A friend of mine is a Mason. He’s in general pretty tight-lipped about it all, and I try to respect that. But the other day, we’d got to talking and I related to him a dream I had over a year ago. The one where I saw the double-headed eagle, and then met all these priests and holy men from all over the world, who showed me tapestries and scrolls and legends of the animal. He’s a pretty low-level Mason, but his ears perked up because the double-headed (bicephalous) eagle is a Masonic symbol (among many other uses). He said though that it’s one of the symbols that you don’t really explore till higher up in their initiation system. He seemed pretty surprised I had dreamt about it though, and made some vague references to my dream as being “accurate” in some way, because of all the priests. And he said something like, “How in hell did you see all that?”

Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking about esoteric secrets and symbols. In certain spiritual traditions (including Masonry), you have what are called inner and outer mysteries - or esoteric and exoteric.

“Each Mystery tradition had exoteric Outer Mysteries, consisting of myths which were common knowledge and rituals which were open to anyone who wanted to participate. There were also esoteric Inner Mysteries, which were a sacred secret known only to those who had undergone a powerful process of initiation. Initiates of the Inner Mysteries had the mystical meaning of the rituals and myths of the Outer Mysteries revealed to them, a process which brought about personal transformation and spiritual enlightenment.”

I’d always thought of this as more of a conscious process. Like you have secret occult groups who jealously guard certain sets of wisdom, etc. And while this may be so in some cases, I feel like it’s probably just a natural extension of how knowledge works. Like nobody actually keeps shit secret. You’re either just ready for it, or you’re not.

An easy example of this is computer programming jargon. Take this passage of computer-ese:

Sterling Hughes was given a lecture on PHP Internals where he mentioned that, using the new filters in Apache 2, you could run a PHP script, send the output to TCL, and finally parse the end result with Perl.

In this sentence, I know the meaning of all this words. Okay, except TCL. But at the same time, the overall meaning of it escapes me. And it’s not because anybody’s trying to keep this information secret. It’s just because I’m not immersed enough in the field to understand why these cultural signals are grouped together - even though they’re all recognizable to me.

And this is just a relatively easy-to-digest bit of technical writing. If we hop back into the occult, we’re faced with an even more interesting problem. We aren’t just using cultural signs with fixed meanings (things like acronyms) - we’re using psychological symbols which actually thrive on having complex, mutable and paradoxical meanings. Double-headed eagles and holy men. Shit like that…