Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

by Albert Pike

When the Celestial Bull opened the new year at the Vernal Equinox, Osiris, united with the Moon, communicated to her the seeds of fruitfulness which she poured upon the air, and therewith impregnated the generative principles which gave activity to universal vegetation. Apis, represented by a bull, was the living and sensible image of the Sun or Osiris, when in union with Isis or the Moon at the Vernal Equinox, concurring with her in provoking everything that lives to generation. This conjunction of the Sun with the Moon at the Vernal Equinox, in the constellation Taurus, required the Bull Apis to have on his shoulder a mark resembling the Crescent Moon. And the fecundating influence of these two luminaries was expressed by images that would now be deemed gross and indecent, but which then were not misunderstood.

Everything good in Nature comes from Osiris,—order, harmony, and the favorable temperature of the seasons and celestial periods. From Typhon come the stormy passions and irregular impulses that agitate the brute and material part of man; maladies of the body, and violent shocks that injure the health and derange the system; inclement weather, derangement of the seasons, and eclipses. Osiris and Typhon were the Ormuzd and Ahriman of the Persians; principles of good and evil, of light and darkness, ever at war in the administration of the Universe.

Osiris was the image of generative power. This was expressed by his symbolic statues, and by the sign into which he entered at the Vernal Equinox. He especially dispensed the humid principle of Nature, generative element of all things; and the Nile and all moisture were regarded as emanations from him, without which there could be no vegetation.

That Osiris and Isis were the Sun and Moon, is attested by many ancient writers; by Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, Lucian, Suidas, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and others. His power was symbolized by an Eye over a Sceptre. The Sun was termed by the Greeks the Eye of Jupiter, and the Eye of the World; and his is the All-Seeing Eye in our Lodges. The oracle of Claros styled him King of the Stars and of the Eternal Fire, that engenders the year and the seasons, dispenses rain and winds, and brings about daybreak and night. And Osiris was invoked as the God that resides in the Sun and is enveloped by his rays, the invisible and eternal force that modifies the sublunary world by means of the Sun.

Osiris was the same God known as Bacchus, Dionusos, and Serapis. Serapis is the author of the regularity and harmony of the world. Bacchus, jointly with Ceres (identified by Herodotus with Isis) presides over the distribution of all our blessings; and from the two emanates everything beautiful and good in Nature. One furnishes the germ and principle of every good; the other receives and preserves it as a deposit; and the latter is the function of the Moon in the theology of the Persians. In each theology, Persian and Egyptian, the Moon acts directly on the earth; but she is fecundated, in one by the Celestial Bull and in the other by Osiris, with whom she is united at the Vernal Equinox, in the sign Taurus, the place of her exaltation or greatest influence on the earth. The force of Osiris, says Plutarch, is exercised through the Moon. She is the passive cause relatively to him, and the active cause relatively to the earth, to which she transmits the germs of fruitfulness received from him.

In Egypt the earliest movement in the waters of the Nile began to appear at the Vernal Equinox, when the new Moon occurred at the entrance of the Sun into the constellation Taurus; and thus the Nile was held to receive its fertilizing power from the combined action of the equinoctial Sun and the new Moon, meeting in Taurus. Osiris was often confounded with the Nile, and Isis with the earth; and Osiris was deemed to act on the earth, and to transmit to it his emanations, through both the Moon and the Nile; whence the fable that his generative organs were thrown into that river. Typhon, on the other hand, was the principle of aridity and barrenness; and by his mutilation of Osiris was meant that drought which caused the Nile to retire within his bed and shrink up in Autumn.

Elsewhere than in Egypt, Osiris was the symbol of the refreshing rains that descend to fertilize the earth; and Typhon the burning winds of Autumn; the stormy rains that rot the flowers, the plants, and leaves; the short, cold days; and everything injurious in Nature, and that produces corruption and destruction.

In short, Typhon is the principle of corruption, of darkness, of the lower world from which come earthquakes, tumultuous commotions of the air, burning heat, lightning, and fiery meteors, and plague and pestilence. Such too was the Ahriman of the Persians; and this revolt of the Evil Principle against the Principle of Good and Light, has been represented in every cosmogony, under many varying forms. Osiris, on the contrary, by the intermediation of Isis, fills the material world with happiness, purity, and order, by which the harmony of Nature is maintained. It was said that he died at the Autumnal Equinox, when Taurus or the Pleiades rose in the evening, and that he rose to life again in the Spring, when vegetation was inspired with new activity.

Of course the two signs of Taurus and Scorpio will figure most largely in the mythological history of Osiris, for they marked the two equinoxes, 2500 years before our Era; and next to them the other constellations, near the equinoxes, that fixed the limits of the duration of the fertilizing action of the Sun; and it is also to be remarked that Venus, the Goddess of Generation, has her domicile in Taurus, as the Moon has there her place of exaltation.

When the Sun was in Scorpio, Osiris lost his life, and that fruitfulness which, under the form of the Bull, he had communicated, through the Moon, to the Earth. Typhon, his hands and feet horrid with serpents, and whose habitat in the Egyptian planisphere was under Scorpio, confined him in a chest and flung him into the Nile, under the 17th degree of Scorpio. Under that sign he lost his life and virility; and he recovered them in the Spring, when he had connection with the Moon. When he entered Scorpio, his light diminished, Night reassumed her dominion, the Nile shrunk within its banks, and the earth lost her verdure and the trees their leaves. Therefore it is that on the Mithriac Monuments, the Scorpion bites the testicles of the Equinoctial Bull, on which sits Mithras, the Sun of Spring and God of Generation; and that, on the same monuments, we see two trees, one covered with young leaves, and at its foot a little bull and a torch burning; and the other loaded with fruit, and at its foot a Scorpion, and a torch reversed and extinguished.