The Flower of Life – Where Freemasonry and Spirituality Meet
The Flower of Life – Where Masonry and Spirituality Meet
Promoting the Fraternity across the World
The Flower of Life – Where Masonry and Spirituality Meet
Throughout our lives, we have heard of the liberal arts and sciences. But until we were presented with them in The Winding Stair lecture, most of us had only a vague notion of what they consisted. The Fellowcraft Degree commends Freemasons to study the Liberal Arts and Sciences, which are grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. When we study the historical background for this list, we will uncover layers of Masonic meanings for us in each of the seven areas of knowledge.
The Mark is a ceremony or degree [sometimes called the ‘friendly’ degree], conferrable today only to Master Masons and forms part of a hierarchical organization. In Craft Masonry it was quite a late innovation making its appearance during the mid-1700s. However we do know that Operative Masons, without any kind of ceremony, were taking marks 150 years before the Mark came into use as part of that particular ceremony.
The purpose of learning the arts is to train the mind how to think (as opposed to what to think). By combining the seven liberal arts with the five senses, one can distinguish between reality and fiction. This can be visually represented with a Pythagorean triangle.