Mystic Masonry or The Symbols of Freemasonry and the Greater Mysteries of Antiquity

Is Masonic ritual the inheritance of a builders' guild, or the last surviving fragment of the sacred rites of the ancient world? J. D. Buck's Mystic Masonry argues in earnest for the second.Jirah Dewey Buck (1838-1916) was a Cincinnati homeopath and dean of the Pulte Medical College, and one of the most influential American Theosophists of his generation: he founded the Cincinnati branch in 1886 and chaired the meeting that established the American Section of the Theosophical Society. He was also a thirty-third-degree Mason. First published in 1897, Mystic Masonry reads the Masonic degrees through the teaching set out by Helena Blavatsky and the older esoteric currents she drew on.Buck begins with education and ethics, moves to what he calls the genius of Freemasonry, and then to the doctrine itself - the relation of science and religion, the sevenfold nature of man, the sign of the master - before closing with an outline of symbolism. Written from inside both traditions and argued with real conviction, it became one of the founding statements of the esoteric reading of Masonry, and it is still passed between readers drawn to the mystical side of the order.This edition features:The complete text of Buck's 1897 study of Masonic symbolism and the ancient mystery ritesSections on the ethics of the order, the genius of Freemasonry, and science and religionHis Theosophical reading of the degrees, drawing on Blavatsky and the wisdom-religionThe original plates on the descent of spirit, the trinities and the tetraktysA key document in the esoteric interpretation of Masonic ritual for readers of Western mysticism