Freemasonry [antikvár]

The Pursuit of the Knowledge of One's Self Throughout all times and in all cultures men and women have sought to acquire knowledge about human nature and the purpose of human existence. In their search they have made use of an enormous variety of disciplines which have promised to penetrate the mystery of human nature and give them greater insight into themselves. These traditions have generally recognized some purpose for humanity. They are almost always closely connected with the religion of the society in which they have developed and orientated toward its Deity. In the West they belong to a general body of thought called 'The Mysteries', which can be traced, in one form or another, more or less continuously through the history of Western civilization. The Mysteries were a recognized public institution in the ancient world. Although they have been a major influence in western intellectual life as recently as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they are difficult for us to understand today because they are based on a view of the world which is quite different from our contemporary scientific materialism. While our 'universe' is limited by the extent of physical phenomena, that of the ancient world was conceived as containing, in addition to all the material objects, vast non-material realms which were not available to ordinary perception but were still considered to be part of the universe as it was then understood. These were arenas for the exploits of the gods of ancient mythology. Events occurring within these non-material domains were considered to be governed by an extension of the same body of natural law which gave consistency to the world of ordinary experience; and those events were thought to have an important influence on the daily activity of human life. The Mysteries were schools which provided knowledge of those non-material realms and of the natural laws operating in them. Although their existence was widely recognized, they usually conducted their work in seclusion. Their knowledge was imparted by a process of development which was represented by advancement through a series of grades, and the instruction itself involved extensive ritual and an elaborate symbolic structure which was used to codify the principles as well as to communicate them. The objective was to train people to live in consonance with natural laws as they operate in the non-material domains. Although the laws were considered to be of Divine origin, the Mysteries were not usually religious. Generally speaking, they were more concerned with philosophy and morality than with theology and religion. The content of the Mysteries, that is, the symbolic material which was used to convey their instruction, includes tales of men and women with remarkable powers. They encounter fantastic beasts while involved in astonishing adventures which are governed by arbitrary rules and occur in unlikely locations. All this sounds very abstract, more than a little superstitious, and quite irrelevant to our contemporary experience until we recognize that in our own terms the closest and most immediately available of these non-material domains is called the psyche. Each of us has similar adventures every time we dream, for the boundary of the inaccessible part of that domain is the threshold of one's own consciousness. The symbols employed and the way in which they are used have made the Mysteries seem strange, even bizarre, to our twentieth-century perception, conditioned as it is by the materialistic orientation of our society. Nonetheless, in recent years and for a variety of reasons the