CORPORATE SIGNS AND THEIR ORIGINAL MEANING
Since our article on ancient corporate marks [1] seems to have been or particular interest to a number of readers, we now return to this too little known subject to offer further information, the reflections submitted to us from various quarters having shown us the utility thereof.
First of all, our concluding remarks regarding the marks of masons and stone-cutters, and the Hermetic symbols to which they seem directly attached have been confirmed. The particulars in question are found in an article on the Compagnonnage, which by a curious coincidence was published at exactly the same time as our article. The following passage has been extracted from it:
Having reached its apogee, Christianity required a style epitomizing its thought, and for the dome, the plain arch, and the massive tower, substituted the slender spire and the Gothic arch, which underwent rapid development. It was at this time that the popes created the University of the Arts in Rome, where monasteries of all countries sent their students and their lay builders. These elites thus founded the universal Mastership, where stone-cutters, sculptors, carpenters, and other artistic crafts received the architectural concept they called the Great
Work. The gathering of all the foreign Masters of Works formed the symbolic association, and the trowel surmounted by a cross from the arms of which the square and compasses were suspended, the universal marks. [2]
The trowel surmounted by the cross is precisely the Hermetic symbol reproduced in figure 22 (p83); and because of its triangular shape, the trowel was taken for an emblem of the Trinity: Sanctissima Trinitas Conditor Mundi. [3] Moreover, it seems that the Trinitarian dogma may have been particularly emphasized by the ancient guilds, most of their documents commencing with the formula: 'In the name of the Very Holy and Indivisible Trinity.'
Since we have already pointed to the symbolic identity of the inverted triangle and the heart, [4] it is relevant to add that a Trinitarian meaning can also be attached to this latter. We find proof of this in an engraving made by Callot for a thesis submitted in 1625, of which Fr Anizan has already provided an explanation in this journal (December 1922). At the top of the composition is the heart of Christ, containing three iods, the first letter of the name Jehovah in Hebrew; moreover, these three iods were themselves considered as to form a divine name, which is quite naturally regarded as an expression of the Trinity. [5] 'In this connection,' wrote Fr Anizan,
we today adore the Heart of Jesus, son of the Eternal Father; the Heart of Jesus unites substantially with the Word of God; the Heart of Jesus formed by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. How can we be surprised that since 1625 the noble connection of the Heart of Jesus with the Holy Trinity has been
affirmed? From the twelfth century, theologians have seen this Heart as the 'Holy of the Holy' and as the 'Ark of the Testament'. [6] This truth cannot be lost: its very expression carries the support of the spirit. It is never lost. In a Diurnal which appeared in Anvers in 1616, one reads this beautiful prayer: 'O so sweet Heart of Jesus, where everything good is found, organ of the ever adorable Trinity, in you I confide, in you I recover myself completely.' The 'Organ of the Most Holy Trinity' is here right before our eyes: it is the Heart of the three iods. And our engraving says, in short, that this Heart of Christ, organ of the Trinity, is the 'principle of order': Prcedestinatio Christi est ordinis origo.
No doubt we shall have occasion to return to other aspects of this symbolism, especially the mystical signification of the letter iod, but we are anxious to mention here forthwith the following significant comparisons.
Several people who support our intention to restore to ancient symbols their original meaning and who have genuinely wanted us to do so, have at the same time expressed a desire to see Catholicism plainly claim all the symbols that rightfully belong to it, including those such as triangles, that were appropriated by organizations such as Masonry. The idea is quite sound and corresponds well to our thinking; but an ambiguity and even a real historical error may exist in some minds and it would be well to dissipate this.
In truth, not many symbols are properly and exclusively 'Masonic', as we have already pointed out concerning the acacia (December 1925, p26). Even the more particularly 'architectural' emblems, such as the square and compasses, have been common to
a great many guilds, we could even say to nearly all of them, [7] not to mention their use in purely Hermetic symbolism. [8] Masonry employs symbols which, in appearance at least, are of rather varied character, but despite what some appear to believe, it has not appropriated them in order to divert them from their true meaning; it received them, just as did the other guilds (for originally it was one of these), at a time when they were quite different from what they have become today, and it has preserved them, although it has already been quite some time since they understood them.
'Everything indicates that common Freemasonry is a detached and perhaps corrupted branch of an ancient and respectable stem,' said Joseph de Maistre. [9] And the question should be regarded in this way, for we are too often wrong in thinking only of modern Masonry, forgetting that it is simply the product of a deviation. It seems that those first responsible for this deviation were the Protestant pastors Anderson and Desaguliers, who drew up the Constitution of the Grand Lodge of England, published in 1723 and disposed of all the ancient documents on which they were able to lay their hands so that their innovations might pass unnoticed, and also because these documents contained formulas which they thought troublesome, such as the obligation of 'devotion to God, to the Holy Church, and to the King,' an incontestable mark of the Catholic origin of Masonry. [10] The Protestants prepared this work of distortion by making the most of the fifteen years that elapsed between the death of Christopher Wren, last Grand-Master of ancient Masonry, and the foundation of the new Grand Lodge of England in 1717. However, they retained the symbolism, not suspecting that, for
whomever understood it, the latter would bear witness against them as eloquently as would the written texts, not all of which moreover they were able to destroy. This, in brief, is what should know by everyone who wishes to effectively combat the tendencies of present-day Masonry. [11]
We have not dealt here with the whole complex and controversial question of the multiple origins of Masonry, but have confined ourselves to considering what can be called the corporate side represented by operative Masonry, that is to say by the ancient brotherhoods of builders. These latter, like the other guilds, had a religious symbolism, or if one prefers, a hermetico-religious symbolism, related to the conceptions of the Catholic esoterism that was so widespread in the Middle Ages, and of which traces are found everywhere on the monuments and even in the literature of that era. Despite claims by many historians, the association of Hermeticism with Masonry goes back much further than Elias Ashmole's affiliation with the latter (1646). We even think that by the seventeenth century it was a question of reconstituting a tradition of which a great part was already lost. A few, who seem well informed on the history of the guilds, even fixed 1459 as the date for this loss of the ancient tradition. [12] It seems incontestable to us that the operative and speculative aspects were always united in medieval guilds, which moreover used expressions as patently Hermetic as the 'Great Work', in ways that were different but always related by analogical correspondence. [13]
If we truly wished to get to the origins, supposing this were even possible on the basis of the necessarily fragmentary information at
our disposal, it would doubtless be necessary to go back beyond the Middle Ages, and even beyond Christianity. This leads us to complete something we said in this same journal in an earlier article on the symbolism of Janus (December 1925), [14] for it turns out that this latter symbolism is closely connected with the question now before us. [15] In ancient Rome the Collegia fabrorum rendered special worship to Janus, in whose honor they celebrated the solstitial festivals corresponding to the beginning of the ascending and descending halves of the zodiacal cycle, that is, to the two points of the year which in the astronomical symbolism we have already mentioned represent the doors of the celestial and infernal ways (Janua Cceli and Janua Inferni). The solstitial festivals were retained in the builders' guilds, but in Christianity these festivals were identified with the two St Johns, of winter and of summer (whence the expression 'Lodge of St John' still retained in modern Masonry), providing another example of the adaptation of pre-Christian symbols to which we have pointed on several occasions.
Two interesting conclusions can be drawn from the above. First, among the Romans Janus was, as we have already said, the god of initiation into the mysteries; but he was at the same time the god of the artisans' guilds, and this can be no coincidence. There must necessarily be a connection between these two functions related to the same symbolic entity; in other words, it was necessary that then, as later, the guilds in question be in possession of a truly 'initiatic' tradition. We do not believe it is a question here of a special and isolated case, but that the same could be said for many peoples, and this in turn might perhaps lead to the true origin of the arts and trades, to views quite unsuspected by moderns, for whom such traditions have become a dead letter.
The other consequence is this, that preservation of the ancient tradition linked to the symbolism of Janus by the builders of the Middle Ages explains among other things the importance they attributed to the figure of the zodiac, so frequently reproduced over the portal of churches and generally arranged in such a way as to make quite apparent the ascending and descending nature of these two halves. In our opinion there must have been something quite fundamental in the conception of the cathedral builders, who proposed to make of their works a sort of synthetic resumé of the Universe. If the zodiac is not always in evidence, there are nonetheless many other symbols equivalent to it, capable in a certain sense at least of evoking analogous ideas under the aspect we are considering (without prejudice to their other more particular meanings): representations of the Last Judgment are an example, and certain emblematic trees as well, as we have explained. We could go further still and say that in a way this conception is implied in the very layout of the cathedral; but we would far exceed the limits of this simple observation were we to undertake to justify this last assertion. [16]