The Centre is only such because one point of the Compasses is put there; and wherever that point is put, thereby becomes the Centre.
If you start in one corner of a square or rectangular room, provided you persist on whichever path you take around the edge -- whether with your left, or your right, hand to the wall -- you will eventually reach the opposite corner.
The grain which sprouts and brings forth fruit does not die at all; there is no discontinuity, no catastrophe; it is only an “uninformed and partial view of facts” that sees one.
H.A.B., on the other hand, died, was buried, and stayed dead and (after a couple of re-interrals) buried.
It is a common mistake of mystics to decry all paths other than the one they are personally following as false and worthless. For them, perhaps they are; but this does not mean they are so for all aspirants.
One might have hoped that the symbol set used in speculative Freemasonry would have served to counter the tendency towards a hylophobic dualism which has plagued esotericist schools and mystical philsophy throughout recorded history; in Wilmshurt's case it patently didn't. Abstract intellectuality with no material on which to work is just as useless as sense data with no thought to process them. In the former case you may have a nice shiny and sharp set of tools but with no materials to work on, you can't build anything; in the latter you're at best limited to dry-stone walling (J.S.M. Ward, in one of his little handbooks on the symbolism of the Craft rituals, suggested that the use of "cowan" as a Masonic out-group term had its origin in a dialect word for a dry stone waller).
I am not actually sure how common the notion is among esotericist interpretations of Masonic ritual which distinguish the "first temple" and "second temple" degrees in terms of the former being concerned with building the "moral" character of the initiate -- the ordinary civic virtues inculcated in the Craft degrees, for instance -- and the latter with his "spiritual" personality; that is to say, I'm pretty sure I didn't make it up, but can't remember where I first came across it. It should be remembered though, that the second temple could only be built after the first had been destroyed -- the woodwork burnt to ash, the gold and silver looted (generally by Kings of Judah who needed to hire mercenaries or bribe invaders to go away), the bronze broken up and not one stone left standing upon another.
Elaborate accounts of rituals of Initiation in the Pyramids in works not clearly marked as fiction raise the obvious question to anyone with the slightest inclination toward scepticism who has not by this point thrown the book across the room in disgust—“and you know all this how?” A Mystery-cult, by definition, keeps its doctrine and ritual secret. The hard evidence for the very existence of anything resembling the Greek mystery-religion paradigm in Egypt prior to the Ptolemaic period (to which period the Mystery-rite of Serapis, and probably those of Isis and Osiris as worked in the Græco-Roman world, owe their origin) is, to say the least, minimal. Those Mystery-cults whose existence is well-attested from contemporary references—at Eleusis, Samothrace, &c.—for the most part did such a good job of keeping their secrets that by the nineteenth century C.E. (long before, actually) it was open for any imposter to assert, or darkly hint, without fear of refutation, that their ‘real’ teaching was . . . whatever s/he wanted it to have been
[Most of the above remarks were originally written as footnotes to an edition of The Meaning of Masonry by W. L. Wilmshurst which I had planned to issue on the Celephaïs Press imprint; however the book annoyed me so much that I gave up on it a short way into the fifth chapter. Apparently a lodge under Wilmshurst's influence (founded by him, rather) is still operating in Leeds 6.]
