No Longer Divided

Why can a regularly initiated Mason spend a whole life in front of the symbols of his lodge and receive none of them? Not for want of merit or of intelligence, and not because the rite has failed either: where the chain was not broken, the deposit is intact. What is missing is someone to open it.

This book does not explain the symbols. It does something harder and more necessary: it repairs the instrument with which they are read. We are living through a crisis of language, in which words go on existing but have stopped meaning, and a crisis of initiation, in which the rites remain in use but scarcely transmit any longer. They are not two crises but one, and the road back runs through the Trivium, through the frontier between the psyche and the spirit, and through the temple read whole.

It is written from within, by a Mason, and it names what is broken without stepping outside the Order or asking the reader for anything he cannot verify.

This book initiates no one. It would rather be the contrary: not a substitute for the door, but the reason to look for it.