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

All-seeing eye of the eternal Watcher of the human scene.
Square, triangle, cross, circle--oldest symbols of humanity, all of
them eloquent, each of them pointing beyond itself, as symbols always
do, while giving form to the invisible truth which they invoke and
seek to embody. They are beautiful if we have eyes to see, serving not
merely as chance figures of fancy, but as forms of reality as it
revealed itself to the mind of man. Sometimes we find them united, the
Square within the Circle, and within that the Triangle, and at the
center the Cross. Earliest of emblems, they show us hints and
foregleams of the highest faith and philosophy, betraying not only the
unity of the human mind but its kinship with the Eternal--the fact
which lies at the root of every religion, and is the basis of each.
Upon this Faith man builded, finding a rock beneath, refusing to think
of Death as the gigantic coffin-lid of a dull and mindless universe
descending upon him at last.
II
From this brief outlook upon a wide field, we may pass to a more
specific and detailed study of the early prophecies of Masonry in the
art of the builder. Always the symbolic must follow the actual, if it
is to have reference and meaning, and the real is ever the basis of
the ideal. By nature an Idealist, and living in a world of radiant
mystery, it was inevitable that man should attach moral and spiritual
meanings to the tools, laws, and materials of building. Even so, in
almost every land and in the remotest ages we find great and beautiful
truth hovering about the builder and clinging to his tools.[14]
Whether there were organized orders of builders in the early times no
one can tell, though there may have been. No matter; man mixed thought
and worship with his work, and as he cut his altar stones and fitted
them together he thought out a faith by which to live.
Not unnaturally, in times when the earth was thought to be a Square
the Cube had emblematical meanings it could hardly have for us. From
earliest ages it was a venerated symbol, and the oblong cube signified
immensity of space from the base of earth to the zenith of the
heavens. It was a sacred emblem of the Lydian Kubele, known to the
Romans in after ages as Ceres or Cybele--hence, as some aver, the
derivation of the word "cube." At first rough stones were most sacred,
and an altar of hewn stones was forbidden.[15] With the advent of the
cut cube, the temple became known as the House of the Hammer--its
altar, always in the center, being in the form of a cube and regarded
as "an index or emblem of Truth, ever true to itself."[16] Indeed, the
cube, as Plutarch points out in his essay _On the Cessation of
Oracles_, "is palpably the proper emblem of rest, on account of the
security and firmness of the superficies." He further tells us that
the pyramid is an image of the triangular flame ascending from a
square altar; and since no one knows, his guess is as good as any. At
any rate, Mercury, Apollo, Neptune, and Hercules were worshiped under
the form of a square stone, while a large black stone was the emblem
of Buddha among the Hindoos, of Manah Theus-Ceres in Arabia, and of
Odin in Scandinavia. Everyone knows of the Stone of Memnon in Egypt,
which was said to speak at sunrise--as, in truth, all stones spoke to
man in the sunrise of time.[17]