Ancient Mystic Oriental Masonry

15.That no one knew why the Pyramids were built is a wrong conclusion for we, of the Mystic Order of Masonry, know that they were built for no other purpose than for Supreme Initiation, for it must be re-membered that there have ever been two Religions founded on the one Principle. The one for The Priests and the other for the People. Not only does the Initiation in Mystic Oriental Masonry explain the very foundation of All Religions, but it gives the Key to the Pyramids and unlocks the doors of the same.

16.The shape of the Pyramid itself has one of the deepest meanings to the Initiates. A Pyramid, the triangular form of it, signifies fire, and the cubical form the earth visited by fire. Fire in turn signifies Love, God, the Fatherhood of God. Could the Initiates have built a more lasting monument to the fact that they, above all others, knew God as but few men know Him at the present day?

17." The Egyptian Pyramids excite in us the feeling of the sublime, not only on account of their spacial vastness, but also of their great age, we feel ourselves dwarfed to insignificance in their presence, and yet revel in the pleasure of contemplating them. In the presence of such a monument of ancient times, which ^[31] has outlived the knowledge of itself, we stand as senseless and stupid as the brute in the presence of the action of man, or as a man before something written in an old cipher of his own, the key to which he has forgotten. For who will believe that those who at incalculable cost set in action the human powers of many thousands for many years in order to construct the Pyramids, which have already existed for thousands of years, could have had in view the short span of their own life, too short to let them see the finishing of the construction, or even the ostensible end which the ignorance of the many required them to allege? Clearly, their real end was to speak to their latest descendants, to put themselves in communication with these, and so to establish the unity on the consciousness of humanity." *

18."It is further certain that so much science, labor, and treasure as were required for erecting so extraordinary and gigantic a structure would not have been expended by men so skillful and ingenious as its builders were, without an end in view fully commensurate, in their own minds, with the magnitude of the project. Hence, if astronomy shows that the Great Pyramid was planned with reference to a relation between Alcyone and the Pleiades and some pole star (possibly Alpha Draconis), obviously that relation must have been of the highest importance in the cosmological systems of the builders — the veritable key, perhaps, to all the Wisdom of antiquity.

^[32] 19. " To those ancient sages, the cosmos was literally uni-verse, or a revolution around one center. Their doctrines of the Unity of Nature, now confirmed by Spectrum Analysis," and the Reign of Law (our systems of Universal Gravitation and Cosmic Evolution) were tersely summed up in the famous axiom of the Smagdarine Tablet of Hermes: 'That which is below is as that which is above, and that which is above is as that which is below.' This basic concept they expressed in various ways, as by ascribing to their rulers celestial descent while associating their great deeds with appropriate constellations, and, in Egypt if not elsewhere, by laying out the land, dividing its districts, and naming its cities in allusion to astronomy, a course which Drummond makes it appear probable, from an etymological examination of Hebrew names of places and persons, the twelve tribes of Israel pursued when they entered the promised land, bearing the twelve signs of the Zodiac for tribal emblems.