The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found (14 page)

According to Masonic legend, Hiram
entered the temple through the twin pillars of Jachin and
Boaz.

Let me pause.

Mathew, the following is what is known
as a Masonic tracing board. It is used to teach the uninitiated
simple Freemason allegories.

But I think you know already that
there is more here than allegory. You saw these pillars in the
Rosicrucian temple, did you not? More importantly, you saw them in
your dream. You asked me to help you interpret the symbols of your
dream. Yes, obviously you dreamed of the pillars after your
experience in the temple, but you dreamed also of the obelisk.
Mathew, you are tapping, more than any of us, into the collective
unconscious that is shrouded in myth, Masonic myth, and its
symbols. This is not typical. You are in possession of some truly
remarkable gifts. But let me continue with myth.

The pillars represent the male and
female – relevant to the inner secret of the inner sanctum. Inside
the holy of holies was the presence of God, or more specifically
the female aspect of God present on earth that the Jews called
Shekinah. This inner sanctum, the holy of the holies was the site
for communion with the high priest. The secret of this communion
was the secret Hiram would not divulge when he was confronted by
three fellow craftsmen envious of the secret or the secret word. In
rage they each in turn struck him with a mason tool used in the
building of the temple.

Hiram died and was buried under a
sprig of acacia. Remember, so too was Osiris. And like Osiris they
found the acacia and learned of his internment and raised him from
the dead. Have a look at the next tracing board.

What is the secret Hiram would not
divulge?

It is the secret that was destroyed
when the Romans destroyed the holy of holies and the temple along
with it. It is the secret pursued by arcane cabals like the Knights
Templars who excavated the ruined temple and discovered the
mysterious idol Baphomet. It is a secret that became known as The
Holy Grail. You can only comprehend all this as an initiated
Freemason.

Mathew, I am a Freemason and I took an
oath not to divulge the secrets of my secret society. But my
studies have led me to conclude that we are but a shell. We are
just a common interest group. A group of men with silly rituals
that preach rather pedestrian morality. We are merely a society
with secrets, not a secret society.

I cannot initiate new members into the
institution I have become disillusioned with, but I can initiate
new members into the ancient order that predates the modern
society. And in all my years as a Freemason and as a psychologist,
I have never met someone who was more ready to be truly initiated,
to truly understand the mysteries – perhaps even more than I. Your
dreams are closing the gap between the divine and the mundane, the
conscious and the collective unconscious. You as an initiate and me
as your guide are on the verge of discovering what the institution
has lost. If you let me plan your next ritual, you will be putting
your dream into ritual, but you will also learn the secrets of the
lost brotherhood of the Freemasonry.

Become a Freemason – you dreamed it –
put dream into action… into ritual!

Your friend,

Dr. Mike Anderson

Rites at the Blue
Rock

By Mathew Hope

We caught stares as the six of us
filed past the coin operated video porn. “From the profane to the
divine,” Dr. Mike said, gesturing to the group screaming and
shouting at the cock fight. We had to pass through this discothèque
in the town of Caldera to arrive at the cattle pasture, our
destination. We disappeared out the back, past urinating drunks,
and slipped through the barbed wire to an open field in search of
our next sacred temple for rituals. It seems Dr. Mike always
chooses places that invoke fear. This time fear’s name was a black
bull staring at us silently as we marched to the far end of the
field.

I kept my flashlight to the ground.
Creeping vines caught my eye in the light and I constantly thought
I was seeing snakes. I hadn’t noticed that María was walking beside
me without a flashlight. She was carrying a black garbage bag and
staring at the night sky.

None of us could see the Elephant
Stone engraved with pre-Columbian hieroglyphs, so we spread out
like a search party and kept walking. We searched for twenty
minutes before we reconvened, and Dr. Mike decided he wanted to
open the sacred circle. María protested and said that the rock was
essential to her ritual. We compromised by starting my ritual
first. Later, we would continue the search for the Elephant
Stone.

Before Dr. Mike opened the sacred
circle, María said she had a surprise for us. She asked everyone to
gather around her, and then she reached into the garbage
bag.

“
Gifts,” she said, and
handed a colorful robe to each of us. These were the robes she
stole from the Rosicrucian Temple in David. She seemed to have
chosen specific colors for us. Mine was purple. “The color of
Easter,” she told me. Then we formed a circle and Dr. Mike drew the
sacred pentagram in the air with his hand and prayed to the five
elements. “To earth,” he said, “and the philosopher’s stone, to sky
and the crescent moon of Isis, to fire and the sword, Excalibur, to
wind and the crown of the king.” This was the first time I heard
him cleverly combine the elements with the symbols we had chosen to
draw on our hands for lucid dreaming. They seemed to fit perfectly.
The coincidence, I know Dr. Mike would say, was not a coincidence,
but the will of our collective unconscious.

Dr. Mike had secretly rehearsed my
ritual with everyone the day before, so that everything would be a
surprise for me.

“
Brothers and sisters,” he
shouted into the air, “this sublime degree has been calculated to
bind us together by mystic points of fellowship. It points to the
darkness of death and to the obscurity of the grave. It is a
forerunner of a more brilliant light, which shall follow at the
resurrection, when these mortal bodies shall be awakened and
clothed with immortality.”

Usnavy stood in front of me in her
yellow robe. She held up a strip of cloth and blindfolded
me.

“
Matthew Bernard Hope, you
are Hiram. You are the Osiris in the Temple of Solomon, here to pay
your respects to the Holy Goddess Isis.” His volume and tone then
drastically changed. He shouted ominously, “But three fellow
craftsmen barred the south, west and east entrances to the holy of
holies, the shrine of the Holy Grail. At the first entrance you met
your first assailant.”

At this point Steve put his hand on my
shoulder and whispered in a poor attempt at sounding intimidating.
“What is the sacred word of the resurrection?”

I stuttered a moment. In my dream I
had said nothing, so now in the ritual I assumed that I should do
the same.

“
Hiram refused to divulge
the sacred word, and his refusal was met with a sharp blow to the
head with a plumb rule.”

Someone tapped me in the middle of the
forehead. I almost snickered. I tried to remember my dream. But
standing in the middle of a cattle pasture, knowing everyone was
watching me, made it hard for me to get back into the ambiance, the
feeling of my dream.

It must have been Steve who pushed
hard on my shoulder, and someone else who gently tapped me behind
my right leg, indicating that I should go down on one
knee.

“
Faint and bleeding he ran
to the east gate where he met his second assailant, who struck him
with a level.” Okay, whoever hit me next, I wish I knew who it was,
because it was hard and made me snap out of any kind of vibe I was
experiencing going back into my dream.

“
Hiram lay lifeless on the
ground.” Two people now eased me onto my back. I understood now
that I just had to passively allow myself to be handled like a
puppet. They covered me with a sheet and pulled my right hand out
from under it. Someone, a girl I think, maybe María, took my hand
but then let it slide through hers and drop to the
ground.

“
The entered apprentice
grip seems to slip,” Dr. Mike shouted, sounding as though this was
nearing a climax.

I was on the ground for a bit. I think
I was supposed to be contemplating my afterlife. I remembered the
blue bus from my dream and wondered why that was a reappearing
motif. Dr. Mike mentioned nothing of this in the dream analysis he
emailed me. The blue bus couldn’t really be an archetype from the
collective unconscious, could it?

Then María grabbed my hand again and
jerked me up to my feet.

“
The Lion’s Grip,” Dr. Mike
cried, signaling my resurrection and the end of the
ritual.

My blindfold was removed, and everyone
around me clapped. I was grateful. It was an earnest attempt, but
now it seemed like I was the only one that didn’t have this kind of
mystical experience where I connected with my unconscious by acting
out my dream. For me, the lucid dream felt even more real, more
vivid, than this rehearsed ritual.

I was a Freemason now, I guess, and I
felt Dr. Mike searching my face for something. I would answer his
questions later, but the truth was that I felt nothing. The mood
crashed right after. Maybe because of my reaction, I don’t know.
Without The Elephant Stone we were left with nothing to do. Dr.
Mike attempted to salvage the night.

He arranged for us to lie in a circle
with each of our heads resting on the stomach of the person next to
us. So each of us rested our heads on a stomach and each of us had
a head on our stomach. Then we just waited for Steve to say
something.

“
Let’s tape a piece of
buttered bread to Rocky’s back, butter side up. And then let’s see
what happens, butter down or Rocky’s feet.”

It started with snickers, but when you
have a bobbing, snorting head on your stomach. you can’t help but
laugh. We all erupted. I wondered what my Roman Catholic mother
would have thought, seeing me in a robe, participating in a pagan
ritual and then laughing like a madman.

Steve stood up all of a sudden because
he had rolled onto a cow pie. Then he made a discovery.
“Mushrooms!” he shouted. “I know these. For sure they are magic
mushrooms.”

Despite Dr. Mike’s elder voice of
reason, Steve popped a little blue capped mushroom into his mouth,
offering himself up as the sacrificial guinea pig. Five minutes
later he assured us that he knew these mushrooms, and Dr. Mike
couldn’t stop the others from going to town. In the end, he ate
some, too.

We lied out there in the field, and
for a moment I got lost staring at the sky before I realized that
María was lying beside me. I wasn’t tripping yet. My stomach hurt,
like the mushrooms decided to kick me in the gut before opening up
out the top of my head.

“
They are so amazing,” she
said to whoever was listening.

“
What?” I asked.

“
The mountains,” she
responded, but she said it a kind of detached melancholy. Not like
the awe she expressed when we laid on the beach in Bocas and stared
at the rising moon. She rolled over and turned toward the
mountains. But it was too dark to actually see them -- just the
jagged edges where the star lit sky ended and darkness began, as if
earth’s dark fangs were taking a bite out of the
constellations.

“
It’s beautiful,” Maria
said. “These mountains were once one -- until great forces ripped
them apart. There is great power when standing between two forces
that were once one. Out here we are stone immaculate.”

There seemed to be a hazy film over
everything. I became acutely aware of my own face -- it felt like
there were a thousand needles jutting out the pores of my skin. My
face was hot, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Colored
robes flashed as if we were illuminated by a great strobe
light.

Dr. Mike, never missing an opportunity
to lecture, broke the moment of silence. “We are opening the gates.
The collective unconscious is rising uncensored. It’s like our
dreams. When we take psilocybin, repressed images from deep within
us, images that we all share, bubble forth. And the doors of
perception are cleansed as we see everything as it is --
infinite.”

I was really tripping now. As I lay
staring at the stars I felt as if the earth moved. Then I heard
Usnavy. “Oh my god!” she shouted and pointed toward a light in the
distance.

What I saw can only be described as a
blue light shooting up from the ground around a massive rock. We
all stood up and slowly walked toward it. When we got closer we
were all struck silent in awe. It was the Elephant Stone, lit by
some mysterious light emanating from underneath. The hieroglyphs on
the sides were strange two dimensional carvings of the faces of the
gods. A round radiating face smiled at us from one, and from
another a tear dropped from a face of pure despair. The carvings
were filled in with white chalk that seemed to glow under the blue
light pouring from under the stone.

Suddenly María appeared, naked, on top
of the rock. I felt something tugging at me in my memory. It was a
strong sense of déjà vu. She stood before us and lifted her hands
into the air. Then I remembered my dream… more than remembered… I
was in my dream. She held out her hands like she was welcoming the
wind and I couldn’t breathe.