SAINTE CROIX. The work of the Baron de Sainte Croix, in two volumes, entitled, "Recherches Historiques et Critiques sur les Mystères du Paganisme," is one of the most valuable and instructive works that we have in any language on the ancient Mysteries,—those religious associations whose history and design so closely connect them with Freemasonry. To the student of masonic philosophy and symbolism this work of Sainte Croix is absolutely essential.
SALSETTE. An island in the Bay of Bombay, celebrated for stupendous caverns excavated artificially out of the solid rock, and which were appropriated to the initiations in the ancient Mysteries of India.
SENSES, FIVE HUMAN. A symbol of intellectual cultivation.
SETH. It is the masonic theory that the principles of the Pure or Primitive Freemasonry were preserved in the race of Seth, which had always kept separate from that of Cain, but that after the flood they became corrupted, by a secession of a portion of the Sethites, who established the Spurious Freemasonry of the Gentiles.
SEVEN. A sacred number among the Jews and the Gentiles, and called by Pythagoras a "venerable number."
SHEM HAMPHORASH. (שם המפירש the declaratory name.) The tetragrammaton is so called, because, of all the names of God, it alone distinctly declares his nature and essence as self-existent and eternal.
SHOE. See Investiture, Rite of.
SIGNS. There is abundant evidence that they were used in the ancient Mysteries. They are valuable only as modes of recognition. But while they are absolutely conventional, they have, undoubtedly, in Freemasonry, a symbolic reference.
SIVA. One of the manifestations of the supreme deity of the Hindoos, and a symbol of the sun in its meridian.
SONS OF LIGHT. Freemasons are so called because Lux, or Light, is one of the names of Speculative Masonry.