"32nd Degree - Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret (Master of the Royal Secret)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pike Albert)

conflicts between the rushing currents. These and the benign trade-winds result from the same great law. God is omnipotent; but effects without causes are impossible and these effects cannot but sometimes be evil. The fire would not warm, if it could not also burn, the human flesh. The most virulent poisons are the most sovereign remedies, when given in due proportion. The Evil is the shadow of the Good, and inseparable from it.

The Divine Wisdom limits by equipoise the Omnipotence of the Divine Will or Power, and the result is Beauty or Harmony. The arch rests not on a single column, but springs from one on either side. So is it also with the Divine Justice and Mercy, and with the Human Reason and
Human Faith.

That purely scholastic Theology, issue of the Categories of Aristotle and of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, that logic of the syllogism which argues instead of reasoning, and finds a response to every thing by subtilizing on terms, wholly ignored the Kabalastic dogma and wandered off into the drear vacuity of darkness. It was less a philosophy or a wisdom than a philosophical automaton, replying by means of springs, and uncoiling its theses like a wheeled movement. It was not the human verb but the monotonous cry of a machine, the inanimate speech of an Android. It was the fatal precision of mechanism, instead of a free application of rational necessities. ST THOMAS AQUINAS crushed with a single blow all this scaffolding of words built one upon the other, by proclaiming the eternal Empire of Reason, in that magnificent sentence, "A thing is not just because GOD wills it, but GOD wills it because it is just". The
proximate consequence of this proposition, arguing from the greater to the less, was this: "A thing is not true because ARISTOTLE has said it; but ARISTOTLE could not reasonably say it unless it was true. Seek then, first of, all, the TRUTH and JUSTICE, and the Science of ARISTOTLE will be given you in addition".

It is the fine dream of the greatest of the Poets, that Hell, become useless, is to be closed at length, by the aggrandizement of Heaven; that the problem of Evil is to receive its final solution, and Good alone, necessary and triumphant, is to reign in Eternity. So the Persian dogma taught that AHRIMAN and his subordinate ministers of Evil were at last, by means of a Redeemer and Mediator, to be reconciled with Deity and all Evil to end. But unfortunately, the philosopher
forgets all the laws of equilibrium and seeks to absorb the Light in a splendor without shadow, and movement in an absolute repose that would be the cessation of life. So long as there shall be a visible light, there will be a shadow proportional to this Light and whatever is illuminated will cast its cone of shadow. Repose will never be happiness, if it is not balanced by an analogous and contrary movement. This is the immutable law of Nature, the Eternal Will of the JUSTICE which is GOD.

The same reason necessitates Evil and Sorrow in Humanity which renders indispensable the bitterness of the waters of the seas. Here also, Harmony can result only from the analogy of contraries, and what is above exists by reason of what is below. It is the depth that determines the height; and if the valleys are filled up, the mountains disappear. So, if the shadows are
effaced, the Light is annulled, which is only visible by the graduated contrast of gloom and splendor and universal obscurity will be produced by an immense dazzling. Even the colors in the Light only exists by the presence of the shadow. It is the threefold alliance of the day and night, the luminous image of the dogma, the Light made Shadow, as the Saviour is the Logos made man and all this reposes on the same law, the primary law of creation, the single and absolute
law of Nature, that of the distinction and harmonious ponderation of the contrary forces in the universal equipoise.

The two great columns of the Temple that symbolizes the Universe are Necessity, or the omnipotent Will of God, which nothing can disobey and Liberty, or the free-will of His creatures. Apparently and to our human reason antagonistic, the same Reason is not incapable of comprehending how they can be in equipoise. The Infinite Power and Wisdom could so plan the Universe and the Infinite Succession of things as to leave man free to act and foreseeing what each would at every instant think and do, to make of the free will and free action of each an instrument to aid in effecting its general purpose. For even a man, foreseeing that another will do a certain act, and in no wise controlling or even influencing him may use that action as an instrument to effect his own purposes.

The Infinite Wisdom of God foresees what each will do and uses it as an instrument, by the exertion of His Infinite Power, which yet does not control the Human action so as to annihilate its freedom The result is Harmony, the third column that upholds the Lodge. The same Harmony results from the equipoise of Necessity and Liberty. The will of God is not for an instant defeated nor thwarted, and this is the Divine Victory and yet He does not tempt nor constrain men to do Evil and thus His Infinite Glory is unimpaired. The result is Stability, Cohesion, and Permanence in the Universe, and undivided Dominion and Autocracy in the Deity. And these, Victory, Glory, Stability, and Dominion, are the last four Sephiroth of the Kabalah.

I AM, God said to Moses, that which Is, Was and Shall forever Be. But the Very God, in His unmanifested Essence, conceived of as not yet having created and as Alone, has no Name. Such was the doctrine of all the ancient Sages and it is so expressly declared in the Kabalah. is the Name of the Deity manifested in a single act, that of Creation and containing within Himself, in idea and actuality, the whole Universe, to be invested with form and be materially developed
during the eternal succession of ages. As God never WAS NOT, so He never THOUGHT not, and the Universe has no more had a beginning than the Divine Thought of which it is the utterance, no more than the Deity Himself. The duration of the Universe is but a point halfway upon the infinite line of eternity; and God was not inert and uncreative during the eternity that stretches
behind that point. The Archetype of the Universe did never not exist in the Divine Mind. The Word was in the BEGINNING with God, and WAS God. And the Ineffable NAME is that, not of the Very Essence but of the Absolute, manifested as Being or Existence. For Existence or Being, said the Philosophers, is limitation and the Very Deity is not limited nor defined, but is all that may possibly be, besides all that is, was, and shall be.

Reversing the letters of the Ineffable Name and dividing it, becomes bi-sexual, as the word Yud-He or JAH is and discloses the meaning of much of the obscure language of the Kabalah, and is The Highest of which the Columns Jachin and Boaz are the symbol. "In the image of Deity" we are told, "God created the Man; Male and Female created He them" and the writer,
symbolizing the Divine by the Human, then tells us that the woman, at first contained in the man, was taken from his side. So Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, was born, a woman and in armor, of the brain of Jove; Isis was the sister before she was the wife of Osiris and within BRAHM, the Source of all, the Very God, without sex or name, was developed MAYA, the Mother of all that is. The WORD is the First and Only-begotten of the Father and the awe with which the Highest Mysteries were regarded has imposed silence in respect to the Nature of the Holy Spirit. The Word is Light, and the Life of Humanity.

It is for the Adepts to understand the meaning of the Symbols.

Return now, with us, to the Degrees of the Blue Masonry, and for your last lesson, receive the
explanation of one of their Symbols.

You see upon the altar of those Degrees the SQUARE and the COMPASS, and you remember how they lay upon the altar in each Degree.

The SQUARE is an instrument adapted for plane surfaces only, and therefore appropriate to Geometry, or measurement of the Earth, which appears to be and was by the Ancients supposed to be, a plane. The COMPASS is an instrument that has relation to spheres and spherical surfaces and is adapted to spherical trigonometry, or that branch of mathematics which deals
with the Heavens and the orbits of the planetary bodies.

The SQUARE, therefore, is a natural and appropriate Symbol of this Earth and the things that belong to it, are of it, or concern it. The Compass is an equally natural and appropriate Symbol of the Heavens and of all celestial things and celestial natures.

You see at the beginning of this reading, an old Hermetic Symbol, copied from the MATERIA PRIMA of Valentinus, printed at Frankfurt, in 1613, with a treatise entitled "AZOTEI". Upon it you see a Triangle upon a Square, both of these contained in a circle and above this, standing upon a dragon, a human body, with two arms only, but two heads, one male and the other
female. By the side of the male head is the Sun and by that of the female head, the Moon, the crescent within the circle of the full moon. And the hand on the male side holds a Compass and that on the female side, a Square.

The Heavens and the Earth were personified as Deities, even among the Aryan Ancestors of the European nations of the Hindus, Zends, Bactrians and Persians and the Rig Veda Sanhita contains hymns addressed to them as gods. They were deified also among the Phoenicians and among the Greeks OURANOS and GEA, Heaven and Earth, were sung as the most ancient of the Deities, by
Hesiod.

It is the great, fertile, beautiful MOTHER Earth that produces, with limitless profusion of beneficence, everything that ministers to the needs, to the comfort and to the luxury of man. From her teeming and inexhaustible bosom come the fruits, the grain, the flowers, in their season. From it comes all that feeds the animals which serve man as labourers and for food.
She, in the fair Springtime, is green with abundant grass and the trees spring from her soil and from her teeming vitality take their wealth of green leaves. In her womb are found the useful and valuable minerals; hers are the seas the swarm with life; hers the rivers that furnish food and irrigation and the mountains that send down the streams which swell into these rivers; hers the forests that feed the sacred fires for the sacrifices and blaze upon the domestic hearths.
The EARTH, therefore, the great PRODUCER, was always represented as a female, as the MOTHER, Great, Bounteous, Beneficent Mother Earth.

On the other hand, it is the light and heat of the Sun in the Heavens and the rains that seem to come from them, that in the Springtime make fruitful this bountifully-producing Earth, that restore life and warmth to her veins, chilled by Winter, set running free her streams and beget, as it were, that greenness and that abundance of which she is so prolific. As the procreative and generative agents, the Heavens and the Sun have always been regarded as male; as the generators that fructify the Earth and cause it to produce.