THE EGYPTIAN INFLUENCE ON OUR MASONIC CEREMONIAL AND RITUAL

BY BRO. THOMAS ROSS, P.G.M., NEW ZEALAND

THE BUILDER SEPTEMBER 1922

PART I

FOREWORD

BEFORE centering on my subject I think it would be as well if I made it quite clear that whatever antiquity may be urged for our ceremonies and ritual, our signs, words and tokens, there can be no question that shortly after the formation of the three Grand Lodges in the early part of the eighteenth century our ritual, with all that is attached to it, was much as we have it today. When I therefore enter on the object of endeavouring to prove that much of that ritual has an Egyptian origin I want the brethren to know that it was not until the year 1820, or quite 100 years after the formation of the three Grand Lodges, before there was anything like an earnest attempt made to read the hieroglyphics or sacred Writings of Egypt, while it was quite another fifty years before the Book of the Dead was deciphered and given to the world by Lepsius Wilkinson, Naville, Petrie, Wallace Budge and other enthusiastic Egyptologists.

The reading of the hieroglyphics or sacred writings was for centuries before the Christian era confined to the priests of Egypt, and was called by themselves the writing of the priests, so that when Christianity became the dominant religion in Egypt the old worship became obsolete the priests died out, and the knowledge and practice of the priestly writings went completely out of use, was neglected, forgotten, and for a period of 1500 years utterly unknown to the world.

Egyptology, or the science of studying the ancient language, history and religion from the hieroglyphics, is a thing of almost yesterday, and may be looked upon as one of the most romantic episodes in the domain of literature.

Most of you are conversant with the history of the finding of the Rosetta Stone by a French officer of artillery in 1798 in Rosetta, on the coast of Egypt.  This stone is of black basalt, and is one of the most treasured relics in the Egyptian galleries in the British Museum, being the key that unlocks the mysteries of the Egyptian writings.

The Rosetta Stone is a monumental slab or tablet set up as a record of the benefactions of Ptolemy V, a king of Egypt about 195 B.C.; it contains fourteen lines of hieroglyphics, thirty-two lines of Demotic, and fifty-four of Greek, coming in that order from the top.  The Greek text was easily read, a translation being published in 1801-2.  Since it stated that the monument was a bilingual one (the writing of the priests and the writing of the books being the Egyptian identical with the writing of the Greeks) men of letters set themselves the task of trying to decipher the hieroglyphics.

In the years 1819 to 1822 Mr. Thomas Young, an Englishman, and M. Champollion, a Frenchman, stated that these characters, which were generally looked upon as picture-writing, were letters of an alphabetic or phonetic value.  Certain characters, as may be seen in the hieroglyphic part of the stone, were written in cartouches or cartridge-shaped enclosures, and these cartouches recurred in the Greek text under the name of Ptolemy.  Eventually such names as Ptolemy, Berenice and Cleopatra were spelt out, and thus a key was obtained, which enabled them to unlock the secret of reading the records of the priests of Egypt.

In the latter half of the last century Ernest Renan, the celebrated French water, truly said: "Egypt remains a lighthouse in the profound darkness of antiquity." One would almost think the compilers of our ritual had these words in mind when we read in our lectures: "The usages and customs of Freemasonry, our signs and symbols, our rites and ceremonies, correspond in a great degree with the mysteries of ancient Egypt." An assertion such as this would naturally lead one to expect in working the several degrees some reference or some allusion to the religion and mysteries of Egypt as the origin of some part at any rate of our ritual.

On the contrary however, nearly the whole of our ceremonial is attributed to episodes in the life of some member of the Jewish race as narrated in the Holy Scriptures, while almost all our words and passwords are given as being derived from the same source. Not a single one of the signs, tokens or words are pointed out as corresponding with those used in the religion or mysteries of ancient Egypt.  It will be my endeavour to show the brethren wherein much of our ceremonies correspond with the religion of Egypt, and that we can fairly claim the fundamentals of the Masonic ritual to have had an origin hoary with antiquity compared with the religion of Israel.

RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT

It would be as well before going further to glance briefly at the religion of Egypt, for each of the Egyptian mysteries, like those practised in Syria, Greece and Rome, was based on some circumstance in the life of their gods and goddesses.

The religion of ancient Egypt is to be found in a vast collection of religious texts, arranged in 190 chapters.  They have been collected from the walls of tombs and temples, from papyrus rolls enclosed in mummy cases along with their occupants, and from writings upon the mummy cases and sarcophagi themselves.  A
very fine example of this is the picture shown in Fig. 1, being The Alabaster Sarcophagus of Seti I, who lived 1360 B. C. This very fine coffin has upon it extracts from nearly all the texts, and, many of them being illustrated, the illustrations make the text doubly interesting.  The part presented to us shows the divine bark of Ra, the Sun God, being conveyed through the fourth hour of the mysteries. The bottom of the sarcophagus shows a beautiful full-size painting of the Goddess of the Heavens (Fig. 2,) surrounded with texts of the same religious litany.

The name Book of the Dead has been given to these writings, and as far back as Egyptian history and traditions can go the Book of the Dead appears to have been an integral part of the religions of Egypt.  No mere man was the author of this remarkable collection.  The texts were dictated by God Himself at the creation of the world, to Thoth, the Scribe of the Gods, who is shown as having the body of a man and the head of a bird, and is always depicted in the act of writing the decrees of the deities.  We might style Thoth the Divine emanation of wisdom and learning, the inspiration of God to man, the first to fill the place ascribed by Plato to the Divine Logos and by St. John to "The Word." The picture in Fig. 3 represents Thoth in his different attributes, "Lord of Writing," "Great God," "Scribe of the Gods," and "establisher of millions of years."

Thousands of years before Moses wrote, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," the Egyptian story of the creation had been given to Egypt as we have it here in Fig. 4, where the god Nu is rising out of the primeval water bearing on his outstretched arms the boat of the sun god Ra; this is being received by the goddess of the heavens Nut, who again stands on the head of Osiris, whose body encloses the region of the underworld.  In the center of the picture we have the Sacred Scarabaeus, symbol of the Creator raising himself out of the primeval void, and separating the firmament above from the waters beneath.

The Book of the Dead contains (as we see here) a history of the creation, the attributes of God, the powers and functions of the attendant gods and goddesses, as well as the ceremonies required to enable a to live such a life on earth as shall prevent his soul from being cast into that pit of fire, where the doomed one must not only suffer eternal torment, but, as can be seen in Fig. 5, must undergo a species of penal servitude.

On the other hand, a man who lives a good life and acts up to the teachings of the inspired writings, will obtain from Osiris, the "Lord of Everlastingness," as his final reward, not only the crown of immortality, but a pleasant existence in the Elysian fields.  There he will live in the company of the gods, there his crops will grow luxuriantly, his cattle be sleek and docile, and there he can have the company and fellowship of those whom he loved and knew on earth.  We find this belief borne out in the prayer of Sepa, as shown in Fig. 6.

With the exception of a few tales, the records of the wars, expeditions of their rulers, detailed statements of the erection of their temples, tombs and monuments, and some hymns to the gods and goddesses, the chief and almost only literature of the Egyptians was the Book of the Dead. We can, therefore, realize how inseparably these chapters, with their formula of rubrics, litanies, ceremonies, passwords and signs must have entered into the minds and lives of the people.

To an outsider the people of Egypt almost deserved the sneer of Juvenal: "Who knows not what monsters mad Egypt can worship; whole towns worship a dog, nobody Diana"; or that of Plutarch: "The Egyptians, by adoring the animals and reverencing them as gods, have ruled their religious worship with many ridiculous rites. To this Origin, one of the Christian fathers, very pertinently replies, "Many, listening to accounts they do not understand, relative to the sacred doctrines of the Egyptian philosophers, fancy that they are acquainted with all the wisdom of Egypt, though they have never conversed with any of their priests, nor received any information from persons initiated into their mysteries."

Now, although every province, city, town, and even household had its god or trinity of gods, over and above all there reigned the Supreme Ruler of heaven and earth - the great First Cause, Creator and Preserver of all, the Great Architect of the Universe - Ra, the Sun God, called in Upper Egypt Amun Ra, "the hidden one." As proof of this, we have, in the Book of the Dead, among the many hymns to Ra, "Thou art the one God who didst come into being in the beginning of time." "Thou didst create the earth; thou didst fashion man; thou didst make the abyss of the sky; thou didst create the watery abyss; and thou didst give life to all that therein is." "O Thou One, Thou mighty One, of myriad forms and aspects." So when we contemplate the group of prominent deities in Fig. 7 we see Ra, the Great Architect in some of his myriad forms and aspects.

Ra, or Amun Ra, and the triad of Osiris, Isis and Horus were worshipped throughout the whole of Egypt from the earliest pre-dynastic times to the very end of its civilization under its native rulers, a period of anything from 7,000 to years.  The worship of Isis and Horus and the ceremonial of Ra and Osiris have survived to the present day, though under different names; the former in a branch of the Christian Church, and the latter, as I hope to show, in our Masonic cult.

Having set forth this general claim for the close connection between our ancient moral system and that of Egypt, let me show briefly under separate headings how some of our more familiar symbols, traditions and ceremonies may be explained in the light of Egyptology.

THE POINT WITHIN A CIRCLE

The God Ra is written phonetically with the hieroglyphs R. and A., i.e., a mouth and an arm, followed by the two ideographs, a circle with a dot in the centre and a seated god. But on most occasions the name of Ra, the Sun God, is written with the ideograph of a point within a circle, as though the name was of "too essential a nature to be fully comprehended by human wisdom or clearly pronounced by the tongue of any individual."
 
This sign of a point within a circle was used by the kings of Egypt for thousands of years as their royal title to the throne, while they did not scruple to style themselves (as we see in Fig. 8), sons of Ra.  The same sign is even today used by astronomers in writing of the sun as the centre of the heavenly bodies, and is referred to in our Masonic ritual.

MASTER AND WARDENS

The sun, being the visible emblem of the god Ra, had three names or aspects.  In the morning he was Kheper Ra, or Ra Harmachis, the opener of the day. The Sphinx, the oldest monument in the world, was called Ra Harmachis, the rising sun.  This huge figure, with the face and head of a man and the body of a lion, is 140 feet long and over 60 feet in height.  As it sits there see (Fig. 9) facing "the east, to open and enliven the glorious day," it represents wisdom and strength.  For thousands of years also it represented beauty, for in 1200 A. D. the learned Arab, Abd-el-Latif, described the face as being very beautiful and the mouth as graceful and lovely.

At midday, when the sun was at his meridian, he was Ra, the strong one: "When all beasts and cattle reposed in their pastures and the trees and green herbs put forth their leaves."

At even he was Atmu, or Temu, the closer of the day: "When thou settest in the western horizon the earth is in darkness and is like a being that is dead." This last quotation is strikingly shown in the illustration to chap. xviii. of the Book of the Dead.  The Sun God, in shape of the Sacred Eagle with disc on head and folded wings, is about to set in the mountains of the west.  Isis and Nepthys, sister goddesses, are adoring two lions, representing the sun of yesterday and the sun of tomorrow - a fine allegory of past, present and future.

Thus we see that Ra Harmachis, like our W.M. was placed in the east; Ra, like our J. W., represented the sun at its meridian; and Temu, like our S. W., is placed in the west to close the day, or, as the Egyptian ritual puts it: "I am Ra Harmachis in  the  morning, Ra in his noontide, Temu in the evening."

THE. TWO GREAT PILLARS

Next in importance to the worship of Ra, the Sun God, was the cult of Osiris and Isis and of Isis and Horus.  The adoration of these gods and this goddess was not only the dominant religion in Egypt from the very earliest until the latest times, but during nearly a thousand years it had spread into Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, and throughout the whole of the Roman Empire.  In many cases Osiris is identified with Ra, the Sun God, while Isis is most frequently shown wearing the disc of the moon or the crescent moon on her head.

In the texts Isis is the divine consort of Ra Osiris.  She is the moon who rules the night as the sun rules the day; and every month at Now Moon she gathered the sun into her lap to be impregnated anew.  "That I may behold the face of the sun and that I may behold the moon for ever and ever," was the great wish of the pious Egyptian (Book of the Dead, chap. xviii).

Osiris and Isis are often pictured as the two eyes of Ra, and in that capacity enter largely into the mysteries of Ra.  Now, when we consider how much the sun and moon bulked in the worship of the Egyptians and surrounding nations, let us see what effect this would be likely to have on those two great pillars placed by King Solomon at the porchway or entrance to his temple at Jerusalem.  Before the temple of the sun at Heliopolis (the On of Genesis), Osertsen the First (of the twelfth dynasty B. C. 2435) set up two obelisks.  One of them remains there today, the only trace left of that gorgeous building where Joseph's father-in-law served as priest to the Sun God, where Moses, as the adopted son of Pharaoh, must have worshipped and conducted the mysteries of the temple; and where, two thousand years later, learned Grecians like Herodotus came to study.  These two obelisks would undoubtedly represent the two most important objects in the worship of the heavenly bodies, the sun and the moon, Osiris Ra and Isis.

About 1000 years later, or, to be exact, B.C. 1566, Queen Hatasoo, of the eighteenth dynasty, set up two obelisks in front of the Temple of the Sun at Karnak.  They are there today, the one standing, the other fallen down, a memorial to the worship of the two heavenly bodies. Fig. 10 gives us this obelisk as it stands to-day.

I have a work published in 1757, "Travels in Egypt, by Frederick Lewis Norden, Capt Danish Navy." Captain Norden visited Karnak on 11th December, 1737.  In his book he has plates in the old copper engraving, and among them he has this view (Fig. 11), which I have copied from his book.  Speaking of this plate, he says: "I drew magnificent antiquities in all the situations is was possible for me and as they offered themselves to my sight."

We can see by Captain Norden's drawing that obelisks were standing at the entrance to the temple less than two hundred years ago.  So that the artist who made for us the drawing of Karnak restored (which we have here in Fig. 12), placed the obelisks in the position they originally stood when set up by Queen Hatasoo nearly 3600 years ago.  The queen, in an inscription on the walls of her temple, describes them as "two great obelisks of granite of the south, and the summit of each is covered with copper and gold, the very best which can be obtained; they shall be seen from untold distances, and they shall flood the land with their rays of light. I have done these things because of the loving heart I possess towards my father, Amun Ra, the Sun God."

Some centuries later at Medinet Abu was placed a very fine pair of pillars at the porchway or entrance to the temple.  We see by this that the obelisk has given place to a pillar with an ornamental capital.  These pillars (Fig. 13) were set up by Rameses III about 1200 B.C., or quite 200 years before King Solomon built the Holy Temple at Jerusalem.

The pillar seems to have been largely used in the religious thinking of the Egyptians, either as an emblem of the Deity or a thank-offering from the worshippers. In many of the temples to-day there are beautiful lotus and papyrus pillars, while in numerous vignettes in the Book of the Dead we have Osiris seated in a shrine upheld by two graceful pillars.  Now, when we see that not only in Egypt, but in the surrounding countries, the worship of the sun and the moon was not only the prevailing but the popular religion of the people, there is little to be wondered at that when the Israelites left Egypt they not only carried away with them a very strong bias in favour of this worship, but had that propensity considerably strengthened when they settled down among the sun and moon worshippers of Palestine.  So rampant was this prejudice in favour of sun and moon worship, that we find Moses denouncing it in no unmeasured terms, and threatening death on the "man or woman that hath brought wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God in transgressing His covenant, and hath gone and served other gods and worshipped them, either the sun or the moon" (Deut. xvii. 2, 3).  In spite of these warnings, however we find years afterwards "Josiah put down the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense to the sun and to the moon" (2 Kings xxiii. 5).  Again we read, "At that time, saith the lord, they shall bring out the bones of the brings of Judah, and the bones of his Princes, and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem out of their graves, and they shall spread them before the sun and the moon whom they have loved and whom they have worshipped" (Jer. viii. 1, 2).

Ezekiel saw "five and twenty men with their backs towards the temple of the Lord and their faces towards the east, and they worshipped the sun towards the east" (Ezek. viii. 16).  The Jewish women told Jeremiah: "But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth to burn incense unto the Queen of Heaven (the moon or Isis) and to pour out drink unto her as we have done, we and our fathers and our kings and our princes in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem" (Jer. xlix. 17).  One more quotation, this time from the sorely afflicted Man of Uz: "If I beheld the sun when it shines or the moon walking in brightness, and my heart hath been secretly enticed or my mouth hath kissed my hand" (Job xxxi. 26, 27).

When we thus see the influence that sun and moon worship had upon the children of the Exodus, and when we consider that though settled in Palestine they were surrounded by nations who paid homage to the sun and moon under the names of Osiris Ra and Isis, Baal and Astarte, Milcom and Ashtoreth, and Adonis and Cybele, and when we read that Solomon took to himself wives from Egypt, Moab, Ammon, Edmon and Phoenicia we are quite prepared for the information given in I Kings xi. 5 that "Solomon went after Ashtoreth, the Goddess of the Zidonians (the moon), and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites (the sun)."

This brings us to still another consideration that, in view of these telling quotations from Scripture, are we not justified in assuming when Solomon put up those two great pillars at the porchway or entrance to the temple (as portrayed by R.'. W.'. Bro. Haweridge in Fig. 14) they had an esoteric meaning entirely different from that ascribed to them in holy writ and that only by adopting the view I shall now put before you as to the signification of those pillars can we bring in the meaning given to them in our ritual.

We are told that the pillar on the left denoted strength, while that on the right signified to establish. Let us suppose that these two pillars, no matter by what names they were called, had also a hidden meaning, what more appropriate conception for signifying strength could be selected than the Sun God.  The sun was all powerful, all beneficent, daily observing all that transpired on earth, while the pillar on the right, if we put it down as representing the moon goddess, would answer as the Establisher.  The phases of the moon marked out the weeks, each moon was a lunar month, and with unfailing regularity she indicated the Jewish festivals, marking them to stand firm forever, and when conjoined with the strength of the sun what better designation could be applied than stability?

If we consider the question carefully and reflect on all that the sun and the moon stood for to these people at this particular time, we can see that strength and stability would be a more apt interpretation for those bodies than could be deduced from the great-grandfather of David and the assistant high priest at the dedication of the temple.  Reading certain passages of the Psalms helps to confirm us in this.  "They shall fear Thee as long as the sun and moon endure throughout all generations." (Ps. lxxii. 5.) "It shall be established forever as the moon." (Ps.lxxxix. 37).  "He appointed the moon for seasons, the sun knoweth his going down." (Ps. civ. 19).

Another shown (Fig. 15) is from an ancient Cyprian coin depicting the old temple of Aphrodite, at Paphos, built about 100 years before the temple at Jerusalem.  In addition to the pillars at each side of the entrance to the temple, the sun and moon are also represented as adorning the top of the building.  Let us bear in mind that Solomon's intimate friend and adviser was Hiram, King of Tyre, that his Chief Master Mason was Hiram Abif, that his principal architect was Adoniram, all Phoenicians; that this temple of Paphos, which was at the time the glory of the Mediterranean Coast and lay only a short distance from Tyre, would powerfully influence the minds of these in the immediate vicinity.  Nor is it improbable that the architecture of this temple, with its pillars, would appeal to the Phoenician craftsmen and would largely guide them in suggesting to Solomon a similar style of sanctuary in the house he was about to build for the Lord God of Israel.  There is yet another motive that may have influenced Solomon in dedicating these pillars to solar deities.  Professor Sayee says that Hadad was the Supreme Baal or sun god of Babylonia and that his worship was widespread in Palestine and Syria, also that the abbreviated form of the name of Hadad was Dad, Dadu, and the biblical David.  If therefore David was the Palestinian name for Baal, the sun god, what more likely than that Solomon would be ready to take this opportunity of perpetuating the memory of his illustrious father. Fig. 16 shows Hadad, the Syrian sun god, in the form of a pillar, with solar emblems, a solar crown and grasping a fiery sword symbolic of the thunderbolt.

The Encyclopedia Biblica, in treating of the two pillars, suggests that the names given are enigmatical and that they must have a religious significance.  That not improbably the full name of the pillar on the left hand is Baal-zebul (dwelling of the sun), and in later times probably the name of the second pillar was literately mutilated because of the new and inauspicious associations which had gathered round it.  Solomon, to have been consistent with the teachings of Moses, should have erected only one pillar as a symbol of that unity of the Divine Being, which was so integral a part of the worship of the Israelites.

In setting up two pillars he was conforming to the belief of every one of the surrounding nations, i.e., A duality in the divine, the sun and moon representing the active and passive principle in nature, the male and female element. Coming down to later times we find these two pillars prominent in Druidic enclosures used for the rites of sun worship, while the two steeples or towers at the front of our Christian cathedrals and churches look as if they were an unconscious survival of the votive obelisks or pillars erected to the sun or moon before the temples of Egypt.

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