It will be sufficient here to refer simply to the fact, that through the instrumentality of the Tyrian workmen at the temple of King Solomon, the spurious and pure branches of the masonic system were united at Jerusalem, and that the same method of scenic representation was adopted by the latter from the former, and the narrative of the temple builder substituted for that of Dionysus, which was the myth peculiar to the mysteries practised by the Tyrian workmen.
The idea, therefore, proposed to be communicated in the myth of the ancient Mysteries was the same as that which is now conveyed in the masonic legend of the Third Degree.
Hence, then, Hiram Abif is, in the masonic system, the symbol of human nature, as developed in the life here and the life to come; and so, while the temple was, as I have heretofore shown, the visible symbol of the world, its builder became the mythical symbol of man, the dweller and worker in that world.
Now, is not this symbolism evident to every reflective mind?
Man, setting forth on the voyage of life, with faculties and powers fitting him for the due exercise of the high duties to whose performance he has been called, holds, if he be "a curious and cunning workman," [162] skilled in all moral and intellectual purposes (and it is only of such men that the temple builder can be the symbol), within the grasp of his attainment the knowledge of all that divine truth imparted to him as the heirloom of his race—that race to whom it has been granted to look, with exalted countenance, on high;[163] which divine truth is symbolized by the WORD.
Thus provided with the word of life, he occupies his time in the construction of a spiritual temple, and travels onward in the faithful discharge of all his duties, laying down his designs upon the trestle-board of the future and invoking the assistance and direction of God.
But is his path always over flowery meads and through pleasant groves? Is there no hidden foe to obstruct his progress? Is all before him clear and calm, with joyous sunshine and refreshing zephyrs? Alas! not so. "Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward." At every "gate of life"—as the Orientalists have beautifully called the different ages—he is beset by peril. Temptations allure his youth, misfortunes darken the pathway of his manhood, and his old age is encumbered with infirmity and disease. But clothed in the armor of virtue he may resist the temptation; he may cast misfortunes aside, and rise triumphantly above them; but to the last, the direst, the most inexorable foe of his race, he must eventually yield; and stricken down by death, he sinks prostrate into the grave, and is buried in the rubbish of his sin and human frailty.
Here, then, in Masonry, is what was called the aphanism[164] in the ancient Mysteries. The bitter but necessary lesson of death has been imparted. The living soul, with the lifeless body which encased it, has disappeared, and can nowhere be found. All is darkness—confusion— despair. Divine truth—the WORD—for a time is lost, and the Master Mason may now say, in the language of Hutchinson, "I prepare my sepulchre. I make my grave in the pollution of the earth. I am under the shadow of death."
But if the mythic symbolism ended here, with this lesson of death, then were the lesson incomplete. That teaching would be vain and idle—nay, more, it would be corrupt and pernicious—which should stop short of the conscious and innate instinct for another existence. And hence the succeeding portions of the legend are intended to convey the sublime symbolism of a resurrection from the grave and a new birth into a future life. The discovery of the body, which, in the initiations of the ancient Mysteries, was called the euresis,[165] and its removal, from the polluted grave into which it had been cast, to an honored and sacred place within the precincts of the temple, are all profoundly and beautifully symbolic of that great truth, the discovery of which was the object of all the ancient initiations, as it is almost the whole design of Freemasonry, namely, that when man shall have passed the gates of life and have yielded to the inexorable fiat of death, he shall then (not in the pictured ritual of an earthly lodge, but in the realities of that eternal one, of which the former is but an antitype) be raised, at the omnific word of the Grand Master of the Universe, from time to eternity; from the tomb of corruption to the chambers of hope; from the darkness of death to the celestial beams of life; and that his disembodied spirit shall be conveyed as near to the holy of holies of the divine presence as humanity can ever approach to Deity.
Such I conceive to be the true interpretation of the symbolism of the legend of the Third Degree.