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The Great Initiates – Edouard Schuré

Nevertheless he was admitted only to the threshold. Long years of study and apprenticeship began. Before rising to Isis Uranus, he had to know terrestrial Isis, had to learn the physical sciences.

His time was divided between meditations in his cell, the study of hieroglyphics in the halls and courts of the temple, as large as a city and in lessons from his teachers. He learned the science of minerals and plants, the history of humankind and peoples, medicine, architecture and sacred music. In this long apprenticeship he had not only to know, but to become. He had to acquire strength through renunciation. The ancient wise people believed that human beings possess truth only if it becomes a part of their innermost being, a spontaneous deed of the soul.

But in this intense work of assimilation, the pupil was left to himself. His teachers did not help him in anything, and often he was amazed at their coldness and their indifference. He was carefully supervised, he was subjected to inflexible rules, absolute obedience was required of him, but nothing was revealed to him beyond certain limits. His uncertainties and his questions were answered by "'Wait and work." Then, sudden revolts, bitter regrets and horrible suspicions surged up in him. Had he become the slave of bold impostors or black magicians who were subjugating his will to an infamous purpose? Truth was fleeing, the gods were abandoning him, he was done, a prisoner of the temple.

Truth appeared to him in the form of a sphinx. The sphinx said to him, "I am Doubt!" And the winged beast, with its head of an impassive woman and its lions paw, carried him away to tear him apart in the burning desert sand.

But hours of calm and divine forbearance followed these nightmares. Then he understood the symbolic meaning of the trials he had gone through upon entering the temple. For, alas! The dark well into which he had almost fallen was less dark than the abyss of unfathomable truth; the fire he had passed through was less to be feared than the passions that still burned his flesh; the black, freezing water into which he had to plunge was less cold than the doubt into which his mind sank and became engulfed in his evil moments.

In one of the halls of the temple, arranged in two rows, were those same sacred paintings that had been explained to him in the crypt during the night of ordeals, and that represented the twenty-two arcana. These arcana, which could be partly seen as the threshold of esoteric science, were the very pillars of theology, but it was necessary to have gone through the entire initiation in order to understand them. Since then none of the leaders had spoken to him of them again. He was allowed only to walk in this room and meditate upon the signs. He spent long, solitary hours there. Through these figures, pure as light, serious as Eternity invisible and impalpable truth slowly entered the heart of the neophyte. In the silent society of these quiet, nameless divinities, each of which seemed to preside over a sphere of life, he began to feel something new: First, a descent into the depths of his being, then a sort of detachment from the world, which made him soar above things.

Sometimes he asked one of the Magi, "One day will I be allowed to smell the rose of Isis, to see the light of Osiris?" He was told, "That does not depend upon us; truth is not given. Either one finds it in oneself, or one does not find it.  We cannot make an adept of you; you must become one yourself.  The lotus grows under the river a long time before it blossoms. Do not rush the blossoming of the divine flower! If it is to come, it will appear in its own time. Work and pray!"

And the disciple returned to his studies and to his meditation with a quiet joy.