Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

AND HIS SECRET SOCIETY. 351
Degree" in Masonry, but the author of the Royal Masonic Cyclopedia
rejects it, sayiug that it has no significance. In later
specimens than Caxton's the pot becomes usually more graceful,
and more like the sacramental chalice, yet without having any
of the accessories enumerated above.
If Francis Bacon or his father,. Sir Nicholas, helped to devise
new or to develop old symbolic water-marks, this idea of a pot of
manna would commend itself to them, lending itself easily to
the further development of pots and jugs whence issue bunches
of grapes — the fruits of knowledge ;
pearls, the dew of heaven —
Wisdom ; manna, the spiritual food, all symbols of the Holy
Spirit, Truth, the gifts of reason and sweet
speech, which link
themselves together in such passages as the following from the
Natural History, or Sylva Sylvarum :
i
" There be three things for sweetness : sugar, honey, manna.
... I have heard from one that was industrious in husbandry
that the labour of the bee is about the wax, and that he hath
known in the beginning of May honeycombs empty of honey, and
within a fortnight, when the sweet dews fall, filled like a cellar."
A note in Spedding's edition of the Works says here :
" Bacon's
informant took the same view of the matter as Aristotle, and probably
was directly or indirectly influenced by his opinion. According
to Aristotle, the bees manufacture the wax from flowers, but
simply collect the honey which falls from the sky."
The " informant, " we think, was probably Aristotle himself,
and Bacon was here thinking of his own husbandry and of the
hive in which he made the frame or comb, wherein the labour
consisted, whilst his busy working bees merely collected the dew of
knowledge without any great exertion to themselves, but thus
enabling him rapidly to store up and methodise it for the advancement
of learning.
"It is reported by some of the ancients that there is a tree
called Occhus in the valleys of Hyrcania that distilleth honey in
the mornings. It is not unlike that the saps and tears of some
l This work, as has been said, is considered by the present writer to be a masterpiece
of ambiguous writing— a study in metaphor and simile from beginning
to end. These extracts concerning manna are thus interpreted. See Emblems,
etc.