Through the Key Hole - RoseCroix.org.au

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CIRCUMAMBULATION
MacKey—Encyclopædia of Freemasonry & Others
MacKey
The perambulations that candidates and members undertake around
the lodge floor is often, and more accurately, referred to as circumambulation.
This is the name given by sacred archaeologists ti that
religious rite in the ancient initiations which consisted in a formal procession
around the altar or other holy and consecrated object. The
same rite exists in Freemasonry.
In ancient Greece, when the priests were engaged in the rite of sacrifice,
they and the people, always walked three times around the altar
while singing a sacred hymn. In making this procession, great care
was taken to move in imitation of the course of the sun.
For this purpose they commenced in the east, and passing on by
way of the south to the west and thence by the north, they arrived at
the east again. In this procession, as it will be observed, the right
hand was always placed to the altar….This ceremony the Greeks
called moving, from right to the right, which was the direction of the
motion, and the Romans applied it to the term dextrovorsum or dextrorsom,
which signifies the same thing.
Among the Romans, the ceremony or circumambulation was always
used in the rites of sacrifice, of expiation or purification. In fact, so
common was it to unite the ceremony of circumambulation with that
of expiation or purification, or in other words to make a circuitous procession
in performing the latter rite, that the term lustrate, whose
primitive meaning is to purify, came at last to be synonymous with
circuire, to walk around anything, and hence a purification and a circumambulation
were often expressed by the same word.
This Rite of Circumambulation undoubtedly refers to the doctrine of
sun worship, because the circumambulation was always made
around the sacred place just as the sun was supposed to move
around the earth; and although the dogma of sun worship does not of
course exist in Freemasonry, we find an allusion to it in the Rite of
Circumambulation which it preserves as well as in the position of the
officers of a lodge and in the symbol of a point within a circle.
Photograph taken March 1998