The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON THE KING is spontaneously plunged into a surging mill-race of classical deities and heroes, many of whom thrust themselves boister- ously upon him without rhyme or reason. Ushered as it were into a Judgment Hall in which the law expounded to him is not only entirely unknown but is written in a language which he cannot even read, he is cross-questioned in a foreign tongue and judged in words which at present convey not a symptom of sense tohim. As the Rituals pro- ceed it might be expected that these difficulties would gradually lessen, but this is far from being the case; for, as we have seen, the complexities already involved by the introduction of Ancient Egyptian deities, concerning whom it is probable the candidate has but little knowledge, are further heightened by a general intrusion on the part of Hebrew, Christian, Mace- donian and Phrygian gods, angels and demons, and a profuse scattering of symbols; which, unitedly, are apt either so to bewilder the candidate that he leaves the temple with an impression that the whole ritual is a huge joke, a kind of buffoonish carnival of Gods which in the sane can only provoke laughter; or, on account of it being so utterly in- comprehensible to him, his ignorance makes him feel that it is so vastly beyond him and above his own simple standard of know- ledge, that all that he can do is to bow down before those who possess such an exalted language, concerning even the words and alphabet of which he can get no grasp or measure. The result of this obscurity naturally is that in both cases the Rituals fail to initiate—in the first case they, not being understood, are jeered at; in the second they, though equally incomprehensible, are however revered. Instead of teaching the Alphabet by means of simple characters they teach it by grotesque and all but impossible hieroglyphics, and in the II T 289