The legend has been considered of so much importance that it has been preserved in the symbolism of every masonic rite. No matter what modifications or alterations the general system may have undergone,--no matter how much the ingenuity or the imagination of the founders of rites may have perverted or corrupted other symbols, abolishing the old and substituting new ones,--the legend of the Temple Builder has ever been left untouched, to present itself in all the integrity of its ancient mythical form. What, then, is the signification of this symbol, so important and so extensively diffused? What interpretation can we give to it that will account for its universal adoption? How is it that it has thus become so intimately interwoven with Freemasonry as to make, to all appearances, a part of its very essence, and to have been always deemed inseparable from it? To answer these questions, satisfactorily, it is necessary to trace, in a brief investigation, the remote origin of the institution of Freemasonry, and its connection with the ancient systems of initiation. It was, then, the great object of all the rites and mysteries which constituted the "Spurious Freemasonry" of antiquity to teach the consoling doctrine of the immortality of the soul.[159] This dogma, shining as an almost solitary beacon-light in the surrounding gloom of pagan darkness, had undoubtedly been received from that ancient people or priesthood[160] what has been called the system of "Pure Freemasonry," and among whom it probably existed only in the form of an abstract proposition or a simple and unembellished tradition. But in the more sensual minds of the pagan philosophers and mystics, the idea, when presented to the initiates in their Mysteries, was always conveyed in the form of a scenic representation.[161] The influence, too, of the early Sabian worship of the sun and heavenly bodies, in which the solar orb was adored, on its resurrection, each morning, from the apparent death of its evening setting, caused this rising sun to be adopted in the more ancient Mysteries as a symbol of the regeneration of the soul. Thus in the Egyptian Mysteries we find a representation of the death and subsequent regeneration of Osiris; in the Phœnician, of Adonis; in the Syrian, of Dionysus; in all of which the scenic apparatus of initiation was intended to indoctrinate the candidate into the dogma of a future life. It will be sufficient here to refer simply to the fact, that through the instrumentality of the Tyrian workmen at the temple of King Solomon, the spurious and pure branches of the masonic system were united at Jerusalem, and that the same method of scenic representation was adopted by the latter from the former, and the narrative of the temple builder substituted for that of Dionysus, which was the myth peculiar to the mysteries practised by the Tyrian workmen.