nts are no more nor
less than exoteric accounts of what was dramatically enacted in
the esoteric recesses of the Mysteries.40 Any person must be
invincibly prejudiced who can doubt that the Greek Hades meant a
capacious subterranean world of shades. Now, to assert, as Bryant
and his disciples do,41 that "Hades means the interior of Noah's
ark," or "the abyss of waters on which the ark floated, as a
coffin bearing the relics of dead Nature," is a purely arbitrary
step taken from undue attachment to a mere theory. Hades means the
under world of the dead, and not the interior of Noah's ark.
Indeed, in the second place, Faber admits that in the Mysteries
"the ark itself was supposed to be in Hades, the vast central
abyss of the earth." But such was not the location of Noah's
vessel and voyage. They were on the face of the flood, above the
tops of the mountains. It is beyond comparison the most reasonable
supposition in itself, and the one best supported by historic
facts, that the representations of a mystic burial and voyage in a
ship or boat shown in the ancient religions were symbolic rites
drawn from imagination and theory as applied to the impressive
phenomena of nature and the lot of man. The Egyptians and some
other early nations, we know, figured the starry worlds in the sky
as ships sailing over a celestial sea. The earth itself was
sometimes emblematized in the same way. Then, too, there was the
sepulchral barge in which the Egyptian corpses were borne over the
Acherusian lake to be entombed. Also the "dark blue punt" in which
Charon ferried souls across the river of death. In these surely
there was no reference to Noah's ark. It seems altogether likely
that what Bryant and his coadjutors have constructed into the
Arkite system of interpretation was really but an emblematic
showing forth of a natural doctrine of human life and death and
future fate. A wavering boat floating on the deep might, with
striking fitness, typify the frail condition of humanity in life,
as when Hercules is depicted sailing over the ocean in a golden
cup; and that boat, safely riding the flood, might also represent
the cheerful faith of the initiate in a future life, bearing him
fearlessly through all dangers and through death to the welcoming
society of Elysium, as when Danae and her babe, tossed over the
tempestuous sea in a fragile chest, were securely wafted to the
sheltering shore of Seriphus. No emblem of our human state and
lot, w