Around March 20 each year, day and night run close to even, and from then on the light gains a little every day. In many cultures that turn marks the victory of light over darkness and the return of life after the dead of winter. The ancient Mystery Schools and Freemasonry both built their teaching on the same pattern. They took the cycles of nature and the sky and used them to describe what happens to a person who sets out to change: purification, the death of an old self, and rebirth into greater light.
Three of the ancient mysteries show that pattern clearly: the Egyptian rites of Osiris, the Eleusinian rites of Demeter and Persephone, and the Roman cult of Mithras. Each deserves a look on its own terms before we set it beside the Craft.
Spring Renewal in the Ancient Mystery Schools
The Egyptian Mysteries: Osiris and the Cycle of Resurrection
Osiris was the Egyptian god of the underworld, agriculture, and eternal life, and the judge of the dead. His brother Set murdered him and scattered his body across Egypt. Isis, his wife and sister, gathered every piece but one and revived him long enough to conceive Horus, who grew up to defeat Set and restore order. Life, death, and return: the myth follows the same arc as the growing season.
How the Egyptians themselves used the myth is harder to pin down than a lot of Masonic writing suggests. They did stage Osiris’s death and return at Abydos. The stela of Ikhernofret, a treasurer under Senusret III in the 19th century BC, describes public processions that re-enacted the god’s funeral and then carried him back to his temple. The private initiation, in which a candidate passes through a symbolic death and rebirth and turns from the profane to the sacred, reaches us mostly through Greek and Roman writers. The fullest account comes from Apuleius, whose Metamorphoses, a Latin novel of the 2nd century AD, ends in Book XI with Lucius initiated into the mysteries of Isis and later of Osiris. Lucius can only hint at what he saw: he came, he says, to the boundary of death and set foot on the threshold of Proserpina, the Roman name for Persephone. The rest was largely filled in during the 18th century. Jean Terrasson’s novel Sethos (1731) built an Egyptian initiation out of those same Greek and Roman sources, and it may also have borrowed from the Masonic ritual then spreading through France. Freemasons took Terrasson’s Egypt up in turn, and it found its way into Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The theme is ancient. The detailed initiation ritual that Masonic lore credits to Egypt is largely a later reconstruction, and partly a reflection of the Craft itself.
The Eleusinian Mysteries: Persephone and the Return of Light
The threshold Lucius crossed belongs to the goddess at the heart of the mysteries of Eleusis, near Athens. There the rites centered on Demeter and her daughter Persephone, the goddess of springtime who became queen of the underworld. Hades carried Persephone off to be his wife, and Demeter’s grief left the earth barren. When Persephone came back each year, her mother’s joy brought spring back with her. Initiates were said to come away changed in consciousness, as if they had made the same descent into darkness and the same return to light.
The calendar matters here. The great rite, the Greater Mysteries at Eleusis, was held in autumn, in the month of Boedromion (roughly September to October). Spring had its own rite: the Lesser Mysteries at Agrai, on the Ilissos River outside Athens, held in Anthesterion (roughly February to March). The Lesser Mysteries purified and prepared candidates, and only after them could a candidate go on to Eleusis. The Eleusinian cycle itself ran from a spring of purification to an autumn of revelation.
Mithraism and the Seven Grades
Mithraism, a mystery cult popular among Roman soldiers, centered on a single image: Mithras slaying the cosmic bull. In a number of the carved scenes, ears of wheat sprout from the dying bull’s tail, and sometimes from its wound. Death turns into new life and fertility, and the slaying reads as an act of sacrifice that renews the world.
No Mithraic text survives, so most of what we know comes from images and inscriptions, and they tell us little about the cult’s calendar. What they do show is a structure of ascent. Initiates climbed through seven grades, from Raven at the bottom to Father at the top, though some scholars question whether every member passed through all of them. The floor mosaic of the Mithraeum of Felicissimus at Ostia, from the second half of the 3rd century AD, pairs each grade with a planet; the sixth grade, Heliodromus or “Sun-runner,” sits under the Sun. Celsus, a 2nd-century critic of Christianity whom Origen quotes in Against Celsus (6.22), describes a Mithraic ladder with seven gates of different metals, one for each planet, and an eighth gate at the top, picturing the soul’s passage through the heavens. The solar connection is real as well. Many inscriptions are dedicated to Sol Invictus Mithras, the unconquered Sun-god Mithras, though the reliefs also show Sol and Mithras as two allies clasping hands.
The Theme of Renewal in Freemasonry
The Masonic Journey as a Cycle of Death and Rebirth
Set side by side, the three mysteries share a shape: a descent, a trial in the dark, and a return to light. Freemasonry’s three degrees follow that shape, and each finds a partner among the ancient rites. Some of that resemblance is inherited. Some of it, as the story of Sethos shows, was read back into the ancient rites by Masons and their admirers, and an honest comparison keeps both in view.
The Entered Apprentice degree is the first green after winter. The candidate arrives as a seeker, in darkness, asking for light, much as a candidate came to Agrai to be purified before he could go any further. The Fellowcraft degree is growth. The Mason is set to study the book of nature and the seven Liberal Arts and Sciences, cultivating his intellect and his moral faculties, and his advance recalls the seven grades on the Ostia floor, or the seven-gated ladder Celsus described: one step of understanding at a time. The Master Mason degree is the descent and return itself. Like Osiris, like Persephone, and like Lucius at Proserpina’s threshold, the candidate meets death and is raised, and the degree treats that raising as the height of wisdom and self-mastery.
The Vernal Equinox and Masonic Symbolism
Between the darkness and the Light of the East, the symbolic source of knowledge and wisdom, lies what Carl Jung called the confrontation with the shadow. No one reaches the East without first facing his own inner darkness.
The equinox adds one more lesson. At that moment light and dark stand nearly level, and Freemasonry asks the initiate to hold the same kind of balance between earthly duties and higher philosophical work. The two columns at the porch of Solomon’s Temple, Boaz and Jachin, carry the same meaning.
Practical Applications: Living the Wisdom of Renewal
Personal Renewal and Transformation
Masonry teaches that personal renewal is deliberate. Nature renews itself every spring; a Mason has to choose to. That starts with letting go of old burdens and working on the virtues the Lodge holds up: wisdom; strength, in body, emotion, and spirit; and beauty, which Masons also call harmony or equilibrium. It continues through steady study, reflection, and introspection, through charity and service that turn personal growth into help for others, and through taking part in ritual and study so the flame of wisdom stays lit.
The Hermetic tradition calls this kind of renewal the Great Work, in which base metal (ignorance and vice) is turned into gold (wisdom and virtue). For the Mason, the furnace is discipline and honest self-examination. The labor is mastering his passions and desires, and the gold is a life of purpose spent in service to his fellow man.
Conclusion: The Eternal Return of Light
Spring, the ancient mysteries, and the Craft all teach the same thing: wisdom comes in cycles of growth, challenge, and breakthrough, and nobody gets it in one season. Freemasonry gives that process a structure, symbolic as it is. It leads the seeker from darkness to light, out of a spiritual winter, toward self-mastery and harmony with divine wisdom. Taking up what our ancient ancestors left us, we prepare for greater light ahead and keep working on the inner temple, a little closer to perfection each time.
So mote it be.
Sincerely & Fraternally,
The Kabbalistic Craftsman
Sources
- Stela of Ikhernofret, Berlin, Ägyptisches Museum 1204 (12th Dynasty, reign of Senusret III). Translations in J. H. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, vol. 1 (1906), subsections 661–670, and M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 1 (1975), 123–125.
- Apuleius, Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass), Book XI, especially 11.23. Latin novel, 2nd century AD.
- Jean Terrasson, Séthos, histoire ou vie tirée des monumens anecdotes de l’ancienne Égypte (Paris, 1731); English translation by Thomas Lediard as The Life of Sethos.
- “Eleusinian Mysteries,” Encyclopædia Britannica.
- M. J. Vermaseren, Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae (CIMRM), 2 vols. (1956–1960). Example of the Sol Invictus Mithras dedication: altar from Poetovio (Ptuj), AD 260–268, CIMRM 1585.
- Floor mosaic, Mithraeum of Felicissimus, Ostia (Regio V, Insula IX, 1), second half of the 3rd century AD; CIMRM 299.
- Origen, Against Celsus (Contra Celsum) 6.22, quoting Celsus (mid-2nd century AD).
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