the duke also had influence
over the free grafships. After the break-up of the ancient
duchy of Saxony, every princely land proprietor within
its territory was duke of Westphalia; this is specially
true of the Archbishop of Cologne, and also of the
bishops of Muenster, Osnabrueck and Minden, and of the
Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg—dukes of Westphalia all,
but with more or less limitation. Probably the duke was
entitled to preside over any free court, and to summon to
his own tribunal, the “botding,” the free grafs. So, too,
the stuhlherr (lord of the manor) possessed the right of
presiding, even when he was no prince, but only a graf;
and often he assumed that the free graf gave judgment
only in his (the lord’s) name, and so granted release from
the jurisdiction of the free courts, to cities, for example.
The free graf and his assessors, the schoeffen (a lower
grade of judges), afterward called freischoeffen, constituted
the freigericht (free court), afterward known as femgericht.
These offices might fall to any freeman—and
any one was reckoned a freeman who had “his own
smoke,” i. e., a house of his own.
In the latter half of the 14th and the first half of the
15th century the emperors bestowed on the archbishops
of Cologne, as dukes of Westphalia and lieutenants of the
Emperor, the right of investiture of all free grafs and
supervision of them all over Westphalia. A chapter of
free grafs was held yearly at Arnsberg, and hence the
Arnsberg tribunal obtained the first rank.
As the free grafs held their investiture from the king,
they looked on themselves as king’s officers, and little
by little went on extending their jurisdiction over the
whole empire—a design favored by the confusion reigning
everywhere, and even approved by the emperors
152themselves. At last the free grafs began to think that they
were higher than the emperor, and had no need of his
meddling: this arrogance was at its height in the reign
of Sigmund, and it was still to be seen under Frederic
VII.; in fact, Frederic, for having taken steps to punish
some insubordinate free grafs, was summoned by free
grafs to stand trial.
Some of the emperors did, indeed, set up free graf
tribunals outside the limits of Westphalia; but these never
prospered. In the 15th century it was an axiom that
such courts could exist only in Westphalia, or, as the saying
was, “on red earth,” a phrase that does not occur
prior to 1490, and the sense of which is not quite clear;
for neither is the soil of all Westphalia red, nor is red soil
confined to Westphalia: and the same criticism may be
made if “red earth” be taken for “blood-stained earth.”
The early “free courts” were in a certain sense “private”
courts, inasmuch as they were not open to all like
the courts of the gaugrafs (or judges of districts). The
associate judges (Freischoeffen) were called “wissende”
(wisemen, knowing ones), which, in old times, meant
“judges.” The “private” tribunal of the Feme became
by degrees a “secret” tribunal about the middle of the 14th
century, as the free grafs became more conscious of their
ambitious aims. The Schoeffen were now required to
bind themselves by oath to observe secrecy: the one who
proved false to his oath was first to have his tongue
plucked out, and then he was to be hanged, either three
or seven feet higher than a thief. The penalty was exacted
very rarely, and probably never the first item of it.
153The obligation of secrecy extended over all the proceedings
of the secret courts, even their letters and summonses.
But the most important secret was the countersign, by
means of which the initiated recognized each other. This
was made up of four words (taken from the oath), Stock,
Stein, Gras, Grein; and as the words were pronounced
one laid his right hand on the others’ left shoulder. Poetry
and romance have made the Feme courts sit in subterranean
chambers, at night, the faces of the judges masked.
The fact is that the tribunals of the Feme were set up at
the ancient seats of the free tribunals, and of such places
there were in Westphalia more than a hundred; and the
trials were always held in the open air, in broad daylight.
Whether in certain cases they were also public, so that
any one might be present, is not known. In all cases
where testimony was taken the proceedings were secret;
whoever willingly or unwillingly was present unbidden at
the secret deliberations was straightway hanged from the
nearest tree.
Very remarkable was the universal recognition
throughout Germany of the power of the Femgerichte. In
1387 the most distinguished people of Cologne were
“wissende”; about 1420 the Rhineland was full of wissende
belonging to every grade in society; and soon after
the same might be said of Bavaria, Tyrol, Switzerland,
Suabia, Franconia, Saxony, Prussia. Every manor lord
and every free city needed the advice of wissende. Princes
and cities had their judges admitted as schoeffen; archbishops
and princes, even the Emperor Sigmund, were
initiated: in the middle of the 15th century there must
have been more than 100,000 freischoeffen in the empire.
To be initiated became a craze, a fad; the native Westphalians
were amazed at the folly of their southern and
eastern countrymen.
154And the long arm of the Femgericht jurisdiction
reached as far as the host of wissende: the localities in
which the activity of the secret tribunals was manifested
were scattered all over the empire; in fact, the proceedings
of these courts which affected Westphalia itself became
a very small fraction of the whole.
But with the spread of the Feme jurisdiction arose
opposition to the same. There were seen faint beginnings
of opposition even in the early part of the 14th century,
when Bremen decided not to allow members of the Feme
courts to reside within its jurisdiction; toward the close
of that century other cities took more effective measures,
and in the 15th were even formed leagues of cities for
self-defense against the encroachments of the Feme.
Brunswick appealed to the Pope and the Emperor, and
Hildesheim and Erfurt to the Council of Basel. In the
middle of the 15th century several cities, especially in
Southern Germany and in Holland, were freed from the
jurisdiction of the secret courts by the supreme ecclesiastical
and civil authorities. Then the dukes of Bavaria
and of Saxony forbade their subjects laying complaints in
the Westphalian courts, and some cities punished that offense
with death, imprisonment, or banishment.
A Feme court consisted of a free graf and at least
seven schoeffen. The graf was required to be a freeborn
Westphalian of stainless reputation, whatever his station in
life, for peasants were often chosen to be grafs. The
schoeffen also had to be freemen born, and if not of Westphalian
birth, were required to present proofs of their
fitness. There was a fee for admission to the Feme. As
time went on the examination of applicants became less
and less strict, and often very questionable characters,
even serfs and men accused of crimes, were admitted: such
155admissions were illegal, and the men chosen under such
circumstances were called notschoeffen (makeshift schoeffen).
The free graf sat at a judgment-board, on which lay a
naked sword and a rope as symbols of avenging justice,
and the schoeffen took oath on these instruments. Each
free graf and each schoeffe of a given court was required
not only to be present at a trial, but to take part in pronouncing
sentence. When the trial was one of special
importance several hundred schoeffen would be in attendance.
The Femgerichte had their special codes and statutes,
which were from time to time amended. In these the
competence of the courts was defined, and this had to do
with matters purely criminal, at least so far as the trials
were held in secret. The crimes of which the Femgerichte
took cognizance—vemewrogige punkte (points for femic
animadversion)—were, according to the list drawn up at
Dortmund in 1430, as follows: 1, robbery and acts of
violence against ecclesiastics or churches; 2, larceny;
3, robbery of a woman in childbed or of a dying person;
4, plundering the dead; 5, arson and murder;
6, treachery; 7, betrayal of the Feme; 8, rape; 9, forgery
of money or of title to property; 10, robbery on the imperial
highway; 11, perjury and perfidy; 12, refusal to appear
in court on summons. Apostasy from the Christian
faith was put at the head of the list in an assembly held
at Arnsberg 1437, and in 1490 heresy and witchcraft were
added. For the person found guilty there was but one
punishment, death, and only one manner of death, by the
rope. This penalty could be inflicted without sentence
if the offender were taken in the act, or if he confessed
guilt, or if there were eyewitnesses of the crime.
156That among the offenses punishable by the Feme
heresy and witchcraft held almost the first place shows that
these tribunals were no object of apprehension to the ecclesiastical
power. This secret association, therefore, differed
from that of the Templars, as also from that of the
Stonemasons (which will be next considered) especially in
this, that the Feme was no league of Illuminati, but that
their specialty was opposition to the law of the stronger
and to the rule of petty states, and that their aim was to
uphold and exaggerate antiquated judicial institutions.
The procedure of the Femgerichte was entirely in accord
with the principle of ancient Teutonic law, that
“where no complainant appears, neither is there any
judge.” It was not the inquisitorial court procedure
of the 16th–19th centuries, in which the judge made investigation
on his own account, but a procedure founded
entirely in the practice of civil courts, and one that agreed
well with the independent spirit of the Middle Age, and
the view that then prevailed that law was a matter of personal
rights.
The free tribunals took up the complaint from whatever
quarter it came. All schoeffen, too, were under obligation
to bring to the attention of the free courts, and
to prosecute all doings coming under the animadversion
of the Feme. Hence were a schoeffe to give information
regarding such offenses to any other court, he was liable
to be hanged; and the same fate befel the one who, having
been entrusted with a bill of accusation, should open
the same and betray its contents. Accusations were not
entertained unless when submitted by wissende. The accuser
had to stand betwixt two fellow schoeffen, his sponsors,
in front of the tribunal in kneeling posture.
In every case the first thing done was to decide
157whether the crime was one meet for animadversion by the
Feme. That decided, the accused was summoned to appear,
if he was a wissender, before the secret tribunal, if
not a wissender, before the open court. The first summons
to a wissender to appear before the secret tribunal
was drawn up in writing by two schoeffen, and allowed
the accused a delay of six weeks and three days. If he
did not obey the summons, then four schoeffen summoned
him in person; and this proving ineffectual, six schoeffen
and one free graf repeated the summons, which
now was called the “warning.” The delay allowed
was the same as at first. If the accused was a
free graf the number of schoeffen employed in each
of the three processes of summoning was 7, 14 and
21, respectively, and of free grafs 2, 4 and 7.
The schoeffe, on receiving the summons, could appear at
any time within the three delays before the free court and
demand a statement of the charges and the names of the
accusers; then he might on his sword swear to his innocence,
and obtain his freedom; but he was liable to be
summoned again. Outsiders were summoned once only,
and usually by only one schoeffe. When the whereabouts
of an accused person was unknown, four summonses were
prepared, and these were posted in four places where he
might possibly be found. If the accused was one who inspired
fear, the summons might in the night time be
posted or left at the gate of the castle or of the city in
which he lived. In such cases the schoeffen walked or
rode up before the gate, hacked off the crossbeam three
chips, which they kept, put a penny of the realm in the
notch, affixed the summons, and cried out to the castellan
or the burgomaster, “We have stuck a king’s brief in
the notch and taken the proof with us: say you to him
158that is in the castle that he must on his appointed day
present himself before the free tribunal, on behalf of highest
law and the Emperor’s ban.” When the opposition
to the Femgerichte began to gain force, the summoners
were in greater peril often than the summoned: often they
lost their lives.
The day of the trial having arrived, if the accuser
was not on hand the accused was discharged. But if the
accused failed to appear, the accusation was repeated and
testimony taken. The free graf then thrice called the accused
by name, and asked if any one was there as his attorney.
If there was no appearance of the accused, the accuser
could demand judgment “after a se’ennight.” In
making this demand, he knelt, laid two fingers of the right
hand on his naked sword, affirmed the guilt of the accused,
and six schoeffen, as his sponsors, maintained the truth
of what he swore. If the verdict was against the accused,
the free graf arose, and outlawed the accused, in words
like these: “The accused (name and surname) I except
from the peace, the laws and the freedom (of the empire)
as the same have been stablished and decreed by
popes and emperors; and I cast him down and place him
in uttermost unquiet and disgrace, and make him illegitimate,
banned, outside the peace, dishonored, insecure,
loveless; and I do outlaw him according to the sentence
of the secret tribunal, and devote his neck to the rope,
his carcass to the birds and beasts to devour; and I
commend his soul to the power of God in heaven; and
his fiefs and goods I give up to the lords of whom the fiefs
are held; and I make his wife a widow and his children
orphans.” Then the free graf threw a twisted cord out
over the bounds of the court, the schoeffen spat out, and
the name of the outlaw was written in the book of the
159condemned. Among the persons thus condemned were
numbered some men of high station, as the dukes Henry
and Louis of Bavaria (1429), John, bishop of Wurtzburg,
and others. All free grafs and schoeffen were henceforth
under obligation to arrest and to execute sentence upon
the outlaw (but three members of the Feme were required);
and executing sentence meant hanging the culprit
from the nearest tree. Often the relatives of executed
outlaws of the Feme accused the executioners in the free
courts as assassins, and the court could outlaw its own
ministers for carrying out its own decrees. Many were
the abuses that arose, assassination of innocent persons,
for example. Murderers, too, pretended to be schoeffen;
and highwaymen robbed under pretense of sequestering
the property of persons condemned by judgment of the
Feme.
If ever the condemned, being a wissender and not
having overstayed the se’ennight of grace, appeared in
court with six compurgators he was set free; but if he
confessed his guilt, or was convicted, he was executed
forthwith in the usual way. The ban of the Feme could
never be lifted; but the number of death sentences actually
carried out was, says Lindner, “so very small that one
might readily allow the Feme’s decree of outlawry to be
pronounced upon him.” Pope Nicolas V. in 1452 condemned
the capital executions done by the Feme.
If a man under sentence of death should be proved
innocent before he fell into the hands of the executioners,
he was, if a wissender, brought before the court, with a
rope around his neck, wearing white gloves, carrying a
green cross, and attended by two schoeffen; falling on
his knees before the free graf he pleaded for mercy. The
free graf, taking him by the hand, bade him rise, removed
160the rope from around his neck, and restored him to the
grace and favor of the Feme. But one who was not a
wissender had no rights! He merely escaped death, but
there was no amend. The Emperor gave him “a reprieve
of 100 years, 6 weeks and a day”—that was all; he was
forever ineligible to become a schoeffe. Both processes
were called the “entfemung” (“unfeming,” undoing of the
Feme’s judgment).
Many of the condemned, unable to procure the entfemung,
ventured to appeal to the Emperor, the camera,
the Pope, or a Church Council. But the Femgerichte
never recognized such appeals, and protested strongly to
the Emperor against them. They regarded the condemned
as dead, and said that no one had the right “to
awaken the dead.” The Emperor Sigmund could think of
no means of saving a man under condemnation, except
by taking him into his own service, for the Femgerichte
did not care to take measures against officials of the
Kaiser and the empire. Women, too, as well as aged
men and children, were excepted from the cognizance
of the Feme, also, in theory, Jews, for Jews were “servants
of the Emperor’s bedchamber”; ecclesiastics, also,
for they could in the Middle Age be tried only in the
spiritual courts; but in the 15th century the Feme disregarded
these provisions, and summoned both Jews
and ecclesiastics.
But the Initiates of the Red Earth league met the
fate that overtakes all movements that lag behind the
times. The Feme did by no means render in the days
of “faustrecht” (fist-right, the rule of the stronger) so
great services as it has been credited with: never was
161the insecurity of life and property so great as when the
Femgerichte were most flourishing. If the extension of
the Feme beyond the borders of Westphalia was a wrong,
that wrong became aggravated through the excessive
secrecy of the tribunals. The Feme degenerated steadily,
and the respect in which it was held declined in equal
degree. The free grafs forgot the fair promise of their
original institution—that their function was to protect innocence
against the machinations of bad men. They,
and especially the presidents of courts, enriched themselves
with fees for admission of new members, with
costs of court, with fines and fees, and even with moneys
got by extortion and oppression. They delayed trials,
condemned innocent persons, overstepped the limits of
their jurisdiction so as to condemn to death the entire
male population (over 18 years) of a town, for not obeying
a summons. The opposition to the Femgerichte
culminated in the decree of the Emperor Maximilian I.
creating the supreme court of judicature (kammergericht),
which left no further excuse for protecting the
free courts. The applications for admission to the Feme
soon grew less, and at last ceased. The princes changed
the free courts into ordinary tribunals, or abolished
them. At the end of the 16th century a capital execution
by a Femgericht was a thing unknown; at the end
of the 17th these courts had nearly all disappeared. But
even when Westphalia was a Napoleonic kingdom there
were still living some schoeffen, and not till the decade
1880–90 did the last free graf disappear, “taking with him
to the grave the secret of the countersign.” The existence
of the Feme is still commemorated by the stone
judgment seats under the lindens; and the branches overhead
are still whispering the story of the redoubtable
Wissende of the Red Earth country.
PART EIGHTH. Stonemasons’ Lodges of the Middle Ages. — 1. MEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE. — 2. THE STONEMASONS’ LODGES OF GERMANY. — 3. FRENCH CRAFTSMEN. — 4. THE ENGLISH STONEMASONS.
162
We have already noted as a prominent characteristic
of the Middle Age this, that freedom of action, except
so far as it interfered with the interests of the clergy or
the nobles, was left unrestricted and that individuals
formed social unions for the exercise of it. Thus we
have seen these two dominant classes uniting to form
associations which finally were crowned by the institution
of the military orders. But the medieval world had
not followed the arts of peace very long after the stormy
times of the barbarian invasions, before it became conscious
of a need not only of a union of swordsmen and
penmen, but also and still more of a union of handicraftsmen.
True, the Middle Age could not rise to such an
intellectual height as would enable it to see that work is
more to be honored than indolence, peace than war:
hence the worker had to take a subordinate place. Of
the agricultural laborer this is true without any reservation:
but the artisan was more favorably situated as soon
as the cities had begun to develop.
But the progress made by the artisans was due to
their union in corporations or gilds. The constitutions
of the trade gilds derive partly from the “collegia”
of artisans in ancient Rome and partly from the monastic
163orders. The “collegia” had secret rites, mysteries,
but of these we have no reliable information; and it is
certain that the medieval gilds had their mysteries, too.
Of not all the gilds is this true; in some of them the
secret ceremonial consisted only of passwords and
countersigns by which craftsmen recognized their fellows.
The most elaborate of these mysteries was that of
the Stonemasons. And the reason if this is obvious, for
of all trades that of the builder not only makes most demands
on the thinking faculty, involves most details, is
the first to require new methods of facilitating operations,
new “wrinkles,” and these easily are made trade
secrets: besides, as builders of temples, the masons acquired
a sacred and mystical character.
After the great migrations the mason’s trade had
its home in the monasteries. As long as architecture or
the builder’s art was thus under monastic guidance, it
affected the Romanic style—simple columns, rounded
arches, squat towers; but when the monks forsook art
and science, in the 11th and 12th centuries, the craftsmen
no longer saw why they should serve under the direction
of men who had no taste for anything but wine,
the chase, and war. And so there arose unions of masons
outside of the monasteries, especially in the cities, and
henceforth the monastic churches were inferior to the
city churches in size and splendor. The change in the
circumstances of the builders’ unions, which were now
selfcontrolled, was seen in the development of a new
style. Instead of the single columns rose clustered columns,
symbol of free union, and of the strength that
comes of harmonious action between equals; in the place
of rounded arches, pointed ones, to show that the forces
that conspired to raise the structure did not sacrifice their
164several individualities, but freely contributed each its
share toward the attainment of the end; in place of squat,
close towers, tall spires aspiring to infinitude, and open
on all sides, as much as to say, “Here we stand free and
open, acknowledging no laws but those of heaven.”
Then came decoration of the window arches, which
showed a different design in each, thus entering a protest
against all stereotyped uniformity. This was the true
Germanic or Gothic architecture, the triumph of the free
Teutonic spirit, which favors the unhindered development
and the unrestricted independence of individual
genius. It was also the expression of mysticism, with
innumerable spirelets striving heavenward to find the
Divine. Hence the Gothic style has somewhat of gloom
and melancholy in its vast arches and narrow windows.
It invites the free spontaneous spirit of man to sound the
depths of his own nature, and so is as adverse to obtrusive
dogmatism as to reckless investigation and illuminism,
which disturb prejudices. Hence as the
Romanic style is the architecture of the popedom, so is
the Gothic that of free church life; and then the architecture
of illuminism followed as the style of the Renaissance.
The meeting places of the masons’ unions in the
cities were the board huts that stood on the site of
churches in process of construction, affording shelter to
the masons or stone cutters while at work. These huts,
or “lodges,” were at an early period leagued together,
and the members of the leagues, in memory of their
formerly having been inmates of monasteries, called one
another Brother, and their unions Brotherhoods; they
165also bestowed on their chief officers such tokens of respect
as are found in the clerical epithets “reverend” and
“worshipful.” The date of the formation of this league
cannot be determined. It appears to have been in full
swing in the 13th century, and the credit of its definitive
organization is usually given to Albert the Great, Count
of Bollstadt, a celebrated Dominican friar (b. 1200, d.
1280). Albert lived nearly all his life in Cologne, and
therefore the famous Cathedral of Cologne is to be regarded
as the cradle of the great league of stonemasons’
lodges.
For the government of this league an assembly of
delegates from the lodges, which came together “in chapter”
(another reminiscence of the monastic origin of
these unions) at Ratisbon in 1459, drew up a trade constitution
entitled “Ordnung und Vereinigung der gemeinen
Bruderschaft des Steinwerks und der Steinmetzen”
(Regulation and Combination of the general brotherhood
of stonework and stonemasons): it was revised and
amended at Basel in 1497, and at Strasburg 1498. From
this and other ancient documents relating to the organization
of the brotherhood we gather that the Brethren
were classed as Masters, “Parleyers” and Comrades
(meister, parlirer, gesellen), and to these were added,
though not as brethren, yet as dependents, Helpers,—that
is, apprentices. At the head of a lodge stood the
Master of Works, or Master-Builder. The masters of
the three lodges at Strasburg, Cologne and Vienna were
the Chief Judges of the league, and he of Strasburg held
the foremost rank among these. To the judicial district
of Strasburg belonged the left bank of the Rhine down
to the Moselle, and on the right bank Suabia, Franconia,
Hesse; to the district of Cologne belonged the region on
166the other side of the Moselle; and to that of Vienna,
Austria, Hungary, Italy. Switzerland stood apart under
a separate master, who had his seat at Berne; Zurich
afterward succeeded to the place of Berne. The masons
of Northern Germany, on the right bank of the Rhine
(Thuringia, Saxony, etc.), were only nominally members
of the league: as matter of fact they were subordinate
to none of these lodges, but they adopted a special “order”
for themselves at Torgau in 1462. In these regulations
we find many striking evidences of the sturdy good
sense of the masons. For example, they were forbidden
to disparage deceased masters and their works; also
to teach others their art for money, for they ought to
deal with each other as friends; one master was not to
expel a fellowcraft; to do so he must not only take
counsel with two other masters, but also a majority of
the fellowcrafts must approve; differences between masters
should be settled by arbitrators chosen from members
of the league.
In the brotherhoods brotherly comradeship played
an important part. Meetings were held monthly, and
the business ended with a feast. Each General lodge
yearly held a grand assembly; and the festivals of Saint
John the Baptist, and of the so-called “Four Crowned
Ones,” were holidays for the league. Each meeting of a
lodge was opened and closed with questions and answers
of the master and the comrades. To the journeyman,
as soon as he began to travel, were communicated
the secret signs of the brotherhood—passwords, grip,
etc. With these he identified himself as a brother mason
wherever he went, and so had the right to learn the trade
gratis. On coming to a hut where stone-cutting was
going on, he first shut the door, so as to knock on it
167after the masonic fashion; then asked, “Are German
masons at work here?” Forthwith the comrades made
search through the hut, shut the doors, and ranged themselves
in a right angle; the visitor placed his feet at right
angles, saying, “God bless the worthy masons;” to which
the answer was “God thank the worthy masons,” and
so on, questions and answers many, among them
these: “Who sent you forth”? “My honored master,
honored sureties, and the whole honored masons’
lodge at X.” “What for?” “For discipline and right behavior.”
“What is discipline and right behavior?” “The
usages of the craft and its customs.”
Of the rites of initiation in those times we know
nothing: what Fallou has on that head regarding the
usages of the German stonemasons is simply borrowed
from the Freemasons’ ritual of the present time. It is
highly probable that in the medieval masons’ lodges the
technical details of the craft and its secrets played the
chief part in the ceremonies of initiation. The medieval
stonemasons also employed as symbols of their craft the
hammer, the circle, the square, etc., also mystic figures,
e. g., the flaming star (which was the Pythagorean pentagram,
or the magic hexagram—two triangles laid across
each other), the two pillars of Solomon’s temple, wine
skins, ears of corn, interlaced cords, etc. The only
other point of any consequence of which we have certainty
is that the postulant swore to observe secrecy.
But there is no doubt that the drinking usages as handed
down to us are authentic. For example, the glass was
never to be handed to the banqueter, but set on the table
before him; then, he must not touch it save with the
right hand—covered with a white glove or a white napkin,
when a special toast is drunk.
168The masons’ brotherhoods were a distinctly Christian
institution: the members were required by the “Ordinances”
to comply with all the usages of the Church.
This was a survival from the time when the lodges had
their origin in monasteries. The sects that arose on
every side despite bloody persecutions, and the illuminism
spread abroad by them, contributed to bring about
a change in the spirit of the masons which was noticeable
in the 14th and 15th centuries: many, perhaps a majority,
of them acquired a spirit of opposition to Roman
ecclesiasticism, and it was very plainly manifested in their
sculpture. More bitter satire cannot be imagined than
they employed; and what is most significant is that it
found expression in the churches themselves. Thus in
a representation of the Last Judgment in the Berne minster
a pope wearing a glittering tiara of gold is seen
tumbling headlong into Hell; and in the vestibule the
Wise and the Foolish Virgins are shown keeping vigil,
but the foolish ones wear cardinals’ hats, bishops’ mitres
and priests’ caps. The Doberan Church in Mecklenburg
shows a mill in which church dogmas are ground
out. At Strasburg was seen a procession of all manner
of beasts with blazing torches and an ass performing
the mass; at Brandenburg was shown a fox preaching
to a flock of geese, etc.
Illuminism is the foe of knighthood and ecclesiasticism,
for illuminism knows no privilege of birth or
of rank or of vocation. Hence, in so far as such bodies
as the Templars and Stonemasons favored illuminism,
they undermined the institutions to which they owed their
existence, and so were working for their own extinction.
The downfall of the Stonemasons’ brotherhood had its
causes even in the age before the Reformation, in that
169there was no lack now of churches, and that hardly any
new churches were erected. What the relation was of
the lodges to the Reformation we shall see later on. The
savageries of the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly the
Thirty Years’ War, dealt a severe blow at the building-craft;
but the deathblow to the Stonemasons’ league
was the treacherous seizure of the seat of the principal
lodge, Strasburg, by Louis XIV. Naturally, the German
princes interdicted communication of their subjects with
foreign associations, and, of course, with the principal
lodge in Strasburg, 1707. And as the discords of the
German masons and their weakness prevented them from
instituting a new head lodge, the Emperor at one stroke
did away with all lodges, principal and subordinate, and
forbade the oath of secrecy, the use of the “nonsensical
form of salutation” (so ran the text of the decree), and
the distinction between “salutation-masons” and “letter-masons”
(grussmaurer, briefmaurer). Nevertheless, the
lodges remained as secret societies until modern freedom
of industrial trades stripped them of all meaning, and
cut the ground under their feet.
Very different from the German societies of craftsmen
were those of France. Whereas, in Germany we
find strenuous endeavor toward perfection in the craft,
cultivation of the beautiful, and a disposition no less elevated
in a moral sense than devoutly religious; in France
we see only rude, undirected effort, with here and there
some encouraging features. In France there is sharp
distinction between the gilds of the masters and the
lodges of the journeymen. The masters have neither a
common bond of union, nor any common property; the
170craftsmen form strong societies, with secret constitutions
and usages.
There are several societies of French craftsmen
(compagnonnages), but they are not distinguished according
to locality, but according to the supposed manner
of their first institution and the branch of the craft which
they represent. They are divided, first, into two great
sections, the Compagnons du Devoir (companions of
duty), and the Compagnons de la Liberte (companions
of liberty). The former are again divided into the Enfants
de Maitre Jacques (Master James’s children), and
the Enfants de Maitre Soubise (Master Soubise’s children),
but the latter commonly called themselves Enfants de
Salomon. Between the Compagnons du Devoir and the
Compagnons de la Liberte, as well as between the children
of James and those of Soubise, there exists the bitterest
enmity which is mirrored in their myths and traditions.
According to the story of the Devoir comrades,
at the building of Solomon’s temple, Hiram, master-builder,
to maintain discipline and order among the workmen,
instituted societies with special passwords and secret
ritual. But that act was the occasion of his death, for
some workmen slew him because he refused to give them
the countersign of the masters: those evildoers were the
founders of the Compagnonnage de la Liberte! Now
among the faithful workmen were two Gaulish masters,
James, stonemason, and Soubise, carpenter: these, after
the completion of the temple, returned home, and landing,
one at Marseilles, the other at Bordeaux, founded societies
after the pattern of those instituted by Hiram; and
these societies, little by little, admitted craftsmen other
than builders, but the two bodies lived in perpetual hatred
of each other, each claiming priority. Each of them
171refers its own institution (on what grounds is unknown)
to the years 558 B. C. and 550 B. C., respectively,
and each possesses authentic documents in proof, though
none has ever seen them. The Liberte tradition is the
same as that of the Devoir, only the respective parts of
the chief actors are reversed. In the bosom of La
Liberte are gathered four crafts—stonemasons, carpenters,
joiners, locksmiths. The Devoir includes 28 crafts,
and of these the children of Soubise comprise the carpenters,
roofers and plasterers; to the children of James
belong the stonemasons, joiners, locksmiths, and 22 other
trades, introduced in later times, but all connected with
housebuilding, except hatmakers. All other craftsmen
whose work is the production of clothing and foodstuffs
are excluded from the compagnonnages, and form separate
societies of their own. The shoemakers and the
bakers, in particular, are held in contempt, and persecuted
in every way by the compagnons; while among
James’s children even the members of the building crafts
despise their juniors (trades of less ancient lineage), and
in their ignorance derive the word compagnon from
“compas” (a pair of compasses), the symbol of the art
of building; hence in their eyes the other trades are quite
destitute of art or skill.
Even craftsmen of the same trade, but belonging to
different leagues, whether Devoir or Liberte, oppose each
other in every way. The carpenters of Paris have made
an end of this strife by dividing the cosmopolitan city
between themselves, the compagnons du Devoir taking
the left and those of La Liberte the right bank of the
Seine. With the other trades and in the provinces the
case is worse, the hostile leagues often engaging in
street fights and pitched battles. Even in the same trade
and in the same league hostilities often break out.
172Of the French corporations of craftsmen, those of the
building trades, especially the stonemasons, probably
arose about the same time as the German masons’ lodges:
at least there existed in the Middle Age in southern
France, a society of bridge-builders, who, for the behoof
of pilgrims to the Holy Land and wayfarers in general,
maintained bridges, roads and inns. The earliest
known charter was granted in 1189, by Pope Clement
III., who, like his third predecessor, Lucius III., took
them under his protection. As emblem they wore on
the breast a pointed hammer. The other compagnonnages
can show no authentic records of earlier date than
the 14th century. The most ancient of them is the society
of the Dyers, dating from 1330. Admission to these
societies involves many ceremonies derived from the
ritual of the Catholic Church; hence, the Tailors and
Shoemakers were in 1645 denounced to the ecclesiastical
tribunals, and their meetings forbidden by the theological
faculty of Paris.
While the German societies of handicraftsmen were
oppressed by the imperial power, and the French societies
lived in obscurity, the English masons’ lodges, on the
contrary, attained high importance. Tradition traces
English (operative) masonry back to King Alfred the
Great (871–901), and his successor, Athelstan, whose
younger son, Edwin, is said to have called meetings of
masons, and to have given laws to their lodges. However
that may be, it is certain that in England, as in
Germany, important edifices were erected by the clergy,
and that Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, was an accomplished
173architect; but after the rise of Gothic architecture
the builders were laymen, and in all probability
many of them Germans. In the early English societies
of masons we find rules and usages that clearly follow
German precedent, and the lists of master masons contain
many decidedly German names. Nevertheless, English
masonry showed some peculiar features, e. g., the station
of the master in the east, the holding of the lodge meetings
in open air in fair weather, the posting of guards
around the lodge, the drenching of peepers with the
drip from the roof “till the water ran out of their shoes,”
etc.
The English Freemasons may have got their name
from the fact that the original founders of lodges were
workers in freestone—freestone masons, as distinguished
from workers in rough stone; freestone mason, it is supposed,
was afterward contracted to the form “freemason.”
In an act of parliament of the year 1350 the word freemason
is found for the first time. By that act congregations
and chapters of masons were forbidden. But
the masons survived this persecution. Among themselves
all masons were equals, comrades or fellows; in the
lodges no distinction was made of master and fellow,
though, of course, the actual master of a lodge presided
over the meetings. The members studied mutual improvement
in technical knowledge, and aided one another
in misfortune. In the reign of Edward III. the
laws prohibiting assemblage of masons was relaxed so
as to permit meetings when held in presence of the sheriff
of a county or the mayor of a city. Out of these societies
of operative masons arose the modern institution
of “speculative” freemasonry.
Astrologers and Alchemists.
174
The epoch of the Reformation closed with the recovery
to the Catholic Church of a large proportion of
its lost territory through the labors of the Jesuits. Long
before the Thirty Years’ War the zeal for religious creeds
had died out; people had grown weary of theological
strifes, though they had little taste for other serious matters;
and thus it came about that in the transition from the
16th to the 17th century such pseudo-sciences as Alchemy
and Astrology had great vogue. The study of Astrology
had for its aim only fame and glory, and, therefore, was
pursued openly; while Alchemy being inspired mainly by
avarice, had its laboratories in dark cellars, and made a
strict secret of its processes.
Hence, it was natural that Alchemy, or the pretended
art of producing gold and silver, should give rise to
secret associations, especially as it employed sundry
mystic, theosophic, and kabbalistic means for attaining
its ends, such as were used by the pupils and followers of
the famous Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus, reformer
of the medical art, and one of the most zealous of
astronomers and alchemists. That was the era of a Jacob
Boehme, shoemaker and philosopher, who, though he
had none of the “accurst hunger” for the precious metals,
gave an impetus to fatuous investigations of divine things.
At the beginning of the 17th century a multitude of
writings about this mystic and superstitious business appeared,
175pro and contra. In this battle of goosequills the
Lutheran theologian, John Valentine Andraea of Tuebingen
(b. 1586, d. 1654), took a very prominent part.
Andreae in 1614 conceived the thought of playing a trick
on these mystics by publishing two satirical pieces, in
which was given an account of an alleged secret society
designed to promote studies of that kind; to this society
he gave a name suggested by the design of his own family
seal (a Saint Andrew’s cross, with roses at the ends of its
four arms)—Rosicrucians. These writings, “Fama Fraternitatis
Roseae Crucis” (Fame of the Brotherhood of the
Rosy Cross) and “Confessio Fraternitatis” (Confession of
Faith of the Brotherhood) traced the pretended society
back to a monk named Christian Rosenkreuz, who,
in the 14th and 15th centuries, visited the holy land,
was instructed in the occult sciences in the East, founded
among his fellow-monks the brotherhood called by
his name, and died at the age of 106 years. After
a lapse of 120 years, in his tomb, which, in accordance
with the rule of the order, was kept secret, but which was
a magnificent structure in a vault, was found resting on
his incorrupt body a parchment book containing the constitution
and the secrets of the order. A later document
“Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreuz” (alchymic
nuptials of Christian Rosenkreuz), which appeared in
1616, span the story out to greater length. Now, so
great was the alchemistic furore of that time that the tale
passed for solemn truth, and a swarm of writings followed,
championing or battling against the Society of the
Rosicrucians. To the opponents of the Rosy Cross belonged
the theologians, who sniffed heretical tenets in the
“documents,” and the medical men who scented danger
to their close gild; while the alchemists, and particularly
176the followers of Paracelsus, inquired diligently after the
Rosicrucians, and maintained the authenticity of their
Constitution. Nor was there lack of attempts at interpreting
in a mystical sense the symbol of the Rosy Cross:
it signified Holiness joined with Silentiousness; it typified
the rose-colored Blood of Christ poured out on the
cross. Astounded by the war of no-wits against little-wits
occasioned unintentionally by himself, Andreae tried to
undo the mischief by putting forth two pieces, “Mythologia
Christiana,” and “Turris Babel,” to prove that the
whole thing was a joke, that the Brotherhood was a fiction
and non-existent. But as he neglected to name himself
as author of the first two writings, in vain did he pour
out on the Rosicrucianistic partisans all the vitriol of his
contempt. In vain, with a view to lead men’s fancy in
other directions, did he found a “Christian Brotherhood”
for the purpose of purging religion of abuses and planting
true piety. The insanity persisted. Alchemy, barely
alluded to in Andreae’s writings, became the subject
of a multitude of new books, whose authors gave out that
they were members of the alleged society. The incident
was also turned to account by adventurers and by factions
of every sort; the thing went so far that in the
Rhineland and the Low Countries secret alchemistic societies
were founded under the name of Rosicrucians,
which also took the style Fraternitas Roris Cocti
(Brotherhood of Boiled Dew), that is, of the Philosophers’
Stone; but these societies had no general organization
among themselves. Many a wight was choused out of
his money by these schemers. There were branch societies
in Germany and Italy. In England Dr. Robert
Fludd, an ardent mystic and alchemist, propagated the
singular order by publishing a number of writings. With
177regard to the usages of the societies, we are told that the
members roamed about meanly clad, with hair cropped
close near the forehead, wearing as a token a black silken
cord in the top buttonhole, carrying, when several went
together, a small green banner. They claimed that their society
was an offshoot of the great knightly order of St. John
(Hospitalers). At their lodge meetings they wore a blue ribbon,
on which was a gold cross inscribed with a rose, and
their president (styled Imperator, emperor) was dressed in
priestly togs. They observed strict secrecy as toward
outsiders. They disappeared little by little in the 18th
century, and there is no means of determining the relation
between them and the masonic Rosicrucians, of
whom more anon.
PART NINTH. Rise and Constitution of Freemasonry. — 1. RISE OF FREEMASONRY. — 2. CONSTITUTION OF THE ORDER. — 3. THE LODGE.
178
The Reformation and the events connected with it
had given people much matter of meditation. But the
intolerance shown by the authorities and by the members
of both creeds, in maltreating and persecuting their opponents,
so alienated all humane minded men that secretly
people began to care neither for the interest of Protestantism
nor for that of Catholicism, and in the common
brotherhood of mankind to disregard all differences of
creed. Illuminism, which had been “good form” though
in a frivolous sense among the Templars, and in a satiric
sense among the Stonemasons, took a more dignified
shape, not of incredulity but of earnest desire to build up,
and to this consummation the English masons contributed
materially. In England people had had enough
of strife over creeds, enough of persecution of Protestants
under “Bloody Mary” and of Catholics under the inflexible
Elizabeth, and they longed for tolerance. They
derived the principles of tolerance from renascent literature
and art, which made such impression that as in an
earlier age the Romanic architecture, so now the Gothic,
as the expression of a definite phase of belief, lost its following,
and the so-called Augustan or “Renaissance”
style—an imitation of the ancient Grecian and Roman
styles—won the day with all who knew anything of art.
179The Renaissance style was brought to England by the
painter Inigo Jones, who had learned his art in Italy, and
who, under James I., became in 1607 superintendent general
of royal constructions, and at the same time president
of the Freemasons, whose lodges he reformed. Instead
of the yearly general meetings he instituted quarterly
meetings: such masons as adhered to the manual craft
and cared nothing for intellectual aims were permitted
to go back into the trade gilds; while, on the other hand,
men of talent not belonging to the mason’s trade, but
who were interested in architecture and in the aspirations
of the time, were taken into the lodges under the
name of “accepted brethren.” Under the altered circumstances
a new, bold spirit awoke among the Freemasons,
and it found support in the sentiment of brotherliness,
irrespective of creeds, then everywhere prevalent.
This disposition of minds was promoted in an incalculable
degree by the pictures drawn by Sir Thomas More
in his “Utopia,” and by Sir Francis Bacon in his “New
Atlantis,” of countries existing, indeed, only in their
imagination, but which presented ideal conditions, such as
enlightened minds might desire to realize upon this earth;
also by the writings of the Bohemian preacher, Amos
Komensky (latinized Comenius), who, during the Thirty
Years’ War was expelled from his country by the partisans
of the Emperor, and came to England in 1641—writings
that condemned all churchly bigotry and pleaded
for cosmopolitanism. As men of the most diverse views,
political and religious, were in the lodges, the order suffered
severely during the civil commotions of the first
and second revolution, but on the return of peace it more
than recovered lost prestige. The rebuilding of London,
and in particular St. Paul’s Cathedral (1662), added
180greatly to the fame of English masonry: Sir Christopher
Wren, builder of Saint Paul’s, was of the brotherhood.
But about the time of the death of William III. (1702),
owing to slackness of occupation in the building trades,
the Freemason lodges became conscious of a serious defect
in their organization. The members who were practically
connected with the operative craft of masonry were
steadily declining in number, and the “accepted” masons
had become the majority. The lodges, therefore, had
come to be a sort of clubs, and this transformation spread
rapidly in London.
Another influence that came in to affect the development
of English freemasonry was the diffusion of deistical
opinions by Locke’s school in philosophy. Though the
lodges then, as now, made loud protestations of orthodoxy,
they could not withdraw themselves out of the
deistical atmosphere of the period.
The resultant of these different influences gained the
upper hand in the clubs or lodges of the quondam masons,
now Freemasons. They now aimed at a more thorough
betterment of morals on a conservatively deistical basis.
But the necessity of a closer organization was recognized.
Two theologians, Theophilus Desaguliers (who was both
a naturalist and a mathematician) and James Anderson,
together with George Payne, antiquary, were the foremost
men of those who, in the year 1717, effected the
union of the four lodges of masons in London in one
Grand Lodge, and procured the election of a Grand Master
and two Grand Wardens, thus instituting the Freemasons’
Union as it exists at this day. What Jerusalem
is to Jews and Mecca to Mohammedans, and Rome to
Catholics, that London is to Freemasons.
Henceforth the masons of England were no longer
181a society of handicraftsmen, but an association of men
of all orders and every vocation, as also of every creed,
who met together on the broad basis of humanity, and
recognized no standard of human worth other than morality,
kindliness and love of truth. The new Freemasons
retained the symbolism of the operative masons, their
language and their ritual. No longer did they build
houses and churches, but the spiritual temple of humanity;
they used the square no more to measure right angles of
blocks of stone, but for evening the inequalities of human
character, nor the compass any more to describe
circles on stone, but to trace a ring of brother-love around
all mankind. It was, perhaps, a picture of the young
league of the Freemasons that Toland drew in his “Socratic
Society” (1720), which, however, he clothed in a
vesture the reverse of Grecian. The symposia or
brotherly feasts of this society, their give-and-take of
questions and answers, their aversion to the rule of mere
physical force, to compulsory religious belief, and to
creed hatred, as well as their mild and tolerant disposition
and their brotherly regard for one another, remind
us strongly of the ways of the Freemasons.
Though differences of creed played no part in the
new masonry, nevertheless the brethren held religion
in high esteem, and were steadfast upholders of the only
two articles of belief that never were invented by man,
but which are borne in on the mind and heart of every
man, the existence of God, to wit, and the soul’s immortality.
Accordingly every lodge was opened and
closed with prayer to the “Almighty Architect of the universe”;
and in the lodge of mourning in memory of a deceased
brother, this formula was used: “He has passed
over into the eternal East”—to that region whence light
182proceeds. Political parties, also, were not regarded
among Freemasons: one principle alone was common to
them all—love of country, respect for law and order, desire
for the common welfare.
Inasmuch as the league must prize unity, one of
the first decrees of the Grand Lodge was one declaring
illegitimate all lodges created without its sanction. Hence
to this day no lodges are recognized as such which are
not founded originally and mediately from London. Despite
this restriction there sprung up even in the first
years after the institution of the Grand Lodge a multitude
of new lodges, which received authorization from the
Grand Lodge. With these numerous accessions the
need of general laws became pressing, and at request of
the Grand Lodge, Anderson, one of the founders, undertook
to compare the existing statutes of the order with
the ancient records and usages of the Stonemasons, and
to compile them in one body of law. The result was
the “Book of Constitutions,” which is still the groundwork
of Freemasonry. It has been printed repeatedly,
and is accessible to every one. Another foundation stone
of Freemasonry was laid by the Grand Lodge in 1724,
when it instituted the “committee for beneficence,” thus
giving play to one of the most admirable features of the
order—that of giving help to the needy and unfortunate,
whether within the order or without.
The inner organization of the order, finally, was completed
by the introduction of the Degrees. Brothers
who had filled the post of Masters, on retiring from office,
did not return to the grade of Fellows, but constituted
a new degree, that of Masters: on the other hand,
newly admitted members were no longer forthwith Fellows,
but only apprentices: these degrees were instituted
183probably in 1720; at that time no other higher degrees
were known. The right to promote apprentices to the
degree of Fellow, and Fellows to that of Master, previously
a function of the Grand Lodge, was accorded to
the subordinate lodges in 1725.
Soon Freemasonry spread abroad. Lodges arose
in all civilized countries, founded by English masons or
by foreigners who had received masonic initiation in England;
these lodges, when sufficiently numerous, united
under Grand Lodges. The Grand Lodge of Ireland
was created in 1730, those of Scotland and of France
in 1736, a provincial lodge of England at Hamburg in
1740, the Unity Lodge of Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1742,
and in the same year a lodge at Vienna, the Grand
Mother Lodge of the Three World-spheres at Berlin in
1744, etc. A lodge was instituted at Boston, Mass., in
1733, and from Boston the order spread to Philadelphia.
Thus in the space of thirty years from its origin freemasonry
existed in all civilized lands, and so did not lag
behind its opposite pole, Jesuitism, in respect of rapidity
of propagation. Opposite poles these two societies are,
for each possesses precisely those qualities which the
other lacks. The Jesuits are strongly centralized, the
freemasons only confederated. Jesuits are controlled by
one man’s will, Freemasons are under majority rule.
Jesuits bottom morality in expediency, Freemasons in
regard for the wellbeing of mankind. Jesuits recognize
only one creed, Freemasons hold in respect all honest
convictions. Jesuits seek to break down personal independence,
Freemasons to build it up.
184
The Society of Freemasons, because of its historic
propagation, through sets from the English stock and
through further budding and branching of these, forms
no unitary organic whole. It has no central or supreme
authority, no common head, whether acknowledged or
unacknowledged. Its sole unity consists in a common
name and a common end, in the common recognition
signs, in agreement as to the general internal polity, and
in a general uniformity of usages, though these show
marked differences also. But very different between one
country and another are the methods employed for attaining
the ends of Freemasonry; different also is the organization
of the lodge and the arrangement of the work.
Regarding the common end and aim of Freemasonry
there is lack of perfect definiteness. In this regard Freemasonry
presents a strong contrast to its rival, Jesuitism,
which has only too clear perception of its aim. But so
much is absolutely indisputable, that the end of Freemasonry
is neither religious nor political, but purely
moral. “Freemasonry labors to promote the wellbeing
of mankind”: here all Freemasons are at one, though
some of them may lay more stress on material wellbeing,
some on purely moral, some on spiritual welfare,
while again others will consider the wellbeing of the
whole, and still others, the wellbeing of individuals as the
object of the society. But as these several views are by
no means mutually exclusive, but, in fact, complementary
of one another, this lack of definition in the end of the
society cannot be any hindrance to the society’s beneficent
labors. And as matter of fact the society has
wrought much good. Not only does it help its own
185members in need; no worthy person in need ever appeals
to the order for relief in vain.
But as it is impossible that in so widely diffused a
society the members should know one another personally,
it became necessary to establish tokens by which a
mason may be able to recognize the masonship and the
degree of a fellow mason. These tokens consist of a
word uttered in a peculiar way, a sign made by various
motions of the hand and a peculiar pressure given in
shaking hands (the grip). The mason is also recognized
by his knock on a door, his way of drinking, etc., provided
he cares to make use of these methods of intimating
his masonry.
Besides these peculiarities common to all Freemasons
there are specialties shared only by particular
sections of the masonic body. The whole body of Freemasons,
because of its diffusion among diverse nationalities,
is divided into a number of “systems” differing
one from another in the ceremonies of initiation, of promotion
to higher degrees, of the lodge of sorrow, and of
other occasions. The differences consist largely in the
form and tenor of the solemn addresses and counter-addresses,
or questions and answers with which the meetings
are opened and closed: these forms are an imitation
of the rituals of the ancient stonemason lodges, and of
other secret organizations. The ritual for the reception
of an applicant into the first degree, that of apprentice, is
modeled on the stonemasons’ ritual; and the ceremonies
of the higher degrees are amplifications of the same
originals, with embellishments. In brief, the ritual of
admission is such as was used by the monkish and the
knightly orders; but the prototype of all these rituals was
undoubtedly the ceremonial of baptism in the Catholic
Church.
186No doubt many persons are desirous of knowing
what takes place on the admission of a would-be Freemason.
For the sake of such persons it may be remarked
that these ceremonies are different in different
systems, and that consequently an exposition of them
would require a more than ordinarily voluminous work;
that, furthermore, when communicated in writing, they
lose all the effect they have when employed in the act of
initiation; and that they would be likely to make no impression
whatever on one who should desire to know
them out of mere curiosity.
In the ceremonial of Freemasonry symbols or emblematic
devices hold a prominent place. Of these the
most ancient are borrowed from the stonemasons’ lodges,
and, therefore, represent masons’ tools and implements;
other symbolic devices are reminiscent of various secret
societies or of ecclesiastical rites. But both in symbolism
and in ceremonial many abuses have, in the course of
time, crept in, and innovations have been made which
mar the native simplicity of the order and divert it from
the pursuit of more useful ends.
The recognition signs, the ceremonial, and the symbols
are the only secrets in Freemasonry. Mysteries,
that is to say, knowledge of things that are hidden from
all other persons, the order has none, and the claims that
have been made in that regard are without foundation.
Discretion, with respect to the business of the lodges and
the membership, Freemasonry enjoins in common with
many other societies; and so far the order is a close
society, or a private society, and not a secret society. Of
secret machinations and intrigues such as are hatched in
the Jesuit order and in the secret political associations of
our time, there is no trace in Freemasonry.
187The masonic organization of each country exists for
itself and in entire independence of other countries. A
minor union of Freemasons, consisting of members, all
of whom, as a rule, attend its meetings, is called a Lodge.
The place (city, town, village, etc.,) in which there are
one or more lodges is called Orient; the presiding officer
of a lodge is the Master, and with him are associated two
Wardens besides other officers. The assemblage of the
members, as well as the place in which they meet, is
called a lodge. A lodge may be an isolated one, that
is, entirely independent; but that is rarely the case; as a
rule each lodge belongs to a union of lodges, called
Grand Lodge, or Grand Orient. The several lodges of
such a union work sometimes on one common system,
sometimes on different systems. Again, the grand
lodges differ greatly in their organization. As a rule
they have a Grand Master, with several Grand Officers,
and these are either elected by delegates from all the associate
lodges, or are named by certain specially privileged
lodges. The freest masonic constitution is that
of Switzerland, adopted in 1844: there the seat of the
Grand Lodge is changed in every five years. In monarchical
countries the royal residence city is usually the
seat of the Grand Lodge. There are in Germany eight
grand lodges, whose jurisdictions overlap one another, so
that often there may be in a given city several lodges belonging
to as many different grand lodges: but that does
no prejudice to fraternal harmony. France, Belgium,
Spain, and Brazil have each two grand lodges, each with
a distinct system of ritual. But in Holland, Switzerland,
Denmark, Sweden, England, Scotland, Ireland, Hungary,
Italy, Portugal, and Greece all the lodges of each
country belong to one grand lodge. In each of the states
188of the American Union there is a grand lodge, and the
same is to be said of the larger states of Central and
South America. In the British colonies and dependencies,
India, the Cape, Australasia, etc., the lodges are
under the jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of the United
Kingdom: British America, however, has its own Grand
Lodge. The grand lodges of the world number more
than 90, the subordinate lodges more than 15,000, and
the members, perhaps, one million, reckoning only those
in good and regular standing; but this is only a rough
estimate; precise figures are not obtainable in default of
a unitary organization.
The several lodges are named after persons, virtues,
masonic emblems, historic events, etc. In America and
England they are often designated by numbers indicative
of the time of their foundation. A lodge may be erected
wherever a certain number of resident accepted brethren,
among them at least three masters, desire to effect
an organization, and obtain the approval of the grand
lodge having jurisdiction. An indispensable requisite
for a lodge is a “well tiled” apartment—one well protected
against the intrusion of outsiders, spies, or eavesdroppers.
Usually the lodge is a square oblong hall or
room, furnished after the manner of the time and country,
and decorated with the masonic insignia. The attire of
the assembled brethren is usually black, with white gloves
(emblematic of hands not soiled by unjust gain) and a
short white leather apron, a memento of the stonemasons
and of the obligation to labor. The use of other insignia
and of tokens to indicate the rank of the officials is left
to the discretion of the several lodges. In England and
189her colonies, in the United States, Belgium and France
on festive occasions Freemasons appear in public and on
the streets in full masonic regalia, bearing the emblematic
insignia of the order: in Germany and Switzerland such
parade is frowned upon by Freemasons as unbecoming.
A Freemason lodge is an Apprentice Lodge, a Fellowcraft
Lodge, or a Masters’ Lodge, according to the degree
of its members. In the Apprentice lodge, masons
of all degrees take part: its business is to deliberate upon
the affairs of the lodge, and to admit new apprentices.
In the Fellowcraft lodge the Fellows and the Masters
take part: its function is simply to promote members
from the first to the second degree. The Masters’ lodge
is for masters exclusively: the masters direct the work
of the apprentices and promote Fellowcrafts to the master’s
degree. Besides, in each degree there is given instruction
upon the symbolism and work of the same—this
is called a “Lodge of Instruction.” Each degree has
its special meaning, a sum of doctrines and a certain number
of symbols. The purport of the Apprentice degree
is the seeing of the light in the spiritual sense—the
spiritual birth of man: an explanation is given of the nature
of the order, its aims and its constitution. The
Second degree deals with the life of man, its joys, its
griefs, its fears: teaches to withstand passion and temptation,
to know oneself, and to form an idea of the model
human career. Finally, the teaching of the master’s degree
treats of the end of life, death, its inevitableness;
proposes for imitation the examples of great men who
have given up their life for humanity; suggests thoughts
concerning the immortal life. Sometimes, also, the three
degrees are explained as the embodiment of the masonic
motto: Beauty, Strength, and Wisdom. These degrees
190are also known as the Saint John degrees, and the lodges
as lodges of St. John, the Baptist being the chosen patron
of the order, as he was also of the medieval stonemasons
and of the Templars. The fact that the masons
are under the patronage of Saint John the Baptist is interpreted
to mean that the order is the forerunner of a
happier condition of mankind, as John was the forerunner
of Jesus. On the feast of Saint John (June 24th) or
thereabout, in the year 1717, the first meeting of the
Grand Lodge of London was held; and on that same day
there is held in every masonic lodge throughout the
world a festival at once grave and joyful.[3]
3. We make no mention here of the so-called “higher degrees,”
which are, in fact, but amateurish fabrications, without
any practical aim. They are distasteful forms of the true
freemasonry; they differ as to name and number between one
system and another; and the true lodges of Saint John freemasons
recognize no such “supergraduation.” The higher degrees
are considered in another part of this work.
All males who have attained legal majority, and
who are of good repute and their own masters, are eligible
for admission to the order, without regard to race, station,
calling, or creed. Unfortunately, Freemasons have
not always and everywhere been free from antiquated
prejudices in the admission of new members. Down to
this day lodges in the United States shut their doors in
the face of men of color, i. e., of those who are not whites;
and many German, Danish, and Swedish lodges, both
grand and particular, exclude Jews; in consequence,
there are very many lodges of colored men and in Germany
some Jewish lodges, whereas in the British colonies
brethren of all colors and creeds work together in
the same lodges.
Women and children are not altogether shut out
191from Freemasonry everywhere. It is the almost universal
custom to admit, before the attainment of majority, masons’
sons, who may have been instructed by their fathers
as to the meaning of Freemasonry. There are also special
meetings which the wives, the betrothed, the sisters,
and the daughters of masons are permitted to attend. But
we have an unmasonic excrescence and an abuse when, as
in French lodges, with doors open to the public, a masonic
baptism and a masonic marriage ceremony are performed
with special ritual; still more worthy of reprobation
are the Adoption lodges or Women’s lodges, instituted
at various times in France: in these women were
initiated with a ceremonial adapted to the occasion, and
were promoted to various degrees; thus, before the Revolution
the luckless Princess de Lamballe, in the time of
Napoleon the Empress Josephine, and under the Restoration
the Duchess de Larochefoucauld were presidents of
lodges. In other quarters also the cry has been raised
for the admission of the fair sex: but needless to say that
such an innovation would very seriously compromise the
gravity, the dignity, and the secrecy of the order, and
breed trouble, both in the lodges and in the families of the
members. Once a woman was unwittingly admitted
to the secrets of Freemasonry. Elizabeth Aldworth,
daughter of the Irish viscount Donneraile, in whose house
a lodge used to hold its meetings, on one occasion, in her
young girlhood, peeped through a crack in a partition and
witnessed the admission of a mason. She was caught in
the act, and, to prevent betrayal, was herself initiated. In
her after life she was noted for her acts of benevolence,
and once, wearing the masonic togs, headed a public walk
of the brethren. The Empress Maria Theresa also, it is
said, dressed in man’s apparel, once stole into a lodge in
192Vienna, having been informed that her husband, the
Emperor Francis, was in the habit of meeting women
there; but as she saw no women in the lodge, she withdrew
in haste. Quite recently a Hungarian lodge admitted
to membership a countess resident in its locality;
but the Grand Lodge of Hungary canceled the act.
PART TENTH. Secret Societies of the Eighteenth Century. — 1. MISCELLANEOUS SECRET SOCIETIES. — 2. OBSCURANTIST INFLUENCES. — 3. THE “HIGH DEGREES” SWINDLE. — 4. APOSTLES OF NONSENSE. — 5. THE SWEDISH RITE. — 6. THE NEW ROSICRUCIANISM AND ALLIED SYSTEMS.
193
Conditions in the 18th century were specially favorable
to the vogue of secret organizations: illuminism was
making headway, but at the same time there remained
many a relic of medieval barbarism. The manifest contrasts
of opinion naturally inclined men of like mind to
come together in secret societies for the advancement of
their favorite principles. These societies copied the
methods of Freemasonry, and were, in a greater or less
degree its rivals. Some of them admitted women to
membership.
The societies of both sexes were intended to compensate
women for their exclusion from the Freemason
lodge. The “Order of Woodsplitters” (fendeurs), founded
in 1747 by the Chevalier Beauhaine, a distinguished Freemason,
took its symbolism entirely from the work of the
woodsplitter or woodchopper; the lodges were yards (i. e.,
woodyards, chantiers), the members were cousins (cousins,
cousines; i. e., male and female cousins), the candidate
was a Steel (used to strike fire from a flint), and so forth.
The “Order of Hope” (esperance) was founded expressly
for the behoof of Freemasons’ wives, and they alone were
admitted; but masons of the higher degrees could visit
the lodges without initiation. The president was a
194woman. There were Esperance lodges in several cities of
Germany; at Goettingen the university students joined the
order for the sake of the refinement of manners got from
association with the ladies. There is some doubt as to the
true character of the “Order of Saint Jonathan” (afterward
of Saint Joachim), qualified as “for True and Perfect
Friendship,” or “for the Defense of the Honor of
Divine Providence.” Its end would seem to have been
to propagate belief in the Trinity, to refrain from the
dance (especially the waltz), and from games of chance;
also (this for the female members) to nurse their own
children. It was founded by some German nobles, and
its first grandmaster was Christian Francis, Duke of
Saxe-Coburg. Though Protestants and Catholics were
members of the order, it took on a strongly Catholic
character, and in 1785 adopted the style of “the knightly
Secular Chapter of the Order of Saint Joachim, the blessed
Father of the Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of Our Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ” (ritterlich-weltliches ordenskapitel
von St. Joachim, etc.) The society passed quietly
out of existence. The “Order of the Pilgrims’ Chain”
(Kette der Pilgrime), in Germany and Denmark, whose
members belonged to the higher classes, had for its motto
“Courtesy, Steadfastness, and Silence” (Willfaehrigkeit,
Bestaendigkeit, Stillschweigen), and wore in a buttonhole
a white ribbon bearing the initial letters
of those three words. The members, male and
female, were called Favorites (favoriten); to admit
a new member was “to add a link to the chain”;
and any member could add any “link” whom he
might have known for half a year. The symbolism
was borrowed from travel. The “Order of Argonauts”
was founded in 1772 by Conrad von Rhetz, a Brunswick
195Freemason. On an islet in a pond leased to him by the
state he built a temple in which the members were initiated.
They approached the temple in barges and there
were entertained by the Grand Admiral, as the founder
was styled. There was no fee for admission. The motto
was “Long Live Gladness”; the badge of the order was
a green-enameled anchor of silver. The officers, besides
the Grand Admiral, were the Pilot, the Ship’s Chaplain,
and so forth, and the members were Argonauts. After
the founder’s death the order went to wreck, and the
temple disappeared, leaving no vestige. The renowned
Fenelon founded at Douai an order called “the Palladium,”
its secret dialect was taken from his romance “Telemasque.”
The “Order of the Mustardseed,” said to have been
founded in England in 1708: it spread over Holland and
Germany: it assumed the form of a Protestant clerico-knightly
order, and concerned itself chiefly with religious
affairs: its emblem was a gold cross, with mustard tree in
the middle. This society was reputed to be connected
with the Herrnhuters (Moravian brethren).
The “Order of the Leal” (Orden der Echten), founded
in 1758, at Landeshut, by Bessel, a Prussian military officer,
had for its end simply good-fellowship: it labored
to win over to Prussia the Silesian nobility.
The “Society of the Ducats” (Dukatensocietat) had
for its founder (1746) Count Louis of Neuwied, colonel
in the Prussian Army. The members contributed one
ducat a month; but when a member induced outsiders to
join the society, then for the first outsider his own contribution
for the month current was remitted; for the
third, fifth and each following odd-numbered new accession
procured by him he received a ducat. This vulgar
196swindle, which was the sole end of the society,
worked finely, and the membership grew rapidly: but the
Society of the Ducats was suppressed by the government
after an existence of two years.
Attempts to establish other fraudulent orders were
made by a swindler who understood the foible of his
contemporaries for mysteries. Matthew Grossinger, or
as he styled himself, Francis Rudolf von Grossing, son
of a butcher, born 1752, at Komorn, in Hungary, would
seem to have been once a Jesuit. After the suppression
of his order, he offered to sell to Frederic the Great some
Austrian official documents, but met with a repulse; then
he represented himself to Joseph II. as a victim of the
reactionary policy of the preceding reign, and in 1784
founded in the interest of his own pocket the “Order of
the Rose,” and again in 1788, donning women’s clothes,
the “Order of Harmony,” both orders admitting members
of either sex. He named “Frau von Rosenwald,” a non-existent
personage, as head of the order, with the title
Stiftsrose (The Institute’s Rose). The several local societies
were known as Roses, and their presiding officers as
Rosylords and Rosyladies (Rosenherren, Rosendamen).
But in fact Grossing was all in all, and he appropriated to
himself the very liberal contributions and all other income:
for that end alone were the societies established.
He died in wretched circumstances, having always
squandered his gains in luxury and extravagance.
The daybreak of illuminism in the 18th century gave
to the partisans of the ancient despotism of creed and
privilege matter of most serious concern. They saw all
197their contrivances for keeping the people ignorant and
submissive baffled. For them, as for the Papacy at the
daybreak of the Reformation the question was, To be or
Not to be. But theirs was a war with a far more redoubtable
foe than Protestantism ever was. Illuminism did not aim
merely at separation from the Roman Church: it declared
a war of extermination against Rome, it aimed at
abolition of all authority that presumed to determine the
beliefs of men or to dictate their opinions. To down this
hateful spirit of illuminism with one blow—what satisfaction
that would afford to the obscurantists of that
time! But where should they begin? It was vain to
think of silencing the literary champions of illuminism.
The age of witch trials and courts of Inquisition was past.
The problem was to find an organized institution in
which the odious spirit of illuminism was, as it were, incorporated,
and that could be no other than the society
of the Freemasons. But the experience of the Popes and
the Inquisition had shown that Freemasonry was not to
be overmastered by persecution, by prisons, or by the
stake. Hence, other champions must take the place of
the Dominican inquisitors: the Freemasons must be won
over to the good cause by flatteries and cajoleries.
Among the illuminists of that day the Jesuits were regarded
as the agents chosen for carrying out this plan;
and though it cannot be demonstrated that they had an
actual part in the business, the scheme surely was one
quite consonant with the spirit of their order. The plan
was shrewdly contrived. It dealt with political considerations
affecting England, the native home of freemasonry;
and thus the conspiracy aimed, so to speak, at capturing
the den of the “dragon” of illuminism. The Stuart dynasty,
which had returned to the Catholic fold, was in
198exile from the end of the 17th century, but, aided by
France materially and by Rome intellectually, was ever
striving to regain the lost throne. The efforts of kings and
kings’ sons in exile possess a poetical and romantic
quality. It was possible to win over all sympathetic enthusiasts
by exploiting their foibles, the nobles and legitimists
(the Tories) by preaching legitimacy, and the whole
body of the Catholics by appealing to their loyalty to the
Church. Now, the masonic order was a secret society,
and as such, of course, was a rallying point for all enthusiasts,
mystics, and dreamers. Besides, the nobility
was strongly represented in the society: after the first
four grandmasters of the Grand Lodge of England, who
were all practical masons (architects), all the succeeding
grandmasters belonged to the highest nobility of the
realm. Among them we find dukes of Montague, Richmond,
Norfolk, Chandos, to say nothing of a long series
of viscounts, earls, and marquises. As for the Catholic
element, it had many things in common with Freemasonry—ceremonies
and mysticism, hierarchic degrees, and
cosmopolitan extension; hence, with a little Jesuit finesse,
the order might gradually and insensibly be made Catholic,
as had been done with the Buddhist ceremonial in
India: in this way the Society of Saint John might be transformed
into a preparatory school for the Society of Jesus.
And now, if we consider what a scandal it must have been
to the coronetted chiefs of Freemasonry that their order
originated among mechanics, we can see how easy it
would be, by dishing up a few fables in proof of a nobler
origin, to make converts of them for any ends whatever.
In the event of success, the stronghold of illuminism would
be captured, and with the help of its former champions
the most powerful kingdom in Europe, and a great
199centre of illuminism, would be given back to a Catholic
King, and thereby the road to conquest opened for the
Church of Rome. Of course, these vast designs could
not be carried out all at once. The work had to proceed by
stages, as thus: 1. Aristocratic sentiment would be gratified
by the institution of higher masonic degrees; 2. These
degrees would be connected with the religious orders of
knighthood by a chain of fable; 3. Obstinate Protestants
would be quieted by the offer of a cryptic Catholicism
which apparently would be in accordance with their own
beliefs; 4. Persons inaccessible to religious considerations
would be influenced by hopes of riches to be acquired
through the secret arts of alchemy, and the like; 5. The
whole purpose of the order would be directed toward
spiritual and Catholic ends; finally, 6. when the process
was completed, there would stand forth in all its nakedness
the savage fury of the Inquisition.
Without any sufficient reason assigned, there arose
in England between the years 1741 and 1743 a new degree,
Royal Arch, at first as a higher division of the
master’s degree afterward as an independent degree. Its
content was a hotchpotch of New Testament passages, religious
dogmas, and masonic, or, rather, unmasonic fables.
Its tradition went back to the building of the second
Temple of Jerusalem, after the return from Babylonian
captivity; hence the president of a Royal Arch lodge
took the name of Zerubbabel, and wore a vesture of scarlet
and purple. The meeting was called a “chapter”; the
three masonic degrees were dubbed “probationary degrees”;
and soon, on the title page of the rules of the
200degree was represented an ark, with the inscription
“Nulla Salus Extra” (no safety outside), whereby we are
reminded that according to Catholic doctrine the ark
of Noah was a type of the Church. Afterward the Royal
Arch degree published a program of its work, in which
masonry is divided into Operative and Speculative, and
the former subdivided into manual, instrumental, and
scientific; the aim of the “order” was defined to be, to
gather the human race in one fold under the great Shepherd
of souls. For the rest, the work of this degree was
childish play.
Even before this fruit was borne in England, there
came into circulation in France, how or why nobody
knows, a statement that Freemasonry arose in Palestine
during the Crusades, and was there consolidated with
the Knights of St. John (Hospitalers), wherefore the
lodges came to be called Saint John’s lodges; that after
the Crusades the order was established in Scotland, was
thence afterward introduced into England, and later into
other countries. This historic lie was, of course, welcomed
by the nobles who were members of the order;
as for the many uneducated members who had been
admitted into the French lodges, they were easily deluded.
Thenceforward there were High Degrees of all
sorts in France. And as the fable assigned to Scotland
the foremost place in the history of masonry, the highest
degrees began to be known as Scottish, or, after the name
of Scotland’s patron, Saint Andrew, Saint Andrew’s degrees,
and the lodges Scottish or Saint Andrew’s lodges.
In their rites of admission they adopted from the traditions
of the English and French stonemasons a lot of
myths about the death of Hiram, and taught the aspirants
for admission to avenge that death, the meaning being
201that they were to avenge the expulsion of the Stuarts,
and the wrongs done the Catholic Church by the Reformation
and by illuminism.
But as degrees were multiplied the Hiram myth no
longer sufficed, and for the higher steps it was necessary
to have recourse to other myths. Meanwhile it was
seen that the story of the consolidation of the Freemasons
and the Knights of Saint John would not work,
for that knightly order was still in existence; therefore, if
the aristocratic brethren were to have their vanity flattered,
recourse must be had to a suppressed order of
knighthood. True, that was not pleasing to strict Catholics,
but there was no alternative—and a bond of connection
had to be formed between Masonry and the order of
the Templars—the heretical Templars.
So here is the story of the relation of the Freemasons
to the Templars: A few Templars, fleeing from
papal and royal persecution—among them Grand Comptroller
Harris and Marshal Aumont—reached Scotland,
and in that country, in order to gain a livelihood, worked
as common masons. Advised of the death of the Grandmaster
Molay, and of his last will, wherein he had directed
the brethren to perpetuate the order, these fugitive knights
that same year established the “Freemasons’ league,”
and on the Scotch Isle of Mull held the first “chapter”
in 1314. Now, to say nothing of the fact that, as we shall
see, the story took more than one different shape afterward,
it is on other grounds quite unworthy of belief. It
is beyond question that documentarily the Freemason
league can assign for itself no other origin but the constitution
of the Grand Lodge of England in 1717. But,
besides, the story is ridiculous, not only in that Harris
and Aumont are purely fictitious personages, but also
202in that the Grand Lodge of Scotland and the oldest lodges
of that ancient kingdom know nothing of any such creation
of a society; and, furthermore, the objects and the
sentiments of Templarism and masonry differ too widely
for any unification to take place between them. In the
one body free thinking through levity of temperament:
in the other repudiation of odium theologicum out of
love of fellowmen; on one side egotism: on the other
regard for the general weal; on one side pride of aristocracy:
on the other regard only for the dignity of manhood.
And yet the most eminent men of the 18th century
were fooled into believing that the Freemasons are descended
from the Templars. The first serious and formal
introduction of spurious Templarism into masonry took
place in France. The Chevalier de Boneville, on November
24, 1764, founded at Paris a chapter of the high degrees
called (apparently in honor of the then grandmaster
of Freemasons, Louis de Bourbon, count of
Clermont) the “Clermont chapter”; its members were, for
the most part, partisans of the Stuarts, and therefore of
the Jesuits also. Here it was that the story of the wondrous
transformation of Templars into Freemasons in
Scotland was invented, taught, and employed as part of
the ceremonial of admission to the higher degrees. The
members wore the masonic togs, and in their ritual the
death of the Grandmaster Molay took the place of that
of Hiram; and, in fact, by Hiram, as some asserted,
Molay was meant. From this chapter the influence of
the Jesuits extended soon over the whole field of French
Freemasonry. Surely, it was not by accident nor out of
patriotism that the very next year the French Grand
Lodge, till then dependent on England, declared itself
203independent, and adopted statutes according to which
the “Scottish Masters” (unknown both in England and
Scotland) were to have oversight of the work.
Soon the craze spread further still, and first, of
course, through Germany, where, in those degenerate
days, whatever bore the French stamp was received with
reverence and conscientiously aped. The Scottish lodges
got entrance into Berlin as early as 1742. The dubious
honor of this importation belongs to Baron E. G. von
Marschall, who had been initiated into the new Templarism
at Paris. Dying soon afterward, he was succeeded by
a man who presented the curious spectacle of noblest and
most strenuous endeavor toward a fantastic goal, of the
nature of which he knew nothing. Charles Gotthilf, Imperial
Baron of Hund and Altengrottkau (so he was
styled), born in 1722, was a nobleman of Lusatia and
actual privy councilor of the Emperor; he was a man of
narrow mind, without high education, but he was an
idealist, a chivalrous, hospitable and kindly gentleman.
At Paris he was received into the Catholic Church and
into the spurious order of Templars, to which he was devoted
heart and soul: he was commissioned “Master of
the Host” in Germany. He founded a lodge on one of
his estates, which bore the ominous name of Unwurde
(unworth), and soon had several subordinate lodges under
his jurisdiction.
“About this time,” says a contemporary writer, “the
Seven-Years War broke out. The French troops came
into Germany, and with them many Jesuits. With the
French Army, and particularly in its commissariat, were a
great many Freemasons of the higher degrees, and some
204of those gentlemen had calculated to make a good deal
of money by the sale of merchandise in Germany. I knew
one French commissary who had a whole wagonload of
decorations for some forty-five degrees, and these he peddled
all the way from Strasburg to Hamburg. Thereafter
no German lodge was any longer content with the
three symbolic degrees, but nearly every one of them had
a series of higher degrees of one brand or another, according
to the particular windbag each fell victim to; and so
they dropped one system and took up another when a
new apostle came that way and reformed them.”
Such an apostle of fraud was the Marquis de Lernais
or Lerney. Taken prisoner of war to Berlin, he
there made known the Jesuitical doctrine of the Chapter
of Clermont, and even founded a chapter in the Grand
Lodge of the Three World-Spheres. To spread these
chapters over the rest of Germany, or, in plain terms, to
give the whole country into the hands of the Jesuits, a
character by no means ambiguous, one Philip Samuel
Rosa, once a Protestant clergyman, counsel to the consistory,
and superintendent, but afterward deposed for immorality,
was employed. Rosa’s whole endeavor was to
make money. Joining the Chapter of Clermont he got
the title “Knight of Jerusalem and Prior of the Chapter of
Halle.” As he traveled up and down the land, the lodge
at Halle paid his expenses. The eyes of the deluded
brethren were at last opened, on the discovery of the relations
between Rosa and another swindler, one Leuchte,
who palmed himself off as an Englishman, Baron Johnson,
and who founded a Grand Chapter, admitted novices
and knights, boasted of armies and fleets at his command,
and sent forth to all Templars in Germany an encyclical
letter summoning them to his standard. Many were his
205dupes, among them Rosa, who visited him at Jena, humbled
himself before him, and consented to the expulsion
of the Berlin chapter from the “order.” But as Rosa was
loth to admit at Halle his submission to Johnson, and
counseled the “knights” there not to recognize Johnson,
his double-dealing was betrayed to his dupes at Halle by
the “Baron,” and he was dismissed from their service in
disgrace. The “Baron” himself, after the discovery of his
frauds, was repudiated by his followers, and in 1765 was
imprisoned in the famous castle of Wartburg, and there
remained till his death in 1775.
This was the opportunity of the Baron von Hund,
the Don Quixote of the 18th century. He became now
the acknowledged head of the “order,” and ruled it as
his fancy dictated. He always spoke of “Unknown Superiors”
of the order as though his policy was guided by
them; but the “Superiors” who imposed on the guileless
gentleman were the intriguants at Paris. Because of the
unconditional obedience required of the members, Hund
called the system of the order that of “Strict Observance,”
in contradistinction to the “lax observance” of ordinary
Freemasons. The Strict Observance comprised seven
degrees; viz., the three masonic degrees, the degree of the
Scottish Master, that of the Novice, that of the Knight-Templar,
finally the degree of the Eques Professus, or
Professed Knight (one who has “professed” or taken the
monastic vows!). All knights assumed Latin names or
surnames. Hund was Eques ab Ense (Knight of the
Sword); others were Knight of the Sun, of the Lion, of
the Star, even of the Whale, of the Chafer, of the
Golden Crab, of the Mole, etc. Soon Strict Observance
was dominant in the German lodges, while genuine Freemasonry
was forgotten. No less than twenty-six German
206princes joined the order, and so puffed up were its directors
in consequence that forthwith they divided Europe
up into provinces, after the manner of the Templars and
the Jesuits, naming for each province a Master of the
Host. The subdivisions of provinces were called, as
among the Templars, Priories, Prefectures, Comptrollerships,
etc. To give these subdivisions something more
than an existence on paper, Hund dispatched the Baron
G. A. von Weiler, Knight of the Golden Ear (of wheat,
barley, etc.) to France and Italy, where he founded several
chapters: even the Grand Orient of France united itself
with the Strict Observance. Toward those German
lodges which held aloof from this bastard masonry the
Hundian Templars were supremely disdainful, and but
few of the lodges had the spirit to speak out against the
“obscurantist innovations.” Chief among the few was the
gallant old Lodge of Unity, at Frankfort-on-the-Main,
which declared itself an English provincial lodge, to
show its independence of pseudo-Templarism.
A zealous apostle of the Strict Observance was John
Christian Schubart of Kleefeld, Knight of the Ostrich,
who was constantly on the road converting lodges to
that system. Schubart devised a plan by which the order
was to acquire great wealth. Hund’s financial affairs
were in confusion, in consequence of the war, and he proposed
to bequeath his property to the order, in consideration
of a certain sum in cash: but the order had not the
money. Schubart now proposed to exact enormous fees
for initiations and admissions to high degrees (for example,
350 thalers for admission). But the scheme could
not be worked, and Schubart withdrew from the order.
The order had no longer any use for Hund. The
time had come for the Jesuit influence to assert itself: it
207would have no more fooleries with helmets, swords, accoutrements,
and Templar’s mantles. It was seen by the
original projectors of the “order” that if they would succeed
in their design of winning over Freemasonry to the
plan of catholizing Germany, they must betimes provide a
clerical directorate for the organization, which till now had
worn the mask of knighthood. They found a convenient
instrument in the person of the Protestant theologian,
John Augustus von Stark, born at Schwerin in 1741.
While a student in Goettingen Stark was admitted (1761)
to the masonic order; then he was a teacher in Petersburg,
where he adopted the mystic system of one Melesino,
a Greek. The ceremonial of Melesino’s system
comprised a number of prayers and genuflections, and
even a mass; the high-degree meetings were called Conclaves,
and the members wore surplices. Later, at Paris,
Stark took an interest in Oriental manuscripts, and joined
the Catholic Church, but all the same, on his return home
he served as professor of theology at Koenigsberg, and
then as court preacher and general ecclesiastical superintendent
in the same city, and afterward in Darmstadt.
Through some acquaintances, who were members of the
Strict Observance, he got an introduction to Hund, to
whom he revealed the great secret which he had learned
at Petersburg, namely, that the grand mysteries of the
Templars were revealed not to the knights, but only to
the clerical members, and that these mysteries had been
kept and handed down to that time; further, that the true
chief of the order of Templars was none other but the
Knight of the Golden Sun, Charles Edward Stuart, the
Pretender, then resident in Florence. Delighted at the
prospect of an enhancement of what he fancied to be his
sciences, Hund recognized Stark and two of Stark’s
208friends as Clerics of the Order of Templars. These clerical
Templars thereupon drew up a ceremonial and created
degrees of their own, and as a special favor initiated some
secular knights into their mysteries. But because Hund
declined to accommodate Stark with a loan of two hundred
thalers to defray the expenses of a journey to Petersburg,
where Pylades, head of the Templar clerics, resided,
the two fell out, and Stark announced his purpose to
keep the “Clericate” independent of the “Order.” Nevertheless,
he begged a friend to negotiate on his behalf with
the secular Templars. This friend was a noble personage,
Ernest Werner von Raven, Knight of the Pearl, a wealthy
landowner, “prior” in the “order,” member of a Chapter
under Rosa and Hund, and also an initiate in Stark’s
own clerical order of Templars. Like Hund, he was a
man of honor, but vain and narrow-minded, a mystic and
an alchemist. Raven, in 1772, attended a convention held
at Kohlo, in Lusatia, for the purpose of bringing about
an understanding between the Knights and the clerics.
He appeared in the costume of the Templar clerics, viz.;
white cassock with red cross on the breast and a hat like
that of a cardinal. He presented to the meeting a project
of union drawn up by Stark, which the knights received
with plaudits of satisfaction. Hund was deposed
from his high office, and appointed one of the Masters
of the Host, while Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick was
made Grandmaster, and other princes were named to be
Superiors and Protectors under him.
But the ritualistic pomp of the Clerics had already
awakened suspicion in the minds of the Protestant members,
and they began to cry out against mysteries of
foreign origin and against the dictation of unknown
Superiors. This discontent found expression in the convention
209held at Brunswick in 1775. There Hund was
questioned as to the legitimacy of his appointment as a
Master of the Host and the Clerics as to the authenticity
of their mysteries. Hund was deposed from office; the
following year he died of a broken heart, and, clothed in
the regalia of Master of the Host, was interred in the
church at Melrichsstadt in front of the altar. The seat
of the Grandmaster was fixed permanently at Brunswick.
Thus the machinations of the Jesuits seemed to have
come to naught. But now they sent forth a new apostle,
a man who was an enigma, whose place of birth and of
death are unknown, and who himself admitted to his confidants
that he was an agent of the Jesuits. Gugomos—such
was his name—styled baron and professor of art,
and as a member of the Strict Observance Knight of the
Triumphant Swan, in 1776, in his capacity as dignitary of
the order of Templars with a long string of titles, invited
the Grandmaster, the Directorate, and the Prior of the
Clerics to attend a convention at Wiesbaden, in order, as
he said, to instruct them in the genuine Templarism.
And many “Knights” obeyed this singular invitation,
among them several princes. Gugomos made loud
boasts of the great number of mysteries into which he
had been initiated, and in telling of them used phrases
and terms that remind us strongly of the “Exercitia
Spiritualia;” he exhibited his insignia and the commission
of a “Most Holy See” in Cyprus; and declared that
the Order to which he belonged, and of which the ancient
order of Templars was only an offshoot, was founded by
Moses, whose successors in the office of Grandmaster had
been Egyptian, Judean, and other kings, Grecian philosophers,
Christ himself and his apostles, finally popes. The
Templar succession, he said, had been perpetuated in
210Cyprus (not in Scotland, then), and the archbishops of
Cyprus were the successors of the Grandmasters. The
degrees of Freemasonry (thus he driveled on) were a
later innovation on the original clerical and knightly system,
which in its organization was, he said, exactly the
same as the Jesuit order. The one thing needed in order
to instruct men in the occult sciences was a holy temple.
On the completion of such a temple the “natural fire”
would fall from heaven, etc. Many persons recognized
the fraud; others walked into the trap, and were initiated.
But seeing how little confidence was placed in him, Gugomos
absconded, and that was the end of Jesuit Freemasonry.
But the farce of Templarism lived a few years yet,
though people were growing tired of it. Some of the
members went back to the old-fashioned masonry; others
turned to new lights of mysticism that had for some time
been looming on the horizon—the Swedish Rite and the
New Rosicrucianism.
Swedish Freemasons, as early as the middle of the
18th century, had found the genuine English masonry too
simple and inornate: they longed for more glitter and
pomp, mysteries and degrees. King Gustavus III. attempted
to satisfy this want by concocting a new system,
the ingredients being genuine freemasonry, the Strict Observance,
and the system then known at “Rosicrucianism,”
and in largest proportion the Clermont system: the doctrines
of the famous mystic and seer, Swedenborg, may
also have given a flavor to the compound. In founding
the Swedish Rite or System, Gustavus counted on obtaining
the help of the members in his effort to rid himself
211of the party of the nobles. The Swedish Rite has ten
degrees. It is founded on two stories, one that certain
secrets have descended to it from Christ through the
Apostles, the clerical Templars, and the Freemasons; the
other, that a nephew of the Grandmaster Beaulieu, a
predecessor of Molay, visited Molay in prison, and, at the
suggestion of Molay, went down into his uncle’s sepulchre,
where, in a casket, he found the insignia and the records
of the order; that from Paris he took these into Scotland,
and thence into Sweden. The symbols of the higher degrees
refer to Templarism and Catholicism. The ceremonies
of the highest degree are said closely to resemble
the mass. Other alleged usages are, the wearing of the
red cross of the Templars on the breast, reciting every
night Saint Bernard’s prayer to the Lamb of God, fasting
on Good Friday till sundown, then eating three slices of
bread, with oil and salt. The title of the head of the
System is Vicar of Solomon. Several distinguished
members of the Swedish System, among them the celebrated
poet J. H. Voss, have characterized its ceremonies
as “vain, useless and ridiculous.”
The New Rosicrucianism had its rise in Southern
Germany about the year 1760, while Rosa and Johnson
were busy with their systems. Its originators had no
connection with Freemasonry, and of its nine degrees
not even the first three were named after the masonic
degrees. Several discontented members of the Strict
Observance joined the new order. The members assumed
fanciful names, as Foebron, Ormesus, Cedrinus;
the lodges were called “Circles.” Unquestioning obedience
was to be rendered to the Superiors. The members
212learned only the mysteries of their own particular circle.
The motto was: “May God and His Word be with us.”
They claimed to possess a cryptic Book containing a
sacred history of events prior to the creation of the world,
especially of the Fall of the Angels.
Their specialty was a mystical, kabbalistic, and totally
absurd interpretation of the Bible, and of other alleged
sacred or occult writings, whence they deduced an explanation
of the universe. For example, they taught
that the planets and the other heavenly bodies reflect
back on the sun the light they receive from him, thus
conserving his might and his splendor. They also practiced
necromancy, exorcization, alchemy, the art of making
gold, of preparing the elixir of life: they studied such
problems as the production of the noble metals from rain
water, urine, and other bodies, and even of evolving human
beings by chemical processes. In their assemblies
the members wore white and black scarfs, but those of
the higher degrees wore priestly vestments, with crosses
of silver or gold. At the initiation the candidates swore
fearful oaths. Aspirants to the ninth degree were assured
that once they should attain that eminence they
would understand all nature’s secrets and possess supreme
control of angels, devils, and men. The first prophet
of the New Rosicrucianism was John George Schrepfer,
coffeehouse keeper in Leipsic. In 1777 he founded in
his own shop a lodge of the Scottish Rite, to afford his
customers a better style of masonry than was found in
the ordinary lodges. The Duke of Courland, protector
of one of the masonic lodges, had the man publicly
bastinadoed: but Schrepfer shortly afterward inspired
both him and the Duke of Brunswick with a curiosity to
be instructed in the mysteries, and visited them at Dresden
213and at Brunswick. In his lodge he gave demonstrations
of his supernatural powers as a magician and a
necromancer: for example, he would summon up spirits
of the dead. Puffed up by success, Schrepfer indulged in
all manner of debauchery, and at last was reduced to
penury. He died by his own hand, aged 35 years.
But Rosicrucianism was yet to reach its highest point,
which it did in the person of John Christopher Woellner
(born at Spandau, 1732, ordained preacher 1759, a councilor
in the Prussian service in 1766, and Minister of State
1788; deceased 1800), and John Rudolf Bischofswerder
(born in Thuringia 1741, chamberlain to the Elector of
Saxony; major in the Prussian army 1772; minister at
war 1768; deceased 1803). Not content with the honor
of being Knight of the Griffin in the Strict Observance,
Bischofswerder went in search of an order that practiced
the magic art, and was so fortunate as to find it in the
New Rosicrucianism. He was initiated into the mysteries
by Schrepfer, and it was he who converted the Duke of
Courland from an enemy into a friend of the coffeehouse
Rosicrucian. After the death of Schrepfer, whose most
zealous supporter he had been, Bischofswerder obtained
promotion in the Prussian service through the favor of
the crown prince Frederic William, nephew of Frederic
the Great, and shared his good fortune with Woellner,
Knight of the Cube, who like himself had seceded from
Templarism. The pair won the crown prince over to
Rosicrucianism, and enjoyed his confidence both then
and after his accession to the throne of Prussia in 1786,
as William II. At last, as ministers of state, they succeeded
in substituting obscurantism and state religionism
in the place of the illuminism and toleration that
had prevailed under old Fritz. It was they that dictated
214the odious Edict of Religion of 1788, which was expected
to prove a deathblow to illuminism and free thought: but
the death of the King upset all their calculations. That
was the end of the New Rosicrucianism.
Simultaneously with the order of the Rosicrucians
arose two variant forms of the same, the society of the
Asiatic Brethren, and that of the African Buildingmasters
(Asiatische Brueder, Afrikanische Bauherren). The
Asiatic Brethren’s order was founded in Vienna by Baron
Hans Henry von Eckhofen, an ex-Rosicrucian: it admitted
only Freemasons, but did not exclude Jews, and
its aims were the same as those of the Rosicrucians. Its
chief seat was at Vienna, called by them Thessalonica,
for they gave a foreign name to every place. Its head
officers were styled Inquisitors. There were five degrees,
viz., two probationary—those of Seekers and of Sufferers—and
three superior degrees. The members in the two
lower degrees wore round black hats with distinctive
feathers for each degree, black mantles, and white or
black ribbons, broidered with different emblems; those
in the higher degrees wore red hats and mantles; the attire
of those in the highest degree was all rosy-red. Ten
members constituted a Mastership, ten masterships a Decade,
and so on. The order became shockingly corrupt
in Austria.
The African society, founded by War Councilor
Koeppen in Berlin, had rather higher aims than the Rosicrucians
and the Asiatic Brethren: they studied the history
of Freemasonry, admitted to their order only scholars
and artists, conducted their business in Latin, and offered
prizes for scientific researches: but they indulged in
farfetched and absurd symbolism, kabbalism, magic, and
mysticism. Their degrees were five inferior or preparatory,
215and five higher or esoteric. The order lived for a
few years only.
There were many other societies, instituted mostly
for the purpose of fraud and moneymaking: of these we
give no account here. But there still remains one society
which is worthy of mention—that of the Brethren of the
Cross (Kreuzbrueder) or Devotees of the Cross (Kreuzfromme),
founded by Count Christian von Haugwitz
(1752–1832), who was at one time Knight of the Holy
Mount in the Strict Observance, afterward belonged to a
German imitation of the Swedish rite, and at last founded
a society which was described by a contemporary as “a
conspiracy of despotism against liberty, of vice against
virtue, of stupidity against talent, of darkness against enlightenment.”
The Devotees of the Cross observed the
strictest secrecy, corresponded in cipher, inveigled princes,
in order to rule in their stead (after the manner of Bischofswerder
and Woellner) and practiced all manner of
superstitions to make an end of science. They had no
connection whatever with Freemasonry.
Unfortunately this multiplication of mystical orders
was not without effect on the fortunes of the masonic body,
in that it has led to a vicious growth of “high degrees.”
It was a French adventurer, Stephen Morin, who, in
1761, introduced into the United States the 33 degrees:
they entered France again in 1803, and were regarded as
a novelty, having been forgotten during the Revolution.
The titles of these degrees are at once bombastic and unmeaning:
Grand Scots, Knights of the East, High Princes
of Jerusalem, Princes of Grace, Grand Inquisitors, Princes
of the Royal Secret, etc., and in some of the variations
of these ridiculous degrees we have Knights of the Ape,
and of the Lion, and Emperor of East and West.
PART ELEVENTH. The Illuminati and Their Era. — 1. THE ILLUMINATI. — 2. IMITATIONS OF ILLUMINISM. — 4. FREEMASONRY AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.
216
By the suppression of the Jesuit order by Clement
XIV., the results of two centuries of painful toil in the
interest of a universal ecclesiastical dominion were undone.
Then it was that an ingenious mind conceived the
thought of employing on behalf of enlightenment such
instrumentality as the Jesuits had employed against it.
It was a pupil of the Jesuits to whom this thought first
occurred: their mechanical, soul-stifling method of education
had made him their enemy; but besides he had
learned the artifices and the secrets of the Jesuits, and
hoped that by imitating them in a Catholic country
likely to be influenced by such arts, he might thereby
promote the very opposite interests. Adam Weishaupt
was born in 1748, and when only 25 years of age was professor
of canon law and jurisprudence in the university of
Ingolstadt, and also lecturer on history and philosophy,
being the first in that institute to deliver lectures in
the German language, and in consonance with the more
enlightened spirit of the age. The intrigues of the ousted
Fathers against their successor in a professorial chair
which they had held for nearly a century forced to maturity
the thought which he had cherished from his
student days: and the founding in the neighboring village
of Burghausen of a lodge of Rosicrucians, who were trying
217to attract to themselves his students, decided him to
carry his idea into execution. On May 1, 1776, he
founded the Order of Perfectibilists to which he afterward
gave the name Illuminists (Illuminati). To propagate
this institution and to strengthen it he adopted measures
which, in the circumstances of the time, seemed not unpractical.
First, he adopted entire the hierarchic system
of government existing among the Jesuits—despotic rule
from top to bottom; secondly, he employed Freemasonry
to promote the ends of his order, just as the Jesuits had
attempted to do. Accordingly Weishaupt, who was full
of vanity, ambition, and desire of revenge, but knew
nothing of the true Freemasonry, only of its perversions,
obtained admission to the order in a lodge in Munich.
Hence it is not true that the Freemasons founded the
league of the Illuminati, but rather than an order that
arose outside of the lodge simply made use of Freemasonry:
and so to the defeated reactionary movement
against Freemasonry now succeeded an unmasonic revolutionary
movement. In executing his plan Weishaupt
was assisted mainly by Francis Xavier von Zwackh, of
Landshut, councilor to the government of the Bavarian
Palatinate, a man initiated in the highest degrees of masonry.
Several years after its foundation the order of
the Illuminati was still confined to South Germany, or
even to Bavaria; but as Weishaupt desired that the north
also, and Protestants no less than Catholics, should take
an interest in his institute, he sent the Marquis Costanzo
von Costanza, Bavarian chamberlain, to Frankfort-on-the-Main
in 1779 to win over to the order the lodges in that
city. Costanzo himself had little success, the rich
merchants of Frankfort being averse to anything that
would unsettle the peace of the world; but a young man
218whose acquaintance he made was destined to be, after
Weishaupt, the most effective promoter of the new society.
This was Baron Adolf von Knigge, well known
for his much-read book. “Ueber den Umgang mit Menschen.”
He was born in 1752, and from his youth up
had been an amateur of spiritism (ghostseership). He
was already an Initiate of the higher degrees of the Strict
Observance; but, dissatisfied with that order, he adopted
the idea of Illuminism enthusiastically, and brought into
the system a number of men who became its apostles; for
example, Bode, the translator; Francis von Ditfurth, associate
justice, of Weimar. With these two Knigge attended
the Conventus of Wilhelmsbad, and there championed
the cause of Illuminism stoutly, and helped to
give the deathblow to Templarism. And now as Knigge,
who supposed the order to be an ancient one, entered
into a correspondence with Weishaupt, he was not a little
astonished on learning from him that the society was
as yet no more than an embryo: in fact, it had only the
degree of the minor Illuminates (Kleine Illuminaten).
Nothing disheartened, however, he journeyed to Bavaria,
and was admitted to the order in splendid style. But
his lively fancy led him to develop the order further; and
the sober-minded Weishaupt, whose gifts were those of the
thinker rather than of the contriver of forms, left to
Knigge the elaboration of the several degrees and their
Lessons, in which both were agreed that allusions to the
fireworship and lightworship of the Persians should be
employed, as typical of the spiritual fire and spiritual light
of Illuminism.
The groundwork of the polity of the Illuminati was
as follows: A supreme president ruled the whole, having
next below him two officers, each of whom again had
219two others under him, and so on, so that the first could
most conveniently govern all. The doings of the order
were kept most strictly secret. Each member took the
name of some historic or mythic personage of distinction:
Weishaupt was Spartacus; Zwackh, Cato; Costanzo, Diomede;
Knigge, Philo; Ditfurth, Minos; Nicolai, Lucian,
and so on. Countries and cities also had pseudonyms:
Munich was Athens; Frankfort, Edessa; Austria, Egypt;
Franconia, Illyria, and so forth. In correspondence the
members used a secret cipher, numbers taking the
place of letters; in reckoning time they followed the
calendar of the ancient Persians with the Persian names
of months and the Persian aera.
The number of degrees and their designations were
never definitely fixed, hence they are different in different
localities. But all the accounts agree that there were
three principal degrees. The first of these, the School of
Plants (Pflanzschule) was designed to receive youths approaching
adult age. The candidate for admission was at
first a Novice, and, except the one who indoctrinated him,
knew no member of the order. He was required, by
submitting a detailed account of his life, with full particulars
as to all his doings, and by keeping a journal, to
prove himself a fit subject for admission, and one likely
to be of service to the order. From the grade of Novice
he passed to that of Minerval. The members of the
Minerval class formed a sort of learned society, which occupied
itself with answering questions in the domain of
morals. The Minervals, furthermore, were required to
make known what they thought of the order, and what
they expected of it, and they assumed the obligation of
obedience. They were under the eye of their superior
officers, read and wrote whatever superiors required of
220them, and spied on each other, and reported one another’s
faults to superiors as in the Jesuit system. The
leaders of the Minervals were called Minor Illuminati;
were taken by surprise at the meetings of their degree
and nominated to that dignity—a method that wonderfully
stimulated ambition; they were instructed in the management
and oversight of their subjects, and practiced themselves
in that art; they were besides required to report
their experiences. The second principal degree was Freemasonry,
through the three original degrees of which and
the two so-called Scottish degrees the Illuminati passed;
and strenuous effort was made to have the masonic lodges
adopt a system agreeable to the ideas of the Illuminati,
so that the membership of the order might be steadily increased.
The three original degrees of masonry were imparted
to the regular Illuminati without ceremonies. The
members of the two Scottish degrees were called Greater
Illuminati, and the task of these was to study the characters
of their fellowmembers; and Dirigent Illuminati,
who presided over the several divisions of the illuministic
masonry. The third and highest degree was that of the
Mysteries, comprising the four stages of Priest, Regent,
Magus and King (rex). This principal degree was elaborated
only in part, and was not brought into use. In
these four divisions of the third degree the ends of the
order were, according to Knigge’s plan, to be explained.
The supreme heads of the several divisions of the order
were called Areopagites, but their functions were never
fully defined. It was proposed also to add a department
for women. The aims of this organization of the Illuminati
remind us forcibly of those of the Pythagorean
League. They contemplated, not a sudden and violent
but a gradual and peaceful revolution, in which the
221Illuminism of the 18th century should gain the victory.
This revolution was to be effected by winning for the order
all the considerable intellectual forces of the time,
though the new associates were only little by little to
learn what the aims of the order were. And inasmuch as
the members, when they should have among their number
all those forces, must everywhere attain the highest
places in government, the triumph of their enlightened
principles could not be for long delayed. In the superior
degrees the members were to be taught as a grand secret
of the order that the means whereby the redemption of
mankind was one day to be accomplished was Secret
Schools of Wisdom. These would lift man out of his
fallen estate: these would, without violence, sweep Princes
and National boundaries from the face of the earth, and
constitute the human race one family, every housefather
a priest and lord of his own, and Reason the one lawcode
of mankind. To imbue the minds of men with these
principles, illuminist books were prescribed to the members
for their reading. In sharp contrast to the masonic
systems in which Jesuits had had a hand, the Illuminati
avoided all forms which might suggest obedience to any
religion or church, and welcomed whatever favored the
dominance of reason and the overthrow of revelation.
In the very short period of its existence the order
of the Illuminati attained a membership of 2,000, a result
very materially promoted by the rule that any member
possessing authority from the superiors could admit
a candidate. Among the members were many men eminent,
both socially and in science, as the dukes of Saxe-Gotha
(Ernest), Brunswick (Ferdinand), of Saxe-Weimar
(Charles Augustus, while yet only heir of the ducal
crown); Dalberg, who was afterward prince-bishop;
222Montgilas, afterward minister of state; President Count
Geinsheim; the celebrated philosopher Baader; Professors
Semmer of Ingolstadt, Moldenhauer of Kiel,
Feder of Goettingen; the educator Leuchsenring
of Darmstadt; the Catholic cathedral prebendaries
Schroeckenstein of Eichstadt and Schmelzer of Mayence;
Haefelin, bishop of Munich; the authors Bahrdt, Biester,
Gedike, Bode, Nicolai, etc. Goethe, Herder, and probably
Pestalozzi also belonged to the order. The league
in “Wilhelm Meister” reminds us strongly of the Illuminati.
The order was not yet spread abroad beyond the
German borders, though a few Frenchmen had been admitted
while visiting Germany; but its plans were already
reaching out farther. And now the head of the
whole organization was to be the General (as among the
Jesuits); under him there was to be in each country a
head officer, the National; in each principal division of
a country a Provincial; in subdivisions of provinces a
Prefect, and so on.
This aping of Jesuit polity and the imprudent admission
of objectionable or indifferent characters proved the
ruin of the order. Despotic rule and espionage could
never promote the cause of liberty and enlightenment—and
the founder of the order proposed to make enlightenment
the means of attaining liberty.
Then the dissensions ever growing more serious
between Weishaupt and Knigge. Whereas Weishaupt
cared only for the ends of the society, all else being in his
eyes only incidental, mere formalism, Knigge, on the
other hand, being a man of the world, shrank in horror
from the program of his associate: religion, morality,
the State were imperiled. He dreaded Liberalist books,
223and would have been far better pleased to see the order
working on the lines of the Freemasons of that day,
though with an elaborate ceremonial and manifold degrees
and mysteries, and with some harmless, innocent
ideal of human welfare and brotherly love as the object
of their endeavors. Weishaupt called Knigge’s pet contrivance
tinsel and trumpery and child’s playthings, and
the pair of “Areopagites” grew steadily ever more asunder.
This rising storm within boded less ill to the order
than the attacks from without growing from day to
day more violent. Illuminism was assailed by enemies
of all sorts, that sprung up like mushrooms. First there
were the masonic systems of the reactionary or superstitious
kind, such as the Rosicrucians, the Asiatic Brethren,
the African Masterbuilders, the Swedish Rite, the
remnant of the Strict Observance, etc.; then such of the
Illuminati as thought the hopes of the order had been
disappointed, or who expected to profit by a betrayal of
the order to the enemies of liberty and light; finally, and
above all, there were the sons of Loyola, ever laboring
industriously in the dark though their society had been
suppressed, and now again, thanks to the licentious,
bigoted despotic Elector Charles Theodore, possessing
great influence in Bavaria, the country in which the
membership of the Order of Illuminati was of longest
standing and most numerous. At that court, the seat
of corruption, some courtiers, professors, and clergymen
who had been members of the order, with the secret
pamphleteer, Joseph Utzschneider, at their head, played
traitor, charging the order with rebellion, infidelity, and
all manner of vices and crimes, and at the same time,
without ado, classing with the Illuminati the Freemasons.
224By a decree of August 2, 1784, the lodges of all secret
societies established without government’s approval, including
the Illuminati and the Freemasons, were banned.
The masonic lodges submitted at once, and closed their
doors; but Weishaupt and his associates went on with
their work, hoping to change the mind of the Elector by
bringing up for public discussion their rules and their
usages. Vain Hope. The Elector’s confessor, Father
Frank, an ex-Jesuit, who already had labored against
Freemasonry, procured on March 2, 1781, a second decree,
by which the previous one was confirmed, and all
secret organizations that continued to exist in violation
of it, and specifically the Order of Illuminati, were forbidden
to hold meetings, and all their property was confiscated.
The Minister of State, Aloysius Xavier Kreitmayr,
distinguished himself by the rigor with which he
executed the ukaz. Weishaupt was deposed from his
place at Ingolstadt, expelled from that city, and declared
incapable of legal defense; he had to flee the country.
He first tarried in Ratisbon; but soon, in consequence
of the discovery of compromising documents in a search
of the houses of Illuminati, very grave charges were
brought against the members, and the Elector became
alarmed for his throne. Without distinction of class or
station a prosecution was entered against all persons accused
of membership in the order, or even suspected of
sympathy with it, and they were imprisoned, deposed
from office, banished, and in the case of persons of the
lower classes, punished with stripes. This whole business
was managed, without any recourse to the regular
tribunals, by a special commission under Court direction.
This persecution lasted till after the outbreak of
the French Revolution, and a refusal to condemn the
225French people was taken as evidence of a revolutionary
spirit. This system naturally fostered ignorance among
the lower classes, but among educated people it tended
to spread the principles of Illuminism, and to awaken
opposition to monkish rule in the state.
Weishaupt, no longer safe at Ratisbon, the Bavarian
government having set a price on his head, fled to Gotha,
where Duke Ernest, a member of the order, protected
him, and made him Court councilor. Here he lived till
1830, but he failed to resuscitate his order on an improved
plan. As for Knigge, he made haste to quit the
incriminated order, and in his prim, emasculate “Umgang
mit Menschen,” strongly condemned all “secret
societies”—he, the old-time Templar, Freemason, and Illuminist.
Few were so stout-hearted and firm as Ignatius
von Born, the naturalist, a native of Transylvania,
who had been a Jesuit, but who, after the suppression
of the Society of Jesus, had joined the Illuminati and become
a Freemason. After the suppression of the Bavarian
lodges, Born, who was then in the service of the
Emperor Joseph II. at Vienna, sent back to the Bavarian
Academy of Sciences his diploma as member of that
body, accompanying it with a letter in which he bluntly
declared that he would rather be a Freemason than a
member of a body with which he had nothing in common.
And thus was the cry of Voltaire, “Ecrasons
l’Infame,” taken up by the party against which it was
first uttered, and by them given effect in the shape of
a most infamous persecution, before men of enlightenment
had made the first move toward “stamping out”
what to them seemed an “infamy.” For the rest it is
said that the suppression of the Illuminati was the result
of an understanding with Frederic the Great, whose
policy was threatened by the order.
226
Not long after the break-up of the Order of Illuminati
in the South, a similar order sprang up in Northern Germany.
It originated in the brain of a man unfortunately
at once a zealous Illuminist and a morally depraved
vagabond, who made a deplorable misuse of the talents
with which nature had endowed him richly. This was
Dr. Charles Frederic Bahrdt, Protestant theologian,
sometime preacher, professor, or teacher in sundry places,
and once even keeper of an eating house at Halle. In
1788 it occurred to him to found an association to promote
enlightened views, and his plan was to combine it
with the masonic society, of which he had become a
member in England. The projected association he called
the “German Union of the XXII.” (Deutsche Union der
XXII.), for the reason, as he explained in a circular letter,
that twenty-two men had formed a union for the
ends set forth. The Union was to be organized on the
plan of Jesus Christ, whom Bahrdt in a voluminous work
portrayed as the founder of a sort of Freemasonry, and
of whose miracles he offered a rather forced natural explanation.
In accordance with this plan the association
was to be a “silent brotherhood” that was to hurl
from their throne superstition and fanaticism, and this
chiefly by the literary activity of the members. The literary
labor was ingeniously organized in such fashion that the
Union would by diligent effort in time gain control of
the press and the whole book trade, thus acquiring the
means of insuring the triumph of enlightenment. Outwardly
the Union was to have the appearance of a purely
literary association; but inwardly it was to consist of three
degrees, of which the lower ones were to be simply reading
227societies, while the third alone would understand the
real purpose of the order, viz., advancement of science,
art, commerce, and religion, betterment of education, encouragement
of men of talent, remuneration for services,
provision for meritorious workers in age and misfortune,
also for the widows and orphans of members. But
inasmuch as Bahrdt had painted this beautiful picture
solely to make money, the Deutsche Union existed only
on paper; but it wrought for its projector a protracted
term of imprisonment, which he survived but a short
time; he died in 1792.
Another imitation of the Order of Illuminati, the
League of the Evergetes (Bund der Evergeten, or benefactors,
or welldoers) which sprang up at the close of
the 18th century, had a longer term of life, though but
little expansion. Its activity extended over all the arts
and sciences, except positive theology and positive jurisprudence.
The members were designated after the manner
of the Illuminati; but they acknowledged no unknown
superiors. Time was reckoned from the death
of Socrates, B. C. 400. The supreme head was called
Archiepistat (archiepistates, chief overseer); there were
two degrees, of which only the higher one had a political
aim, popular representation. Fessler, by his protests
against such tendencies, brought about a split in the association,
and afterward his adversaries tried to convert
it into a sort of moral Femgericht by tracking and branding
all offenses. One of the three leaders betrayed the
other two, and was with them put in prison, but soon
afterward released: that ended the association.
228
That there was any alliance of the Freemasons, or
even of the Illuminists, with the men of the French Revolution,
which broke out in 1789, can be affirmed only by
those who are ignorant of history or wilfully blind—by
men like the Privy Councilor Grolman of Giessen, friend
of Stark (significantly named in the Strict Observance,
Knight of the Golden Crab), or, like the abbe and canon
Augustin Barruel in France, or the ship’s captain and
professor, John Robinson, in England: their allegations
were received only with ridicule, and passed into oblivion.
As we have seen, the Illuminati were to be found only
in Germany, where no revolution took place: in fact,
they were no longer in existence when the French revolution
broke out. As for the Freemasons, we have already
shown that they were opposed to the movement;
but that movement could have no other ground than the
dissatisfaction of the people of France with the shameful
Bourbon dynasty, whose mischief could not be repaired
by the well-intentioned but narrow-minded Louis XVI.
No critical or serious work of history gives any justification
of the belief that Freemasonry had a hand in
bringing about that Revolution: but a decisive proof of
the true relation of Freemasonry to the troubles of those
times is had in the fact that the Terror made an end of the
Grand Orient of France. All the clubs of the French
Revolution were open: the people would not tolerate
secret clubs, not even private assemblages, and hence as
early as 1791 began to persecute the Freemasons as aristocrats.
The Grandmaster then existing, Louis Philip
Joseph, Duke of Orleans, gave up his title, as we know,
and called himself Citizen Equality, and at last, in 1793,
229declared that he had given up the “phantom” of equality,
found in Masonry, for the reality; that in the Republic
there should be no Mysteries; and, therefore, he would
no more have anything to do with Freemasonry. That
same year his head fell under the guillotine, and his
blood sealed the “reality of equality”; and most of the
members of the two zealous lodges, those of the “Contrat
Social” and of the “Neuf Soeurs” were taught, when
they met with a like fate, that “real” equality was a more
dreadful “phantom” than those they had pursued in the
lodges. Only three lodges continued in existence
through the Terror by extreme caution and secrecy, and
not till the fall of the Terrorists did Brother Roettiers de
Montaleau come forth from the prison in which he had
been incarcerated simply because he was a Freemason.
Thus did French Masonry weather the terrible storm
of the Revolution; the German lodges in the mean time
were busy in reforming and strengthening themselves;
for a season they withdrew into retirement, and exerted
no longer any influence on public affairs. Superstition
and child’s play fell into disrepute: the Rosicrucians, the
“Asian” and “African” orders, the Templars, and their
like, condemned by public opinion, had to give up their
absurdities and return to right reason. The general
league of German Freemasons projected in 1790 by Bode
of Gotha, failed of realization in consequence of the death
soon afterward of that enlightened mason (1793); but its
purpose was served, though not in its whole extent, by
the sturdy Eclectic League of Masonry (Ekletische
Freimaurerbund) founded as early as 1783, with headquarters
at Frankfort. This League has ever since rendered
notable service to the cause of genuine Freemasonry.
PART TWELFTH. Secret Societies of Various Kinds. — 1. SOCIETIES OF WITS. — 2. IMITATIONS OF THE ANCIENT MYSTIC LEAGUES. — 3. IMITATIONS OF FREEMASONRY.
230
The Comic has a place everywhere in history: there
is no lack of it in secret societies; indeed, in such societies
it assumes many different forms. For there be secret
societies that would be comic; there be secret societies
that are comic without knowing it; and finally there be
men and parties that by their action against so-called
secret societies make themselves comic without intending
it.
While Goethe lived at Weimar, there was formed in
that city a satirical Society of Chevaliers. Curiously
enough it was suggested by Frederic von Goue, a Knight
of the Strict Observance and a strong believer in the
descent of Freemasonry from Templarism, but a comical
old soul withal, and author of a parody of Goethe’s
Werther. The members took knightly names: Goethe,
for example, was Goetz von Berlichingen; they spoke in
the style of chivalry, and they had four degrees. In sarcastic
allusion to the revelations promised (but never
communicated) in the high pseudomasonic degrees, the
degrees of the Society of Chevaliers were, 1, Transition;
2, Transition’s Transition; 3, Transition’s Transition to
Transition; 4, Transition’s Transition to Transition of
231Transition. Only the initiated understood the profound
meaning of the Degrees.
Another society of similar nature was that of the
Mad Court Councilors founded at Frankfort-on-the-Main
by the physician Ehrmann in 1809. Membership
consisted only in the receipt from the founder (in recognition
of some humorous piece) of a Diploma written in
burlesque style in Latin, and bearing the impress of a
broad seal. Among men honored with the diploma were
Jean Paul, E. M. Arndt, Goethe, Iffland, Schlosser,
Creuzer, Chladny, etc. Goethe earned his diploma by a
parody of his own “Westoestlicher Diwan,”—“Occidentalischer
Orientalismus.”
Many societies of this sort have since arisen, but
those of Vienna are worthy of special mention. One of
these was called “Ludlamshoehle,” after a not very successful
drama of Oehlenschlager’s. It had many distinguished
men in its membership. The members were
called Bodies, the candidates Shadows. Though mirth
was the only object, the police thought it best to suppress
the society in 1826. In 1855 appeared the Green
Island, a comic-chivalresque society, though it rendered
good service to literature and art. Several writers and
actors of note belonged to it. A society, the Allschlaraffia
was founded at Prague in the ’fifties, which, in 1885,
had eighty-five affiliated societies in Germany, Austria,
Switzerland and other countries. A congress of the
leagued societies met at Leipsic in 1876, and another at
Prague in 1883. The president of each Schlaraffenreich
(or society) was called Uhu, but on festive occasions was
Aha, and in condemning offenses against the Allschlaraffia,
Oho.
232
There have been and still are in France secret societies
that have thought they could in our time transplant
to Europe, under Masonic forms, the Egyptian
Mysteries. Once there was a Holy Order of the Sophisians,
founded by French military officers who had
been with Bonaparte in Egypt. The highest dignitaries
were called Isiarchs, and the rest of the officers of the
society bore similar titles (mostly fictitious) of Egyptian
priests. The lodges were Pyramids, and their aera began
15,000 years before Christ. Two orders which still subsist
are those of Misraim and of Memphis, both of which
in downright earnest trace their origin back to Egyptian
antiquity and regard all the secret associations mentioned
in the present volume, except those having political aims,
as members of one grand association. The fact is that
the Misraim system had its origin in 1805, and was
founded by some men of loose morals, who contrived to
get themselves received into a Freemasons’ lodge in
Milan, but who, because they were not promoted as they
had hoped to be, went out and formed a Freemasonry of
their own. The order spread first over Italy and in 1814
to France. The system has no fewer than ninety degrees,
grouped in seventeen classes, and three series. Only the
Grandmaster received the ninetieth degree: the “content”
of all the degrees is pure nonsense. The Memphis system
was introduced into France in 1814 by a Cairene adventurer.
It held its first lodge at Montauban in 1815,
but has often since that time been obliged to interrupt
its work. The Grand Lodge of Paris was called Osiris,
the head of the order was Grandmaster of Light; the
hierarchy of officials was complex and showy. The degrees
were more than ninety in number, to which were
233added three supreme degrees, but the total was afterward
reduced to thirty. They comprised the Indian, Persian,
Egyptian, Grecian, Scandinavian, and even the Mexican
mythologies and theologies. Only two lodges exist to-day,
and these the Grand Orient of France took under
its wing some years ago, they having given up their silly
ideas, and turned to sensible, beneficent work.
Another anachronism is the ghost of Templarism,
which in the present century, as in the last, walks abroad:
but its connection with Masonry is now rather loose, or
even non-existent. Thus, there is no connection between
Freemasonry and the New Templars of Paris, whose traditions
do not differ from those of the New Observance.
They reckon the years from the founding of the order of
Templars (1118), and their “learned men” have imagined
a succession of Grandmasters deriving from one Larmenius
of Jerusalem, nominated, they say, by Molay as
his successor. But Larmenius never existed. Here,
then, is a new variant of the story put forth by the Strict
Observance, the Royal Arch, etc. A document is shown
to prove the nomination of Larmenius, but its Latin is
not that of the 14th century; and, besides, only the Conventus
of the Templars could name a Grandmaster.
After the Revolution the new Templars purchased a
splendid property in the Nouvelle France suburb of
Paris, and from time to time observed the anniversary of
Molay’s death, having a solemn mass of requiem performed.
The Grandmaster, Raimond Fabre de Palaprat
(1804–1838) had under him four Grand Vicars for Europe,
Asia, Africa and America—indeed, the whole earth was
parceled out among the members in Grand Priories,
Minor Priories, Comptrolleries, etc., and the wearers of
these titles were happy. There were Clerical Templars,
234too, the highest grade being that of Bishop. The rules
of the New Templarism permitted none to be admitted to
the order save men of noble birth: but many a shopkeeper
wore the white mantle with red cross.
There are New Templars also in England, Scotland,
Ireland and the United States, almost all of whom have
received the so-called higher degrees of Freemasonry.
The English Templars are divided into two opposing
parties, from one of which came the Irish and the American
Templars. No one is competent for admission to
any of these Templar societies who does not believe that
Christ came on earth to save sinners with his blood, and
the members must swear to defend this belief with their
swords and with their lives. But no one, alas, has yet
heard of their deeds on behalf of those imperiled articles
of faith. Their lodges are called Commanderies. They
have Swordbearers, Bannerbearers, Prelates.
The resuscitation of the ancient order of Druids is
another example of imitation of the secret societies of
antiquity. Among the Kelts of Gaul and Britain the
Druids were, next after the nobles and the warriors, the
highest estate. Religion, art, and science were their exclusive
province: hence they were priests, poets, and
scholars. Their head was a Chief Druid, and they formed
an order with special garb, a special mode of writing, degrees
and mysteries. The mysteries were certain theological,
philosophical, medical, mathematical, etc., dogmata,
and these were conveyed in three-membered sentences
(triads). They believed in the immortality of the
soul and its transmigration, in one god, creation of the
235world out of nothing, and its transformation (not destruction)
by water and fire. Their assemblies were held in
caverns and forests, on mountains, and within circles,
ringed round with enormous blocks of stone. The
Roman emperors persecuted them as they did Jews and
Christians, because the Druidic mysteries seemed to
them dangerous to the state. In Britain the Bards, i. e.,
those of the Druids who cultivated poetry and song, were
the most influential division of their order. There were
three degrees of the Bards—Probationers, Passed Scholars
and Learned Bards.
In 1781 a society was formed in London whose
members called themselves Druids, and who practiced
rites resembling those of Freemasonry. In 1858 there
were twenty-seven mutually independent societies of
Druids in Britain, but by consolidation the number is
now reduced to fifteen. Druidism was introduced into
the United States in 1833. Their local organizations
are called Groves, and the central organizations Grand
Groves. They have three degrees, to which are appended
other higher degrees, each with its own High Arch Chapter.
There is no close connection between British and
American Druidism. In 1872 Druidism was imported
into Germany from the United States: there are in the
German empire forty Groves, with about 2,000 members.
The order of Odd Fellows is of English origin, but is
very strong in the United States. It was founded toward
the end of the first half of the 18th century, but appears
to have been at first a convivial society of “goodfellows,”
or odd fellows, with mutual benefit as a secondary object.
It was reorganized in 1812, the feature of conviviality
dropped, and the beneficent ends made paramount; this
is the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. A rather
236similar organization, the Ancient Order of Foresters,
was founded in England about the same time with the
Odd Fellows’ order. Forestry also has been transplanted
to the United States. American Oddfellowship severed
its connection with the British Grand Lodge in 1842.
There were in the United States in 1889 more than 600,000
Oddfellows in 10,000 lodges. A society of American
origin is that of the Knights of Pythias, founded in Washington
in 1864; its object is to disseminate “the great
principles of friendship, charity, and benevolence”: it had
in 1885 2,000 separate lodges and 160,000 members. The
Order of Red Men (Improved Order of Red Men) is
of earlier origin than the preceding: the members in their
lodge meetings imitate some of the customs of the American
aboriginals, and wear an attire resembling that of the
Indians. Besides these there are in the United States
very many other secret societies having for their end
mutual beneficence, as Knights of Malta, Senate of Sparta,
Knights of the Mystic Chain, Legion of the Red Cross,
Knights of Friendship, Royal Arcanum. The Grand
Army of the Republic was founded soon after the close
of the civil war. Its members are veteran soldiers of
that war. Its ends are to perpetuate the associations of
comrades in arms, to relieve distress of members and provide
benefit funds, and to advance the interests of the
members in every honorable and lawful way. The badge
of membership is a small bronze button worn in the coat
lapel.
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A WHEEL OF LIFE
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Ethics of Marriage
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