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Updated: June 6, 2025
Most of the organizations now took the form of secret societies whose initiations were marked with naive formalism and whose routines were directed by a group of officers with royal titles and fortified by signs, passwords, and ritual. Some of these orders decorated the faithful with high-sounding degrees.
They led us into a long passage and up a steep flight of wooden stairs. I have learned since then it was a building equipped by a well-known secret society for its initiations. We went on through a narrow hall and up a winding night that seemed to me interminable. Above it, as we stopped, the man who was leading me rapped thrice upon a rattling wooden door.
In all of these ancient Mysteries, while the sacred plant was a symbol of initiation, the initiation itself was symbolic of the resurrection to a future life, and of the immortality of the soul. In this view, Freemasonry is to us now in the place of the ancient initiations, and the acacia is substituted for the lotus, the erica, the ivy, the mistletoe, and the myrtle.
I should like to see the institution of initiations, such as those of the ancients.... To-day the happiness of the human species is abandoned to chance; all the experience of women is individual, like that of animals; it is lost with those women who, being naturally amiable, might have taught others to become so.
"No it doesn't lead to much." Her own initiations so clearly did. Still after all; and she was not jealous: "There must be a charm." "In seeing them?" At this the girl suddenly let herself go. "I hate them. There's that charm!" Mrs. Jordan gaped again. "The real 'smarts'?" "Is that what you call Mrs. Bubb? Yes it comes to me; I've had Mrs. Bubb.
In the morning he was clad in the Robe of Heaven, set up on a pedestal in front of the Goddess and worshipped by the congregation as a God. He had been made one with Osiris or Horus or whatever name it pleased that Sun-God to be called. Apuleius does not reveal it. There were also, of course, the irregular personal initiations and visions of god vouchsafed to persons of special prophetic powers.
The betrayal of the Mysteries by the false Gnostics for the Gnostics, that is, those who know, were the Initiates of primitive Christianity caused the Gnosis to be rejected, and alienated the Church from the supreme truths of the Kabbala, which contains all the secrets of transcendental theology.... Let the most absolute science, let the highest reason become once more the patrimony of the leaders of the people; let the sarcerdotal art and the royal art take the double sceptre of antique initiations and the social world will once more issue from its chaos.
The parallel is now plain to the reader: the corpuscle is the Yogi, bent on liberation: the heat which warms him is the Divine Love, centered in his heart, his initiations are the successive emancipations into higher and higher spaces, till he attains Nirvana inherits the kingdom prepared for him from the foundation of the world.
By virtue of this instinct, which is despotic, by virtue of this education, which is classic and Latin, he conceives human associations not in the modern fashion, Germanic and Christian, as a concert of initiations starting from below, but in the antique fashion, pagan and Roman, as a hierarchy of authorities imposed from above.
Except at Sparta, Greeks dropped the tortures inflicted on boys and girls in the initiations superintended by the cruel Artemis. But Greek mysteries retained the daubing with mud and the use of the bull-roarer.
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