Prospero's Books

Whence came you?

On XM Radio's vintage radio channel, I stumbled on an old series that I'd never heard of: Quiet, Please. In the episode being played is an exchange that will interest my Masonic readers. The narrator, Austin, an Indiana Jones prototype working in Egypt, is showing his friend Abe around a dig site:

ABE FELDMAN: Oh.  What does this say?

AUSTIN: What?

ABE FELDMAN: Uh, this slab here.

AUSTIN: Let's see. Uh... (reads and slowly translates) 'Here was I... Ho-Tep,
presented with a...' I guess you'd say, 'invested with... the working tools of
those who... build.  In my hand, I, Ho-Tep, did take' -- uh -- 'took... the
tools of the second...' -- uh -- 'grade... of workmen in stone, the,' -- uh -- 
'plumb, the square, and the...'

ABE FELDMAN: The level, huh? 

AUSTIN: How'd you know?

ABE FELDMAN (amazed): There were Masons in those days.

AUSTIN: Well, sure.  How do you think they built all this stone stuff?

The series, which aired from 1947 to 1949, was the creation of writer Wyllis Cooper, an active Freemason. So my Masonic readers, knowing well the language of Masonic ritual, will not be surprised that this episode, titled "Whence Came You," begins with the line "I came from Jerusalem."

(Audio and text files of this episode [number 37] and others are available on the fan site Quiet, Please.)

Whence beautiful complexity?

At Gallery of Computation is a gallery of art works, by Jared Tarbell, that are uniquely generated by computer programs as you watch. They are stunning examples of a new level of artistic creation in which the artist does not create just one instance of beauty but instead creates a generative program that can produce infinite instances of beauty.

The fact that the each piece of artwork emerges from very simple rules makes the artist not less significant but more significant: not every set of simple rules produces something interesting, not to mention beautiful. If we glory in the infinitely complex beauty of Tarbell's work, how much more should we glory in the infinitely complex beauty of our universe, from subatomic particles, to us, to galaxies.

Whether we posit a creator behind that beautiful complexity (Freemasons refer to "the Great Architect of the Universe"), posit (with Tillich) a "ground of being" from which complex beauty can arise, or posit our universe as one particularly interesting instance among an infinite number of existing universes, the fact of our existence and the existence of beauty around us is surely worthy of adoration and gratitude.

(To see Tarbell's works, go to the Gallery of Computation. As words appear in the white space, try moving your cursor among them, clicking on them if you wish. Or click on "Thumbnail Gallery" to see a visual index. When you see a work you like, click on it. When you arrive at its page, you'll see a large static image of just one manifestation of the work. But don't stop there. Click on "Small," "Medium," or "Large" below the image and watch a unique art object evolve. Experiment with the sizes to learn which work best on your computer.)

(Thanks to Seed magazine for the lead.)

The stairs to the third floor

Another good article from the Summer 2004 issue of Parabola is "Ours Is Not a Dead Universe," by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Nasr argues that as a result of scientism, "all the levels of consciousness were reduced to a single level (6).

He elaborates:

The consequence of cutting human consciousness off from the higher levels of consciousness in the prevalent scientistic worldview is the weakening of access to the transcendent. Although the higher levels do not go away by our denying them, taking away the ladder or stairs to the third floor in this building means that one does not try to go up to the third floor any longer, and gradually the existence of the third floor is denied. Therefore, the quest for transcendence--for the empowering and illumination of our consciousness, which was the goal of all traditional civilizations--becomes irrelevant, and is ignored as an illusion (9).

(The illustration for this blog posting is an antique Masonic second-degree "tracing board," a visual teaching tool. The ritual for passing to the second degree includes the symbolism of the stairway.)

Stones left to find your way back

My museum and library visits in London this week had a theme, but one I didn't recognize until the trip was over.

• At the British Museum, I found myself drawn to the ways ancient cultures, especially Greek culture, represented their gods in stone.
• At the new British Library (a stunning building), I lingered over a special exhibition called "The Sacred," a collection of early texts of the three great monotheistic religions.
• And at the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, I marveled at the richness of three hundred years of the Craft's imagery.

This theme didn't jump out at me until I read a quotation from architect Louis I. Kahn (see my immediately previous post):

Symbols are gentle reminders. They are stones left to find your way back to where you want to go back to.

A complete and perfect whole

Albert Pike, one of the most colorful and controversial figures in American history, may be best known for his 1871 tome Morals and Dogma, written for the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite, an "appendant body" to U.S. Freemasonry. The book, of more than a thousand pages, seems to be the work most often quoted, usually out of context, by American anti-Masonic writers.

I'm admittedly quoting out of context as well, but I do want to forward a passage, cited by Greg at Masonic Traveler, in which Pike takes a strikingly modern systems view of the universe:

The Universe should be deemed an immense Being, always living, always moved and always moving in an eternal activity inherent in itself, and which, subordinate to no foreign cause, is communicated to all its parts, connects them together, and makes of the world of things a complete and perfect whole (665).

The Pillars of Creation

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has given scientists a new look inside the "Pillars of Creation," columns of gas and dust inside the Eagle Nebula. According to Chandra, "This penetrating view of the central region of the Eagle Nebula reveals how much star formation is happening inside these iconic structures."

Iconic indeed. This awe-inspiring birthplace of stars suggests the columns of Solomon's Temple, and their adoption as symbols by the Kabbalah and Freemasonry.

(Thanks to EurekAlert for the lead.)

The science of the whole

My Lodge Vitruvian brother Chris Hodapp, author of Freemasons for Dummies, has posted an intriguing passage from Chapter 2 of Tolstoy's War and Peace. One paragraph of that passage is particularly apt for this blog. A Mason is speaking to Pierre:

"The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it."

The mystery of Hiram Abiff

When I received my Master Mason degree yesterday, the central part of the ritual concerned Hiram Abiff, the "widow's son," the legendary master builder of King Solomon's Temple who chooses death over loss of integrity.

The origins of the legend are unknown; it hasn't been found in written form earlier than the late 17th and early 18th centuries. But the late Conrad Hahn, Executive Secretary of the Masonic Service Association, offered an intriguing theory in his paper "The Importance of the Legend of Hiram Abiff":

Just where did the legend of Hiram come from? No one really knows; scholars have yet to discover its origins and its introduction into Freemasonry. My own scholarly prejudices lead me to believe that it's a re-working of some mediaeval mystery play, whose original may yet be discovered in a private library or the rubbish of an ancient building.

Mystery plays were the most popular form of public entertainment in the Middle Ages. Each guild or trade had its own preferred dramas; most of them were Biblical in origin. They were produced, staged and acted by members of the guild, first in churches, and then in public squares, to which they were banished when the plays became too boisterious and irreverant for the sacerdotal authorities.

These dramas were called mysteries, not because they treated of witches, ghosts, or detectives, but because they were produced by craft guilds or "mysteres," which is variant of the French word "mestaire," a craft or guild. So the plays became known in England as mysteres, or mysteries, because they were produced by "mestaires," or guilds. The expression, "the mysteries of Freemasonry," therefore, originally meant the ritualistic ceremonies, or work of the Lodge.

Theories of the origin of any of Freemasonry's practices must be examined very critically, since the legendary has often been mistaken—or deliberately substituted—for the historical. But Hahn's theory does make some sense. Even if the story of Hiram Abiff is taken as an 18th-century invention, it must certainly have been influenced by the traditions of English drama, traditions that included the mystery plays.

As an English teacher, I've long taught about the mystery plays, especially as precursors to Shakespeare. So for me, an important part of yesterday's experience was the chance to participate in a 300-year-old ritual that may be a direct descendant of those plays.

(Thanks to Ken at On the Level for making Hahn's paper available.)

Thanks

My thanks go to Brothers Greg Stewart at Masonic Traveler and John Ratcliff at his blog for their kind mentions, in the past week, of Prospero's Books.

An ancient scroll, preserving secrets of eternity

I've been rereading parts of James Gleick's 1987 book Chaos (see What I've Been Reading), and I'm blown away by two sentences about Edward Lorenz's equations that gave birth, in 1963, to chaos theory:

Years later, physicists would give wistful looks when they talked about Lorenz's paper on those equations--"that beautiful marvel of a paper." By then it was talked about as if it were an ancient scroll, preserving secrets of eternity (30). (emphasis mine)

Although I had completely forgotten that simile, it may well have been what started me on putting "signs, stories, systems, spirit" together in my writing, my teaching, and, more recently, this blog.

The work being done on complex, nonlinear systems has, for me, the same quality I find in the Book of Ezekiel, The Gospel of Thomas, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, The Zohar, the rituals of Freemasonry, the Divine Comedy, the plays of Shakespeare, Joyce's Ulysses, Meditations on the Tarot. That quality is the sense that these books--Prospero's books--both conceal and reveal the deep hidden truths of the Cosmos.