This mound had a circular earth vallum seven hundred feet in diameter, which is one three-hundred-thousandths of the diameter of the planet Uranus.
It was here that Orondo’s body was prepared for burial, and it was from this place that the funeral cortége embarked. While it was being rowed across the lake, the mourners scattered rushes on its smooth surface as a sacrifice and peace-offering.
Yermah, Setos, Imos and Hanabusa rowed the funeral barge; and when it landed at the opposite end, they lifted the mummy onto the catafalque standing ready to receive it.
All that was mortal of Orondo was laid in a bed of aloe, yew, cypress, weeping-willow, rosemary and yellow marigolds, while over him was spread the fated mantle given to him by Yermah. On top of this was the sword, helmet and shield of the deceased.
A long line of warriors, with reversed spears, whose pennants trailed in the dust, marched up a long line of mastodon-headed sphinxes, to the judgment hall of Hirach, where the deceased would be tried for the deeds done in the body.
“O Maker of the material world! Thou Holy One! Whither shall we bring, where shall we lay, the bodies of our dead?”
After the body came Yermah, Setos, Imos and Hanabusa, followed by civic deputations, priests and priestesses, and a great concourse of people.
The judgment hall stood on the south side of Mountain Lake, near the plowed out Golden Gate, and had a rock foundation which the Azes called Gharepo. The building was erected in the exact center of a huge pentagram, the apex of which was on the rock Gharepo, the east foot on the north peak of Las Papas, and the west in the ocean, near the Cliff House shore. The feet of Hirach were correlated to those of the pentagram. He was stepping from the ocean to the mountain, signifying the involution of the ego from the astral universe into the material world. Hirach was a counterpart of the Amen of Revelation, who had “one foot on the sea and one on solid land,” etc.
The circle surrounding Hirach described the orbit of Mars, which corresponds to the body of Desire. The sixth labor crushes this principle, but in so doing opens the path for the initiate to measure the proportions of the cosmos; and properly adjust them one to the other.
Mars is the planetary phase of the Red Dragon, the eating of whose heart forms the means by which Sigierd, the Norse hero, attained Wisdom. The heart is triple, emblematic of the three cardinal virtues, Will, Aspiration and Harmony, and their common center—the spirit, was the altar in the middle of the judgment hall.