The Secret Room
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Imagine this was the meeting place of the Knights of the Round Table, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Founding Fathers, and the Jedi Masters. The Arc of the Covenant and Holy Grail are altar and chalice here. The Oracle of Delphi and Merlin, the Wizard, sit atop ionic columns. There is a key to an unknown treasure. Under the floor, there are secret passageways to Batman's cave and Zoro's hideout.

The Holy Grail
"What would your life be like if from this moment forth you regarded your sufferings as refinements? Then the image of sacrifice and refinement would work deep in your mind and soul. The suffering, which is inevitable, would be the vehicle for the recasting of your nature. Then pathos might becomes mythos, and instead of suffering in the school of hard knocks, you would find yourself whipped into consecrated shape, becoming a Grail instead of a crushed plastic cup."
Jean Houston, from The Search for the Beloved.

Ritual bread mold, wood, carved on four sides
L. 14.25" W. 2.5", very old, Tibetan culture, Mount Kailash
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Dreaming Goddess Ganymede and Zeus The Mystery Box Inside the Mystery Box
"Take some gold which is called the male of the chrysokolla and a man who has been kneaded together. The gold of the Ethiopian earth produces it from its drops. A certain species of ant brings the gold to the surface of the earth and enjoys it. Put him together with his wife of vapour, till the divine bitter water comes out. When it has thickened, or colored red with the juice of the golden vine of Egypt, then smear it over the leaflets of the light-bringing goddess and also of the red copper or of the red Venus and then thicken it until it coagulates into gold."
-Olympiodoros, Byzantine alchemist.

Esoteric Tibetan Deity in full regalia

Cave Altar, Thailand.

Earth Goddess, closeup of Cave Altar, Thailand.

The Eleusinian Mysteries: To Die is to be Initiated
The initiation seems to have taken place in three stages: the Dromena, the things done; the Legomena, the things said; the Deiknymena, the things shown. There followed a special ceremony known as the Epopteia, the state of "having seen," only for those initiated the previous year.
In the Dromena the initiates participated in a sacred pageant that reenacted the story of Demeter and Persephone, living through the feelings of sorrow, rage and rejoicing, probably carrying torches in the darkness to the sound of music and singing. Clement of Alexandria writes that "Demeter and Kore have come to be the subject of a mystic drama, and Eleusis celebrates with torches the abduction of the daughter and the sorrowful wanderings of the mother." Foucart believed that the Mystai also experienced a journey to the underworld through wandering in the dark in the lower part of the Telesterion, and that the initiates suffered the terrors of death as a condition of initiation. . . .

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The purpose and essential meaning of the mysteries was initiation into a vision. "Eleusis" means "the place of happy arrival" (this is where "Elysian fields" comes from). The term "mysteries" comes from the word muein, which means to close eyes and mouth, and indicates the veil of secrecy that was kept drawn over the ceremonies.

We can see from the account of the mysteries included here that two essential features of religious ceremony, possibly dating from Neolithic times, are present also at Eleusis--the sacred marriage and the birth of the divine child. This imagery--of the sacred marriage between opposites, between heaven and earth, body and soul, masculine and feminine, heart and mind, and the birth from that marriage of a new kind of human being, the divine child--is central to all mystic understanding of the work of the sacred feminine and is echoed in suggestive ways in the deepest insights of all the mystical traditions.
-Andrew Harvey, The Essential Mystics


What is a Mason?
Masonic image
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The Illustrated Book of Signs & Symbols

 

Vietnamese Dragon
Dragon Fountain, Vietnam

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