Bro. Orlando R. Murgado MM
17 February 2021
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Some people describe the question as a causality dilemma. One hatches out of the other. One lays the other. Going through the degrees in Freemasonry we are faced with a bevy of words, images and ideas, some dimly familiar and many obscure and perhaps seemingly arbitrary or gratuitously arcane. Where the heck did this stuff come from? Who came up with it? Is this just an elaborate justification to get dressed up and hang out with the guys and knock back a few? But churchgoing brothers will tell you how a line comes from this or that book of the Bible. A Jewish brother might tell you how this or that symbol or image goes back to the Torah, or the history of Judaism. A Buddhist might tell you how this or that Masonic idea is inherently Buddhist. Brother Masons from around the world can all tell you how Freemasonry is tied into the foundations, the very fabric of their societies and belief systems. How can this be? If you study history even superficially you quickly learn that all the cultures and societies on earth have evolved and developed throughout time, in different places. Certainly cultures have not developed in a vacuum- anthropology and even history are studies of human interrelations. But Judaism predates Islam, Mithraism comes long after Zoroastrianism, and so on.
Yet something about Freemasonry makes it resonate with essential, ancient ideals and concepts from around the world. Certainly there is more to Freemasonry, what underpins and constitutes it, that goes beyond symbols, allusions and references to these foundational principles, but that notwithstanding, there is a transcendent vein of thought and intent beneath our philosophy that confounds chronology or linear quantification or analysis. The story of Freemasonry is the story of Man throughout time and beyond locality. And once you start counting backwards and connecting dots from a given point in history you will find points of connection. Every. Freaking. Where.
As Historian I have sat down and done the theogony. I’ve gone back through different traditions and pantheons and traced the nub of this and that idea or personage from Masonic lore. Maybe in another ten years I’ll be able to give you a really good explanation of the line from Osiris to the Burning Man though the lens of Freemasonry. I’ve done the exegesis and traced the word back to the logos and even earlier. And maybe by the time my beard goes all white I’ll be able to parse that for the young’uns. I’ve got my hands full….! In the nearer term I’m finding teleology to be the way to go, to help me answer basic questions and come to some semblance of wrapping my mind around this Masonic endeavor. While tracing the roots of Freemasonry might just be the mightiest yawning chasm of a rabbit hole I can tell a lot about its nature by looking at what it does.
So here we are, somewhere within the amorphous doom that is the Coronavirus Pandemic. Right now things are different. Freemasonry is different. The fact that there are people in a Lodge doing the Work at all at this point is remarkable. It’s like the essential personnel are keeping the power plant running, but it is a way- the lights have to stay on, don’t they…? All of this considered, we have managed to get degrees done. We are managing to carry out regular business meetings. Zoom is the virtual Lodge. But we’re getting through because Freemasonry is flexible enough, and the Brothers are creative and resourceful enough that we’ve found ways to work around the worst of it. And that’s a big thing.
For all that Freemasonry is transmitted to us unchanged from “time immemorial,” thank you William Gibson, we do adapt to the givens of our day, while still holding on to the essence of our Craft. In important ways, we can only ever really discover the essence of our endeavors or interests when we are forced out of our comfort zones and obliged to improvise. So there it is. You can look through the history of Freemasonry around the world and find points of inflection. Freemasonry in the United States has formed around some of those big points of change and discord and disarray passed down from traditions in the Old World. Even American Freemasonry is a melting pot.
So I look at our starting question- which came first, the chicken or the egg? And in many important ways it does not matter. There is another symbol not unrelated to our question- the Ouroboros. It’s a symbol of a snake or dragon eating its own tail. On one level a contradiction. A causality dilemma. An Escher-like surrealistic contradiction. It comes from ancient Greece and has been transmitted to our day through a range of disciplines ranging from Western Classicism to pop culture. It was a symbol adopted by alchemists and natural philosophers. It is a symbol of the cycle of birth and death. Renewal. Infinity. Strength, establishment and stability. So let the questions and searching for our origins proceed from the knowledge that, even beset by unprecedented adversity we are still going strong.