48. The Temple Legend

At the beginning of the earth's development, one of the light spirits or Elohim descended from the solar realm into the earthly realm and joined with Eve, the primal mother of the living. From this union was born Cain, the first of the earth humans. Then another of the Elohim, Yahweh or Jehovah, formed the Adam; and from the union of Adam with Eve arose Abel, Cain's stepbrother. The disparity of descent between Cain and Abel (sexual and asexual descent) caused a quarrel between Cain and Abel. And Cain slew Abel. Abel had lost his connection to the spiritual world through sexual descent; Cain had lost it through the moral fall. Jehovah gave the replacement son Seth to Abel's parents. Two types of people descend from Cain and Seth. The descendants of Seth were able to see into the spiritual world in special (dream-like) states of consciousness. The descendants of Cain had lost this ability altogether. They had to work their way up through the generations by gradually developing the human powers of the earth to regain their spiritual abilities.

One of the descendants of Abel-Seth was the wise Solomon. He had inherited the gift of dream-like clairvoyance; indeed, he had inherited it to a particular degree, so that his wisdom was so widely known that it is symbolically reported of him that he sat on a throne of gold and ivory (gold and ivory are symbols of wisdom).

From the Cain race came men who, in the course of time, became more and more concerned with the upward development of human powers on earth. One of these men was Lamech, the keeper of the T-books, in which, as far as was possible for earthly powers, the original wisdom was restored, so that these books are incomprehensible to uninitiated people. Another descendant of Cain's race was Tubal-Cain, who made great advances in the working of metals, and even understood how to fashion musical instruments from them. And as a contemporary of Solomon, Hiram Abiff or Adoniram, a descendant of Cain, had reached such a level of skill in his art that it bordered directly on the vision of the higher worlds, with only a thin wall still to be broken through for him to achieve initiation.

The wise Solomon conceived the plan of a temple, the formal parts of which were to symbolize the development of mankind. Through his wisdom of dreams he was able to conceive the thoughts of this temple in every detail; but he lacked the knowledge of the earth forces for the actual construction, which could only be gained through the training of the earth forces in the Cain race. Therefore Solomon connected himself with Hiram Abiff. He now built the Temple, which was a symbolic expression of the development of mankind.

Solomon's fame had reached as far as the Queen of Sheba, Balkis. One day she went to the court of Solomon to marry him. She was shown all the glories of Solomon's court, including the mighty temple. From the ideas she had gained so far, she could not understand how a master builder who had only human powers at his disposal could have achieved something like this. She had only learned that the leaders of workers, through the possession of atavistic magical powers, were able to gather sufficient crowds of workers to erect the old, mighty buildings. She demanded to see the master builder, who seemed strange and remarkable to her. When he met her, his eye immediately made a deeply significant impression on her. Then he should show her how he leads the workers by mere human agreement. He took his hammer, climbed a hill, and at a sign with the hammer, large crowds of workers rushed to his side. The Queen of Sheba realized that human powers on earth can develop to such significance.

Soon afterward, the queen and her nurse (the nurse is symbolic of a prophetic person) were walking outside the city gates. They encountered Hiram Abiff. At the moment the two women saw the master builder, the bird Had-Had flew out of the air onto the arm of the Queen of Sheba.

The prophetic nurse interpreted this to mean that the Queen of Sheba was not destined for Solomon, but for Hiram Abiff. From that moment on, the queen thought only of how she could break off her engagement to Solomon. It is further related that now, “in her intoxication,” the engagement “ring” was pulled from the king's finger, so that the queen could now consider herself the bride destined for Hiram Abiff. (The significance of this feature of the legend is based on the fact that the Queen of Sheba is seen as the “ancient wisdom of the stars”, which until that epoch was connected with the ancient atavistic powers of the soul, symbolized in Solomon. Occult legends express this in the symbolism of female figures representing wisdom, which can marry with the male part of the soul. The time of Solomon marks the beginning of the epoch in which this wisdom is to pass over from the atavistic old powers to the newly acquired ego powers on earth. The “ring” is always the symbol for the “ego”. Solomon is still thought of as having a not fully human ego, but one that is only a reflection of the “higher ego” of the angels in the atavistic dream-clairvoyant consciousness. The “intoxication” indicates that this ego is lost again within the semi-conscious soul forces through which it was acquired. Hiram is only in possession of a real human “I”).

From this point on, King Solomon is seized by a violent jealousy against his master builder. Therefore, three treacherous companions have no difficulty in finding the ear of the king for an act by which they want to destroy Hiram Abiff. They are his opponents because they had to be rejected by him when they demanded the master's degree and the master's word, for which they are not ready.

These three treacherous companions now decide to corrupt the work of Hiram Abiff, which he is to accomplish as the crowning achievement of his work at the court of Solomon. This is the casting of the “Brazen Sea”. This is an artificial casting made from the seven basic metals (lead, copper, tin, mercury, iron, silver, gold) in such proportions that it is completely transparent. The matter was finished, except for one very last impact, which was to be made before the assembled court – also before the Queen of Sheba – and by which [it] should transform the still cloudy substance to complete clarity. Now the three treacherous journeymen mixed something wrong into the casting, so that, instead of it clearing, sparks of fire sprayed out of it. Hiram Abiff tried to calm the fire with water. This did not succeed, but the flames leapt in all directions. The assembled people scattered in all directions. But Hiram Abiff heard a voice from the flames and the glowing mass: “Plunge into the sea of fire; you are invulnerable”. He plunged into the flames and soon realized that his path was leading him to the center of the earth. Halfway there, he met his ancestor Tubalkain. The latter led him to the center of the earth, where the great ancestor Cain was, in the state he was in before the sin. Here Hiram Abiff received from Cain the explanation that the vigorous development of human powers on earth would ultimately lead to the height of initiation, and that the initiation attained in this way would have to take the place of the vision of the Abel-Seth sons in the course of the earth, which would disappear. Symbolically, the power of bestowing the Mother, which Hiram Abiff receives from Cain, is expressed by the statement that Hiram received a new hammer from Cain, with which he returned to the earth's surface, touched the Sea of Bronze, and thereby was able to make it completely transparent. (This symbolism is given by that which, in proper meditation, elevates to imagination the inner essence of human development on earth. The Iron Age can be seen as a symbol of what man would have become if the three treacherous forces in the soul had not taken hold: doubt, superstition, and the illusion of the personal self. Through these forces, the development of humanity on Earth has come to a fiery unfolding in the Lemurian period, which cannot be dampened by the watery development of the Atlantean period. Rather, such a development of the human powers on earth must take place that the original state of the soul, as it was in Cain before the fratricide, is restored. The dream-like soul powers of the children of Abel-Seth cannot prevail against the powers of the earth, but only the descendants of Cain, who have come to full real ego development.