Category Archives: The Veiled Allegory of Freemasonry

The “secrets” (or arcane truths) imparted in this Degree are explained as consisting of certain peculiar marks or signs, intended to distinguish all Brethren of the elementary grade of Apprentice. Outwardly, in this and in subsequent Degrees also, they are expressed by step, sign, and word. These, of course, are not the full or real secrets, but only figurative emblems of them. It is what they signify that constitutes the secrets, and that significance is left for the Candidate to meditate upon and reduce into daily personal practice. Only so will he really learn them and come to understand why they are called “secrets” and why we insist upon their use. They can never be orally communicated, except in symbolic form, but must be learned by experimental practice.

W L Wilmshurst, The Ceremony of Initiation, Part II

In being given the formal symbolic secrets the Candidate should reflect that he is receiving a first lesson in a long course of instruction of a private and occult nature; i.e., one not taught outside the Lodge, but hidden from public knowledge and intended to help him upon the path of his personal inner life. For having but just entered upon that path, it is proper that he should now be instructed how to tread it.

W L Wilmshurst, The Ceremony of Initiation, Part II

Our teaching is purposely veiled in allegory and symbol and its deeper import does not appear upon the surface of the ritual itself. This is partly in correspondence with human life itself and the world we live in, which are themselves but allegories and symbols of another life and the veils of another world; and partly intentional also, so that only those who have reverent and understanding minds may penetrate into the more hidden meaning of the doctrine of the Craft. The deeper secrets in Masonry, like the deeper secrets of life, are heavily veiled; are closely hidden. They exist concealed beneath a great reservation; but whoso knows anything of them knows also that they are “many and valuable”, and that they are disclosed only to those who act upon the hint given in our lectures, “Seek and ye shall find; ask and ye shall have; knock and it shall be opened unto you”.

W L Wilmshurst, The Meaning of Masonry, Chapter I The Deeper Symbolism of Freemasonry

The secrets of his mental nature and the principles of intellectual life became at this stage gradually unfolded to his view. You will thus perceive, Brethren, that the F.C. degree, sometimes regarded by us as a somewhat uninteresting one, typifies in reality a long course of personal development requiring the most profound knowledge of the mental and psychical side of our nature. It involves not merely the cleansing and control of the mind, but a full comprehension of our inner constitution, of the more hidden mysteries of our nature and of spiritual psychology.

W L Wilmshurst, The Meaning of Masonry, Chapter I The Deeper Symbolism of Freemasonry

The depths of human nature and self knowledge, the hidden mysteries of the soul of man are not, as real initiates well know, probed into with impunity except by the “properly prepared”. The man who does so has, as it were, a cable-tow around his neck; because when once stirred by a genuine desire for the higher knowledge that real initiation is intended to confer, he can never turn back on what he learns thereof without committing moral suicide; he can never be again the same man he was before he gained a glimpse of the hidden mysteries of life. And as the Angel stood with a flaming sword at the entrance of Eden to guard the way to the Tree of Life, so will the man whose initiation is not a conventional one find himself threatened at the door of the higher knowledge by opposing invisible forces if he rashly rushes forward in a state of moral unfitness into the deep secrets of the Centre. Better remain ignorant than embark upon this unknown sea unwisely and without being properly prepared and in possession of the proper passports.

W L Wilmshurst, The Meaning of Masonry, Chapter II Masonry as a Philosophy

Brethren, may we all come to the knowledge how to “open the Lodge upon the centre” of ourselves and so realize in our own conscious experience the finding of the “imprisoned splendour” hidden in the depths of our being, whose rising within ourselves will bring us peace and salvation.

W L Wilmshurst, The Meaning of Masonry, Chapter II Masonry as a Philosophy

Not without good reason does our catechism assert that Masonry contains “many and invaluable secrets.” But these of course are not the formal and symbolic signs, tokens and words communicated ceremonially to candidates; they are rather those secrets which we instinctively keep locked up in the recesses and safe repository of our hearts; secrets of the deep and hidden things of the soul, about which we do not often talk, and which, by a natural instinct, we are not in the habit of communicating to any but such of our brethren and fellows as share with us a common and a sympathetic interest in the deeper problems and mysteries of life.

W L Wilmshurst, The Meaning of Masonry, Chapter II Masonry as a Philosophy

Each In His Own Tongue

A fire-mist and a planet—

A crystal and a cell

A jelly-fish and a saurian,

And caves where the cave-men dwell;

Then a sense of law and beauty

And a face turned from the clod—

Some call it Evolution,

And others call it God.

A haze on the far horizon,

The infinite, tender sky,

The rich ripe tint of the cornfields,

And the wild geese sailing high—

And all over the uplands and lowland

The charm of the golden rod—

Some of us call it Autumn,

And others call it God.

Like the tides on a crescent sea-beach,

When the moon is new and thin,

Into our hearts high yearnings

Come welling and surging in—

Come from the mystic ocean

Whose rim no foot has trod—

Some of us call it Longing,

And others call it God.

A picket frozen on duty—

A mother starved for her brood—

Socrates drinking the hemlock

And Jesus on the rood;

And millions who, humble and nameless,

The straight hard pathway plod—

Some call it Consecration,

And others call it God.

— William Herbert Carruth

To this beautiful conception, Deputy Grand Master Roe Fulkerson, Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia, has added the following inspiration:

Brethren banded together

Hand in hand for good,

Joined for mankind’s uplift,

United in brotherhood.

Each of the band a builder,

Faces turned from the sod;

Some folks call it Masonry

And others call it God.

“Unto the Least of These”

Hail, Craftsman, hail! Canst thou in honor say

Thou hast fulfilled the glory of this day,

Ere thou hast heard the plea of those who miss

A mother’s holy love, a father’s kiss?

Tho’ from thy lavish hand such riches pour

As even princes had not known before,

Hast though much given while a Brother’s child

Wakes to a dawn on which Christ has not smiled?

If Thou hast children, or the memories

Of dear soft lips that once thy cheek didst know,

Give to the orphaned waifs and thou wilt please

The Master who hath said long, long ago:

“As ye have done it to the least of these,

Thus ye have done it unto Me also.”

— George Sanford Holmes, from The Square & Compass, December 1921

Mason Marks

They’re traced in lines on the Parthenon,

Inscribed by the subtle Greek;

And Roman legions have carved them on

Walls, roads and arch antique;

Long ere the Goth, with vanal hand,

Gave scope to his envy dark,

The Mason craft in many a land

Has graven its Mason mark.

The obelisk old and the pyramids,

Around which a mystery clings,—

The Hieroglyphs on the coffin lids

Of weird Egyptian kings,—

Syria, Carthage and Pompeii,

Buried and strewn and stark,

Have marble records that will not die,

Their primitive Mason mark.

Upon column and frieze and capital,

In the eye of the caste volute,—

On Scotia’a curve, or an astrogal,

Or in triglyp’s channel acute,—

Cut somewhere on the entablature,

And oft, like a sudden spark,

Flashing a light on a date obscure,

Shines many a Mason mark.

These craftsmen old had genial whim,

That nothing could e’er destroy,

With a love of their art that naught could dim,

They toiled with a chronic joy;

Nothing was too complex to essay,

In aught they dashed to embark;

They triumphed on many an Appian Way,

Where they’d left their Mason mark.

Crossing the Alps like Hannibal,

Or skirting the Pyrenees,

On peak and plain, in crypt and cell,

On foot or on bandaged knees;—

From Tiber to Danube, from Rhine to Seine,

They needed no “letters of marque;”—

Their art was their passport in France and Spain,

And in Britain their Mason mark.

The monolith gray and Druid chair,

The pillars and towers of Gael,

In Ogham occult their age they bear,

That time can only reveal.

Live on, old monuments of the part,

Our beacons through ages dark!

In primal majesty still you’ll last,

Endeared by each Mason mark.

— Anonymous

The Hermetic Library Blog

Faint gibbering heard from somewhere near the restricted stacks

Category Archives: The Veiled Allegory of Freemasonry

Each In His Own Tongue

“Unto the Least of These”

Mason Marks