THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

him
in all their temples. His symbolic name, on the monuments, was
represented
by the eye accompanying a throne, to which was sometimes added an
abbreviated figure of the god, and sometimes what has been called a
hatchet, but which, I consider, may as correctly be supposed to be a
representation of a square.
The All-Seeing Eye may, then, be considered as a symbol of God
manifested
in his omnipresence--his guardian and preserving character--to which
Solomon alludes in the Book of Proverbs (xv. 3), when he says, "The
eyes
of Jehovah are in every place, beholding (or as it might be more
faithfully translated, watching) the evil and the good." It is a symbol
of
the Omnipresent Deity.
The _triangle_ is another symbol which is entitled to our
consideration.
There is, in fact, no other symbol which is more various in its
application or more generally diffused throughout the whole system of
both
the Spurious and the Pure Freemasonry.
The equilateral triangle appears to have been adopted by nearly all the
nations of antiquity as a symbol of the Deity.
Among the Hebrews, it has already been stated that this figure, with a
_yod_ in the centre, was used to represent the tetragrammaton, or
ineffable name of God.
The Egyptians considered the equilateral triangle as the most perfect
of
figures, and a representative of the great principle of animated
existence, each of its sides referring to one of the three departments
of
creation--the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral.
The symbol of universal nature among the Egyptians was the right-angled
triangle, of which the perpendicular side represented Osiris, or the
male
principle; the base, Isis, or the female principle; and the
hypothenuse,
their offspring, Horus, or the world emanating from the union of both
principles.
All this, of course, is nothing more nor less than the phallus and
cteis,
or lingam and yoni, under a different form.
The symbol of the right-angled triangle was afterwards adopted by
Pythagoras when he visited the banks of the Nile; and the discovery
which
he is said to have made in relation to the properties of this figure,
but
which he really learned from the Egyptian priests, is commemorated in