Promoting the Fraternity across the World
Dive into the heart of the Renaissance with Raphael’s The School of Athens, a fresco that celebrates ancient philosophy and showcases the era’s intellectual giants. Discover the symbolism behind the figures of Plato, Aristotle, and their contemporaries, and learn how this masterpiece reflects the Renaissance spirit of learning, inquiry, and admiration for classical antiquity.
It is often said that symbolism is carried too far and this is difficult to deny when I think of Freud and other psychiatrists and psychologists who seem able to find strange and often erotic meanings in all they see. The meanings given to every image based on repetition makes the lay-person feel at a serious disadvantage when they wish to contradict anything that is given a meaning by such “Specialists.” The symbolic object, which is dredged up by the mind, seems to have no great pattern of consistency in the case of psychiatric symbol definition.
The double headed eagle, a symbol steeped in antiquity, stands as one of the Scottish Rite’s most venerable emblems, its lineage stretching back through…
The address to the Immediate Past Master and the depiction on his jewel refer to the 47Th proposition of Euclid. It also refers to “our brother…
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.
Pythagoras was one of the greatest minds and philosophers of his time and his unquestionable influence can be felt even today in mathematics. It is believed that he was the first man who referred to himself as a “philosopher.” He was the founder of Pythagoreanism, a religious and political movement that appeared mainly in the big cities of Magna Grecia (today southern Italy).
there has been very little agreement among our scholars either as to its (the letter ‘G’) origin or to its meaning. Usually, we can hit upon the manner in which a symbol was introduced into the Ritual by studying the records of the early eighteenth century in England, at which time and place the Ritual was cast in its modern form, but such a study cannot help us here because the eighteenth century Masons were themselves confused about the matter
