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If there is one potential problem with the occult that most anyone can agree on, it would be the dyscivic effects of occult groups in positions of power. Not the wacky wiccans so much as the dark symbolism that seems to hover around the global elites. Regardless of your own beliefs, it should be obvious that people of influence bonding around the ritual acquisition of power by any means necessary may not be the best thing for a society. One group that comes up a lot in these discussions are the Freemasons, an 18th century society with medieval roots. They are hard to pin down - opinions range from a fraternal order to the backbone of the Illumnati - but their symbols are well known. Let's look into that compass and square and see what it means.
From Darkness to Light, 1887, Freemason Print from by the Petibone Bros. MFG. Co. Cincinatti, Fraternity Publishers, Military Band and Society Goods
The compass and square are front and center in this print. Masonic prints like this would be owned by new members, to plot out a symbolic path from initiation as a Master Mason through the ranks. The spaces recording new ranks are visible.
This is the journey from the darkness of the uninitiated to the light of Masonic illumination.
They appear on Masonic aprons, the most prized of the member's symbolic possessions. Here is a minimalist one and a fancier one.
Speaking of influence, here's one of George Washington's aprons, courtesy of Mt. Vernon. It is believed to have been a gift from Lafayette.
And a 19th-century print with Brother Washington in his apron and holding trowel. Freemasonry was the norm among the founding Fathers.
You can see from just these few pictures that Freemasons use a large number of symbols to communicate their ideas. Many of these are quite old, and add to the mystery around this group. The meanings are not secret - Masonic sites include keys to the symbolism. But it is where the symbols come from and what is implied by their use that is worth looking at.
Slav Nedev, Masonic Landscape 2, 2001, watercolor, 23.6 x 19 x 0.1 cm
But is it occult?
There are some terms to clear up first. Occult first appears in English in the 16th century to refer to things that are beyond the understanding of ordinary knowledge. At some point this splits into "occult", meaning invoking unknown forces, as in sorcery or devilry, and "esoteric" meaning unknown secrets that you are initiated in. As you can guess form the definitions, there is a lot of room for overlap. This is because when the occult was first defined, the natural and supernatural worlds were not seen as distinct as they are now. So are the Freemasons occult or esoteric? According to an extensively researched piece by one of their own brothers, their hidden knowledge is esoteric, meaning that not supernatural. But the same author acknowledges that outright occultism has been practiced by many influential Masons, including Éliphas Lévi, the occultist who came up with the now-standard image of Baphomet.
Éliphas Lévi, Baphomet, frontispiece to his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, 1854
Lévi is a great example of what makes Masonry difficult to analyze. He claims that the demon dates back at least to the Medieval Templars, but there is no historical evidence for that at all. The ideas symbolized are old, but it appears that this "ancient" idol is a 19th-century fantasy.
The symbolism of the Baphomet shares some sources with the Freemasons - both involve the search for hidden knowledge - but it is not actually a Masonic symbol.
See how fuzzy this can be?
So what is it about Masonry that makes it susceptible to legitimate Satanists like Lévi? That brings us back to our compasses.
The Compasses
On the surface level, the compass and the square are easy to explain. These are old symbols of architecture, and the name Freemason is a reference to medieval builders, called masons, who traveled from place to place seeking work. The "free" appears to refer to being outside the control of the city-based craft guilds.
Exeter Cathedral, 1112-1400, Devon, UK
The idea of architecture as the art of building did not exist in the Middle Ages - builders were builders, and the designers of the great cathedrals were the top of the master mason food chain. At a time when standard measurements were unavailable, "architects" used modular proportions and Euclidean geometry as the bases for their designs. The compass and square make perfect sense for a group looking to connect itself to the history of the mason's art.
But there was a lot more to Medieval architecture than building. A key aspect of Medieval thought - a key aspect of Western civilization actually - was the belief that God's creation is rational. The notion of a consistent, knowable world was the foundation of Western science. Pre-Modern people often illustrated logical relationships geometrically, we see depictions of God holding a compass.
God as Architect/Builder/Geometer/Craftsman, frontispiece of the Bible moralisée, circa 1220-30, illumination on parchment, 34.4 x 26 cm, Austrian National Library, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, f.1 verso
The use of the compass is clear in this fantastic manuscript.
Here are a few more examples from a website:
Creation Scene from Raoul de Presles' translation of Saint Augustine's De Civitate Dei, circa 1370-80, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. Français 22913
Here it is again - this time with a book to connect the logic of the compass to the Logos.
Guiard des Moulins, Bible Historiale de Jean de Berry, 1380-90, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. Français 20090
This time His other hand makes a gesture of blessing.
Flavius Josèphe, Les Antiquités judaïques, 1410-1420, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 247
Here He reaches through the heavens with his compasses to create the earth.
When artists show masons at work in a manuscript like this one...
Masons at work from the Prudentii psychomachia, 1289, manuscript, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS. Latin 15158, fol. 62r
...the tool is the same.
God and architects create according to their rule. Human geometry is a symbol of the Logos, or rational divine will that orders creation.
This is nothing occultist about this. The creation of man in God's image is part of a rational cosmos.
Creation of Eve, 13th century manuscript from the Musee Marmotten, Paris
This picture captures the idea of creation in God's image my making the faces and hair look alike. Humans therefore create, in "the image" of God's creation. This means following the rule of human reason -geometry - as the image of the divine Logos.
Grand medieval architecture like the Gothic cathedrals are defined by geometry symbolically and practically. The master masons who could design and build huge vaulted stone structures without steel supports needed some amount of engineering knowledge. A cathedral was a stone skeleton with a balanced design that transfered structural forces onto narrow piers. This allowed for the maximum possible space to be turned into windows. Master masons used geometry (they didn't have calculus) to arrive at workable approximations of the force vectors.
Amiens Cathedral, vaulted ceilings and windows around crossing, 1220-66
Balancing the pressure of the vaults and buttresses made these cathedrals much more stable than they look. As designs, they are pretty much applied geometry.
Peterborough Cathedral, 1118–1237
It wasn't just structural geometry in Medieval architecture - the designs were based on symbolic geometry as well. This could get really complex, but was based off of some simple starting ratios. (For an in-depth analysis of sacred geometry in the Middle Ages and at one cathedral in particular, click here).
The design as well as the structure are governed by geometric logic, just as creation follows the reason of the Logos. Click for diagram info.
Santa María de León Cathedral, 1205-1301, León, Spain
The cathedral becomes a 3D symbol of rational creation, and the windows that the rational construction made possible represent God's glorious light pouring in.
Geometry mattered, and master masons used their mastery of sacred geometry to mimic the power of divine creation itself.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, evidence of organized fraternal groups, or lodges, of masons appears, with rules and charters for initiation. These texts are known together as the Old Charges or the Gothic Constitutions, and represent the foundation stones of modern Freemasonry. It is not surprising that masons would organize - Medieval trades were guild-based and tightly controlled, and Freemasons had no outside affiliation. Their knowledge was also very specialized and, because of its mathematical basis, arcane by Medieval standards. Masons traveled from site to site, so they already tended to be more cosmopolitan than most people - put it together and some sort of society is inevitable. It's the mythology that's curious.
The early sources tell of fantastical imaginary histories that aren't really coherent other than as lessons. The Stone of Foundation was a magic altar in the form of a perfect cube with a perfect triangle inscribed that Adam brought out of Eden. We are warned:
"it must be distinctly understood that all that is said of this Stone of Foundation in Masonry is to be strictly taken in a mythical or allegorical sense.., as a philosophical myth, conveying a most profound and beautiful symbolism."
That symbolism is perfect, simple geometry.
Another legend tells of pillars with knowledge of sacred geometry inscribed on them that survived the Biblical Flood. These were discovered and transmitted to the west via Greece by Hermes and Pythagoras - not the actual god and philosopher, but quasi-mythical creations designed to fit with this history of the pillars of knowledge.
The five smaller columns reflect the distillation of this knowledge in the five orders of Classical architecture.
The same proportions are found in the divine architecture of the Temple of Solomon. The architecture or geometry makes it an image of the Logos or divine knowledge symbolized by the eye.
It's interesting folklore and historical fiction, but what opens it up to the occult?
The first problem is with the source of the ancient knowledge. Antediluvian (before the Flood) secrets were so appealing because they came from near creation, purer knowledge from when the world was young. But it was knowledge that got Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in the first place. And there is no credible argument for cubic architectural altars coming with him.
Thomas Cole, Expulsion Moon and Firelight, circa 1828, oil on canvas, 91.4 x 122 cm, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
The point of the Fall is that there is no going "back" by human means. The idea of Prelapsarian - before the Fall - knowledge is a fallacy in Christian terms, but it is a mainstay in Utopianism.
Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, The Expulsion from the Garden, 1853, from his The Bible in Pictures set.
Don't take it literally,
warns the quote above, and we can see why! These two weren't taking anything with them.
But if we take it metaphorically, then it is a general symbol for pure knowledge from the dawn of time. Precisely what the Fall made made impossible. As an idea, it means the fantasy of human perfectibility - something empirically ridiculous, regardless of your religious views.
If the knowledge is just Antediluvian, then it represents the peak of life before the Flood. A way of life that ended with, well, the Flood.
John Martin, The Deluge, 1834, oil on canvas, 168.3 x 258.4 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Both these are situations from the Bible that the Bible says end catastrophically. But don't take them literally. It's just happenstance that they chose the best known moments of cataclysmic change in the Old Testament. It must also be happenstance that they change the stories in ways that suggest the originals are wrong in their take on the lessons of the Fall and the Flood, and that the Masonic interpreters know the truth. In other words, they want to draw on the Bible for its authority and recognition, but rewrite God's conclusions. Hmmmm... a Biblical framework, but with the authority of the individual replacing that of God.
That sounds familiar...
Claiming personal desire as the ultimate authority is something basically all occult systems boil down to and is a reflection of the Satanic - or as they often prefer, Luciferian - self-absorption that they share. This picture is mainly drawing on Crowley, but the Baphomet was created by an occultist Mason and the Egyptian symbolism was shared by both. The Freemasons were one of Crowley's inspirations in founding his Order of the Golden Dawn.
This is not to say that the Masons were or are all closet Satanists, but that there were strange and potentially heretical readings of the Bible coming out of their shadowy Medieval origins that lay out knowledge goals that outstrip human limits. We do know that the modern Freemasonry founded in the early 18th century is not Christian - the God who is cited is the God of the Old Testament, and the notion of mathematical knowledge leading to Him is more Kabbalistic than anything else. But the interpretations are not strictly Jewish either. Instead we have a mess of Renaissance history and occultism that expanded the legends of the Old Charges with new ideas about man and the universe.
Reason and the Wheel of Fortune, 16th-century cartoons and devices for tapestries and stained glass, 1501-1600 MS. Français 24461.
In the humanist thought of the Renaissance. compass and square go from God's hands to the personification of Reason. This isn't exactly contradictory, but it changes the archetype from the divine to the human.
Think about that for a moment.
The next post will look at the transformation of the compass of divine creation into the claim that the human mind can uncover absolute truths on its own. The former recognizes that our experience of the universe is rational. The later is opens the path to arrogant power-seeking that welcomes the occult.
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