Speculative Freemasonry 225recalled the tradition, it no longer faithfully translated the civilization
and life of that time. The cathedral no longer took the place of all the
books. It was no longer the symbol of the faith, of love, of all. The peak
of this evolution would be Versailles. Its strongly emphasized symbolic
conception converges toward the unity of the Solar Majesty, image of
the king and no other, who personally embodies grandeur and the
perennial. This is a completely different world.
Based on this shift, it seems incontestable that a ritual continuing to
express traditional values in a thirteenth-century Christian form, espe-
cially occurring as it did among craftsmen, could be nothing less than a
teaching that had been passed down from an earlier time.
The esoteric character of the operative ritual can be boiled down to
the general symbolism of the building of Solomon's Temple, which was
one of the most popular myths of the Middle Ages. This popularity
reveals an interpretation of the story that reaches far beyond the tale of
the magnificent temple, which David began and Solomon completed in
order to provide a dignified place to worship the Eternal One and house
the Holy of Holies, the Ark of Covenant containing the Tablets of the
Law. To the medieval mind, Solomon's temple was the replica of God's
true temple and must be visualized on two planes: that of the Universe
and the Divine Creation and that of Man, the reduced form of the
Universe to which Christ's incarnation had conferred a level of
grandeur or some value sequal to it. The temple was the symbol of both
the universal macrocosm and the human microcosm.
This is the basic model of the Christian church. No other religious
edifice has as simply and eloquently expressed the immemorial symbol-
ism of the temple consecrated to the godhead. Its perfection was
reached in the Romanesque church, in the outline of its basic plan in
squares and cupolas, sacred architecture's classic vocabulary for sym-
bolizing the union of heaven and earth, the the uncreated and the cre-
ated. It is easy to see how the instruments used to depict the circle and
the square, the compass and the square, were invested with an identical
symbolic meaning.
It is in this very broad sense that the reconstruction of Solomon's
Temple was understood. Likewise, Jerusalem was not merely the city
in Palestine where the Crusaders gathered. This was simply its