Beehive
What does the beehive mean in Freemasonry?
The beehive is usually explained as a symbol of industry and productive labour. Its older meaning is far more profound.
To the ancient initiate the bee was the human soul, the hive was heaven, and the flowers were the earthly world. As the bee gathers nectar and carries it home, so man gathers the fruits of earthly experience and carries them across the threshold of death. But the bee does not stay in the hive; it returns to the flowers. In that simple image the Mysteries conveyed reincarnation — the soul journeying repeatedly between heaven and earth, each life adding to a store of wisdom on a long pilgrimage toward perfection.
Square
What is the square a symbol of?
The Square is usually read as morality and right conduct. Its deeper meaning is found within man himself.
It stands for the ability to connect the physical and spiritual worlds through conscious thought. Its form appears in the profile of the human head, where the vertical and horizontal axes meet at the pineal gland, long regarded as the bridge between matter and spirit. The Square therefore represents spiritual independence: the capacity of every individual to seek truth and find the Divine through his own thinking. The true temple is built not only with moral actions but with awakened consciousness.
Tracing board
What is a tracing board?
A painted panel displayed while a degree is worked, gathering that degree's symbols into one composition. The name comes from the operative mason's practice of tracing a design on a board before stone was cut; in speculative Freemasonry the design traced is an inner one.
Josiah Bowring's miniature boards of 1819 are the subject of this site.
Boaz and Jachin
What do the two pillars represent?
The pillars of the porch embody the two great initiation paths of the ancient world — the mystic and the ecstatic — which are reflected in the First and Second Degrees. Both were superseded by a single event, the sacrificial death of Christ, which Masonic imagery renders as 'an ear of corn near to a fall of water'.
Cowan
What is a cowan?
A Scottish and northern English term for someone who builds dry-stone walls — a builder without mortar. The word also serves as a metaphor for the clergy from the Middle Ages onward: espousers of dry religion without spiritual content.
Keystone and the dry riverbed
What does the arched bridge in Anderson's frontispiece mean?
In the frontispiece to James Anderson's 1723 Book of Constitutions, remove the nobles and their attendants and a different picture appears: Apollo in a wedge of radiant light, an arched bridge crowned by a keystone, and beneath it a dry riverbed, the Pythagorean proposition and the word Eureka.
The bridge and keystone signify a new connection between heaven and earth; the dry riverbed marks the passing of an older spiritual path. Mankind would no longer be initiated through the ancient mysteries symbolised by water, but through the Holy Spirit — the central teaching of the Third Degree.
Five-petalled wild rose
Why does a rose appear in Masonic art?
For centuries the rose has been associated with the Rosicrucian tradition. Where it appears in Masonic imagery it works as a quiet signature, suggesting that the artist was one of the 'Invisibles' — a guardian of esoteric wisdom.