The Builders | Page 6

life, and Darkness evil and death. For the early man light was the mother of beauty, the unveiler of color, the elusive and radiant mystery of the world, and his speech about it was reverent and grateful. At the gates of the morning he stood with uplifted hands, and the sun sinking in the desert at eventide made him wistful in prayer, half fear and half hope, lest the beauty return no more. His religion, when he emerged from the night of animalism, was a worship of the Light--his temple hung with stars, his altar a glowing flame, his ritual a woven hymn of night and day. No poet of our day, not even Shelley, has written lovelier lyrics in praise of the Light than those hymns of Ikhnaton in the morning of the world.[9] Memories of this religion of the dawn linger with us today in the faith that follows the Day-Star from on high, and the Sun of Righteousness--One who is the Light of the World in life, and the Lamp of Poor Souls in the night of death.
Here, then, are the real foundations of Masonry, both material and moral: in the deep need and aspiration of man, and his creative impulse; in his instinctive Faith, his quest of the Ideal, and his love of the Light. Underneath all his building lay the feeling, prophetic of his last and highest thought, that the earthly house of his life should be in right relation with its heavenly prototype, the world-temple--imitating on earth the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. If he erected a square temple, it was an image of the earth; if he built a pyramid, it was a picture of a beauty shown him in the sky; as, later, his cathedral was modelled after the mountain, and its dim and lofty arch a memory of the forest vista--its altar a fireside of the soul, its spire a prayer in stone. And as he wrought his faith and dream into reality, it was but natural that the tools of the builder should become emblems of the thoughts of the thinker. Not only his tools, but, as we shall see, the very stones with which he worked became sacred symbols--the temple itself a vision of that House of Doctrine, that Home of the Soul, which, though unseen, he is building in the midst of the years.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Primitive Art in Egypt.
[2] Chapter iii, aphorism 2.
[3] Architecture, by Lethaby, chap. i.
[4] Architecture, by Lethaby, chap. ii.
[5] Dawn of Civilization.
[6] Dawn of Astronomy, Norman Lockyer.
[7] Churchward, in his Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man (chap. xv), holds that the pyramid was typical of heaven, Shu, standing on seven steps, having lifted the sky from the earth in the form of a triangle; and that at each point stood one of the gods, Sut and Shu at the base, the apex being the Pole Star where Horus of the Horizon had his throne. This is, in so far, true; but the pyramid emblem was older than Osiris, Isis, and Horus, and runs back into an obscurity beyond knowledge.
[8] Religion and Thought in Egypt, by Breasted, lecture ix.
[9] Ikhnaton, indeed, was a grand, solitary, shining figure, "the first idealist in history," and a poetic thinker in whom the religion of Egypt attained its highest reach. Dr. Breasted puts his lyrics alongside the poems of Wordsworth and the great passage of Ruskin in Modern Painters, as celebrating the divinity of Light (Religion and Thought in Egypt, lecture ix). Despite the revenge of his enemies, he stands out as a lonely, heroic, prophetic soul--"the first individual in time."

THE WORKING TOOLS

/# It began to shape itself to my intellectual vision into something more imposing and majestic, solemnly mysterious and grand. It seemed to me like the Pyramids in their loneliness, in whose yet undiscovered chambers may be hidden, for the enlightenment of coming generations, the sacred books of the Egyptians, so long lost to the world; like the Sphynx half buried in the desert.
In its symbolism, which and its spirit of brotherhood are its essence, Freemasonry is more ancient than any of the world's living religions. It has the symbols and doctrines which, older than himself, Zarathrustra inculcated; and it seemed to me a spectacle sublime, yet pitiful--the ancient Faith of our ancestors holding out to the world its symbols once so eloquent, and mutely and in vain asking for an interpreter.
And so I came at last to see that the true greatness and majesty of Freemasonry consist in its proprietorship of these and its other symbols; and that its symbolism is its soul.
--ALBERT PIKE, Letter to Gould #/
CHAPTER II
The Working Tools
Never were truer words than those of Goethe in the last lines of Faust, and they echo one of the oldest instincts of