3.  Or, lastly, the truthful elements of actual history may greatly predominate over the fictitious and invented materials of the myth, and the narrative may be, in the main, made up of facts, with a slight coloring of imagination, when it forms a mythical history.[144]

These form the three divisions of the legend or myth (for I am not disposed, on the present occasion, like some of the German mythological writers, to make a distinction between the two words[145]); and to one of these three divisions we must appropriate every legend which belongs to the mythical symbolism of Freemasonry.

These masonic myths partake, in their general character, of the nature of the myths which constituted the foundation of the ancient religions, as they have just been described in the language of Mr. Grote.  Of these latter myths, Mueller[146] says that “their source is to be found, for the most part, in oral tradition,” and that the real and the ideal—­that is to say, the facts of history and the inventions of imagination—­concurred, by their union and reciprocal fusion, in producing the myth.

Those are the very principles that govern the construction of the masonic myths or legends.  These, too, owe their existence entirely to oral tradition, and are made up, as I have just observed, of a due admixture of the real and the ideal—­the true and the false—­the facts of history and the inventions of allegory.

Dr. Oliver remarks that “the first series of historical facts, after the fall of man, must necessarily have been traditional, and transmitted from father to son by oral communication.” [147] The same system, adopted in all the Mysteries, has been continued in the masonic institution; and all the esoteric instructions contained in the legends of Freemasonry are forbidden to be written, and can be communicated only in the oral intercourse of Freemasons with each other.[148]

De Wette, in his Criticism on the Mosaic History, lays down the test by which a myth is to be distinguished from a strictly historical narrative, as follows, namely:  that the myth must owe its origin to the intention of the inventor not to satisfy the natural thirst for historical truth by a simple narration of facts, but rather to delight or touch the feelings, or to illustrate some philosophical or religious truth.

This definition precisely fits the character of the myths of Masonry.  Take, for instance, the legend of the master’s degree, or the myth of Hiram Abif.  As “a simple narration of facts,” it is of no great value—­certainly not of value commensurate with the labor that has been engaged in its transmission.  Its invention—­by which is meant, not the invention or imagination of all the incidents of which it is composed, for there are abundant materials of the true and real in its details, but its invention or composition in the form of a myth by the addition of some features, the suppression of others, and the general arrangement of the whole—­was not intended to add a single item to the great mass of history, but altogether, as De Wette says, “to illustrate a philosophical or religious truth,” which truth, it is hardly necessary for me to say, is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.