textfiles/magazines/STB/stb-1930-03.txt

SHORT TALK BULLETIN - Vol.VIII   March, 1930   No.3

SUN, MOON AND STARS

by: Unknown

We have more right to be astonished that the astronomical references 
are so few, rather than to be surprised that there are so many!
We are taught that geometry and Masonry were originally synonymous 
terms and geometry, fifth of the seven liberal arts and sciences, is 
given more prominence in our Fellowcraft degree than the seventh, 
astronomy.  Yet the beginnings of astronomy far antedate the earliest 
geometrician.  Indeed, geometry came into existence to answer the 
ceaseless questionings of man as to the “why” of celestial phenomena.
In these modern days it is difficult to visualize the vital 
importance of the heavens generally, to early man.  We can hardly 
conceive of their terror of the eclipse and the comet, or sense their 
veneration for the Sun and his bride, the Moon.  We are too well 
educated.  We know too much about “the proportions which connect this 
vast machine.”  The astronomer has pushed back the frontiers of his 
science beyond the inquiries of most of us; the questions which occur 
as a result of unaided visual observations have all been answered.  
We have substituted facts for fancies regarding the sun, the moon, 
the solar system, the comet and the eclipse.
Albert Pike, the great Masonic student “who found Masonry in a hovel 
and left her in a palace” says:
We cannot, even in the remotest degree, feel, though we may partially 
and imperfectly imagine, how those great, primitive, simple-hearted 
children of Nature, felt in regard to the Starry Hosts, there upon 
the slopes of the Himalayas, on the Chaldean plains, in the Persian 
and Median deserts, and upon the banks of the great, strange River, 
the Nile.  To them the universe was alive - instinct with forces and 
powers, mysterious and beyond their comprehension.  To them it was no 
machine, no great system of clockwork; but a great live creature, in 
sympathy with or inimical to man.  To them, all was mystery and a 
miracle, and the stars flashing overhead spoke to their hearts almost 
in an audible language.  Jupiter, with its kingly splendors, was the 
Emperor of the starry legions.  Venus looked lovingly on the earth 
and blessed it; Mars with his crimson fires threatened war and 
misfortune; and Saturn, cold and grave, chilled and repelled them.  
The ever-changing moon, faithful companion of the sun, was a constant 
miracle and wonder; the Sun himself the visible emblem of the 
creative and generative power.  To them the earth was a great plain, 
over which the sun, the moon and the planets revolved, its servants, 
framed to give it light.  Of the stars, some were beneficent 
existences that brought with them Spring-time and fruits and flowers 
- some, faithful, sentinels, advising them of coming inundations, of 
the season of storm and of deadly winds some heralds of evil, which, 
steadily foretelling. they seemed to cause.  To them the eclipse, 
were portents of evil, and their causes hidden in mystery, and 
supernatural.  The regular returns of the stars, the comings of 
Arcturus, Orion, Sirius, the Pleides and Aldebaran; and the 
journeyings of the Sun, were voluntary and not mechanical to them.  
What wonder that astronomy became to them the most important of 
sciences; that those who learned it became rulers; and that vast 
edifices, the pyramids, the tower or Temple of Bel, and other like 
erections elsewhere in the East, were builded for astronomical 
purposes? - and what wonder that, in their great childlike 
simplicity, they worshipped the Light, the Sun, the Planets, and the 
stars; and personified them, and eagerly believed in the histories 
invented for them; in that age when the capacity for belief was 
infinite; as indeed, if we but reflect, it still is and ever will 
be?”
Anglo-Saxons usually consider history as their history; science as 
their science; religion as their religion.  This somewhat naive 
viewpoint is hardly substantiated by a less egoistic survey of 
knowledge.  Columbus’s sailors believed they would “fall off the 
edge” of a flat world, yet Pythagoras knew the earth to be a ball.  
The ecliptic was known before Solomon’s Temple was built.  The 
Chinese predicted eclipses long, long before the Europeans of the 
middle age quit regarding them as portents of doom! 
Astronomical lore of Freemasonry is very old.  The foundations of our 
degrees are far more ancient than we can prove by documentary 
evidence.  It is surely not stretching credulity to believe that the 
study which antedates “Geometry, the first and noblest of sciences,” 
must have been impressed on our Order, its ceremonies and its 
symbols, long before Preston and Webb worked their ingenious 
revolutions in our rituals and gave us the system of degrees we use - 
in one form or another - today.
The astronomical references in our degrees begin with the points of 
the compass; East, West,  and South; and the place of darkness, the 
North.  We are taught the reason why the North is a place of darkness 
by the position of Solomon’s Temple with reference to the ecliptic, a 
most important astronomical conception.  The Sun is the Past Master’s 
own symbol; our Masters rule their lodges - or are supposed to! - 
with the same regularity with the Sun rules the day and the Moon 
governs the night.  Our explanation of our Lesser Lights is obviously 
an adaption of a concept which dates back to the earliest of 
religions; specifically to the Egyptian Isis, Orsiris and Horus; 
represented by the Sun, Moon and Venus.
Circumambulation about the Altar is in imitation of the course of the 
Sun.  We traverse our lodges from East to West by way of the South, 
as did the Sun Worshipers who thus imitated the daily passage of 
their deity through the heavens.
Measures of time are wholly a matter of astronomy.  
Days and nights were before man, and consequently before astronomy, 
but hours and minutes, high twelve and low twelve, are inventions of 
the mind, depending upon the astronomical observation of the Sun at 
Meridian to determine noon, and consequently all other periods of 
time.  Indeed, we are taught this in the Middle Chamber work, in 
which we give to Geometry the premier place as a means by which the 
astronomer may “fix the duration of time and seasons, years and 
cycles.”
Atop the Pillars representing those in the porch of King Solomon’s 
Temple appear the terrestrial and celestial globes.  In the 
Fellowcraft degree we are told in beautiful and poetic language that 
“numberless worlds are around us, all framed by the same Divine 
Artist, which roll through the vast expanse and are all conducted by 
the same unerring law of nature.”
Our Ancient brethren, observing that the sun rose and set, easily 
determining East and West in a general way.  As the rises and sets 
through a variation of 47 degrees north and south during a six 
month’s period the determination was not exact.
The earliest Chaldean star gazers, progenitors of the astronomers of 
later ages, saw that the apparently revolving heavens pivoted on a 
point nearly coincident with a certain star.  We know that the true 
north diverges about from the North Star one and one-half degrees, 
but their observations were sufficiently accurate to determine a 
North - and consequently East, West and South.
The reference to the ecliptic in the Sublime Degree has puzzled many 
a brother who has not studied the elements of astronomy.
The earliest astronomers defined the ecliptic as the hypothetical 
“circular” plane of the earth’s path about the sun, with the sun in 
the “center.”
As a matter of fact, the sun is not in the center and the earth’s 
path about sun is not circular.  The earth travels once about the sun 
in three hundred and sixty-five days, and a fraction, on an 
“elliptic” path; the sun is at one of the foci of that ellipse.
The axis of the earth, about which it turns once in twenty-four 
hours, thus making a night and a day, is inclined to this 
hypothetical plane by 23 and one-half degrees.  At one point in its 
yearly path, the north pole of the earth is inclined towards the sun 
by this amount.  Half way further around in its path the north pole 
is inclined away from the sun by this angle.  The longest day in the 
northern hemisphere - June 21st - occurs when the north pole is most 
inclined toward the sun.
Ant building situated between latitudes 23 and one-half north and 23 
and one-half south of the equator, will receive the rays of the sun 
at meridian (high twelve, or noon) from the north at some time during 
the year.  King Solomon’s Temple at Jerusalem, being in latitude 31 
degrees 47 seconds north, lay beyond this limit.  At no time in the 
year, therefore, did the sun or moon at meridian “darts its rays into 
the northerly portion thereof.”
As astronomy in Europe is comparatively modern, some have argued that 
this reason for considering the North, Masonically, as a place of 
darkness, must also be comparatively modern.  This is wholly mistaken 
- Pythagoras (to go further back) recognized the obliquity of the 
world’s axis to the ecliptic, as well as that the earth was a sphere 
suspended in space.  While Pythagoras (510 B.C.) is much younger than 
Solomon’s Temple, he is almost two thousand years older than the 
beginnings of astronomy in Europe.
The “world celestial and terrestrial” on the brazen pillars were 
added by modern ritual makers.  Solomon knew them not, but 
contemporaries of Solomon believed the heavens to be a sphere 
revolving around the earth.  To them the earth stood still; a hollow 
sphere with its inner surface dotted with stars.  The slowly turning 
“celestial sphere” is as old as mankind’s observations of the “starry 
decked heavens.”
It is to be noted that terrestrial and celestial spheres are both 
used as emblems of universality.  They are not mere duplications for 
emphasis; they teach their own individual part of “universality.”  
What is “universal” on the earth - as for instance, the necessity of 
mankind to breathe, drink water, and eat in order to live - is not 
necessarily “universal” in all the universe.  We have no knowledge 
that any other planet in our solar system is inhabited - what 
evidence there is, is rather to the contrary.  We have no knowledge 
that any other sun has any inhabited planets in its system.  Neither 
have we any knowledge that they have not.  If life does exist in some 
other, to us unknown world, it may be entirely different from life on 
this planet.  Hence a symbol of universality which applied only to 
earth would be a self-contradiction.
Real universality means what it says.  It appertains to the whole 
universe.  While a Mason’s charity, considered as giving relief to 
the poor and distressed, must obviously be confined to this 
particular planet, his charity of thought may, so we are taught, 
extend “through the boundless realms of eternity.”
Hence “the world terrestrial” and “the world celestial” on our 
representations of the pillars, in denoting universality mean that 
the principles of our Order are not founded upon mere earthly 
conditions and transient truths, but rest upon Divine and limitless 
foundations, coexistent with the whole cosmos and its creator.
We are taught of the “All Seeing Eye whom the Sun, Moon and Stars 
obey and under whose watchful care even comets perform their 
stupendous revolutions.”  In this astronomical reference is, oddly 
enough, a potent argument, both for the extreme care in the 
transmission of ritual unchanged from mouth to ear, and the urgent 
necessity of curbing well-intentioned brethren who wish to “improve” 
the ritual.
The word “revolution” in this paragraph (it is so printed in the 
earliest Webb monitors) fixes it as a comparatively modern 
conception.  Tycho Brahe, progenitor of the modern maker and user of 
fine instruments among astronomers, whose discoveries have left an 
indelible impress on astronomy, made no attempt to consider comets as 
orbital bodies.  Galileo thought them “emanations of the atmosphere.”  
Not until the seventeenth century was well underway did a few daring 
spirits suggest that these celes-tial portents of evil, these 
terribly heavenly demons which had inspired terror in the hearts of 
men for uncounted generations, were actually parts of the solar 
system, and that many if not most of them were periodic, actually 
returning again and again; in other words, that they revolved about 
the sun.
Obviously, then, this passage of our ritual cannot have come down to 
us by a “word of mouth” transmission from an epoch earlier than that 
in which men first commenced to believe that a comet was not an 
augury of evil but a part of the solar system.
The so-called “lunar lodges” have far more a practical than an 
astronomical basis.  In the early days of Masonry, both in England 
and in this country, many if not most lodges, met on dates fixed in 
advance, but according to the time when the moon was full; not 
because the moon “Governed” the night, but because it illuminated the 
traveler’s path!  In days when roads were but muddy paths between 
town and hamlet, when any journey was hazardous and on black nights 
dangerous in the extreme, the natural illumination of the moon, 
making the road easy to find and the depredations of highwaymen the 
more difficult, was a matter of some moment!
One final curious derivation of a Masonic symbol from the heavens and 
we are through.  The symbol universally associated with the Stewards 
of a Masonic lodge is the cornucopia.
According to the mythology of the Greeks, which go back to the very 
dawn of civilization, the God Zeus was nourished in infancy from the 
milk of a goat, Amalthea.  In gratitude, the God placed Amalthea 
forever in the heavens as a constellation, but first gave one of 
Amalthea’s horns to his nurses with the assurance that it would 
forever pour for them whatever they desired!
The “horn of plenty,” or the cornucopia, is thus a symbol of 
abundance.  The goat from which it came may be found by the curious 
among the constellations under the name of Capricorn.  The “Tropic of 
Capricorn” of our school days is the southern limit of the swing of 
the sun on the path which marks the ecliptic, on which it inclines 
first its north and then its south pole towards our luminary.  Hence 
there is a connection, not the less direct for being tenuous, between 
out Stewards, their symbol, the lights in the lodge, the “place of 
darkness” and Solomon’s Temple.
Of such curious links and interesting bypaths is the study of 
astronomy and its connection with Freemasonry, the more beautiful 
when we see eye to eye with the Psalmist in the Great Light; “The 
Heavens Declare the Glory of God and the Firmament Sheweth His 
Handiwork.”