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SABIANISM, or SABAISM.  The worship of the sun, moon, and stars, the TSABA Hashmaim, “the host of heaven.”  It was practised in Persia, Chaldea, India, and other Oriental countries, at an early period of the world’s history.  Sun-worship has had a powerful influence on subsequent and more rational religions, and relics of it are to be found even in the symbolism of Freemasonry.

SACELLUM.  A sacred place consecrated to a god, and containing an altar.

SAINTE CROIX.  The work of the Baron de Sainte Croix, in two volumes, entitled, “Recherches Historiques et Critiques sur les Mysteres du Paganisme,” is one of the most valuable and instructive works that we have in any language on the ancient Mysteries,—­those religious associations whose history and design so closely connect them with Freemasonry.  To the student of masonic philosophy and symbolism this work of Sainte Croix is absolutely essential.

SALSETTE.  An island in the Bay of Bombay, celebrated for stupendous caverns excavated artificially out of the solid rock, and which were appropriated to the initiations in the ancient Mysteries of India.

SENSES, FIVE HUMAN.  A symbol of intellectual cultivation.

SETH.  It is the masonic theory that the principles of the Pure or Primitive Freemasonry were preserved in the race of Seth, which had always kept separate from that of Cain, but that after the flood they became corrupted, by a secession of a portion of the Sethites, who established the Spurious Freemasonry of the Gentiles.

SEVEN.  A sacred number among the Jews and the Gentiles, and called by Pythagoras a “venerable number.”

SHEM HAMPHORASH. (the declaratory name.) The tetragrammaton is so called, because, of all the names of God, it alone distinctly declares his nature and essence as self-existent and eternal.

SHOE.  See Investiture, Rite of.

SIGNS.  There is abundant evidence that they were used in the ancient Mysteries.  They are valuable only as modes of recognition.  But while they are absolutely conventional, they have, undoubtedly, in Freemasonry, a symbolic reference.

SIVA.  One of the manifestations of the supreme deity of the Hindoos, and a symbol of the sun in its meridian.

SONS OF LIGHT.  Freemasons are so called because Lux, or Light, is one of the names of Speculative Masonry.

SOLOMON.  The king of Israel, and the founder of the temple of Jerusalem and of the temple organization of Freemasonry.

That his mind was eminently symbolic in its propensities, is evident from all the writings that are attributed to him.

SPECULATIVE MASONRY.  Freemasonry considered as a science which speculates on the character of God and man, and is engaged in philosophical investigations of the soul and a future existence, for which purpose it uses the terms of an operative art.