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

For the reason, God is a dualism made up of matter and mind, as in the
faith of Zoroaster and many other cults. But when the social life of
man becomes the prism of faith, God is a trinity of Father, Mother,
Child. Almost as old as human thought, we find the idea of the trinity
and its triangle emblem everywhere--Siva, Vishnu, and Brahma in India
corresponding to Osiris, Isis, and Horus in Egypt. No doubt this idea
underlay the old pyramid emblem, at each corner of which stood one of
the gods. No missionary carried this profound truth over the earth. It
grew out of a natural and universal human experience, and is explained
by the fact of the unity of the human mind and its vision of God
through the family.
Other emblems take us back into an antiquity so remote that we seem to
be walking in the shadow of prehistoric time. Of these, the mysterious
Swastika is perhaps the oldest, as it is certainly the most widely
distributed over the earth. As much a talisman as a symbol, it has
been found on Chaldean bricks, among the ruins of the city of Troy, in
Egypt, on vases of ancient Cyprus, on Hittite remains and the pottery
of the Etruscans, in the cave temples of India, on Roman altars and
Runic monuments in Britain, in Thibet, China, and Korea, in Mexico,
Peru, and among the prehistoric burial-grounds of North America. There
have been many interpretations of it. Perhaps the meaning most usually
assigned to it is that of the Sanskrit word having in its roots an
intimation of the beneficence of life, _to be_ and _well_. As such, it
is a sign indicating "that the maze of life may bewilder, but a path
of light runs through it: _It is well_ is the name of the path, and
the key to life eternal is in the strange labyrinth for those whom God
leadeth."[11] Others hold it to have been an emblem of the Pole Star
whose stability in the sky, and the procession of the Ursa Major
around it, so impressed the ancient world. Men saw the sun journeying
across the heavens every day in a slightly different track, then
standing still, as it were, at the solstice, and then returning on its
way back. They saw the moon changing not only its orbit, but its size
and shape and time of appearing. Only the Pole Star remained fixed and
stable, and it became, not unnaturally, a light of assurance and the
footstool of the Most High.[12] Whatever its meaning, the Swastika
shows us the efforts of the early man to read the riddle of things,
and his intuition of a love at the heart of life.
Akin to the Swastika, if not an evolution from it, was the Cross, made
forever holy by the highest heroism of Love. When man climbed up out
of the primeval night, with his face to heaven upturned, he had a
cross in his hand. Where he got it, why he held it, and what he meant
by it, no one can conjecture much less affirm.[13] Itself a paradox,
its arms pointing to the four quarters of the earth, it is found in
almost every part of the world carved on coins, altars, and tombs, and
furnishing a design for temple architecture in Mexico and Peru, in the
pagodas of India, not less than in the churches of Christ. Ages before
our era, even from the remote time of the cliff-dweller, the Cross
seems to have been a symbol of life, though for what reason no one
knows. More often it was an emblem of eternal life, especially when
inclosed within a Circle which ends not, nor begins--the type of
Eternity. Hence the Ank Cross or Crux Ansata of Egypt, scepter of the
Lord of the Dead that never die. There is less mystery about the
Circle, which was an image of the disk of the Sun and a natural symbol
of completeness, of eternity. With a point within the center it
became, as naturally, the emblem of the Eye of the World--that