Here, then, in Masonry, is what was called the aphanism[164] in the ancient Mysteries.  The bitter but necessary lesson of death has been imparted.  The living soul, with the lifeless body which encased it, has disappeared, and can nowhere be found.  All is darkness—­confusion—­despair.  Divine truth—­the WORD—­for a time is lost, and the Master Mason may now say, in the language of Hutchinson, “I prepare my sepulchre.  I make my grave in the pollution of the earth.  I am under the shadow of death.”

But if the mythic symbolism ended here, with this lesson of death, then were the lesson incomplete.  That teaching would be vain and idle—­nay, more, it would be corrupt and pernicious—­which should stop short of the conscious and innate instinct for another existence.  And hence the succeeding portions of the legend are intended to convey the sublime symbolism of a resurrection from the grave and a new birth into a future life.  The discovery of the body, which, in the initiations of the ancient Mysteries, was called the euresis,[165] and its removal, from the polluted grave into which it had been cast, to an honored and sacred place within the precincts of the temple, are all profoundly and beautifully symbolic of that great truth, the discovery of which was the object of all the ancient initiations, as it is almost the whole design of Freemasonry, namely, that when man shall have passed the gates of life and have yielded to the inexorable fiat of death, he shall then (not in the pictured ritual of an earthly lodge, but in the realities of that eternal one, of which the former is but an antitype) be raised, at the omnific word of the Grand Master of the Universe, from time to eternity; from the tomb of corruption to the chambers of hope; from the darkness of death to the celestial beams of life; and that his disembodied spirit shall be conveyed as near to the holy of holies of the divine presence as humanity can ever approach to Deity.

Such I conceive to be the true interpretation of the symbolism of the legend of the Third Degree.

I have said that this mythical history of the temple builder was universal in all nations and all rites, and that in no place and at no time had it, by alteration, diminution, or addition, acquired any essentially new or different form:  the myth has always remained the same.

But it is not so with its interpretation.  That which I have just given, and which I conceive to be the correct one, has been very generally adopted by the Masons of this country.  But elsewhere, and by various writers, other interpretations have been made, very different in their character, although always agreeing in retaining the general idea of a resurrection or regeneration, or a restoration of something from an inferior to a higher sphere or function.

Thus some of the earlier continental writers have supposed the myth to have been a symbol of the destruction of the Order of the Templars, looking upon its restoration to its original wealth and dignities as being prophetically symbolized.