Page 18 - WM Manual Guide and Monitor 2024 - 2025

slaves," implying that the eyes of the soul were still blind in ignorance and lust.
Our own use of the device is in harmony with these old customs and ideas. The
purpose of the hoodwink is not to conceal something from the candidate, for it has
another significance: it symbolizes the fact that the candidate is yet in darkness,
like the babe lying in its mother's womb.

Being in darkness the candidate is expected to prepare his inmost mind for those
revelations that will be made to him after the hoodwink is removed.
III

I have used the word "revelations" advisedly in this connection because the entire
symbolism of the hoodwink is a beautiful and pregnant suggestion of the methods
of revelation, and of the part played by it in the larger life of man. Literally
signifying "an unveiling," revelation carries within itself the meaning of something
that is hidden behind a veil, and of the removing of the veil. If one stands before a
blinded window a great sweep of the Sierra Madres may stretch before him but he
will not see them any more than if they were not there; but the moment the blind is
lifted the mountains appear, lifting their eternal sheaves of snow, and the
apparition is like a piece of magic, as though they had been suddenly created. "The
lifting of the blind"—that is revelation, whether in religion, science, art, or in
Freemasonry.
In the Volume of the Sacred Law we read of Jesus that he "brought life and
immortality to light"; these words do not mean that Jesus brought life and
immortality into existence, as though before him they were not: the true life had
been knocking at the hearts of men from the beginning, and immortality had
always awaited them beyond "the narrow house"; Jesus was among the first to
open the eyes of men to see these realities. Men had always been brothers; God
had always been the All-Father; love had always been the law of the world, and
purity the law of the heart: it was the great mission of Jesus to be one of the way-
showers of men who could lift from their eyes the hoodwink of unseeing. He was
an unveiled, and therefore a revealer.

It is ever thus with revelation. Gravitation existed before the first man came to be,
but it was not until Sir Isaac Newton came that men saw this thing that had been
about them always: he lifted the blind, and men saw gravitation. The sidereal
universe is from eternity, but nobody "saw" it until Copernicus, after gazing at the
stars from his narrow cell for many years, uncovered the majesty and meaning of
the heavens. Steam had always been at work along with fire and water, like an
unknown genie, but it took an Isaac Watt to discover ("discover" means to uncover
and is very similar to "reveal") its presence. And so, it ever is. Realities more
wonderful than gravity, steam, or stars are, perhaps, playing about or within us all
the while, but we, wearing the hoodwinks of ignorance, are blind to the great
presences. The prophet, the leader, the mighty teacher of the race is one who, born
into blindness as are we all, somehow has been able to get the hoodwink from his