initiations was made to pass
through a mimic repetition of the conflict and destruction of Osiris, and
his eventual recovery; and the explanations made to him, after he had
received the full share of light to which the painful and solemn
ceremonies through which he had passed had entitled him, constituted the
secret doctrine of which I have already spoken, as the object of all the
Mysteries. Osiris,--a real and personal god to the people,--to be
worshipped with fear and with trembling, and to be propitiated with
sacrifices and burnt offerings, became to the initiate but a symbol of the

"Great first cause, least understood,"

while his death, and the wailing of Isis, with the recovery of the body,
his translation to the rank of a celestial being, and the consequent
rejoicing of his spouse, were but a tropical mode of teaching that after
death comes life eternal, and that though the body be destroyed, the soul
shall still live.

"Can we doubt," says the Baron Sainte Croix, "that such ceremonies as
those practised in the Mysteries of Osiris had been originally instituted
to impress more profoundly on the mind the dogma of future rewards and
punishments?" [19]

"The sufferings and death of Osiris," says Mr. Wilkinson,[20] "were the
great Mystery of the Egyptian religion; and some traces of it are
perceptible among other people of antiquity. His being the divine goodness
and the abstract idea of 'good,' his manifestation upon earth (like an
Indian god), his death and resurrection, and his office as judge of the
dead in a future state, look like the early revelation of a future
manifestation of the deity converted into a mythological fable."

A similar legend and similar ceremonies, varied only as to time, and
place, and unimportant details, were to be found in all the initiations of
the ancient Mysteries. The dogma was the same,--future life,--and the
method of inculcating it was the same. The coincidences between the design
of these rites and that of Freemasonry, which must already begin to
appear, will enable us to give its full value to the expression of
Hutchinson, when he says that "the Master Mason represents a man under the
Christian doctrine saved from the grave of iniquity and raised to the
faith of salvation." [21]

In Phoenicia similar Mysteries were celebrated in honor of Adonis, the
favorite lover of Venus, who, having, while hunting, been slain by a wild
boar on Mount Lebanon, was restored to life b