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Short Talk Bulletin Vol 04 No 01
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.
