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intellect and symbolism
CHAPTER XXIX
part II - Symbolism and the Teachings of Freemasonry
THE SQUARE AND COMPASSES
W.
M. Don Falconer PM, PDGDC
Symbolism is a unique characteristic of
the human intellect.
To appreciate the
interrelationship between intellect and symbolism, it is desirable
to recognise the difference between intellect and intelligence and
to reflect on how they interact, through the process of reasoning,
to initiate an activity or other response. Intellect comprises all
of those faculties and rational powers of the mind and the soul that
enable human beings to know, understand and reason, but it does not
include the faculties of sensation and imagination. Intellect is derived
from the Latin intellectus, which
signifies perception, discernment, understanding and comprehension. It is the
function of the intellect to perceive similarities and to disclose
differences, either choosing or rejecting concepts of different
kinds that are presented to it. Although the human psyche can only
comprehend the outcomes of intellectual processes through mental
awareness, nevertheless the intellect primarily operates on the
spiritual plane. Intellect is instinctively drawn towards the ideal,
enabling the individual’s ego to evolve and ultimately to achieve
perfection. In contrast, the faculties of sensation and imagination
are closely related to feeling and will, which clearly distinguishes
them from the fundamental powers of thought and comprehension.
Intelligence is derived from the Latin intelligentia, which
literally signifies knowledge, taste, the capacity to understand
or the abi1ity to choose. When
compared with intellect, intelligence primarily operates on the
mental plane and is the emotional and sensual counterpart of
intellect. Intelligence is more than the straightforward ability to
perceive and to understand that is implied by intellect because,
being aided by intuition, it also has regard to feeling and will, as
well as to any relevant external influences, thus enabling rational
choices to be made. Reason is derived from
the Latin ratio, which signifies a
reckoning, an account, a consideration or a calculation. The process
of reasoning is the interactive use of intellect with intelligence,
which enables thoughts to be adapted to produce actions that will
achieve a relevant objective. Reason or rationality is the
faculty of making judgements and inferences, which is the guiding
principle of the human mind in the process of logical thought.
René Descartes (1596-1650), a
French philosopher, mathematician and scientist, was often called
the father of modern philosophy. He said that human reason is
universal, by which he meant that a being having reason is not
limited to a fixed collection of responses, but is able to devise a
suitable response for a new set of parameters. Descartes also
connected the faculty of reason with the ability to use language.
Many experiments have been carried out on a diverse group of
animals, ranging from monkeys through dogs and octopuses to
dolphins, in an endeavour to find out whether they have the facility
of mental perception and the capacity to make rational decisions
equivalent to those capabilities possessed by human beings. These
experiments have clearly demonstrated that animals have a capacity
to seek out food and to avoid danger in unusual situations, as well
as to locate their own kind or to return to their previous habitats
under exceptional circumstances, but they have not established that
these capacities are anything more than innate hereditary responses.
Such responses would have developed as a direct result of
environmental influences over many thousands of years, which is in
accord with Charles Darwin’s theory for “the survival of the
fittest”. For this reason the possession of a superior
intelligence, the capacity of intellect and the ability to reason
are still considered to be the most important characteristics that
differentiate human beings from all other members of the animal
kingdom.
Language
Language is the method of
communication that uses spoken or written words in an agreed way to
convey ideas from one person to another. Scholars of linguistics
conceive language in various ways. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
was a Swiss linguistics scholar who was one of the founders of
modern linguistics, whose work was fundamental to the development of
structuralism. Saussure regarded language as a system of arbitrary,
though mutually dependent and interactive signs. He emphasised the
importance of a diachronic or historical
approach to the study of language, which sees it as a continually
changing medium, rather than a purely synchronic or
behavioural approach, which only considers language in the state
that it is in at any particular time. In contrast to these
approaches Avram Noam Chomsky (1928- ), an American professor
of linguistics, considers language to be a set of rules and
principles in the mind of the speaker. He developed the concept of a
generative grammar,
taking into account the surface or superficial
meaning of a sentence and also its deep or underlying
meaning. Language is central to the transmission of culture and it
is essential for the communication of a society’s spiritual beliefs
and sacred values, which can only be achieved through the medium of
ritual speech and symbolism. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Language, by David Crystal, includes discussions on all
aspects of language, its development and usage, its relationship
with symbolism in human communications and also, for comparison,
various methods of non-human communication. Those wishing to explore
the important part that symbolism played in the development of
language, as well as the evolution of symbolism as an instrument of
communication, would probably find most of the information they
require in this book.
Symbolism is as old as
human beings themselves. Communication is one of the greatest assets
of the human race, which was developed by means of symbolism. Before
intelligible speech evolved, humans used grunts and gestures as
symbols to draw attention to their needs and convey the emotions
they were experiencing. As humans became articulate in speech, they
sought to record their words for transmission to others at a
distance, or to make permanent records of their thoughts. These
desires naturally fostered the development of writing, originally by
means of pictographs in which each picture or character was a symbol
or combination of symbols. The hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt were the
most advanced form of pictographic writing ever devised and were in
use before 3250 BCE. The Sumerians of Baby1onia, now southern
Iraq, were using a script in about 3200 BCE, in which tiny
pictographs represented words, but we do not know when or where the
script originated. The ideographic characters used in modern Chinese
writing evolved from pictographs before 1000 BCE and even, as
today, enabled intelligible written communications to be exchanged
between peoples whose dialects were mutually incomprehensible.
Clay tablets found in the
1960s at Tartaria, in Transylvania, have been dated from about
4000 BCE. Their engravings include some pictographs similar to
those found in megalithic markings in Britain, in the Linear A script
found in Minoan Crete and also in inscriptions on Paleo-Elamite
vases found in Persepolis, which suggests that some form of written
communication must have occurred earlier than previously was
believed. Structural changes in the earth’s crust, physiographical
reshaping of the soil mantle, cyclical changes in climate and even
the impact of extraterrestrial bodies on the earth since the last
great Ice Age have all caused significant changes in topography,
limiting the capacity of archaeological investigations. The
relationships between the diverse groups of pictographs have not yet
been discovered, nor has their influence on pictographic writing in
Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, the Sumerian and Phoenician pictographs
provide the first traces of our modern alphabet.
Hieroglyphs were the sacred
language of ancient Egypt, but they continued in use until late in
the third century CE. As the form and structure of the hieroglyphs
were too clumsy for practical purposes in everyday use, a cursive
form of script, written with a pen and called
hieratic, was soon developed for trade purposes and
accounting records. A simplified cursive form, called the
demotic, was in general use by 700 BCE, but both
cursive forms necessitated considerable professional training for
proficient writing. Until quite recently it was believed that the
earliest hieroglyphs had been based on Sumerian pictographs that the
Egyptians had borrowed near the beginning of the First Dynasty, in
about 3100 BCE. However, archaeological investigations carried
out at Abydos and elsewhere in southern Egypt since 1988, prove that
the Egyptians were using an advanced system of writing in
3250 BCE and probably much earlier, long before the pharaonic
monarchy was founded when King Narmer completed the unification of
the Kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt in about 3100 BCE. This
new evidence indicates that the Egyptian hieroglyphs did not develop
progressively from primitive pictographs. Some characters were
always used as an alphabet and others as phonetic signs called determinatives, either
in front of or after a picture sign, to indicate the precise
interpretation or sound of the picture and hence its correct
meaning. Thus literary expression came into being. Another useful
characteristic of Egyptian hieroglyphs is that they can be written
in any direction, to suit the requirements of the text and its
location on the object being inscribed.
The earliest Sumerian
pictographs represented objects. Later some pictographs came to be
associated with sounds, especially the sounds of the initial
consonants of the names assigned to the objects represented. In the
course of time it was realised that pictographs could be used to
represent the same sounds in other words, from which an alphabet
evolved and spelling began. Originally the Sumerian pictographs had
a vertical format and were inscribed in vertical columns commencing
from the right of the tablet and reading downwards. Some time
between 3000 BCE and 2500 BCE the pictographs changed to a
horizontal format, when it was found more convenient to inscribe
them in horizontal lines commencing from the top of the tablet and
reading from left to right. Because the Sumerians found it difficult
to inscribe curved lines on clay, they soon replaced their
pictographs with characters comprising a series of short straight
lines, which developed into the cuneiform script, from the Latin cuneus, which means a
wedge. The script was called cuneiform because nearly all of the
short lines used to form the characters were wedge shaped, having
been made by the imprint of a square ended stylus on wet clay.
In Byblos, which was the Gebal
of Canaan mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, pictographic
impressions first appeared on seals from about 3100 BCE and
seem to have been the first steps in the growth of Phoenician
writing. The cuneiform script was fully developed in Akkadia, or
northern Iraq, by about 2800 BCE, from whence it spread
throughout the eastern Mediterranean region. Signs from Byblos,
dating from about 2500 BCE, are in a script similar to that
which was then being used in Syria. The Akkadian cuneiform script,
which had become the language of trade and diplomacy that was in use
between Syria and Egypt before 1400 BCE, is considered to be
the forerunner of the Phoenician alphabet and our modern alphabets.
The clay tablets on which the cuneiform script was inscribed varied
in size according to the amount of text, ranging from small tags to
tiles as large as 30 centimetres by 45 centimetres. However the
longer historical and commemorative inscriptions were often written
on large clay prisms or cylinders. By the fifth century BCE, the
simplified Phoenician and Aramaic scripts had supplanted the
cuneiform script in most areas, although cuneiform script continued
to be used for temple documents in Babylon until about 75 CE.
Pottery and other objects from Byblos and Sidon, during the period
from 2100 BCE to 1700 BCE, show that a linear script
called pseudo-hieroglyphics was then in use. Variously called
Canaanite, Sinaitic or proto-Phoenician, this script was one of the
earliest forms of a non-Egyptian alphabetical script. Archaeological
studies testify that the use of this script rapidly became so
widespread in the Middle East that an alphabet, usually called the
Phoenician alphabet, was in general use by 1500 BCE. This
alphabet progressively replaced the cumbersome cuneiform scripts of
Babylonia and Assyria and the more complex hieroglyphic writing of
Egypt. It has been shown that he ancient Hebrew alphabet is linked
to the hieroglyphs of Egypt through the Sinaitic script. Early
samples of the script have been found in the region of Sinai, where
the Hebrew scriptures record that Moses was instructed to write the
Tables of the Law,
probably in about 1280 BCE.
As in the Sinaitic script and
the basic hieroglyphic pictographs from which that script was
derived, each letter in the Hebrew alphabet originally represented
an object and hence conveyed a specific meaning. Over time the
meaning amplified through thought processes to represent additional
associated meanings. For example aleph, the first letter
in the Hebrew alphabet, represents the head of a bull, derived
directly from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing the animal. In
the Hebrew system of characters aleph also has the
numerical value of 1. Because the people
had worshipped the bull in antiquity, Hebrew priests in ancient
times used aleph to represent the
deity. In later times the yod became the symbol of
God, because it is the initial character of the Tetragrammaton and also
of Jah, the two-letter name
of God revered by the Hebrews. Aleph is the equivalent
of alpha in the Greek
alphabet. In the Sinaitic script, the equivalent of the Hebrew aleph looks very much
like the Greek alpha, which in fact was
derived from it. Depending upon the era of the Sinaitic script, its
equivalents of aleph also bear a close
resemblance to either the capital A or the small a of our modern Roman
characters, all of which evolved from the alpha of the Greek
alphabet. Such progressive developments of the alphabet aptly
illustrate the fertile imagination of the human mind when using
symbols.
Another example that deserves
special mention is the eye used in the Egyptian
hieroglyphs. This Egyptian character was carried forward into the
Sinaitic script in a similar, though more rounded form, whence it
was adopted in a modified form as a Hebrew character. In Hebrew the
equivalent character is called ayin, which means an eye. However, it was
also used to signify a well or spring of water. It is of particular
interest to note that the English word for the physical organ also
is eye, which is pronounced
almost exactly the same as the Hebrew word and its equivalent in
other languages of the Near East. The shape of ayin in the present
formal Hebrew script is very different from the teardrop shape of
its prototypes in the Sinaitic script and the Hebrew script of
700 BCE and earlier. Although ayin now looks more like
a small y in the Roman alphabet,
nevertheless the original shape was round, in the form that it was
carried forward into the Greek alphabet as omicron, which is
similar to the capital O and small o of our modern Roman
alphabet. It is interesting to note that the equivalent eye in the Egyptian
hieroglyphs was also used to depict the "all-seeing eye of God"
in the Egyptian texts, in exactly the same sense as it is used in
Psalm 33:18, which says that "the eye of the Lord is upon
thee", signifying God's watchful care over humanity. There
are many similar threads of interest that have their origins in the
Egyptian hieroglyphs and continue through the Sinaitic script into
the Hebrew characters, thence into the Greek alphabet and ultimately
into our modern Roman alphabet. This proves beyond doubt that
symbolism is an integral part of our nature and our language,
without which all communication would be barren.
The scriptural texts of all
religions are copiously illustrated with symbolic references.
Frequently those references are simple figurative statements,
although emphasis may be given by expanding the theme into a short
metaphorical passage or even as lengthy parable. Symbol comes through the
Latin symbolum from the Greek
sumbolon, a derivative
of sumballien meaning to throw. The Greek sumbolon means to put together or to compare in ordinary
usage, but it also is used to signify a token. This is
analogous to the Latin use of symbolum to indicate a
mark or sign as a means of recognition. Metaphor is derived from
the Greek metaphora, meaning transfer or transportation, but in
Greek usage the word is also used to signify a figure of speech, in
the way as it is used in English to indicate that a quality usually
attached to one kind of object is transferred to another. Parable also comes from
the Greek language, in which parabole literally means
putting things side by
side. It is somewhat similar in meaning to allegory, from the Greek
allegoria meaning to say things in a different
way. This brief outline of the background to our language
reveals its extraordinary capacity to communicate abstract thoughts
by symbols.
A key objective in the use of
parables and allegories is to present interesting illustrations,
from which moral or religious truths are easily deduced. The value
of teaching in this way is twofold, because assimilation is easier
and retention is improved when the recipients draw their own
conclusions from the illustrations presented. In modern usage a
parable is a short descriptive story intended to convey a single
truth, whereas an allegory usually is a more elaborate exposition in
which the details present several comparisons. A good example of a
parable, or simple figurative statement in the scriptures, is found
in Psalm 23:1 -
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
want".
Another well known
example of a parable is the Old Testament prophecy that is said to
foretell the birth, death and resurrection of the Messiah, which is
recorded in Psalm 118:22 in the following words:
"The stone which the builders rejected
has become the chief corner-stone".
A typical example of a
short metaphorical passage relates to the latter part of the reign
of Jeroboam II, in about 750 BCE, which was a period of
economic boom when the living conditions were luxurious, moral
corruption was rampant and idolatry was prevalent. The impending
judgment of Israel was foretold by the prophet Amos, in Amos 7:8-9,
when he quoted the Lord's words as:
"I am setting a plumb line to the heart
of my people Israel; never again will I pass them by. The
hill-shrines of Isaac shall be desolated and the sanctuaries of
Israel laid waste; I will rise, sword in hand, against the house of
Jeroboam."
This prophesy was
fulfilled during the reign of Hezekiah's son Menasseh, in about
650 BCE, when the Lord found the people to be irremediably
warped by sin and declared an irrevocable sentence of destruction
upon them, which is graphically recorded in II Kings 21:13-14
by the words:
"I will mark down every stone of
Jerusalem with the plumb-line of Samaria and the plummet of the
house of Ahab; I will wipe away Jerusalem as when a man wipes his
plate and turns it upside down."
A representative parable, in
Matthew 20:1-16, tells the story of labourers in the vineyard to
illustrate the fairness of God. It shows how God deals with men
graciously, though not necessarily in strict accordance with their
merits. The landowner engaged various labourers and agreed their
day's wages with them, then set them to work at different times of
the day. When paid at the end of the day some labourers complained
that their pay was not fair, but the landowner said that it was his
prerogative to set the wages and theirs to accept them. In the
fourth chapter of Mark is an interesting series of parables readily
understood by the peasant farmers of the day, concerning the
vicissitudes of sowing seed, how seed grows secretly at night and
how a minute mustard seed can grow into a tree. Many dramatic
allegories are found in the scriptures. Those in Ecclesiastes are
not divine revelations, but an exposition of how ordinary humans
reason, reminding us that all "under the sun" is
complete emptiness, except that which comes from above in the form
of God's revelation and salvation. Two passages in Ecclesiastes
deserving special attention are in Chapter 11, which exhorts “youthful diligence” and
in Chapter 12, which reminds us of our “inevitable
destiny”.
The initiate is informed that
freemasonry is a peculiar system of morality, veiled in allegory and
illustrated by symbols. In this respect the system of instruction in
freemasonry closely parallels that used in the scriptures. The basic
symbols of freemasonry are drawn directly from a consideration of
the implements used by operative masons, supplemented by the
characteristics of the various building stones, the methods used to
prepare and test the stones, the erection of the building and even
the building itself. The ways in which these implements, methods and
materials are applied in operative freemasonry are used to
demonstrate basic truths and to inculcate analogous actions on the
part of the individual. The purpose is to stimulate intellectual
comparisons and to promote an intelligent consideration of courses
of action and their outcomes, thereby inducing the individual to
discover, by the process of rational reasoning, the moral lessons
inculcated by the symbols. These visible symbols of freemasonry have
greatly enriched our language by introducing such descriptive
epithets as "square conduct", "upright intentions", "on the level" and a
host of other expressions now in everyday use.
The esoteric teachings of
speculative freemasonry are incorporated in the ceremonial in which
the candidate plays an active part, including the apparently
exoteric components of preparation and introduction. They are
essential elements of the ceremonials, which by their nature are
intended to create an enduring impression on the candidate's mind.
The various ceremonials include journeys and other relevant
activities in a dramatic and allegorical form, which are intended to
create a lasting impression. These instructions are supplemented and
amplified by appropriate addresses and allegorical lectures. In
addition to the moral instruction that is communicated through
exoteric symbols, the system of instruction is intended to stimulate
contemplation, thereby helping the individual to formulate personal
answers to the following three fundamental questions:
"What are we and from whence did we
come?"
"What is our purpose on earth and in
life?"
"What is our ultimate destiny?"
These questions are
intimately related to the three elements of human existence, the
body, the mind and the soul. Each in turn is reflected in the
ceremonials of Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft and Master Mason,
which allegorically relate to birth, life and death and provide
symbolic instruction that is intended to assist candidates to find
their own answers to these three fundamental questions.
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