THE BUILDER JUNE 1916

SOME DEEPER ASPECTS OF MASONIC SYMBOLISM
BY BRO. ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE, ENGLAND

PART III

RECURRING to the Legend of the Third Degree, the pivot upon which
it revolves is the existence of a building secret, represented as
a Master-Word, which the Builder died to preserve. Owing to his
untimely death, the Word was lost, and it has always been
recognized in Masonry that the Temple, unfinished at the moment of
the untoward event, remained with its operations suspended and was
completed later on by those who obviously did not possess the Word
or key. The tradition has descended to us and, as I have said, we
are still on the quest.

Now what does all this mean? We have no concern at the present day,
except in archaeology and history, with King Solomon's Temple. What
is meant by this Temple and what is the Lost Word ? These things
have a meaning, or our system is stultified. Well, here are burning
questions, and the only direction in which we can look for an
answer is that which is their source. As to this, we must remember
that the Legend of the Master Degree is a Legend of Israel, under
the aegis of the Old Covenant, and though it has no warrants in the
Holy Writ which constitutes the Old Testament, it is not
antecedently improbable that something to our purpose may be found
elsewhere in the literature of Jewry.

THE KABALAH

I do not of course mean that we shall meet with the Legend itself;
it would be interesting if we did but not per se helpful, apart
from explanation. I believe in my heart that I have found what is
much more important, and this is the root-matter of that which is
shadowed forth in the Legend, as regards the meaning of the Temple
and the search for the Lost Word. There are certain great texts
which are known to scholars under the generic name of Kabalah, a
Hebrew word meaning reception, or doctrinal teaching passed on from
one to another by verbal communication. According to its own
hypothesis, it entered into written records during the Christian
era, but hostile criticism has been disposed to represent it as
invented at the period when it was written. The question does not
signify for our purpose, as the closing of the 13th century is the
latest date that the most drastic view-- now generally abandoned--
has proposed for the most important text.

We find therein after what manner, according to mystic Israel,
Solomon's Temple was spiritualized; we find deep meanings attached
to the two pillars J. and B.; we find how the word was lost and
under what circumstances the chosen people were to look for its
recovery. It is an expectation for Jewish theosophy, as it is for
the Craft Mason. It was lost owing to an untoward event, and
although the time and circumstances of its recovery have been
calculated in certain texts of the Kabalah, there has been
something wrong with the methods. The keepers of the tradition died
with their faces toward Jerusalem, looking for that time; but for
Jewry at large the question has passed from the field of view, much
as the quest is continued by us in virtue of a ceremonial formula
but cannot be said to mean anything for those who undertake and
pursue it. It was lost owing to the unworthiness of Israel, and the
destruction of the First Temple was one consequence thereof. By the
waters of Babylon, in their exile, the Jews are said to have
remembered Zion, but the word did not come back into their hearts;
and when Divine Providence inspired Cyrus to bring about the
building of the Second Temple and the return of Israel into their
own land, they went back empty of all recollection in this respect.

THE DIVINE NAME

I am putting things in a summary fashion that are scattered up and
down the vast text with which I am dealing--that is to say, Sepher
Ha Zohar, The Book of Splendor. The word to which reference is made
is the Divine Name out of the consonants of which, He, Vau, He,
Yod, we have formed Jehovah, or more accurately Yahve. When Israel
fell into a state which is termed impenitence it is said in the
Zoharic Symbolism that the Vau and the He final were separated. The
name was dismembered, and this is the first sense of loss which is
registered concerning it. The second is that it has no proper vowel
points, those of the Name Elohim being substituted, or
alternatively the Name Adonai. It is said, for example: "My Name is
written YHVH and read Adonai." The epoch of restoration and
completion is called, almost indifferently, that of resurrection,
the world to come, and the advent of the Messiah. In such day the
present imperfect separation between the letters will be put an end
to, once and forever. If it be asked: What is the connection
between the loss and dismemberment which befell the Divine Name
Jehovah and the Lost Word in Masonry, I cannot answer too plainly;
but every Royal Arch Mason knows that which is communicated to him
in that Supreme Degree, and in the light of the present explanation
he will see that the "great" and "incomprehensible" thing so
imparted comes to him from the Secret Tradition of Israel.

It is also to this Kabalistic source, rather than to the variant
accounts in the first book of Kings and in Chronicles, that we must
have recourse for the important Masonic Symbolism concerning the
Pillars J. and B. There is very little in Holy Scripture which
would justify a choice of these objects as particular
representatives of our art of building spiritualized. But in later
Kabalism, in the texts called "The Garden of Pomegranates" and in
"The Gates of Light," there is a very full and complicated
explanation of the strength which is attributed to B., the
left-hand Pillar, and of that which is established in and by the
right-hand Pillar, called J.

THE TEMPLE

As regards the Temple itself, I have explained at length elsewhere
after what manner it is spiritualized in various Kabalistic and
semi-Kabalistic texts, so that it appears ever as "the proportion
of the height, the proportion of the depth, and the lateral
proportions" of the created universe, and again as a part of the
transcendental mystery of law which is at the root of the secret
tradition in Israel. This is outside our subject, not indeed by its
nature but owing to limitations of opportunity. I will say only
that it offers another aspect of a fatal loss in Israel and the
world--which is commented on in the tradition. That which the
Temple symbolized above all things was, however, a House of
Doctrine, and as on the one hand the Zohar shows us how a loss and
substitution were perpetuated through centuries, owing to the
idolatry of Israel at the foot of Mount Horeb in the wilderness of
Sinai, and illustrated by the breaking of the Tables of Stone on
which the Law was inscribed; so does Speculative Masonry intimate
that the Holy House, which was planned and begun after one manner,
was completed after another and a word of death was substituted for
a word of life.

THE BUILDER

I shall not need to tell you that beneath such veils of allegory
and amidst such illustrations of symbolism, the Master-Builder
signifies a principle and not a person, historical or otherwise. He
signifies indeed more than a single principle, for in the world of
mystic intimations through which we are now moving, the question,
"Who is the Master ?" would be answered by many voices. But
generically, he is the imputed life of the Secret-Doctrine which
lay beyond the letter of the Written Law, which "the stiff-necked
and disobedient" of the patriarchal, sacerdotal and prophetical
dispensations contrived to destroy. According to the Secret
Tradition of Israel, the whole creation was established for the
manifestation of this life, which became manifested actually in its
dual aspect when the spiritual Eve was drawn from the side of the
spiritual Adam and placed over against him, in the condition of
face o face. The intent of creation was made void in the event
which is called the Fall of Man, though the particular expression
is unknown in Scripture. By the hypothesis, the "fatal
consequences" which followed would have reached their time on Mount
Sinai, but the Israelites, when left to themselves in the
wilderness, "sat down to eat and rose up to play." That which is
concealed in the evasion of the last words corresponds the state of
Eve in Paradise, when she had become affected by the serpent.

To sum up as regards the sources, the Lost Word in Masonry is
derived from a Kabalistic thesis of imperfection in the Divine Name
Jehovah, by which the true pronunciation--that is to say, the true
meaning-- is lost. It was the life of the House of Doctrine,
represented by the Temple planned of old in Israel. The
Master-Builder is the Spirit, Secret or Life of the Doctrine; and
it is the quest of this that every Mason takes upon himself in the
ceremony of the Third Degree, so that the House, which in the words
of another Masonic Degree, is now, for want of territory, built
only in the heart, "a superstructure perfect in its parts and
honorable to the builder."

CRAFT MASONRY

But if these are the sources of Craft Masonry, taken at its
culmination in the Sublime Degree, what manner of people were those
who grafted so strange a speculation and symbolism on the Operative
procedure of a building-Guild? The answer is that all about that
period which represents what is called the transition, or during
the 16th and 17th centuries, the Latin writing scholars were
animated with zeal for the exposition of the tradition in Israel,
with the result that many memorable and even great books were
produced on the subject. Among those scholars were many great
names, and they provided the materials ready to the hands of the
symbolists. What purpose had the latter in view ? The answer is
that in Germany, Italy, France and England, the Zeal for Kabalistic
literature among the Latin-writing scholars had not merely a
scholastic basis. They believed that the texts of the Secret
Tradition showed plainly, out of the mouth of Israel itself, that
the Messiah had come. This is the first fact. The second I have
mentioned already, namely, that although the central event of the
Third Degree is the Candidate's Raising, it is not said in the
Legend that the Master-Builder rose, thus suggesting that something
remains to come after, which might at once complete the legend and
conclude the quest. The third fact is that in a rather early and
important High Degree of the philosophical kind, now almost
unknown, the Master-Builder of the Third Degree rises as Christ,
and so completes the dismembered Divine Name, by insertion of the
Hebrew letter Shin, this producing Yeheshua--the restoration of the
Lost Word in the Christian Degrees of Masonry.

Of course, I am putting this point only as a question of fact in
the development of symbolism. Meanwhile, I trust that, amidst many
imperfections, I have done something to indicate a new ground for
our consideration, and to show that the speaking mystery of the
Opening and Closing of the Third Degree and the Legend of the
Master-Builder come from what may seem to us very far away, but yet
not so distant that it is impossible to trace them to their source.


THE HOLY EARTH

There is something beyond the philosophies in the light, in the
grass blades, the leaf, the sparrow on the wall. Some day the great
and beautiful thought which hovers on the confines of the mind will
at last alight. In that hope is consolation. 

--Richard Jefferies.

