“And
they went up the winding stairs into the middle chamber.” (I Kings
6:8)
Freemasonry’s Middle Chamber is wholly symbolic. Solomon the Wise would
not have permitted any practice do uneconomic as sending multiplied
thousands of workmen up a flight of stairs to a small Middle
Chamber, to receive corn, wine and oil which had to be brought up in
advance, only to be carried down in small lots by each workman as he
received his wages. There actually was a winding stair in Solomon’s
Temple, but of the
three, five and seven steps the scriptures are silent. Only in this
country have the Winding
Stairs but fifteen steps. In older days the stairs had but five,
sometimes seven steps.
Preston had thirty-six steps in his Winding Stairs; in series of
one, three, five, seven,
nine and eleven. The English system later eliminated the number
eleven from Preston’s thirty-six, making but twenty-five in all. The
Stairs as a whole are a representation of life; not the physical
life of eating, drinking, sleeping and working, but the mental and
spiritual life, of both the lodge and the world without; of
learning, studying, enlarging mental horizons and increasing the
spiritual outlook. The first three steps represent the three
principal officers of a lodge, and - though not stated in the ritual
- must always refer to Deity, of which “three,” the triangle, is the
most ancient symbol. They assure the Fellowcraft just starting his
ascent that he does not climb alone. The Worshipful Master, Senior
and Junior Wardens are themselves symbolic of the lodge, and thus
(as a lodge is a symbol of the world) of the Masonic World - the
Fraternity. The Fellowcraft is surrounded by the Craft. The brethren
are present to help him climb. In his search for truth, in quest of
his wages in the Middle Chamber, the Fellowcraft receives the
support and assistance of all in the Mystic Circle; surely an
impressive symbol. Five is peculiarly the number of the
Fellowcraft’s degree; it represents the central of the three groups
which form the stairs; it refers to the five orders of architecture;
five are required to hold a Fellowcraft’s lodge; there are five
human senses; geometry is the fifth science, and so on. In the first
degree the Blazing Star is Five Pointed and in the Sublime Degree
are the Five Points of Fellowship. In the Winding Stairs the number
five represents the five orders of architecture. Here the neophyte
is taught of architecture as a science; its beginnings are laid
before him; he is shown how the Greeks commenced and Romans added to
the kinds of architecture; he learns of the “beautiful, perfect and
complete whole” which is a well-designed, well-constructed building.
Temples are built stone by stone, a little at a time. Each stone
must be hewn from the solid rock of the quarry. Then it must be laid
out and chipped with the gavel until it becomes a Perfect Ashlar.
Finally it must be set in place with the tempered mortar which will
bind. But before any stone may be placed, a plan must come into
existence; the architect must play his part. So must the
Fellowcraft, studying the orders of architecture by which he will
erect his spiritual Temple, design his structure before he commences
to build. There are “five” orders of architecture; not one. There
are many plans on which a man may build his life, not one only.
Freemasonry does not attempt to distinguish as between
Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian as to beauty or desirability. She does
suggest that the Tuscan, plainer than the Doric, and the Composite,
more ornamental though not more beautiful than the Corinthian, are
less reverenced than the ancient and original orders. Freemasonry
makes no attempt to influence the Fellowcraft as to which order of
life building he shall choose. He may elect the physical, the
mental, the spiritual. Or he may choose the sacrificial - “plainer
than Doric,” or the ornamental life, which is “not more beautiful
than the Corinthian.” Freemasonry is concerned less with what order
of spiritual architecture a Fellowcraft chooses by which to build,
than that he does choose one; that he build not aimlessly.
Architecture is the most expressive of all the arts. Painting and
sculpture, noble though they are, lack the utility of architecture,
and strive to interpret nature rather than
to originate. Architecture is not hampered by the necessity of
reproducing something already in existence. It may raise its spires
untrammeled by any natural model; it may fling its arches gloriously
across a nave and a transept with no similitude in nature to hamper
by suggestion. The architect may - if his genius be great enough -
tell in his structure truths which may not be put into words,
inspire by glories not sung in the divinest harmonies. So may the
builder of his own House Not Made With Hands, if he chooses aright
his plan of life and hews to the line of his plan. So, indeed, have
done all those great men who have led the world; the Prophets of
old, Pythagoras, Confucius, Buddha, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe,
Washington, Lincoln -. If the Fellowcraft, climbing his three, five
and seven steps to the Middle Chamber of unknown proportions,
containing an unknown Wage, is overweighed with the emphasis put
upon the spiritual side of life, he may here be comforted.
Freemasonry is not an ascetic organization. It recognizes that the
physical is as much a part of normal life as the mental and
spiritual upon which so much emphasis is put. The Fellowcraft’s
degree is a glorification of education, the gaining of knowledge,
the study of the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences and all that they
connote. Therefore it is wholly logical that the degree should make
special references to the five means by which man has acquired all
his knowledge; aye, by which he will ever acquire any knowledge.
Take away his five senses and a man is no more a man; perhaps his
mind is no more a mind. With no contact whatever with the material
world he can learn nothing of it. As man reaches up through the
material to the spiritual, he can learn nothing of the ethical side
of life without a means of contact with the physical. If there are
limits beyond which human investigations and explorations into the
unknown may not go, it is because of the limitations of the five
senses. Not even the extension of those senses by the marvelously
sensitive instruments of
science may overcome, in the last analysis, the limits of the five
senses. Except for one factor! Brute beasts hear, see, feel, smell
and taste, as we do. But they garner no facts of science, win no
truths. Formulate no laws of nature through these senses. More than
the five senses are necessary to perceive the relation between thing
and thing, and life and life. That factor is the perception, the
mind, the soul or spirit, if you will, which differentiates man from
all other living beings. The Fellowcraft’s five steps glorify the
five senses of human nature because Freemasonry is a well-rounded
scheme of living which recognizes the physical as well as the mental
life of men, and knows that only through the physical do we perceive
the spiritual. It is in this sense, not as a simple lesson in
physiology, that we are to receive the teachings of the five steps
by which we rise above the ground floor of the Temple to that last
flight of seven steps which are typical of knowledge. Most potent of
numbers in the ancient religions, the number seven has deep
significance. The Pythagoreans called it the perfect number because
it is made up of three and four, the two perfect figures, triangle
and square. It was the virgin number because it cannot by
multiplication produce any numbers within ten, as can two and two,
two and three, two and four, or three and three. Nor can it be
produced by the multiplication of any whole number. Our ancient
ancestors knew seven planets. seven Pleiades, seven Hyades, seven
lights burned before the Altar of Mithras, the Goths had seven
Deities; Sun, Moon, Tuisco, Woden, Thor, Friga and Seatur or Saturn,
from which we derive the names of the seven days of our week. In the
Gothic mysteries the candidate met with seven obstructions;
the ancient Jews swore by seven, because seven witnesses were used
to confirm, and seven sacrifices offered to attest truth. The
Sabbath is the seventh day; Noah had seven day’s notice of the
flood; God created the heaven and earth in six days and rested on
the seventh day; the walls of Jericho were encompassed seven times
by seven priests bearing seven rams’ horns; the Temple was seven
years in building, the seven branched candlestick burned in the
Tabernacle and so on through a thousand references. It is only
necessary to refer to the seven required to open an Entered
Apprentice lodge, the seven original officers of a lodge (some now
have nine or ten, or even more) and the seven steps which complete
the Winding Stairs to show that seven is an important number in the
Fraternity. The seventeenth century conception of a liberal
education was compromised in the study of Grammar, Rhetoric and
Logic; called the “tritium.” and Arithmetic, Geometry,
Music and Astronomy, called the “quadrivium. William Preston
endeavored to compress into his Middle Chamber Lecture enough of
these to make at least an outline available to men who might
otherwise know nothing of them. In our day and times grammar and
rhetoric are considered of importance, but in a secondary way; logic
is more or less swallowed up as study in the reasoning appropriate
to any particular subject; arithmetic, of course, continues its
primary importance, but from the standpoint of science, geometry and
its off-shoots are still the vital sciences of measurement. Music is
no longer a necessary part of a liberal education; it is now one of
the arts, not the sciences, and astronomy is so interrelated with
physics that it is hard to say where one leaves off and the other
begins. As for electricity, chemistry, biology, civics, government
and the various physical sciences, they were barely dreamed of in
Preston’s day. So it is not actually but symbolically that we are to
climb the seven steps. As a Masonic author put it: “William Preston,
who put so
practical an interpretation upon these steps, lived in an age when
these did, indeed, represent all knowledge. But we must not refuse
to grow because the ritual has not grown with modern discovery. When
we rise by Grammar an Rhetoric, we must consider that they mean not
only language, but all methods of communication. The step of Logic
means a knowledge not only of a method of reasoning which logicians
have accomplished.
When we ascend by Arithmetic and Geometry we must visualize all
science; since science is but measurement, in the true mathematical
sense, it requires no great stretch of the imagination to read into
these two steps all that science may teach. The step denominated
Music means not only sweet and harmonious sounds, but all beauty,
poetry, art, nature and loveliness of whatever kind. Not to be
familiar with the beauty which nature provides is to be, by so much,
less a man; to stunt, by so much, a striving soul. As for the
seventh step of Astronomy, surely it means not only a study of the
solar system and the stars as it did
in William Preston’s day, but also a study of all that is beyond the
earth; of spirit and the world of spirit, of ethics, philosophy, the
abstract - of Deity. Preston builded better than he knew; his seven
steps are both logical in arrangement and suggestive in their order.
The true Fellowcraft will see in them a guide to the making of a man
rich in mind and spirit, by which riches only can the truest
brotherhood be practiced.” Finally, consider the implication of the
“winding” stairs as opposed to those which are straight. The one
virtue which most distinguishes man is courage. It requires more
courage to face the unknown than the known. A straight stair, a
ladder, hides neither secret nor mystery at its top. But the
stairs which wind hide each step from the climber; what is just
around the corner is unknown. The Winding Stairs of life lead us to
we know not what; for some of us, a Middle Chamber of fame and
fortune, for others, of pain and frustration. The Angle of Death may
stand with drawn sword on the very next step for any of us. Yet, man
climbs! Man has always climbed; he climbed from a cave man savagery
to the dawn of civilization; Lowell’s: ***brute despair of trampled
centuries Leapt up with one hoarse yell and snapped its hands,
Groped for its right with horny, callous hands, and stared around
for God with bloodshot eyes. was a climbing from slavery to
independence, from the brute to the spiritual. Through ignorance,
darkness, misery, cruelty, wrong, oppression, danger and despair;
man has climbed his own Winding Stairs through much the same
experience as that of the race. Aye, man climbs because he has
courage; because he has faith, because he is a man. So must the
Freemason climb. The Winding Stairs do lead somewhere. There is a
Middle Chamber. There are wages of the Fellowcraft to be earned. So
believing, so unafraid, climbing, the Fellowcraft may hope at the
top of his Winding Stairs to reach
a Middle Chamber, and see a new sign in the East - - -. |
