Desaguliers' Code

[Tamrin]

Bro. Gaslight,

While it's not impossible that Desaguliers was a closet goddess worshiper, what ever he and others were trying to achieve with their reorganisation of the original two degrees and the introduction of the third, it appears to have been intended for a Calvinist clique who, one supposes, would be unlikely coverts but might entertain the allegorical example. Moreover, both Desaguliers and Anderson were Rev. Drs. and while both seem to have neglected their ministries to a degree, I would be surprised if either were apostates.

Our emphasis on sets of three appears to have been subsequent to the introduction of the third degree and, while a gnostic framework is indeed appropriate, this appears to derive in part from the archaic Asherah tradition. I suggest the clue that Desaguliers and others followed that lead (laid out in the Bible), was in their layout of the degrees and their, "In strength will I establish...." clue, with Asherah being represented by an object sometimes described as a pillar and with the import of her name being "stability".

[Gaslight]

May 22, 2009 18:55:58 GMT 10 Tamrin said:

I suggest the clue that Desaguliers and others followed that lead (laid out in the Bible), was in their layout of the degrees and their, "In strength will I establish...." clue, with Asherah being represented by an object sometimes described as a pillar and with the import of her name being "stability".

There is certainly an unbalanced equation in the meanings of the two pillars and their conjoined import. So unbalanced that a new member of one of my lodges, full of confidence and unwilling or unable to ask the advice of a senior member, declared the conjoined meaning to be "Strength", and was decidedly put out when corrected. He insisted that Stability didn't make sense in context.

However, the supposed meanings of most of the other words and passwords, not to mention the meaning of the substitute for the Master's Word, also don't ring true, at least not for me. That's what the ritual says, but I could do with a little more convincing.

Earlier today I ordered a copy of Harrison's Genesis of Freemasonry which is supposed to go into Desaguliers' influence. Trouble is, my local Amazon tells me to expect my copy in September.

[Tamrin]

An "unbalanced equation" is a good way of expressing the matter. Strictly speaking, "stability," as a conjoined meaning of the other two, doesn't make sense, leading one to suppose it to be a third element, in its own right, awkwardly disguised.

Moreover, while the import of the names can be checked in Strong's Hebrew Dictionary, the suggestion that the first two had namesakes is strained, especially as there is no reason to suppose J. had any significant part in the dedication. However, they do serve to set a pattern for a third such object, with a significant name (signifying "stability") which WAS so named after someone or something, the goddess Asherah.

If Harrison does go into Desaguliers' influence, I too must get hold of a copy, as I believe JTD to be the most neglected, significant person in our history and further light on him would be very welcome.

I guess you are aware of the Antients' complaint that the Words of the first two degrees had been transposed (soon after they had been reorganised) and J. does indeed makes more sense in the context of the First Degree. This transposition appears to have been done to involve them in greater mystery and to reveal those who hadn't been privy to the transposition and were thus not members of the Premier Grand Lodge. The transposition was seen as an innovation by the Antients: For the Moderns, it would have scarcely mattered, as they had already taken greater liberties with the original two operative Degrees.

[Gaslight]

About the 'third' pillar:

This afternoon one of my lodges (the one that works a Preston-Webb ritual) conferred a Third Degree, at the end of which comes a crushingly boring lecture that recapitulates everything that has already happened, then launches into an exposition of some of the 'hieroglyphical' emblems used in that degree. I had never paid much attention to this lecture, not having had to deliver it, and usually losing interest halfway through. Today, however, I had one of those lightbulb moments when the lecturer spoke about the broken column in the SS, the one erected to the memory of HAB.

May 23, 2009 2:45:44 GMT 10 Tamrin said:

I guess you are aware of the Antients' complaint that the Words of the first two degrees had been transposed

Yes, but only in the context of a reaction to the publication of Masonic exposés. The details you provide of an influx of Masons from other lodges and constitutions was new to me. As a reaction to exposés, the transposition always struck me as feeble and ineffective. I would have thought news of the transposition would have spread within days.

I see you've opened up a separate thread on this topic, so will pick it up over there.

[Tamrin]

May 23, 2009 19:40:18 GMT 10 Gaslight said:

Today, however, I had one of those lightbulb moments when the lecturer spoke about the broken column in the SS, the one erected to the memory of HAB.

Wonderful!

The Monument

[Tamrin]

Jul 14, 2008 7:24:45 GMT 10 Tamrin said:

We may cautiously speculate that the shift from "Saba" to "Sheba" may have some etymological significance, further linking the queen to Asherah (perhaps already implied by the connection with "Isis," as "Ashesh"). A', as a prefix, may be used as a reverential exclamation, similar to the O' in "O'Lord," and a shift in suffix from "ra" to "ba" is well within the normal range for cross language equivalence (with Ra being a sun god, the shift may also suggest a theological distinction).

Turning to Charles Fillmore's Metaphysical Bible Dictionary, under "Sheba," we also find find a semantic connection, with him giving the usual meaning:

Sheba, she-ba (Heb.)—seven; cyclic fullness; completeness; fullness of times; fulfillment; an oath; a covenant.

and also (emphasis added):

Sheba, she-ba (Heb.)—rest; respose; stability; equilibrium; reintegration; return to an original state; restoration; redemption.

While, under "Asherah," he has:

Asherah, a-she-rah (Heb.)—straight; upright; a pillar; fortune; happiness.

[Tamrin]

LADY SOPHIA

[Excerpts - Chapter by Pamela A. Foulkes in Hildegard of Bingen
and Gendered Theology in Judaeo-Christian Tradition, 1995,
Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology, Monash University]

The figure of Sophia or the Lady Wisdom has a rich and ancient history. The major representations of Sophia in biblical tradition occur in the collections of so-called "wisdom" texts: the Book of Proverbs, the Book of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira and The Wisdom of Solomon.

From where has this strong female figure emerged to find a place in biblical tradition? The obvious place to look is amongst the Canaanite goddesses, such as Astarte or Asherah, the Queen of Heaven. The number of biblical attacks that we find against the worship of this goddess are a strong indication of the power of her cult in Israel. King Manasseh, for instance, is castigated in 2 Kings 21:7 because he set up a carved image of Asherah in the temple. And King Josiah is praised for throwing it out again in 2 Kings 23:6-7. Recent archaeological finds support the view that Asherah was worshipped not only by the Canaanite population, but also by the Israelites, and posed a constant threat to the orthodox worshippers of Yahweh.

There are many similarities to be found in the complex of images that surround the figures of both Lady Wisdom and the goddess. Both function as symbols of fertility; sources of rich harvests. Archaeological evidence of the symbols linked with Asherah shows that images of fruit and produce were common, and the same is true for Sophia:

Come to her like one who plows and sows,
and wait for her good harvest,
For when you cultivate her you will toil but little,
and soon you will eat of her produce. (Sira 6:19)

Asherah's particular cult symbol was the tree, or a carved sacred pole representing the tree, call the asherah. This was linked with the very ancient complex of images of the tree of life and the tree as the axis of the centre of the world, found in many cultures. It was under the sacred tree of the goddess that believers could find protection and shelter. Wisdom also is the tree whose branches guard the seeker who "lodges under her boughs" and "is sheltered by her from the heat" (Sira 14:26-27):

She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;
those who hold her fast are called happy. (Proverbs 3:18)

[Tamrin]

I am slightly skeptical about salacious allegations of sexual misconduct within the archaic Hebrew religion. After all, its detractors (who got to record their hostile version of events) would say that, wouldn't they? Also, there is a matter of connotation: How might sex as sacrament have been understood in the context of the religion (it is said to have been practiced in some Hindu temples until relatively recently)? We get a clue from comparing the modern usage of the word "prostitute" with its ealier usage, we read:

The Oxford English Dictionary states that from 1540 to 1677 the word prostitute was used in the sense of "to offer with complete devotion or self-negation" or simply as a synonym for "to devote." By the 1700s, prostitute denoted "given over or devoted to something evil." It began to be used figuratively to mean "debased" or "debasing, corrupt." By mid-century, prostitute was well established in the sexual sense we know today.

Then too, there is a matter of bias. Early scholars were mostly men, who may have been drawn to opinions which appealed to masculine, erotic fantasies and which may, in turn, may led them to overstate the role, function, extent and contemporary understanding of sacred prostitution.

Sacred Prostitutes

[Excerpt - Article by Johanna H. Stuckey, www.matrifoucus.com - Linked Above]

An "improbable percentage of the population [of Mesopotamia and Syria-Canaan] must have been either secular or religious prostitutes of some sort," wrote Beatrice Brooks in 1941 (231). She was drawing conclusions from the writings of predominantly male scholars who accepted without question the concept of "sacred, cult, or temple prostitutes." Female temple functionaries, they maintained, regularly engaged in sexual intercourse in return for a payment to their temples. Female devotees of Inanna/Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of sexuality and love, were "immediately" suspect of such behavior (Assante 1998:6). Until recently, most scholars took this view for granted, and some still do.

In the nineteenth century, scholars thought Mesopotamia to be a hotbed of "naïve and primitive sexual freedom" (Assante 1998:5-6). Members of the then-new discipline of anthropology, such as Sir James Frazer of The Golden Bough fame, made matters worse by presenting for readers' delectation the orgiastic rites of fertility cults (Assante 2003:22-24; Oden 2000:136-138). The result was a fertility-cult myth which took hold among scholars (Stuckey 2005:32-44; Assante 2003:24-25; Lambert 1992:136). A number of ancient sources were ultimately responsible for the concept of "sacred prostitute": the Hebrew Bible; later Greek writers like Herodotus (ca.480-ca.425 BCE), Strabo (ca.64 BCE-19CE), and Lucian (ca.115-ca.200 CE); and early Christian churchmen. They greatly influenced later writers (Oden 2000:140-147; Assante 1998:8; Henshaw 1994:225-228; Yamauchi 1973:216).

Herodotus reported a "wholly shameful" custom by which every woman "once in her life" had intercourse near the temple of Aphrodite (Ishtar) with the first stranger who threw "a silver coin" into her lap (Herodotus 1983:121-122,I:199). Similarly, Lucian described the punishment of women who declined to shave their heads in mourning for Adonis: "For a single day they [had to] stand offering their beauty for sale … [in a] market … open to foreigners only, and the payment [became] an offering to Aphrodite [Astarte]" (1976:13-15). The Christian writers accused pagans of indulging in orgies in honor of Aphrodite, ritual pre-marital sex, and "cult prostitution" (Oden 2000:142-144).

It is true that much ritual activity in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean focussed on promoting the fecundity of the land. In early Mesopotamia, for instance, the "Sacred Marriage," with its fertility focus, could possibly have involved a "sacred prostitute."

Webster's English Dictionary defines a prostitute as, first, "… a woman who engages in sexual intercourse for money; whore; harlot"; second, "… a man who engages in sexual acts for money" (1996:1553). According to one scholar, "Cultic prostitution is a practice involving the female and at times the male devotees of fertility deities, who presumably dedicated their earnings to their deity." The "Sacred Marriage" rite was one of "the motives of the practice, particularly in Mesopotamia," where the king had intercourse with "a temple prostitute" (Yamauchi 1973:213).

Obviously, most scholars did not distinguish between ritual sex and sexuality for pay (Cooper forthcoming). However, ritual sex would not have been prostitution even if the act produced an offering for a temple (Lambert 1992:136). Rather, it would have been an act of worship.

In the Hebrew Bible, the word normally translated "sacred or cult prostitute" is qedeshah/qedeshot (feminine singular/ plural) and qadesh/qedeshim (masculine singular/plural). These four titles do not occur very often in the Hebrew Bible (Henshaw 1994:218-221). The root qdsh means "set apart, consecrated" (Brown, Driver, and Briggs 1978 (1953):871-874). For the most part, the terms occur in books from Deuteronomy through to II Kings, the so-called Deuteronomistic History, which is especially nationalistic, polemical, and denunciatory of Canaanite religion (Oden 2000:131,132; Olyan 1988:3). The assumption that "sacred prostitution" had not only occurred, but had happened in the context of fertility cults, resulted from the Hebrew Bible's "deliberate" association of qedeshah, "sacred/consecrated woman," with zonah, "prostitute" (Bird 1989:76).

Thus, an important category of cult functionary called qedeshah existed in Canaan (Henshaw 1994:235-236). Otherwise, why would the Bible need to discredit such women? Their function in Canaanite religion is not known, but they were "consecrated women," probably priestesses.

When the archives of Ugarit, an ancient Semitic-speaking city in Syria, began to be interpreted, it quickly became evident that the religion of Ugarit was similar to the Canaanite religion vilified in the Hebrew Bible. Thousands of clay tablets dated to the Late Bronze Age, 1300-1200 BCE (Astour 1981:4), were found to contain, among other things, lists of gods, offerings, and religious functionaries (del Olmo Lete 1999; de Tarragon 1980). None of the priestly titles in the texts is grammatically in the feminine gender (de Tarragon 1980:7,8,139ff.), but they could have included women if the masculine form included the feminine, as it used to do in English.

The word qdshm, "consecrated ones," designated important functionaries: "... we find [them] listed second after the khnm `priests' " (Henshaw 1994:222-225; de Tarragon 1980:134,141; Yamauchi 1973:219). Qdshm had high status, could marry and establish families, and could hold other offices (de Tarragon 1980:141). There is no suggestion that the ritual role of the qdshm was sexual, nor, indeed, is there any evidence to date of "sacred prostitution" at Ugarit (de Tarragon 1980:139,140; Yamauchi 1973:219).

In Mesopotamian lists, the Semitic word kharimtu, usually translated "prostitute," was often written with, or close to, the titles of female cultic personnel. As a result, the latter became "tainted" by proximity (Assante 1998:11). Thus not only qadishtu but other female cultic titles were translated "sacred or temple prostitute" (Assante 2003:32).

Then there are the kadoshim, the male cult prostitutes, often translated as "sodomites." I wonder at the hostile assumption that they were necessarily homosexual. Fertility was valued and venerated. A "barren" women visiting a male priest may have been "blessed" with a child (especially if it was her husband who was infertile). If so, this might provide some insight into the common, ancient reports of children being the child of or dedicated to this or that god (being fathered by a priest, acting in that capacity). For instance, Pythagoras was said to have been the son of Apollo.

Jul 14, 2008 7:21:41 GMT 10 Tamrin said:

Beginning with images of Asherah, the common fate of so-called heretics has been to be accused of licentiousness, (lest the finer theological objections are lost on the populous), and to be broken, burnt and scattered. Thus, has been the fate of the ‘Holy Ones,’ the Kadosh and Kadoshah, (Asherah’s priests and priestesses); Gnostics; Early Christians; Hypatia; The Cathars, Knights Templar, Waldensians and finally remembered among Master Masons.

[Tamrin]

Falasha artefacts portraying the supposed bedroom scene between Solomon and Sheba.
Haile Selassie claimed to be the 225th direct-line descendant of this union.

(Graham Hancock, The Sign and the Seal, Plate 8)

[Tamrin]

Asherah, the Tree of Life and the Menorah:
Continuity of a Goddess symbol in Judaism?

[Excerpt - Paper by Asphodel P. Long, The First Sophia Fellowship Feminist Theology Lecture.
The College of St. Mark & St. John. Plymouth. 4th December 1996 - Linked Above]

That there might be a connection, rooted in the Hebrew bible, between the female figure there named Asherah, the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life and the Menorah (the seven branched candlestick of Jewish life and ritual) occurred to me when in 1991 I was writing a study of the biblical divine female figure of Wisdom, Hochma in Hebrew, Sophia in Greek. To some extent it appeared that Hochma was the alter ego of God presented in the feminine gender. In doing this work I looked at other female divine figures in the Hebrew bible, of whom Asherah was certainly one of the most prominent. Where Hochma, Wisdom, encapsulated the comprehension of creation and the brilliance of order and the intellect, it seemed that Asherah stood for the concept of life, its physicality, its sacrality, its cyclical renewal within nature and the hope by the human beings who worshipped her that such renewal was some sort of symbol of eternal life.

It seemed of particular interest that this female divine figure was always associated with trees. LXX translated the word Asherah into in Greek as also, grove, or alse, groves, or occasionally by dendra, trees; Vulgate in Latin provided lucus or nemus, a grove or a wood (thus KJV bible uses grove or groves with the consequent loss of Asherah's name and knowledge of her existence to English language readers of the bible over some 400 years).

I noticed then the possibility that the special tree, the Tree of Life might act as a signal concerning the presence of this divine female being. The familiar Genesis 3:24,(normally accepted as written by the J element in biblical composition) tells us that the human being (ha-adam) was driven out of the garden of Eden and that God placed the cherubim with a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. On the other hand, Prov. 3:18 tells us of female Wisdom "she shall be a tree of life to all who lay hold on her". The contrast here was striking. For the J writer of Genesis, the Tree of Life was denied when our foreparents had gained knowledge of good and evil, yet the Wisdom writer at approximately the same period commended it to the seeker as divine female wisdom. The questions raised were linked. Is Gen 3:24 an expression of the prohibition of worship of a goddess figure who might be Asherah? And is Prov. 3:18 a relic of the popular religious veneration of the female in deity? (Long:1992: 130-31) At the time I was able only to follow through the material about Wisdom but today as a result of the courtesy of this college I am happy to present to you some account of Asherah and the tree of life, and a possible symbol of both that has lasted throughout history, and I am doing so within the context of feminist theology.