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Eleanor C Merry – The Flaming Door

The very form of the Egyptian Pyramids, for example, as Temples of initiation, suggests esoterically, the idea of humanity, as a physical, psychic, and spiritual Being, its apex, or " origin ", in the heavens, spreading downwards from the world of Spirit to cover the Earth.

But the interior of the great Pyramid was a ' house of death ", where the spiritual re-birth of initiation could take place, and whence man could go out from the physical body in the death-trance of initiation and return, in a higher consciousness, to the place of his origin-that is, to a vision of the spiritual world.

The word "pyramid" itself is derived from Egyptian words meaning (in their full interpretation) "a going out of the Temple of the body to Heaven"- or " a going out by day ". This can be understood in two ways; what the initiated man experienced in going out of the body "by day"-that is, while still living-was the same in essence as what the dead experienced, who "went out" not by day, but from the day (or "by night"); namely, from life to death.

So in the greatest stone monument of the whole world we have a picture, seen from the external aspect of its form, of the Cosmic Man descending from heaven; and from its internal aspect, as a Temple of initiation and House of Death - it tells us of man, as a human being on the Earth, placed during the initiatory rites into the darkness and narrow enclosure of a tomb, dying to the earthly consciousness, and becoming once more, through this mystical death, fully conscious of his spiritual origin. To be "initiated" means, in more senses than one, to "know the beginnings".