The average student of the New Testament passes over the event of Jesus in the Wilderness, with little or no emotion, regarding it as a mere incident in His early career.  Not so with the mystic or occultist, who knows, from the teachings of his order, that in the Wilderness Jesus was subjected to a severe occult test, designed to develop His power, and test His endurance.  In fact, as every advanced member of any of the great occult orders knows, the occult degree known as “The Ordeal of the Wilderness” is based upon this mystic experience of Jesus, and is intended to symbolize the tests to which He was subjected.  Let us consider this event so fraught with meaning and importance to all true occultists.

The Wilderness toward which Jesus diverted His steps, lay afar off from the river in which the rites of Baptism had been performed.  Leaving behind him the fertile banks, and acres, of cultivated land, He approached the terrible Wilderness which even the natives of that part of the country regarded with superstitious horror.  It was one of the weirdest and dreariest spots in even that weird and dreary portion of the country.  The Jews called it “The Abode of Horror”; “The Desolate Place of Terror”; “The Appalling Region”; and other names suggestive of the superstitious dread which it inspired in their hearts.  The Mystery of the Desert Places hung heavy over this place, and none but the stoutest hearts ventured within its precincts.  Though akin to the desert, the place abounded in dreary and forbidding hills, crags, ridges and canyons.  Those of our readers who have ever traveled across the American continent and have seen some of the desolate places of the American Desert, and who have read of the terrors of Death Valley, or the Alkali Lands, may form an idea of the nature of this Wilderness toward which the Master was traveling.

All normal vegetation gradually disappeared as He pressed further and further into this terrible place, until naught remained but the scraggy vegetation peculiar to these waste places—­those forms of plant life that in their struggle for existence had managed to survive under such adverse conditions as to give the naturalist the impression that the very laws of natural plant life have been defied and overcome.

Little by little the teeming animal life of the lower lands disappeared, until at last no signs of such life remained, other than the soaring vultures overhead and the occasional serpent and crawling things under foot.  The silence of the waste places was upon the traveler, brooding heavily over Him and all around the places upon which He set His foot, descending more heavily upon Him each moment of His advance.