The Master's Square

see also The Masonic Lodge Floor Explained and We're All Dancing in a Ring Around the Sun

The Master's Lodge of Fremasonry is symbolic of the Holy of Holies of the Temple, as the most consecrated of the three parts of the Temple. (The Entered Apprentice Degree corresponds to the porch and the Fellow Craft Degree to the Holy Place.) The 'symbolic floor' of both the Master's Degree and the Holy of Holies consist of 24 square stones around a cubic 'foundation stone', which corresponds to the 5x5 square of the hypotenuse in the 3-4-5 pythagorean triangle seen here.

 

You will recall that in the desert, the Ark of the Covenant resided in the Tabernacle (a big tent, see Exodus 25) that was at the center of the Hebrew camp (Numbers Ch 2). The altar for the Tabernacle is described as five cubits by five cubits, foursquare, and three cubits tall. Here we see the altar from the House of the Temple on a square floor, flanked by a row of twelve seats on each side. Four and twenty elders around the throne (Rev 4:4) Note how the bordered area around the altar creates a 3x3 grid on the black floor. (The altar itself is probably 1/25th of the black floor.)

 

 

 

 

 

In the Hebrew camp the Tabernacle was located at the center of the area designated for the priests, surrounded by the twelve Hebrew tribes. The tribes were divided into 4 groups of three, which traveled under one of four standards located at the cardinal directions (N,S,E,W). The four main tribes each had two others with them.

 

The four standards bear the images of a bull, man, lion and eagle which are symbolic of Taurus, Aquarius, Leo and Scorpio, the so-called fixed zodiac signs. These are the four creatures of Ezekiel 1:10 and Revelation 4:7 which also relate to the four Apostles, the seasons, the elements and the guardians of the four directions.

 

See Genesis 49 where Jacob describes each of his twelve sons to get clues about which tribes or sons are which zodiac signs. For instance, 'Judah is a lion's whelp'. Aquarius is the water bearer, and we see Reuben described as 'unstable as water'. Note that Judah is in the east, the place of the rising sun. Leo rules the sun. Think of the grip of the lion's paw. Did I forget to mention that Temples and Lodges are traditionally conceptualized as symbolic of the world, the natural order of things?

 

The Hebrew camp is usually depicted like this (below). Note that this image has the approach to the Tabernacle being from the east, with the Ark in the west.

 

In more than one place this layout is compared to a city with 12 gates, and is described as having three gates in the east, three in the south, west and north (See the oblation in Ez 48:31 and new Jerusalem in Rev 21:12) . Remember that in Ezekiel and the Revelation we see a description of the city that surrounds the Ark in the Holy Place in the Temple. At the center of the Hebrew land lay an area called the oblation (meaning offering), the sacred area. At the center of that was the sanctuary. At the center of that the Temple. At the center of that the Foundation Stone.

 

 

HPH Bromwell suggested this arrangement (above) for the desert camp arrangement, based on the symbolic floor' of the Master's Degree, in his book 'Restoration of Masonic Geometry and Symbolry', which I highly recommend. I suggest the layout below for the tribes based on their astrological attributes.

 

We can presume that the descriptions of all these symbolic boxes-within-boxes are inter-related and part of one biblical geometric scheme, which may correspond to a universal architectural canon, as some have suggested. Herein I would like to contrast Bromwell's approach to this subject to those of writers John Mitchell and Nicholas Mann; the difference being that Bromwell was a Past Master of a Lodge who was researching how to restore the ancient knowledge and the ritual that accompanied it, while the other two write 'popular' books.

 

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