Section 22

Advancing in his progress, the candidate is invited
to contemplate another series of instructions. The
human senses, as the appropriate channels through
which we receive all our ideas of perception, and which,
therefore, constitute the most important sources of our
knowledge, are here referred to as a symbol of intel-
lectual cultivation.

Architecture, as the most important of the arts which
conduce to the comfort of mankind, is also alluded to
here, not simply because it is so closely connected with
the operative institution of Freemasonry, but also as

Legend of the Winding Stairs 225

the type of all the other useful arts. In his second
pause, in the ascent of the Winding Stairs, the aspirant
is therefore reminded of the necessity of cultivating
practical knowledge.

So far, then, the instructions he has received relate
to his own condition in society as a member of the great
social compact, and to his means of becoming, by a
knowledge of the arts of practical life, a necessary and
useful member of that society.

But his motto will be ''Excelsior." Still must he go
onward and forward. The stair is still before him; its
summit is not yet reached, and still further treasures
of wisdom are to be sought for, or the reward will not
be gained, nor the Middle Chamber, the abiding place
of truth, be reached.

In his third pause, he therefore arrives at that point
in which the whole circle of human science is to be
explained. Symbols, we know, are in themselves
arbitrary and of conventional signification, and the
complete circle of human science might have been as
well symbolized by any other sign or series of doctrines
as by the seven liberal arts and sciences. But Free-
masonry is an institution of the olden time; and
this selection of the liberal arts and sciences as a
symbol of the completion of human learning is one
of the most pregnant evidences that we have of its
antiquity.

In the seventh century, and for a long time after-
wards, the circle of instruction to which all the learning
of the most eminent schools and most distinguished
philosophers was confined, was limited to what were
then called the liberal arts and sciences, and consisted
of two branches, the trivium and the quadrivium. The
trivium included grammar, rhetoric, and logic; the

226 Symbolism of Freemasonry

quadrivium comprehended arithmetic, geometry, music,
and astronomy.

''These seven heads," says Enfield, "were supposed
to include universal knowledge. He who was master
of these was thought to have no need of a preceptor to
explain any books or to solve any question which lay
within the compass of human reason, the knowledge of
the trivium having furnished him with the key to all
language, and that of the quadrivium having opened to
him the secret laws of nature."^

The words themselves are purely classical, but the
meanings here given to them are of a mediaeval or cor-
rupt Latinity. Among the old Romans, a trivium
meant a place where three ways met, and a quadrivium
where four, or what we now call a cross-road. When
we speak of the paths of learning , we readily discover
the origin of the signification given by the scholastic
philosophers to these terms.

At a period, says the same writer, when few were
instructed in the trivium, and very few studied the
quadrivium, to be master of both was sufficient to
complete the character of a philosopher. The pro-
priety, therefore, of adopting the seven liberal arts and
sciences as a symbol of the completion of human learning
is apparent. The candidate, having reached this point,
is now supposed to have accomplished the task upon
which he had entered — he has reached the last step,
and is now ready to receive the full fruition of human
learning.

So far, then, we are able to comprehend the true
symbolism of the Winding Stairs. They represent the
progress of an inquiring mind with the toils and labors
of intellectual cultivation and study, and the prepara-

1 "History of Philosophy," vol. ii. p. 337.

Legend of the Winding Stairs

227

tory acquisition of all human science, as a preliminary
step to the attainment of divine truth, which it must
be remembered is always symbolized in Masonry by
the Word.

Here let me again allude to the symbolism of num-
bers, which is for the first time presented to the con-
sideration of the Masonic student in the legend of the
Winding Stairs. The theory of numbers as the sym-
bols of certain qualities was originally borrowed by the
Freemasons from the school of Pythagoras.

It will be impossible, however, to develop this doc-
trine, in its entire extent, on the present occasion, for
the numeral symbolism of Freemasonry would itself
constitute materials for an ample essay.

It will be sufficient to advert to the fact that the
total number of the steps, amounting in all to fifteen,
in the American system, is a significant symbol. For
fifteen was a sacred number among the Orientals, be-
cause the letters of the holy name J AH, TT, were, in
their numerical value, equivalent to fifteen; and hence
a figure in which the nine digits were so disposed as
to make fifteen either way when added together per-
pendicularly, horizontally, or diagonally, constituted
one of their most sacred talismans.^ The fifteen steps

* Such a talisman was the following figure^ sometimes called a
magic square:

8

1

6

3

5

7

4

9

2

228 Symbolism of Freemasonry

in the Winding Stairs are therefore symboHc of the
name of God.

But we are not yet done. It will be remembered
that a reward was promised for all this toilsome ascent
of the Winding Stairs. Now, what are the wages of a
Speculative Freemason? Not money, nor corn, nor
wine, nor oil. All these are but symbols. His wages
are Truth, or that approximation to it which will be
most appropriate to the degree into which he has been
initiated.

One of the most beautiful, but at the same time
most abstruse, doctrines of the science of Masonic
symbolism, that the Freemason is ever to be in search
of truth, but is never to find it. This divine truth,
the object of all his labors, is symbolized by the
Word, for which we all know he can only obtain a
substitute; and this is intended to teach the humiliat-
ing but necessary lesson that the knowledge of the
nature of God and of man's relation to him, which
knowledge constitutes divine truth, can never be ac-
quired in this life.

Only when the portals of the grave open to us, and
give us an entrance into a more perfect life, that this
knowledge is to be attained. "Happy is the man,"
says the father of lyric poetry, "who descends beneath
the hollow earth, having beheld these mysteries; he
knows the end, he knows the origin of life.*'

The Middle Chamber is therefore symbolic of this
life, where the symbol only of the word can be given,
where the truth is to be reached by approximation only,
and yet where we are to learn that that truth will con-
sist in a perfect knowledge of the G.*.A.*.0.*.T.*.U.*.
This is the reward of the inquiring Freemason; in this
consists the wages of a Fellow Craft; he is directed to

Legend of the Winding Stairs 229

the truth, but must travel farther and ascend still
higher to attain it.

Thus as a symbol, and a symbol only, we must study
this beautiful legend of the Winding Stairs. If we
attempt to adopt it as a historical fact, the absurdity
of its details stares us in the face, and wise men will
wonder at our credulity.

Its inventors had no desire thus to impose upon our
folly; but offering it to us as a great philosophical
myth, they did not for a moment suppose that we
would pass over its sublime moral teachings to accept
the allegory as a historical narrative, without meaning,
and wholly irreconcilable with the records of Scripture,
and opposed by all the principles of probability. To
suppose that eighty thousand craftsmen were weekly
paid in the narrow precincts of the temple chambers,
is simply to suppose an absurdity.

But to believe that all this pictorial representation
of an ascent by a Winding Staircase to the place where
the wages of labor were to be received, was an allegory
to teach us the ascent of the mind from ignorance,
through all the toils of study and the difficulties of
obtaining knowledge, receiving here a little and there a
little, adding something to the stock of our ideas at
each step, until, in the middle chamber of life — in the
full fruition of manhood — the reward is attained, and
the purified and elevated intellect is invested with the
reward in the direction how to seek God and God's
truth, — to believe this is to believe and to know the
true design of Speculative Freemasonry, the only de-
sign which makes it worthy of a good or a wise man's
study.

The legend's historical details are barren, but its
symbols and allegories are fertile with instruction.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Legend of the Third Degree

THE most important and significant of the legen-
dary symbols of Freemasonry is, undoubtedly,
that which relates to the fate of Hiram Abif,
commonly called, ''by way of excellence,'* the Legend
of the Third Degree.

The first written record that we have been able to
find of this legend is contained in the second edition of
Anderson's Constitutions, published in 1738, and is in
these words:

''It (the temple) was finished in the short space of
seven years and six months, to the amazement of all
the world; when the cape-stone was celebrated by the
fraternity with great joy. But their joy was soon in-
terrupted by the sudden death of their dear master,
Hiram Abif, whom they decently interred, in the Lodge
near the temple, according to ancient usage.'"

In the next edition of the same work, published in
1756, a few additional circumstances are related, such
as the participation of King Solomon in the general
grief, and the fact that the king of Israel "ordered his
obsequies to be conducted with great solemnity and
decency."^ With these exceptions, and the citations

^ Anderson's "Constitutions," 2d edition, 1738, p. 14.

2 Anderson's "Constitutions," 3d edition, 1756, p. 24.

230

Legend of the Third Degree 231

of the same passages, made by subsequent authors,
the narrative has always remained unwritten, and
descended, from age to age, through the means of oral
tradition.

The legend has been considered of so much impor-
tance 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 cor-
rupted other symbols, abolishing the old and substi-
tuting 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 inter-
pretation can we give to it that will account for its uni-
versal 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 neces-
sary 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 Freema-
sonry" of antiquity to teach the consoling doctrine of
the immortality of the soul.^ This dogma, shining as an
almost solitary beacon-light in the surrounding gloom

* "The hidden doctrines of the unity of the Deity and the im-
mortaUty of the soul were originally in all the Mysteries, even
those of Cupid and Bacchus." — Warburton, in Spence's "Anec-
dotes," p. 309.

232 Symbolism of Freemasonry

of pagan darkness,, had undoubtedly been received from
that ancient people or priesthood who practised 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.

*'The allegorical interpretation of the myths has been,
by several learned investigators, especially by Creuzer,
connected with the hypothesis of an ancient and highly
instructed body of priests, having their origin either
in Egypt or in the East, and communicating to the
rude and barbarous Greeks religious, physical, and
historical knowledge, under the veil of symbols."^

The Chevalier Ramsay corroborates this theory:
''Vestiges of the most sublime truths are to be found
in the sages of all nations, times, and religions, both
sacred and profane, and these vestiges are emanations
of the antediluvian and noevian tradition, more or less
disguised and adulterated."

But in the more sensual minds of the pagan philos-
ophers and mystics, the idea, when presented to the
initiates in their Mysteries, was always conveyed in the
form of a scenic representation. 2

Of this there is abundant evidence in all the ancient
and modern writers on the Mysteries. Apuleius, cau-
tiously describing his initiation into the Mysteries of
Isis, says, *'I approached the confines of death, and
having trod on the threshold of Proserpine, I returned
therefrom, being borne through all the elements. At
midnight I saw the sun shining with its brilliant light;
and I approached the presence of the gods beneath,
and the gods of heaven, and stood near and worshipped

* Grote, "History of Greece," vol. i. ch. xvi. p. 579.
'"Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion
unfolded in a Geometrical Order," vol. I, p. iv.

Legend of the Third Degree 233

them."^ The context shows that all this was a scenic
representation.

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 represen-
tation of the death and subsequent regeneration of
Osiris; in the Phoenician, of Adonis; in the Syrian, of
Dionysus; in all of which the scenic apparatus of ini-
tiation 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 work-
men 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 repre-
sentation 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.

The idea, therefore, proposed to be communicated in
the myth of the ancient Mysteries was the same as that
which is now conveyed in the Masonic legend of the
third degree.

Hence, then, Hiram Abif is, in the Masonic system,
the symbol of human nature, as developed in the life
here and the life to come; and so, while the temple was,
as we have heretofore shown, the visible symbol of the
world, its builder became the mythical symbol of man,
the dweller and worker in that world.

^Apuleius, "Metam." lib. xi.

234 Symbolism of Freemasonry

Now, is not this symbolism evident to every rejflective
mind?

Man, setting forth on the voyage of life, with faculties
and powers fitting him for the due exercise of the high
duties to whose performance he has been called, holds,
if he be **a curious and cunning workman, "^ skilled in
all moral and intellectual purposes (and it is only of
such men that the temple builder can be the symbol),
within the grasp of his attainment the knowledge of
all that divine truth imparted to him as the heirloom
of his race — that race to whom it has been granted to
look, with exalted countenance, on high; which divine
truth is symbolised by the Word.

Pronaque cum spectent animalia caetera terrain;
Os homini sublime dedit: coelumque tueri
Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus.^

Thus, while the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.'

Thus provided with the word of life, he occupies his
time in the construction of a spiritual temple, and
travels onward in the faithful discharge of all his duties,
laying down his designs upon the trestle-board of the
future and invoking the assistance and direction of God.

But is his path always over flowery meads and
through pleasant groves? Is there no hidden foe to

* Aish haham iodea hinah, "a cunning man, endued with under-
standing," is the description given by the king of Tyre of Hiram
Abif. See 2 Chronicles, ii. 13. It is needless to say that "cunning"
is a good old Saxon word meaning skilful.

' Ovid, "Metamorphoses," i. 84.

3 Dryden's translation of Ovid.

Legend of the Third Degree 235

obstruct his progress? Is all before him clear and calm,
with joyous sunshine and refreshing zephrys? Alas!
Not so. ''Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly up-
ward.'' At every "gate of life" — as the Orientalists have
beautifully called the different ages — he is beset by peril.

Temptations allure his youth, misfortunes darken the
pathway of his manhood, and his old age is encumbered
with infirmity and disease. But clothed in the armor
of virtue he may resist the temptation; he may cast
misfortunes aside, and rise triumphantly above them;
but to the last, the direst, the most inexorable foe of
his race, he must eventually yield; and stricken down
by death, he sinks prostrate into the grave, and is buried
in the rubbish of his sin and human frailty.