168 @ Thesecret L$ofNature
whom Freemasonry was clearly a survival and symbolic portrayal of
the great mysteries. To Hodson, Masonry was "a gateway leading to-
wards the Mysteries themselves and the power, wisdom, knowledge,
and faculties revealed progressively to initiates in their more advanced
grades."
But unlike a Rosicrucian initiation, whose basic aim is the revela-
tion of Christ, the original mystery initiation, as reconstructed by oc-
cultists, consisted in a the simpler process of rekindling clairvoyance in
the aspirant by separating his etheric and astral bodies from his physi-
cal body, usually by the administration of a powerful drug.As his phys-
ical body lay in a trance lasting three and a half days, his finer bodies
were freed to travel in the supersensible worlds. Wakened from this
trance, the initiate found himself in possession-because memory in-
heres in the etheric body-of the accumulated wisdom imparted to
him by priest or hierophant. Convinced of the immortality of the ego,
the neophyte was considered "twice-born." In the Christian mysteries,
baptism, in the form of a near drowning, could loosen the etheric
body, enabling the initiate to review his current life out of body and so
recover certainty of his essential spirituality-as anyone may do in any
near-death experience.
Nowadays, before being initiated into the lowest grade of Masonry,
the modern aspirant, or Entered Apprentice, is expected to have con-
quered the physical passions of his body and be "engaged in malung his
astral body into an instrument for the expression of high emotionH-
presumably more spiritual than sexual. At the same time, the aspirant is
supposed to be learning to gain control of his mind, for "what man sees
and knows by means of the senses and the intellect, however refined and
developed, is but the smallest and outermost aspect of universal solar
and planetary existence. Man, submerged in matter, must be reawak-
ened.The veil of Maya must be penetrated by the initiate."
To achieve this breakthrough via Masonic initiation the aspirant ini-
tiate was given, as in the ancient mysteries, a draught of forgetfulness
along with a powerful shock.The object was to make him forget all of
his life since birth so that he could be led into the spiritual form of his
life before birth.According to R. Gordon Wasson in his books Soma and