The separation of initiatory Systems
The initiatory System, whose roots are to be found in the East, has always been part of the social fabric of the humankind. It used different expressions and forms to be understood when customs, languages and habits of the profane world changed; it has always affected the men’s education from the inside. They were different, “uncommon” men who aspired, sometimes confusedly, to ethical and moral conditions often antithetical to those proposed and imposed by profane powers.
The initiatory System has never changed itself, its values or principles. It only had to change its forms of expression to suit them to the changeability of popular interests.
The initiatory System aimed to a synthetic knowledge of the reality inside and outside man, recomposing its deepest meanings in the form of scientific principles. When it was addressed outside the central nucleus of Initiates, viz. to educate neophytes and aspirants, it had to consider that they were still characterized by common reason, which divided their emotional aspects in two classes, masculine and feminine.
In actual fact by saying male-female they never meant the sex of the individual but the main emotional focus on the right or left lobe of the brain. Therefore the physical conscience tends to tinge the reality perceived inside and outside oneself through the senses, with a hint of concrete and materialistic tone, if it is polarized on the left lobe of the brain; with a passional and dramatic emotional tint if it is focused on the opposite pole.
The initiatory teaching tends to recognize the ultimate reality in the sense of existence.
The sense of existence is sometimes associated to the sense of life. This association is arbitrary because the sense of life is conditioned by the ability of free choice of man. When the ùnion between advanced intelligence of the physical personality and immaterial faculties of the higher Ego (or soul) is complete, this ability will become Free Will. The latter is complete awareness in discriminating truth from falsehood.
If the sense of life is “personal”, because it is determined by a series of often imprecise and unconscious decision of men, in the other instance man’s life belongs to the Existence. It is dependent on it, with all its attributes, drives (laws) and evolutionary tensions (energies).
Full awareness of this can only occur in a synthetic manner (not sciolist), through individual recognition (empiricism) of the many realities expressed inside and outside man. We must specularly reconstruct (up as is down, inside as is outside) all the relations necessary to eventually recognize the Great Analogy, that joins and contains everything and that people call God.
The Great Synthesis, father-generator of the same cosmic and universal Element, has too often been perceived by conceptual reality as if they were two separate elements. That means that the One Principle becomes Three, because it is replaced by the Second (2) the macrocosm and the Third (3) the microcosm.
It wasn’t easy for the existing minds at the time to go back to the conscience of One by overlapping in their conscience the attributes of 2 and 3; likewise it is not easy today. Nevertheless this is the synthetic Way, expressed in other terms. It can be reached after leaving the crossroad where two lesser initiatory branches end. We are trying to introduce these branches to brothers and sisters of good will.
Since there wasn’t a “central” and synthetic vision (the metaphor of the third eye is a symbolic memory), but they were inspired by the feminine (right lobe) or the masculine (its opposite) vision, they worked out the two-fold research for Truth and Beauty. However, in this search the elements that helped the first temperament were lacking in the other and vice versa.
Dealing with Beauty and Truth as separate elements, as if each expressed its own root, prevents us from reaching the Great archetypical and universal Synthesis as well as finding our own individual synthesis. The Adept, then, closed in the prison of his own physical conscience, can’t do anything else than follow the “thread or bridge” offered by his own inner voice. It is a kind of inner conscience that, like a threshold between consciousness and super-consciousness, can re-direct the Adept replacing farsightedness with true Free Will.
Unfortunately in the search for Beauty many men are charmed by unreasonable and superstitious elements; whilst searching for the Truth, many people lose the view of the Common Welfare, seduced by a sectarian or personal and egocentric faith.
This is the sense of all-inclusive Harmony. Not Beauty, but what we like to see or to know, is raised to the role of totem. Each man has his own totemic culture to be adored, with his own looks and feelings.
Other people transform the Truth into many different ideologies, which end up being indissoluble from the results of dreams and imagination.
This is how the confusion of ideological languages originated in the mind of men.
And their word didn’t transmit either Beauty or Truth any more.
In the domain of abuse and superstition some Initiated started to exteriorize some principles of Morale and Logics. These ideas had been so far a prerogative of men educated in the temples. History tells us what reception was given to those who came to help men.
Despite the contrasts, the teaching of the lesser Mysteries continued to increase among the common people. So much that while at the beginning men went “towards the temple”, afterwards the “men of the temples” went towards men. This is how the exteriorization of the Mysteries and their vulgarization started.
In order to get in touch with the main human temperaments, masculine and feminine, the initiatory System gathered its teachings and split them in two branches to cope with the two characteristics; they became the mysteriosophic System and the mystic System.
In the mysteriosophic Order the focus was on Intelligence and Logics in the search for the immanent Truth to any physical reality, even abstract and impersonal, that could be conceived by human relativity. In the mystic System, on the other hand, the focus on the Sacrifice of the personal self to get closer to the divine Principle of the Love God.
Truth and love are the Lights still recognized by the two Systems; they are also the two faces of the same living God-Reality for those who can understand it.
In the conception of this two-faced appearance is hidden the sacred secret of Initiates.
The meaning of “sacred” is known to the members of every Order; their attitude towards this concept, though, is very different.
The mystic follows the blazing path of the Flame that burns, whilst the devotional worshipper, who is subject to the feminine, introverted, passive and temporizing impulse, tends to adore whatever is the highest peak he can reach with his feelings. He converts into cult any event that appears to him as an “enigmatic” truth originated by fatality. He gives fatality, or cause and effect, humanly emotional meanings and he raises Man to divinity.
This fatal deity is placed on the altars for other men to adore the consequences of their attributes. Therefore they consecrate the causes of their mistakes, the origins of their tribulations and the sources of their hopes.
The man who pursues the path of the Light of Truth is of a different kind.
The mysteriosophic temperament is essentially mental, extroverted and dynamic. When he conceives the sacredness and its mystery, he perceives it as a veil that separates him from the truth he craves and he believes he will reach. The Adept goes towards the sacred veil; he dares to tear it with strength, penetrates it until it joins it and blends with it. The ùnion of the 3 with the 2 is therefore accomplished.
Especially in the modern era, though, many men with a devotional temperament, either because of emulation or self-complacency, converged in the mysteriosophic System, since it is more strong-willed (quality of attraction towards a feminine temperament). Because of their natural submissiveness they contribute to rarefy more and more the push necessary to young Adepts during the processes of inner transmutation. The drive is then left unused and the Adepts are prevented from elevating their intellectual spiral and their push towards their own individual progress.
The devotional and feminine spirit has split into endless trickles of interpretations and faiths that are limited in the cult of the mystery; indeed their physical eyes can’t see the sacred, which is not physical.
Therefore the veil that covers the tabernacle of the inner Temple becomes the insurmountable wall of an undisclosed truth by their own choice. Without the act of resolute will vibrated by the unheard “Chorda” (the lost Word “remembered” by Masons), “vibrated” by the true Initiate through his own inner harmonica, all the tears and laments in the world won’t be enough to dissolve the veil and destroy the wall.
For the mysteriosophic temperament the veil, the symbol or sacred event that holds a truth is only a container to be broken and penetrated through a “sublime” Act of initiatory Will. The laceration Ritually accomplished with the Initiate’s will, is the act of love he “expressed” for his own “Real Principle”. This is the act of consecration that man carries out in the name of the Ideal living-God, of which the initiatory System represents the shadow and the earthly image. It must be joined with the strength of the highest values enclosed in the Principle of Initiation.
Initiatory consecration is what the Adept reaches through a summa of inner conditions and Rituals that “blend” in an ideal balance. It must be said, though, that it has always been difficult to match the quality of these conditions.
Indeed, the spreading of some initiatory values (not the theurgic effectiveness of the mysterial Ceremonial) among the popular classes, transmitted in the form of moral catechisms, symbols and allegories, has freed many of those men from the dullest emotional tendencies. On the other hand, their participation to the most prestigious levels of the hierarchic Pyramid of the (lesser) Mysteries has turned the sense of sacredness into pure formal representation in the Temples. It has reduced the potential of the meanings of Initiation to simple symbolic and virtual meaning. Therefore the imagery of many people turned Initiation into the theatrical representation of an ancient legend. The initiatory Reality remains an undisclosed reality for the multitude of disciples of the cult of mystery. Likewise the source of love is undisclosed to the disciples of the cult of devotion.
Considering all this matter from the point of view of the “glass half full”, we must appreciate how the initiatory Order, during its vulgarization, has reached “fragments” of humanity that would have never imagined the existence of some teachings. Whilst the empty half of the glass is the fact that, by carrying out this work of “exteriorization”, the mysteriosophic as well as the mystic Systems have become heavier and heavier, and their evolution slowed down. This is the weight of materiality, ideological dross and pseudo-spiritualist ballast introduced by men who, without overcoming the old habit of a rigorous selection of the aspirants, have never completely freed themselves from the “vile metals”.
This problem is emphasized by a system of utilitarian proselytism suited to the goals of attitudes which are still too “common”. This “initiatory” attitude is so common that it is considered aberrant for the temperance of the Participants to the Mysteries, who squeezed more and more in the shadow of the Pillars of the Temple.
The initiatory ethics, invaded by the sloppiness of mundane values, has had to carry out a long and painful fight for resistance. This fight was also addressed outside its own Institutions, pushing it into territories where the vulgarity was originated, viz. the profane world.
The young and inexperienced descendants of the Mediterranean mysteric Schools addressed the strength of their ideals against the profane powers that surrounded and invaded the Temples.
This small but wonderful Armageddon of the modern era appeared to the outside like a political and libertarian fight for Human rights, rather than a battle between an enlightened ethics and the egoism of profane totalitarian powers. The Illuminism and the democratic and republican talents of Risorgimento have involved the minds and hearts of the most valuable Masons of Europe; they have been busy facing the moral obscurantism that oppressed people, crushing their bodies and vexing their minds.
The libertarian thoughts of Masonic illuminism crossed the borders of the Old continent and landed in the New world. As a result it catalyzed in its Constitution which states the Right of every citizen to aim, in his own Country, to happiness.
This work has had an important intellectual influence, which Masons have carried out among the peoples and to “the Benefit of the people”. Many people are grateful to Freemasonry and their proselytes for this battle fought outside their Temples; on the other hand, as many have become its enemies, because it has reduced their power on weak and defenceless people. This was a battle for redemption of social customs, rather than a civil fight.
Now the emergency has gone from the paths of popular emotions to higher and more subtle political and economical aspects. So much that many citizens appear today detached from the needs of the less fortunate, as themselves used to be. They are men and women who were humiliated and subjected to violent and anti-democratic oppression; the same oppression is today suffered by other peoples, belonging to younger nations that are constitutionally defenceless from extremist and radical powers that seem to resurrect like ghosts of the past civilizations. Although the level of the ethical conflict has moved on a different level, a global commitment for the Human Rights of men and women is still necessary.
Today only an elitist part of Freemasonry can reasonably consider itself involved in the opposition to the ideological alterations, falsification, forgery and misrepresentations carried out in the modern historical and social history.
Indeed this opposition requires a bigger specialization from the men involved in the affirmation of Truth, Beauty and Sacredness hidden in the initiatory values of Freemasonry. Moral and initiatory knowledge are not suitable any more to today’s needs. Therefore it is necessary that, whilst the best Brothers keep fighting on the arduous paths of profanity, the Mason focuses on closed ranks in his Temples in order to develop his own initiatory abilities.
He must prepare with Order and intelligence to spread them again outside the Temples. He must learn how to communicate the beauty of his thoughts in the most suitable ways and places, with a calculated awareness of space and time. He must continue the fight against obscurantism, which always lays in wait in the emulation of profane models. Freemasonry’s men must continue to strongly revive in their hearts and minds the Sacredness that comes to the Temples from the East.
Indeed, wisdom of justice, Strenght of truth and Beauty of altruism are the only instruments of the Mason and of His Work to the Benefit of the Order and the Humankind. 
