Ragon speaks of a rumour that charged the Emperor Commodus—when he was at one time enacting the part of the Initiator—with having played this part in the initiatory drama so seriously that he actually killed the postulant when dealing him the blow with the hatchet. This shows that the lesser Mysteries had not quite died out in the second century a.d.
The Mysteries were carried into South and Central America, Northern Mexico and Peru by the Atlanteans in those days when
A pedestrian from the North [of what was once upon a time also India] might have reached—hardly wetting his feet—the Alaskan Peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveller, furnished with a canoe and starting from the South, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America.[535]
They continued to exist down to the day of the Spanish invaders. These destroyed the Mexican and Peruvian records, but were prevented from laying their desecrating hands upon the many Pyramids—the lodges of an ancient Initiation—whose ruins are scattered over Puente Nacional, Cholula, and Teotihuacan. The ruins of Palenque, of Ococimgo in Chiapas, and others in Central America are known to all. If the pyramids and temples of Guiengola and Mitla ever betray their secrets, the present Doctrine will then be shown to have been a forerunner of the grandest truths in Nature. Meanwhile they have all a claim to be called Mitla, “the place of sadness” and “the abode of the (desecrated) dead.”
Section XXXII. Traces of the Mysteries.
Says the Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, art. “Sun:”
In all times, the Sun has necessarily played an important part as a symbol, and especially in Freemasonry. The W.M. represents the rising sun, the J.W. the sun at the meridian, and the S.W. the setting sun. In the Druidical rites, the Arch-Druid represented the sun, and was aided by two other officers, one representing the Moon in the West, and the other the Sun at the South in its meridian. It is quite unnecessary to enter into any lengthened discussion on this symbol.
It is the more “unnecessary” since J. M. Ragon has discussed it very fully, as one may find at the end of Section XXIX., where part of his explanations have been quoted. Freemasonry derived her rites from the East, as we have said. And if it be true to say of the modern Rosicrucians that “they are invested with a knowledge of chaos, not perhaps a very desirable acquisition,” the remark is still more true when applied to all the other branches of Masonry, since the knowledge of their members about the full signification of their symbols is nil. Dozens of hypotheses are resorted to, one more unlikely than the other, as to the “Round Towers” of Ireland; one fact is enough to show the ignorance of the Masons, namely, that, according to the Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, the idea that they are connected with Masonic Initiation may be at once dismissed as unworthy of notice. The “Towers,” which are found throughout the East in Asia, were connected with the Mystery-Initiations, namely, with the Vishvakarma and the Vikarttana rites. The candidates for Initiation were placed in them for three days and three nights, wherever there was no temple with a subterranean crypt close at hand. These round towers were built for no other purposes. Discredited as are all such monuments of Pagan origin by the Christian clergy, who thus “soil their own nest,” they are still the living and indestructible relics of the Wisdom of old. [pg 288] Nothing exists in this objective and illusive world of ours that cannot be made to serve two purposes—a good and a bad one. Thus in later ages, the Initiates of the Left Path and the anthropomorphists took in hand most of those venerable ruins, then silent and deserted by their first wise inmates, and turned them indeed into phallic monuments. But this was a deliberate, wilful, and vicious misinterpretation of their real meaning, a deflection from their first use. The Sun—though ever, even for the multitudes, μὸνος οὐρανοῦ θεὸς, “the only and one King and God in Heaven,” and the Εὐβουλῆ, “the God of Good Counsel” of Orpheus—had in every exoteric popular religion a dual aspect which was anthropomorphised by the profane. Thus the Sun was Osiris-Typhon, Ormuzd-Ahriman, Bel-Jupiter and Baal, the life-giving and the death-giving luminary. And thus one and the same monolith, pillar, pyramid, tower or temple, originally built to glorify the first principle or aspect, might become in time an idol-fane, or worse, a phallic emblem in its crude and brutal form. The Lingam of the Hindus has a spiritual and highly philosophical meaning, while the missionaries see in it but an “indecent emblem;” it has just the meaning which is to be found in all those baalim, chammanim, and the bamoth with the pillars of unhewn stone of the Bible, set up for the glorification of the male Jehovah. But this does not alter the fact that the pureia of the Greeks, the nur-hags of Sardinia, the teocalli of Mexico, etc., were all in the beginning of the same character as the “Round Towers” of Ireland. They were sacred places of Initiation.