SUN, MOON AND STARS
We have more right to be astonished that the astronomical references
are so few, rather than to be surprised that there are so many!
We are taught that geometry and Masonry were originally synonymous
terms and geometry, fifth of the seven liberal arts and sciences, is
given more prominence in our Fellowcraft degree than the seventh,
astronomy. Yet the beginnings of astronomy far antedate the earliest
geometrician. Indeed, geometry came into existence to answer the
ceaseless questionings of man as to the “why” of celestial phenomena.
In these modern days it is difficult to visualize the vital
importance of the heavens generally, to early man. We can hardly
conceive of their terror of the eclipse and the comet, or sense their
veneration for the Sun and his bride, the Moon. We are too well
educated. We know too much about “the proportions which connect this
vast machine.” The astronomer has pushed back the frontiers of his
science beyond the inquiries of most of us; the questions which occur
as a result of unaided visual observations have all been answered.
We have substituted facts for fancies regarding the sun, the moon,
the solar system, the comet and the eclipse.
Albert Pike, the great Masonic student “who found Masonry in a hovel
and left her in a palace” says:
We cannot, even in the remotest degree, feel, though we may partially
and imperfectly imagine, how those great, primitive, simple-hearted
children of Nature, felt in regard to the Starry Hosts, there upon
the slopes of the Himalayas, on the Chaldean plains, in the Persian
and Median deserts, and upon the banks of the great, strange River,
the Nile. To them the universe was alive - instinct with forces and
powers, mysterious and beyond their comprehension. To them it was no
machine, no great system of clockwork; but a great live creature, in
sympathy with or inimical to man. To them, all was mystery and a
miracle, and the stars flashing overhead spoke to their hearts almost
in an audible language. Jupiter, with its kingly splendors, was the
Emperor of the starry legions. Venus looked lovingly on the earth
and blessed it; Mars with his crimson fires threatened war and
misfortune; and Saturn, cold and grave, chilled and repelled them.
The ever-changing moon, faithful companion of the sun, was a constant
miracle and wonder; the Sun himself the visible emblem of the
creative and generative power. To them the earth was a great plain,
over which the sun, the moon and the planets revolved, its servants,
framed to give it light. Of the stars, some were beneficent
existences that brought with them Spring-time and fruits and flowers
- some, faithful, sentinels, advising them of coming inundations, of
the season of storm and of deadly winds some heralds of evil, which,
steadily foretelling. they seemed to cause. To them the eclipse,
were portents of evil, and their causes hidden in mystery, and
supernatural. The regular returns of the stars, the comings of
Arcturus, Orion, Sirius, the Pleides and Aldebaran; and the
journeyings of the Sun, were voluntary and not mechanical to them.
What wonder that astronomy became to them the most important of
sciences; that those who learned it became rulers; and that vast
edifices, the pyramids, the tower or Temple of Bel, and other like
erections elsewhere in the East, were builded for astronomical
purposes? - and what wonder that, in their great childlike
simplicity, they worshipped the Light, the Sun, the Planets, and the
stars; and personified them, and eagerly believed in the histories
invented for them; in that age when the capacity for belief was
infinite; as indeed, if we but reflect, it still is and ever will
be?”
Anglo-Saxons usually consider history as their history; science as
their science; religion as their religion. This somewhat naive
viewpoint is hardly substantiated by a less egoistic survey of
knowledge. Columbus’s sailors believed they would “fall off the
edge” of a flat world, yet Pythagoras knew the earth to be a ball.
The ecliptic was known before Solomon’s Temple was built. The
Chinese predicted eclipses long, long before the Europeans of the
middle age quit regarding them as portents of doom!
Astronomical lore of Freemasonry is very old. The foundations of our
degrees are far more ancient than we can prove by documentary
evidence. It is surely not stretching credulity to believe that the
study which antedates “Geometry, the first and noblest of sciences,”
must have been impressed on our Order, its ceremonies and its
symbols, long before Preston and Webb worked their ingenious
revolutions in our rituals and gave us the system of degrees we use -
in one form or another - today.
The astronomical references in our degrees begin with the points of
the compass; East, West, and South; and the place of darkness, the
North. We are taught the reason why the North is a place of darkness
by the position of Solomon’s Temple with reference to the ecliptic, a
most important astronomical conception. The Sun is the Past Master’s
own symbol; our Masters rule their lodges - or are supposed to! -
with the same regularity with the Sun rules the day and the Moon
governs the night. Our explanation of our Lesser Lights is obviously
an adaption of a concept which dates back to the earliest of
religions; specifically to the Egyptian Isis, Orsiris and Horus;
represented by the Sun, Moon and Venus.
Circumambulation about the Altar is in imitation of the course of the
Sun. We traverse our lodges from East to West by way of the South,
as did the Sun Worshipers who thus imitated the daily passage of
their deity through the heavens.
Measures of time are wholly a matter of astronomy.
Days and nights were before man, and consequently before astronomy,
but hours and minutes, high twelve and low twelve, are inventions of
the mind, depending upon the astronomical observation of the Sun at
Meridian to determine noon, and consequently all other periods of
time. Indeed, we are taught this in the Middle Chamber work, in
which we give to Geometry the premier place as a means by which the
astronomer may “fix the duration of time and seasons, years and
cycles.”
Atop the Pillars representing those in the porch of King Solomon’s
Temple appear the terrestrial and celestial globes. In the
Fellowcraft degree we are told in beautiful and poetic language that
“numberless worlds are around us, all framed by the same Divine
Artist, which roll through the vast expanse and are all conducted by
the same unerring law of nature.”
Our Ancient brethren, observing that the sun rose and set, easily
determining East and West in a general way. As the rises and sets
through a variation of 47 degrees north and south during a six
month’s period the determination was not exact.
The earliest Chaldean star gazers, progenitors of the astronomers of
later ages, saw that the apparently revolving heavens pivoted on a
point nearly coincident with a certain star. We know that the true
north diverges about from the North Star one and one-half degrees,
but their observations were sufficiently accurate to determine a
North - and consequently East, West and South.
The reference to the ecliptic in the Sublime Degree has puzzled many
a brother who has not studied the elements of astronomy.
The earliest astronomers defined the ecliptic as the hypothetical
“circular” plane of the earth’s path about the sun, with the sun in
the “center.”
As a matter of fact, the sun is not in the center and the earth’s
path about sun is not circular. The earth travels once about the sun
in three hundred and sixty-five days, and a fraction, on an
“elliptic” path; the sun is at one of the foci of that ellipse.
The axis of the earth, about which it turns once in twenty-four
hours, thus making a night and a day, is inclined to this
hypothetical plane by 23 and one-half degrees. At one point in its
yearly path, the north pole of the earth is inclined towards the sun
by this amount. Half way further around in its path the north pole
is inclined away from the sun by this angle. The longest day in the
northern hemisphere - June 21st - occurs when the north pole is most
inclined toward the sun.
Ant building situated between latitudes 23 and one-half north and 23
and one-half south of the equator, will receive the rays of the sun
at meridian (high twelve, or noon) from the north at some time during
the year. King Solomon’s Temple at Jerusalem, being in latitude 31
degrees 47 seconds north, lay beyond this limit. At no time in the
year, therefore, did the sun or moon at meridian “darts its rays into
the northerly portion thereof.”
As astronomy in Europe is comparatively modern, some have argued that
this reason for considering the North, Masonically, as a place of
darkness, must also be comparatively modern. This is wholly mistaken
- Pythagoras (to go further back) recognized the obliquity of the
world’s axis to the ecliptic, as well as that the earth was a sphere
suspended in space. While Pythagoras (510 B.C.) is much younger than
Solomon’s Temple, he is almost two thousand years older than the
beginnings of astronomy in Europe.
The “world celestial and terrestrial” on the brazen pillars were
added by modern ritual makers. Solomon knew them not, but
contemporaries of Solomon believed the heavens to be a sphere
revolving around the earth. To them the earth stood still; a hollow
sphere with its inner surface dotted with stars. The slowly turning
“celestial sphere” is as old as mankind’s observations of the “starry
decked heavens.”
It is to be noted that terrestrial and celestial spheres are both
used as emblems of universality. They are not mere duplications for
emphasis; they teach their own individual part of “universality.”
What is “universal” on the earth - as for instance, the necessity of
mankind to breathe, drink water, and eat in order to live - is not
necessarily “universal” in all the universe. We have no knowledge
that any other planet in our solar system is inhabited - what
evidence there is, is rather to the contrary. We have no knowledge
that any other sun has any inhabited planets in its system. Neither
have we any knowledge that they have not. If life does exist in some
other, to us unknown world, it may be entirely different from life on
this planet. Hence a symbol of universality which applied only to
earth would be a self-contradiction.
Real universality means what it says. It appertains to the whole
universe. While a Mason’s charity, considered as giving relief to
the poor and distressed, must obviously be confined to this
particular planet, his charity of thought may, so we are taught,
extend “through the boundless realms of eternity.”
Hence “the world terrestrial” and “the world celestial” on our
representations of the pillars, in denoting universality mean that
the principles of our Order are not founded upon mere earthly
conditions and transient truths, but rest upon Divine and limitless
foundations, coexistent with the whole cosmos and its creator.
We are taught of the “All Seeing Eye whom the Sun, Moon and Stars
obey and under whose watchful care even comets perform their
stupendous revolutions.” In this astronomical reference is, oddly
enough, a potent argument, both for the extreme care in the
transmission of ritual unchanged from mouth to ear, and the urgent
necessity of curbing well-intentioned brethren who wish to “improve”
the ritual.
The word “revolution” in this paragraph (it is so printed in the
earliest Webb monitors) fixes it as a comparatively modern
conception. Tycho Brahe, progenitor of the modern maker and user of
fine instruments among astronomers, whose discoveries have left an
indelible impress on astronomy, made no attempt to consider comets as
orbital bodies. Galileo thought them “emanations of the atmosphere.”
Not until the seventeenth century was well underway did a few daring
spirits suggest that these celestial portents of evil, these
terribly heavenly demons which had inspired terror in the hearts of
men for uncounted generations, were actually parts of the solar
system, and that many if not most of them were periodic, actually
returning again and again; in other words, that they revolved about
the sun.
Obviously, then, this passage of our ritual cannot have come down to
us by a “word of mouth” transmission from an epoch earlier than that
in which men first commenced to believe that a comet was not an
augury of evil but a part of the solar system.
The so-called “lunar lodges” have far more a practical than an
astronomical basis. In the early days of Masonry, both in England
and in this country, many if not most lodges, met on dates fixed in
advance, but according to the time when the moon was full; not
because the moon “Governed” the night, but because it illuminated the
traveler’s path! In days when roads were but muddy paths between
town and hamlet, when any journey was hazardous and on black nights
dangerous in the extreme, the natural illumination of the moon,
making the road easy to find and the depredations of highwaymen the
more difficult, was a matter of some moment!
One final curious derivation of a Masonic symbol from the heavens and
we are through. The symbol universally associated with the Stewards
of a Masonic lodge is the cornucopia.
According to the mythology of the Greeks, which go back to the very
dawn of civilization, the God Zeus was nourished in infancy from the
milk of a goat, Amalthea. In gratitude, the God placed Amalthea
forever in the heavens as a constellation, but first gave one of
Amalthea’s horns to his nurses with the assurance that it would
forever pour for them whatever they desired!
The “horn of plenty,” or the cornucopia, is thus a symbol of
abundance. The goat from which it came may be found by the curious
among the constellations under the name of Capricorn. The “Tropic of
Capricorn” of our school days is the southern limit of the swing of
the sun on the path which marks the ecliptic, on which it inclines
first its north and then its south pole towards our luminary. Hence
there is a connection, not the less direct for being tenuous, between
out Stewards, their symbol, the lights in the lodge, the “place of
darkness” and Solomon’s Temple.
Of such curious links and interesting bypaths is the study of
astronomy and its connection with Freemasonry, the more beautiful
when we see eye to eye with the Psalmist in the Great Light; “The
Heavens Declare the Glory of God and the Firmament Sheweth His
Handiwork.”
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