Read Ebook: Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches 11500 Years Ago Their relation to the sacred mysteries of Egypt Greece Chaldea and India. Free Masonry in times anterior to the Temple of Solomon. by Le Plongeon Augustus

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Let us consider for a moment the universality of Sex as we see it expressed in all the variety of forms and throughout all the species, and in so doing we may trace the ever upward trend of the law of sex-attraction, and discover, if we have the eyes to see, the evident plan and purpose of the cosmic law as it tends toward completement and perfection in the type of the man-god whom the world has long looked for and who we believe is here.

If we look at the expression of Sex from the viewpoint of the physical only, instead of basing our observations from the interior, the spiritual, outward to the physical, we might conclude that the function of sex was designed for no other purpose than that of procreation, since care of the young increases with the upward trend of life-manifestation.

Beginning at the lower forms of life, such for example as the fish, we find as a general thing an indifference to the fate of the eggs deposited by the female, which is in keeping with the prolific and almost unconscious generation of these tiny evidences of the law of Sex. A fish laying more than a million eggs in a season is naturally rather careless about what becomes of them. Apparently no higher sentiment actuates this form of life than an unconscious and merely instinctive urge to perpetuate the species--the lowest expression of Love--and yet the germ of Love, the Creator and Preserver is there, and a well-defined law of attraction and repulsion is evident from the fact that as an almost general thing the male will not fertilize eggs other than those of his own species. But even in these low forms, we see the evidence of that higher expression of Love which presages the god-like quality of self-sacrifice. Some species of fish, notably the stickle-back and the bass, make nests and mother their young.

In bird-life we find this higher type of love almost universal. Parental love, that exquisite and refined flower from the seed of sex-attraction, characterizes the bird and we may readily agree that Paradise would be incomplete without birds and flowers as well as babies.

Considering the birds as an infinitely finer type of sex-expression than that offered by any other of the forms of life below man, we note with satisfaction the all-important point, namely, that the sex-urge is more diffused and lasting, and of a finer quality than that of the mammals.

The bird woos its mate with the beauty of its plumage and the harmonious notes of its love-call. Its desire finds so many esthetic ways of expressing itself; in tender pleadings; in cooing promises; in continuous evidences of care and protection. Nor does its intense love, vital as it is, exhaust itself in concentrated expression, but it softens and ripens into something that so closely resembles our ideals of spiritual love, that we are not surprised to find the emblem of the dove employed throughout the history of the world, as the spiritual symbol of pure and holy love. Well, indeed, may human beings learn from the birds the lesson of the higher type of sex-mating, which finds fruition in their mutual love for and care of their progeny. Nor does the love-life of birds cease with sex-expression. It permeates all their intercourse.

Thus nature serves the cosmic law, which aims to raise the sex-instinct from the incomplete and unsatisfying plane of physical contact, to that of spiritual union--a wide gulf seemingly; but who would not strive to bridge it, did he but realize what spiritual union with the Beloved One means?

SEX WORSHIP AND SEX DEGRADATION

Every form of religious worship, from pre-historic time down to and inclusive of the present century, and among all races, savage and civilized, has been founded upon Sex--the inevitable, the inviolable, the unescapable, and the unfathomable mystery of Creation.

Nor should this fact be distasteful to the most refined. An intelligent review of the many evidences that prove this truth will not shock the sensibilities of the most devout worshipper of an unknown and unseen God. What can be more beautiful and more holy, more worthy of our highest reverence and adoration, than the mystery of birth, whether that birth be the growth of a flower from a tiny seed planted in the womb of Mother Earth, or the birth of a tiny human life from the seed Love sows in the womb of the human mother? The only shocking thing about the matter is that there are persons who can be "shocked" at contemplation of this wonderful and beautiful mystery. It is shocking and deplorable that so many are still so far away from spiritual consciousness, that the beauty and the purity of the miracle of Sex is unrecognized by them.

With all due respect to the highest types of religious creeds which survive today, we are bound to concede that the very first form of worship which prevailed upon this earth was the purest as it was the simplest. Truth is simple. Deception introduces us into a maze of complexities. Nature worship prevailed we know not how many centuries previous to the dawn of historic records. All allegorical literature makes constant allusion to "The Golden Age," evidently referring to a time before that which has come down to us in sacred literature, as "The Fall of Man." The first conception of a supreme power, something higher and more perfect than Man himself, originated in the mystery of Sex; not only in the sex-function as exercised by Man, but also in the evidences of sex seen in plants and animals.

It became evident to the earliest races that the human being was after all only a progenitor. Somewhere there must be a First Cause. The vital spark which gave to the seed its power to bring forth was seen to be beyond and above the control of physical man, and the natural and inevitable inference was drawn that there was some power greater than that of human beings--a power manifesting itself in the act of procreation. At this early stage in Man's efforts to know God, the Female Principle was deified, because out of the womb of the woman issued the little life. Thus the symbol of the "virgin with the child" became the symbol of worship; the word "virgin" then having a somewhat different meaning from that which we give it today, although we may trace the analogy in our use of the term "virgin soil," signifying fecundity. The virgin and child then, popularly supposed by those whose prejudices prevail over their desire for Truth, to have originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, antedates history, as an object of worship.

Let us here again emphasize the fact that the very persistence of this symbol as a pronounced part of our Twentieth Century traditions, and reverence, offers proof of the fact that whatever is true is also enduring. Truth is eternal and defies extinction. Love, although defiled and scorned, will lift Mankind out of Hell.

The symbol of the mother with the child the very earliest of all symbolic worship is also the truest and most consistent with the ideals of spiritualized Man when we realize its higher significance. At first, for the obvious reason that woman was the recipient and the nurse of the seed, woman was regarded as a higher type than man; she alone was supposed to possess the creative energy. This was ultimately reversed and Man was thought to be the sole custodian of the reproductive power.

There is the best of evidence to support the claim that all the early Deities were female and in all Mythology the earth is adored as the "Divine Mother." The earliest Venus, worshipped as the goddess of Universal Womanhood, was represented with a beard signifying her androgynous character.

Venus worshipped as "the soul of the world" was said to be the "parent of all things, the primary progeny of Time, the most exalted of all the Deities." Neith, Minerva, Athena, Ceres, Cybele, all worshipped as the first of all the Deities, were represented as female, and to this day we refer to the qualities of wisdom, light, truth, and virtue as feminine.

Even the sun is said to have been at one time worshipped as feminine, as were all deities; but later, when it was shown that the sun apparently fertilized the fecund earth, the gender was changed, and in succeeding ages, when the male principle had become dominant as a deific symbol, the earth was said to be but the nurse which cradled and cared for the generic power resident in the male. Thus woman from her lofty height of the one and only deity gradually sank to the level of the nurse maid, permitted to care for man's offspring.

While the Female Principle of Sex was worshipped as the "giver of life," the heads of families were female and descent was traced from the mother only. The male parent was scarcely more than an intruder and the necessity to please the entire family and, above all, the mother-in-law, the generic head of the family has left its mark upon the masculine mind, even unto this far-off day, when by virtue of this ordeal of primitive man, an idea seems to exist, that a mother-in-law is to be both feared and dreaded, if not propitiated. When we contemplate the persistence of those traits of human nature that have prevailed among all races and throughout all ages, we are easily persuaded that time is a delusion, and that Eternity is Now. As it was yesterday it is today and will be tomorrow in all that is really fundamental.

From the refined simplicity of nature worship there gradually evolved a phase of worship, which in the beginning had for its basic principle an exalted ideal of the purpose and the powers of the female sex-function; but this ideal sunk to the level of debauchery and sex-degradation, in which the symbol of the female sex-organ of generation was worshipped, literally, although not reverently; and yet from the fact that it is only upon the temples and in the groves dedicated to worship that are found the carvings of the generative organs of either and sometimes of both sexes, it is evident that the most exalted motives first actuated the worshippers.

The sex organs, representing the mystery of creative life, or the Deity, would naturally be held in reverence by nature-children, and it must be conceded that this attitude of mind toward the wonderful miracle of creative energy is worthy of our emulation. As we look back over the pages of history, we note the tendency of human nature to fall far short of ideals; we mistake the letter for the spirit; we get lost in the trap of the senses, and we miss the higher and more exalted planes of our ideals.

From yoni worship , with all the privileges and perquisites which such honor bestowed upon woman, there came the inevitable revolt, which comes in course of time, from all tyranny and special privilege, whether it be individual, national, racial, sexual, or supernatural. Thus there was established a "new religion," and this time it was the male organ which was deified as the symbol of eternal life, of creative energy. In many instances both symbols were represented, but for the most part the same subtle struggle for supremacy, the remnants of which we note today among the different religious creeds and sects, waged, and waxed stronger, with time and opposition. Which was the more worthy of deification--the yoni, or the phallus? Woman, or man?

The Ionians, seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of the phallic worshippers in India persisted in their adherence to yoni worship, and from them dates the Eleusirian mysteries, which were celebrated in Athens down to a comparatively late date. The Eleusirian festivals represented the survival of the purest ideals of nature worship, before the warfare between the yoni and the phallic worshippers had brought both ideals into degradation.

There is a point in this festival, which the Greeks called Thesmophoria and which is derived from the more ancient festival of Ceres , which we are anxious to have noted here, because it marks a golden thread which runs throughout the entire fabric of the sex-problem. This point is the fact, that the rites and ceremonies of this festival were performed by "virgins distinguished for their purity of life." Very rarely were men admitted to the inner secrets of the Eleusirians.

Another important point is that this ceremony was performed in honor of the androgynous character of the goddess, as it was declared that the power to bring forth a child without the co-operation of the male belonged exclusively to the exalted or perfected woman, which is to say the goddess. Another translation and interpretation of this ceremony claims that it was prophecied in these festivals, that a time would come in the history of the world when a woman would so conceive and bring forth a child and that when that time should come the question as to which sex was supreme would be forever settled and that purity and peace would reign upon earth.

This part of the record may easily have been either an interpolation to sustain the claim of the miraculous birth of Jesus, or it may have been simply the defiant fling of the vanquished to the victor, because phallic worship was in the ascendant. It is, however, recorded, that not an instance can be cited in which the honor of initiation into the Eleusirian mysteries was conferred upon a bad man; nor of any man violating the secrets of the inner temples of the Eleusirians. This gives rise to the hope that the ideal of this spiritually exalted sect, in the midst of almost universal degeneracy, was not so much that of female supremacy, as of purity; that their ideal included the pure and perfect union of male and female--the only ideal that will, or can, redeem the world to a life of peace and love.

The festivals of Carthage were said to be similar to those of Eleusis. For a period of several days during the time set apart for the festivities, public feasts were prepared in honor of the deific nature of Man, which, it was pointed out, was his prerogative only by virtue of inward purity and strict adherence to high ideals of truth and honor.

Crowning all the religious observances of the Ancients, whether expressed in the legends of the sun-myths or of star and serpent worship, we find the universally recognized fact that only those qualities of mind and soul can be expected to endure, or reach immortal godhood, which are of an exalted character. Which is to say what the present day orthodox creed says, that immortality belongs only to those who are pure in heart.

From the Eleusirian festivals is derived our custom of taking holy communion, the symbol of the Lord's supper; albeit the substitution of the male principle in the Christian ceremony attests the fact that the phallic symbol ultimately supplanted the yoni, as a deific symbol. Phallic worship reached its height during Hebrew and Assyrian supremacy, and was perpetuated by Greek and Roman materialism. Superstition is nothing more than Truth degenerated by men from a spiritual to a material application. That which is held in awe and reverence by any race; that which is embodied in the traditions of every tribe on the globe; that which persists throughout all times will be found to have a fundamental basis of truth, no matter how obscured it may be by the ignorance with which it is so frequently associated.

The sacredness of Sex, as exemplifying the Supreme Creative Energy, underlies all the traditional ideals of man, from the fetishes of the Central African savage to the cathedral spires which rise above the din of our modern commercial civilization. The prejudiced and the superficial observer of so-called "heathen" rites and ceremonies records only the superstitions, and sees only the evidences of depravity and savagery. He overlooks the fact that the spirit of the idea conveyed may have been the highest ideal of an early race which has sunk, as have all races during certain periods of the world's evolution into the depths of a materialism, from which all races are today emerging.

The pattern of the Eucharist with its golden circle and radiations is easily recognizable by any one who is familiar with the symbols of yoni worship. Nor should this fact be distasteful to any one, although it is either concealed, or flatly denied by the Church, since it is only through the elevation of the sex-function that the Christ-man can be born into the physical realms. The reason that this truth is either concealed or denied by the Church is due to the influence of Greek and Roman civilization, which subjugated woman to the control of man. This debasement of woman reached its culmination under Roman rule and is unquestionably the psychic cause of the fall of the Greek and Roman empires.

If we will but take home to ourselves the important lesson that neither sex is fundamentally, or even relatively, superior, but only different; that no race is permanently in advance of another, but that each little group and class of humans has its particular contribution to the sum of knowledge, we will have done much toward freeing the mind from the shackles of ignorance--that darkness which obscures our inner vision. Let this truth penetrate the egotism of so-called civilized races. Let it sink into the minds of the men and women of this century: we are of service to the world in proportion as we are different and not identical. In the direct ratio of our individuality is our contribution to the work of the cosmic law, which is seeking to lift the planet earth out of its undeveloped state into celestial light.

The symbol of the Eucharist, occupying as it does an important place in a religious system which is otherwise essentially masculine, is one of the many evidences of the persistence of Truth. For approximately four thousand years, phallic worship has predominated over the earlier ideal, which was embodied in the "virgin of the spheres," the emblem of the Female Principle as eternal motherhood; and in the sacred character of androgynous plants and flowers, which were characterized as feminine, such, for example, as the lily, the lotus, and the fleur de lis. These flowers are still regarded as more or less sacred, and they are called feminine, although really androgynous.

The lotus, long held sacred because of its androgynous character, has been regarded as typical of the One Perfect One, because it is supposed that the lotus reproduces itself without the male pollen. But close examination of the flower will show that the little seed-vessel in the center of the flower is shaped like a pine cone, in which are tiny cells too small to let out the seeds as occurs in most plant and seed life; these tiny seeds having no outlet, shoot when ripe into new plants, the bulb of the plant being the matrix or womb of the new life. Thus it is evident, that although the two sexes are not as pronounced in the lotus as in the lily, yet the bulb and the cone are both present in the lotus, making the plant bi-sexual, and not feminine alone.

Our modern Easter festival, in which the lily is recognized as the representative par excellence of the renewal of abundant life and energy, the "sacred" flower, is a tribute to the Feminine Principle in the Deity, as the lily like the lotus is called feminine, although in reality bi-sexual.

The lily and the Eucharist have survived the centuries in which the male principle has dominated, as the one true and only God--the giver of life, the energizing power of Creation--and the lily and the Eucharist are both representative of the Female principle.

The architecture of, and the inscriptions on, the tower of Babel show conclusively that it was a monument to the victory of the phallic worshippers over the yoni, proving that the "one true and only God" was male. From that time also God has been alluded to as "He," although in the Oriental countries, and particularly among the Hindus, we find repeated allusions to the Deity as "The Divine Mother," and all the higher qualities are spoken of as feminine. It is because of this fact also, that we note the spread of Oriental religions and philosophies in this day of Woman's uprising. The Orientals retained the divinity of the female principle in theory, but not in fact.

Sex-worship is contemptuously alluded to in modern literature as "strange and erotic ideas," or words equally condemnatory. But this is an absurd stand, since nothing could be more natural than that the mystery of Creative Life should arouse our interest and our wonder; and it certainly ought to enlist our highest reverence. It becomes erotic only when men fail to worship in "spirit and in truth," and when the letter of the ideal survives, and the spirit is ignored. It becomes not only erotic but destructive when it involves a fight for supremacy between the male and the female. When the spirit of union shall prevail, which it must in a perfected world, no higher form of religious aspiration can be imagined than that in which the miracle of birth is reverenced and idealized. Then, and not until then, will the family be what it should be, and Love, the one and only true God, be worshipped.

The trinity in unity has been a widespread and persistent part of all religions, from which fact we may logically infer that this ideal has a permanent place in the sum of human knowledge. Truth is often obscured, but it can never be hidden from the eyes that are seeking the light. The rightful interpretation of those ancient and obscured truths, erroneously classified as "myths" and "superstitions," will reveal a universal truth, and will also show their relation to modern concepts.

The fuller meaning of this symbolical idea will be considered in a subsequent chapter; but for the present we are concerned with the history of sex-degradation from the pure ideal of nature worship to that of a monistic God whose gender is masculine. The pine tree, held sacred in many countries as a symbol of generation, and from which our own Christmas-tree is descended, is distinctively a male emblem, and its perennial green typifies the hope of Man that he too may manifest, in some form of life, the never-failing virility of the pine. The Latin name for the pine is pinus.

Thus from nature worship to phallic worship was but a step, but that step led to others. The pine, from the fact of its erect form; its spiral convolutions; its sap; its fruit; its renewal of activity; its root and veins; became a universally accepted emblem of the life-energy in man and in animals, and the gradual substitution of the male principle alone, for the androgynous idea as a symbol of Deity contributed to the idea of the inferiority of woman, until she finally became the slave and the plaything of man. The "virgin of the spheres," from her exalted mission as the Eternal Mother of the race, became at best but a secondary personality, and finally was refused any part in the symbol of the Holy Trinity.

Instead of father, mother and child, the Holy Trinity became "Father, Son and--Holy Ghost."

The early Romans must have been devoid of a sense of humor. But what of our modern Christian creeds, and their idea of the Holy Trinity composed of three male beings?

It is in Christian Science alone of all the modern creeds that the female principle is given a place co-equal with the male. Christian Science addresses the Deity as "Father-Mother-God," and their reverence for the woman who established the creed, as well as the Ionian type of architecture employed in their church edifices, are evidences of the re-establishment of the female principle in the God-idea. Christian Science is one of the most important instruments of the cosmic law in the present-day dethronement of the male principle as the only true God.

So permeated with this male God-idea is every branch of our modern thought; so enwrapped with the glamour of worship, that we hardly notice the one-sidedness of the ideal. Tradition is a powerful hypnotist.

Many members of the Masonic fraternity fail utterly to understand the symbolical language of their mosques and the phallic and yoni emblems which constitute their decorations. Notable among these emblems are the pomegranate; the lotus; the circle; the crescent; the swastika. The cone-shaped towers, that rise above the mosques, with their protruding heads, vein-tipped; the central symbol identical with the mound of Venus; denote the preservation of the Egyptian ideal, which venerated both sexes as co-equal. It is easy to realize why the Jews were driven out of Egypt when we remember that they refused to worship the Egyptian ideal of God as bi-sexual, but persisted in rearing the phallic symbol alone, denying the female principle a place in the God-head.

It is also significant that side by side with the present-day Feminist Movement we find the revival of Egyptian fashions; Egyptian architecture; Egyptian philosophies and religions. Even Cubist art, which in itself could make no possible appeal to recognition on its artistic merits, has been received with much publicity, if not with acclaim. Cubist art is a lineal descendant of Egyptian art, and so closely resembles its far-off ancestry as to seem to have bridged the centuries and connected us as if by telephone with the days of ancient civilization. Our drama and our popular songs have responded to the Egyptian thought-wave. Talismanic jewelry, so essentially Egyptian, is in vogue, and on every sign board advertising breakfast foods, tobacco and what not we find the modernized use of Egyptian symbols, notably the swastika.

The swastika, the earliest form of the cross, found in every country and in every out-of-the-way corner of the globe, is fundamentally, originally and pre-eminently a bi-une sex symbol, and although volumes have in recent years been written on its history and meaning, the whole story may be summed up by examining its form and by realizing its antiquity and its universality.

The original form of oath was to swear by the sacred power of the generative organs, and we may readily conclude that this power was conceded to be vested in the male only, from the fact that we still "testify" when under oath and although the Bible has been substituted for the generative organs, as an outward expression of our recognition of the Creative Principle, we note that the Bible is made up of "testaments," which stand for its "sacredness."

Evidently it was only after the advent of the male God that oaths and vows and pledges were necessary. Previous to that time, a man's word was reliable. It was inevitable that an ideal of the Supreme Creative power of the universe so one-sided, and so lacking in the essential of union, must degenerate into mere licentiousness and animalism; and it is estimated that about six hundred years B.C. the level of debauchery and vileness reigned. So-called religious rites and ceremonies were nothing more than orgies of sex-degradation.

The ideal of godhood as nothing higher than masculine virility and power evidenced by the number of his progeny, naturally reduced woman to the lowest depths of slavery, since she was nothing more than a receptacle for man's seed. Of course one wife was insufficient and a man's claim to divinity was best expressed by profligacy--an ideal which is rife even today among those, whose consciousness is bounded by nothing higher than the conception of the animal nature of man.

Whence came this wonderful thing manifested as generative power? What did it feed upon? These were natural queries. In seeking the answer the idea originated that in the blood was to be found the secret of the generative fluid. This idea arose from the evidence that as old age conquered man's physical strength, his blood became weakened and the supply insufficient.

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