deification of the dead, man-worship, or hero-worship, the next
development of the religious idea after fetichism, was simply an
acknowledgment of the belief in a future life; for the dead could not have
been deified unless after death they had continued to live. The adoration
of a putrid carcass would have been a form of fetichism lower and more
degrading than any that has been discovered.

But man-worship came after fetichism. It was a higher development of the
religious sentiment, and included a possible hope for, if not a positive
belief in, a future life.

Reason, then, as well as revelation, leads us irresistibly to the
conclusion that these two doctrines prevailed among the descendants of
Noah, immediately after the deluge. They were believed, too, in all their
purity and integrity, because they were derived from the highest and
purest source.

These are the doctrines which still constitute the creed of Freemasonry;
and hence one of the names bestowed upon the Freemasons from the earliest
times was that of the "_Noachidae_" or "_Noachites_" that is to say, the
descendants of Noah, and the transmitters of his religious dogmas.




III.

The Primitive Freemasonry of Antiquity.



The next important historical epoch which demands our attention is that
connected with what, in sacred history, is known as the dispersion at
Babel. The brightness of truth, as it had been communicated by Noah,
became covered, as it were, with a cloud. The dogmas of the unity of God
and the immortality of the soul were lost sight of, and the first
deviation from the true worship occurred in the establishment of
Sabianism, or the worship of the sun, moon, and stars, among some peoples,
and the deification of men among others. Of these two deviations,
Sabianism, or sun-worship, was both the earlier and the more generally
diffused.[5] "It seems," says the learned Owen, "to have had its rise
from some broken traditions conveyed by the patriarchs touching the
dominion of the sun by day and of the moon by night." The mode in which
this old system has been modified and spiritually symbolized by
Freemasonry will be the subject of future consideration.

But Sabianism, while it was the most ancient of the religious corruptions,
was, I have said, also the most generally diffused; and hence, even among
nations which afterwards adopted the polytheistic creed of deified men and
factitious gods, this ancient sun-worship is seen to be continually
exerting its influences. Thus, among the Greeks, the most refined people
that cultivated hero-worship, Hercules was the sun, and the mythologic
fable of his destroying with his arrows the many-headed hydra of the
Lernaean marshes was but an allegory to denote the dissipation of paludal
malaria by the purifying rays of the orb of day. Among the Egyptians, too,
the chief deity, Osiris, was but another name for the sun, while his
arch-enemy and destroyer, Typhon, was the typification of night, or
darkness. And lastly, among the Hindus, the three manifestations of their
supreme deity, Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, were symbols of the rising,
meridian, and setting sun.

This early and very general prevalence of the sentiment of sun-worship is
worthy of especial attention on account of the influence that it exercised
over the spurious Freemasonry of antiquity, of which I am soon to speak,
and which is still felt, although modified and Christianized in our modern
system. Many, indeed nearly all, of the masonic symbols of the present day
can only be thoroughly comprehended and properly appreciated by this
reference to sun-worship.

This divine truth, then, of the existence of one Supreme God, the Grand
Architect of the Universe, symbolized in Freemasonry as the TRUE WORD, was
lost to the Sabians and to the polytheists who arose after the dispersion
at Babel, and with it also disappeared the doctrine of a future life; and
hence, in one portion of the masonic ritual, in allusion to this historic
fact, we speak of "the lofty tower of Babel, where language was confounded
and Masonry lost."

There were, however, some of the builders on the plain of Shinar who
preserved these great religious and masonic doctrines of the unity of God
and the immortality of the soul in their pristine purity. These were the
patriarchs, in whose venerable line they continued to be taught. Hence,
years after the dispersion of the nations at Babel, the world presented
two great religious sects, passing onward down the stream of time, side by
side, yet as diverse from each other as light from darkness, and truth
from falsehood.

One of these lines of religious thought and sentiment was the idolatrous
and pagan world. With it all masonic doctrine, at least in its purity, was
extinct, although there mingled with it, and at times to some extent
influenced it, an offshoot from the other line, to which attention will be
soon directed.

The second of these lines consisted, as has already been said, of the
patriarchs and priests, who preserved in all their purity the two great
masonic doctrines of the unity of God and the immortality of the soul.

This line embraced, then, what, in the language of recent masonic writers,
has been designated as the _Primitive Freemasonry of Antiquity_.

Now, it is by no means intended to advance any such gratuitous and