textfiles/magazines/STB/stb-1926-01.txt

SHORT TALK BULLETIN - Vol.IV   January, 1926     No.1

MUMMIES

by: Unknown

Three thousand years ago King Tutank-Amen was gathered to his 
fathers, and hidden from sight - and, as it proved, from memory for 
one hundred and twenty generations.

Now his rocky tomb is opened, and his mummy is brought forth for 
investigation; to be x-rayed, to tell its extraordinary story to a 
race of people of which he and his court never dreamed.  The gold 
ornaments of his elaborate sarcophagi are still bright and shining; 
the wonderful carvings of the decorations of his rocky sepulcher are 
still as graceful as when made; the multitude of objects with which 
the Royal body was surrounded to help it on its travels through the 
realms of the shades to the Egyptian heaven are, most of them, 
apparently in as perfect a condition as when they put aside.

But just what they mean, why they were placed there, what message 
they carried from the living to the dead, we have yet to discover.
We will discover them.  Patient scholars have untangled the meanings 
concealed in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics; deductive reasoning 
will eliminate the impossible and then the improbable from the 
various theories advanced to account for all that seems strange and 
reasonless in this most elaborate laying away of the earthy 
tabernacle of him who once was Pharaoh in Egypt, and, as much without 
his intent as without his knowledge, we will turn one more page, read 
one more chapter in the wonderful and vivid story of a civilization 
which has vanished, a people which is no more.

It is not only curiosity which makes us try to read the riddle of the 
past, decipher the inscription on the mummy's case, understand the 
religion, the philosophy, the political faith and the daily life of 
men who lived and loved and died three thousand years ago.  It is to 
help us understand the riddle of humanity as it is spread before our 
eyes today; it is to give us some added measure of comprehension of 
the great "why" of all life, that we try to learn what other men of 
other times have thought of the great problems of existence; the 
mystery of life; the mystery of the universe, the mystery of God.

The world has other mummies than those prepared by the hands of the 
Egyptian undertakers.  Freemasonry has her mummies; the dead bodies 
of her philosophies and her teachings, embalmed in symbol and 
preserved in cryptic sign.,  For many years - years numbering perhaps 
in hundreds as many as have passed over the tomb of King Tut-amen - 
symbols and mysteries which Freemasonry has preserved, have kept 
inviolate the secrets which our ancient brethren discovered.  Our 
Freemasonry, in its organization, its political system and its ritual 
claims no such antiquity, but the essentials of this our Fraternity, 
do go back into ancient times as truths, as much without a beginning, 
as far as we know, as they seem to us necessary to be without an 
ending.

It is our business to read these ancient doctrines; to unwrap the 
mummies of Freemasonry, to decipher the cuneiform inscriptions which 
conceal the old, old truths, as new today as when they were first 
formulated by the Great Teller of All Truth.

Freemasonry today lays before our eyes mummies of an ancient 
religion, in every degree she sees conferred upon an initiate.  In 
all our ceremonies of initiation we perform the Rite of 
Circumambulation.  Most of us perform it as solemnly as we perform it 
ignorantly, knowing little , and too often, caring less, of its 
significance.  It is truly a Masonic mummy.  When loving hands unwind 
the wrappings, we find within this simple ceremony our kinship with 
the earliest men who worshipped a Higher Power, and learn that we 
have a direct kinship with the first of all religions
Circumambulation; a walking around an Altar or Holy Spot; is an 
imitation.  Early man worshipped the sun, which kept him warm, which 
defended him from wild beasts, which made his grain to grow and 
smiled benignly upon his life.  When his God was angry, he hid his 
face; when he was grieved, he wept tears which were rain; when he was 
contented with his people, he shown full upon them, and traveled 
slowly, majestically from the east to the west by way of the south.
His bit of fire on a rude altar of stones was early man's first 
attempt to bring his God close to him.  His slow walk about that 
Altar, from east to west by way of the south, was his imitation of 
the course of his God through the heavens.  All people, of all lands, 
in all religions, have walked about their place of Divine habitation, 
and always they, as did the first worshippers, travel from east to 
west by way of the south.  Truly is circumambulation a mummy, 
concealing in its prosaic footsteps a truth of the heart which well 
repays study.

In the Fellowcraft Degree we pass between the Pillars which are 
emblematic of those which stood upon the porch of King Solomon's 
Temple.  Modern scholars find this mummy which not all their skill 
has succeeded completely in unwrapping.  But enough of the ancient 
body of truth has been discovered to make us marvel at the gentle 
wisdom which made this a part of Freemasonry.  From Holy Writ we 
learn that the significance of the pillars was an establishment of 
strength; learned translators approve our belief that "porch" 
probably meant "arch" rather than place of refreshment.  But the 
"arch" itself is significant; it is the mummy of that ancient belief 
that heaven was an arch, or curved structure above the earth.  Our 
symbolism, then, supports heaven, a place of happiness, only by 
established strength, and "establish" is but another name for 
"control."

"Strength" or power, which is "established" or controlled, is 
illustrative of the principle of balance, which in turn, is the 
underlying fundamental law of all we know of the universe, of all we 
learn in scientific investigation, of all we have discovered of the 
"why" of things.  The earth is balanced in its orbit about the sun by 
the pull of gravity on one side, the force we call centrifugal upon 
the other.  The explosive force which is the incomprehensible speed 
of the electron about the nucleus, the whole making what we call an 
atom of matter, is balanced by that other strange force we term 
cohesion, which keeps the atoms together and makes them form an 
apparently indestructible and inert matter.  Love of life and 
selfishness are balance against love of our fellowmen and altruism; 
wherever the balance is upset, some sort of chaos follows; wherever 
it is preserved, peace and order result.  Our pillars, then, as the 
mummy of the dead body of the ancient belief in the efficacy of 
balance, as the controlling and dominating power which rules all 
life, all things, all idea, is one well worth attention within tiled 
doors  He who takes off the wrappings of time, and discovers through 
wall after wall laid about it by the years, the inner meaning of this 
carefully preserved truth, is one with the wise scientist who reads 
painstakingly and lovingly whatever he may of the riddle which is in 
the coffin of the long, long dead Egyptian Pharaoh.

Among the many mummies of truth in Freemasonry is that of the body of 
ethics; standards of conduct.  Freemasonry teaches in words that a 
Freemason must square his actions by the square of virtue, that he 
stand erect as invoked by the plumb.  But for all the apparently 
plain instruction, here is a dead body of truth awaiting the reviving 
touch of understanding.

Level and plumb are matters of longitude and latitude. 
What is level in New York is angular in London.  The earth is a 
sphere, not a plane.  What is level is coincident with a tangent to 
the face of the sphere at the place where the level is.  The 
Woolworth Tower in New York and the Eiffel Tower in Paris are both 
plumb to the surface in their respective localities, but they are not 
parallel to each other.  So a square made by a level and a plumb in 
one place, under one set of circumstances, may not be a square in 
some other place and under some other circumstances.  The Parisian 
has no moral right to condemn the Woolworth Tower because it is not 
parallel to the Eiffel Tower.  The New Yorker cannot truthfully 
contend that the base of the Nelson Statue in Trafalger Square is not 
level because a line drawn parallel with it would not coincide with 
the base of Grant's Tomb on Riverside Drive.  Each is level for its 
location, as each tower is plumb in its place of erection.

We must square our actions with the square of virtue which is of our 
own time, our own place, our own ideas; not by those of others.  To 
contend that there is but one square of virtue, one level, one plumb 
for all people of all times is at once to arrogate to ourselves the 
only real possession of the truth, and to miss completely the hidden 
meaning in the mummy which is the symbol.  But if we erect our 
buildings and our characters, square our foundations and our actions, 
stand our towers and our virtues by the measure of our own tools, our 
own consciences, then, indeed, do we begin to see the ancient mummy 
fill out to life-like proportions and the hue of life tinge the long 
dried flesh of a symbol which was old when Tut-amen was not yet born.

We are taught in Freemasonry that Logic, one of the seven liberal 
arts and sciences, is highly important.  We are also taught 
Mathematics and Geometry, or Masonry; and that the study thereof 
makes a wise Freemason.  Yet, mathematics can be used to demonstrate 
as a truth, that which is false; and logic can be twisted to prove as 
fact, that which is fancy.

Let him who doubts this consider this argument.  Take as premises the 
statements that space is infinite, without limits, and that the earth 
moves about the sun.  The first we believe, the second we prove with 
a telescope as well as common experience.  It follows, logically, 
that the earth moves in space.  If the earth moves in space, it must 
proceed from some point or location to some other point or location.
So much seems perfectly demonstrable.

Yet, if space is infinite, we cannot conceive motion in it with 
respect to it, because anything that exists in limitless space must 
be considered as without relation to limits which do not exist.  To 
move in limitless space is to become "nearer" to something and 
"farther" from something else.  If there is no "something else," 
obviously there can be no motion in relation to space.

The same argument is applicable to time.  We consider ourselves, our 
race, our earth, as moving through time, from something we call "the 
beginning" towards we know not what.  But we cannot move in time 
without getting farther from that "beginning" and at the same time 
approaching what is connoted by a "beginning;" that is, an "ending."  
Yet if time had a "beginning" what was before it?  And if it has an 
"ending," what comes after?  According to logic we can move in 
neither space or time, if both are infinite.  We cannot conceive of 
either as other than infinite, we cannot conceive of them as finite, 
yet our common experience and our scientific measurements tell us 
that we do move in both space and time!

Here both logic and mathematics fail us.  There are truths which 
neither the mind, nor any tool of mind, can appreciate.  Logic, 
Mathematics and Geometry become to us, as Freemasons, less realities 
than symbols.  They ,too, are mummies yet to be unwrapped, yet to 
bring to us the meanings concealed within them.

It is no argument to say that what is concealed in a symbol must have 
been known to him who first concealed it.  Those who wrapped the body 
of the dead Egyptian King in his vestments and preserved it with 
injections of bitumen and sweet spices of the East, knew nothing of 
what they did, save objective reality.  Not for them was this 
preservation to be a great book to be read by the civilization yet to 
come.  Not for them was his tomb to be a museum, his objects of gold 
to speak to us of today, of their lives, their times, their loves and 
deaths.  They did but preserve their dead.  It is we who have made of 
that simple preservation a tool with which to learn.

He who first put mathematics, geometry and logic into the body of 
Freemasonry may have had no knowledge that he was inspired to place 
there symbols which are mummies for us to unwrap; he did but add to 
the ritual of the degrees a suggestion of knowledge which seemed to 
him all thinking men should have.  Those who embalmed King Tut-ank-
amen, and William Preston and his contemporaries who wrote our 
Fellowcraft Degree, builded better than they knew, and gave to us 
more than they suspected.

What we do with these our mummies depends upon our wit, our skill, 
and our willingness to study.  But even as King Tut-ank-amen; long, 
long dead; cometh back from the Halls of Amenti to teach us today 
what ancient Egypt knew of life and death, so come back to us the 
gentle shades which are the spirits of mathematics, logic and 
geometry; as considered in Freemasonry, to teach us if we will but 
learn.  Wisdom is not of any one age or clime, but universal; only by 
patient thought and study can we hope to understand what Freemasonry 
really means.  Even as the Egyptologist with reverent hands reads the 
riddle of long gone years in what those years have not destroyed, so 
may we, as Freemasons, read the riddle of long preserved truths in 
the mummies of Freemasonry as we unwrap them today.