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THE LESSER LIGHTS
I
The Sun, Moon, and Master of the lodge, is, according to our best authorities, a
Hermetic symbol and must be interpreted accordingly. The sun throws out light
from itself, it dispenses energy, and in the physical sense is the creator of life. In
view thereof the Hermitizes made the sun to signify the active principle in nature.
By a peculiar coincidence it is still a popular custom to speak of the sun as he or
him and this suggests that the Hermetic theory was not very far-fetched.
By virtue of a similar kind of reasoning the moon was accepted as the symbol of
the passive forces of nature, and here again we find the popular custom in
agreement, for we all speak of the moon as she or her. The moon has no light of
her own but merely reflects to us that which she has received from the sun;
therefore, she may be understood as symbolizing the receptive, passive, and
feminine principles.
This cleavage between masculine and feminine, active and passive, goes down to
the roots of the world; it is a distinction found in all nature's processes and in every
man and woman. Work and rest, ruthlessness and pity, hardness and tenderness—
everywhere are these qualities found, mingling in various proportions; and the
secret of the full-orbed life is to hold them in equilibrium. John Woolman was so
tender that he grieved for days over a robin's death; Friedrich Nietzsche looked
upon pity as a weakness, and taught men to flee it as a disease and urged his
disciples to be hard.
Too much of John Woolman in human nature would people the world at last with a
race of sentimentalists too soft for the mastery of the hard, grey facts of nature; too
much of Nietzsche would give us a world full of blond beasts, preying on each
other, like the dragons in the slime; but when Woolman and Nietzsche balance
each other, the one correcting the extravagances of the other, man will be tender
with little children, chivalrous to women, patient with his fellows, and he will have
strength to wage the warfare against death, disaster, and destruction. Out of Isis
and Osiris, comes Horus, the master of life. Out of the woman and the man, comes
Christ, "the man-woman." Out of the Sun and the Moon comes the Master, even
the Master of a Lodge, for the Master of the Lodge, in our symbiology, is nothing
other than a representation of the Complete Man.
II
This, I have said, is the Hermetic explanation of the symbolism of the three Lesser
Lights; but with this reading of the matter some scholars will not agree, preferring
to trace it to usages in the old Operative Lodges. The hut, or the lodge, they say,