The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE TEMPLE OF SOLOMON THE KING and the invocation made, after which an inscription recording the result was built. This invocation was of a very remarkable character. There had been a bar to the progress of Frater Perdurabo, a dualism in his conception of the Cosmos. He had not fully understood that the Universe was One, that one might in very truth eat and drink to the glory of God. He knew that by eating and drinking one did not necessarily detract from the glory of God, but had not fully understood the sacra- mentalism of the simplest actions. Now he knew that the huddling together of unhewn stones might build a better Temple than that of Luxor or of Karnak. He had still the old illusion that to succeed on one plane you must fail on another; still thought the mind more than the body, the soul more than the mind; did not see that these three must be one in exactly the same sense as the Christian Trinity (as under- stood by the truest Christians) is One. It was in the course of this illumination that the Truth was ceremonially conveyed to him on the Magical plane, although it was not for three years later that it fully illuminated his mind. This illusion, of which it is here spoken, is a most neces- sary step for the beginner, because to the beginner his ordinary life is not a sacrament. To him things are really common and unclean. He must, therefore, cut them out of his life, and hence to him the name of the Path is Renun- ciation. But to him who would be a Master of the Temple, the reverse applies. He wishes to remain perpetually in Samadhi, and it is therefore his renunciation to descend further and further into matter. He has volatilized the fixed: now he must fix the volatile. He has ascended from his par- ticular body to the Universal Soul. That Universal Soul 12 115