Monks, Alchemist, Hermetic Masons and Old Charges

 

Monks, Alchemist, Hermetic Masons and Old Charges

Victor. Arturo. Cabello. Reyes.

''Wherever Rome established its influence, wherever Monastic Orders were founded, Romanesque art made its appearance. Western Christianity, led by energetic popes, thriving Monasteries, and pious rulers, entered a period of expansion.'' (1)

(Sir Lawrence Gowing)

During the 11th and 12th centuries Romanesque art (Romanesque art) flourished into the Proto-Gothic or Gothic.

The monastic life was revived and the discipline of the Rule [''Regula monacharum] was strengthened thanks to the spiritual and material work of the Monasteries and Abbeys = {Cluny, in Burgundy}.

The forms of spiritual life and profane renunciation re-emerge from the heremite and the visionary and cultured monk. Monasticism is the living force of the Church, and the monks prescribed manual and intellectual labor.

In reality, Romanesque art is predominantly monastic with clear influence from Cluny and the Benedictines. The Cistercian Church played an essential and fundamental role during the time of Abbot St. Bernard, exerting a solid influence on twelfth-century art and the revival of Gothic art.

On the other hand, the monastic orders put their stamp on the architecture and the work of the "polishing and design" of the rough stone.

From the eleventh century, the constructive forms and techniques of stonework within the planning and layout of cathedrals and churches developed.

However, in the 1000s, the semicircular arch, a half-barrel vault, the Latin Cross floor plan and thick retaining walls were already presented. Always taking care of the construction due to fires or accidents in the construction work.

''One of the preoccupations of masons during the Romanesque period was to reduce the risk of fires.'' (2)

It is worth noting that the earliest forms practiced by Christians already appear in the Egyptian desert around the second and third centuries.

By that time monasteries and convents were founded= (Pachomius near the Nile-320 A.D.)

Subsequently, there were many monastic orders and their educational and spiritual mission (Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Carthusians, Franciscans and Dominicans).

In the Old Charges, these Venerable Masters are referred to as the Venerable Bede, "a learned, studious, and humble monk": "The Master of History and Bede." (3)

(Cooke Manuscript: 1410)

For Venerable Bede, ''... Nothing has been sweeter to me than to endlessly learn, to teach and to write."

Of the educated monks he has Freemasonry su=Trivium [dialectic-grammar-rhetoric] and Quadrivium [astronomy-arithmetic-geometry-music]

"Most of the alchemists, at least until the dawn of the Renaissance, were clerics, especially friars belonging to the mendicant orders, the most powerful since their foundation in the thirteenth century." (4)

The evolution of ideas and the monastic school from the tenth to the thirteenth century was reserved for monks and monastic orders (Premonstratensian and Cistercian), they nourished university education by founding colleges for novices and stone workers in the process of "refinement".

Great intellectuals came out of these places = Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant and Wyclif. There are three powers: the clerical, the monarchical and the valuable university.

"But many of them, because of their intellectual function and because of the 'freedom' of the university, in spite of their limitations, more or less intellectual, 'critical and bordering on heresy.'' (5)

By their constant training and studies, the monks and Master Masons – Stone workers or workers – had to faithfully follow the Constructive Rule, in order to develop and solve the most varied and complex aesthetic and structural forms.

But there is an Occult Perennial Wisdom or Pansophy = ARCANA ARCANíSIIMA.

It is the Ancient Mystery Thread that has never been broken and that is deposited and latent in the rough, crude and unrefined stone = the Mason.

And that motivated the stone workers, for generations and generations, to zealously transmit their legacy in a congruent iconographic body of symbols and teachings. (6)

The medieval organizations of masons' guilds were originally concentrated as guild traditions fused with the monastic orders:

"The constructive art, the science, the research came from the monasteries in the Gothic period."

It is there, in its libraries, workshops and desks, that the intellectual work that will shape the structures of the Gothic is carried out. (7)

Serious researcher Arnold Hauser:

"These monasteries as intellectual units maintained and preserved ancient traditions of the ART OF STONE..."

"The great merit of the monastic movement consisted in ensuring that the production of art was carried out within the framework of orderly workshops..."

The ancient Regius and Cooke Manuscripts comment on those corporate assemblies of operative Masons.

It is there that the rules of the trade were evidenced in rigorous and well-articulated: "articles, rules and points".

They emphasize the obvious importance of the relationship between Freemasons and clerics.

In the manuscript Regius= (Halliwell MS c.1390), among its 794 lines we can see a series of instructions of a moralizing nature which start from deep clerical concerns.

Euclidean geometry – Hic Incipiunt constitutions artis gematriae secundum Eucyldem – and the intellectual value of the Old Charges contain elements of that ecclesiastical wisdom: 'EX Uno Omnia'.

Especially, the Cooke manuscript (1410).

In the Cooke, the first nineteen articles are from a "history" of Geometry and Architecture.

It is not altogether difficult for a studious Master Mason to observe in the "Gothic" style clear elements of the speculative mason's trade.

Masonic wisdom is based on the ancient Egyptian-Hermetic tradition of the Broken Column or Split Pillar.

''... the author describes his initiation into the alchemical art after the collapse of the column containing the Secret Books of his master Ostanes.'' ''... seems to be based, such as the master's early death or the collapse of the column.'' 

(#8)

The ancient tradition of the two Pillars of Wisdom (marble and Laterus).

In the Cooke Manuscript, (1400) it is stated that all antediluvian wisdom was written in 2 Columns; one is discovered by Pythagoras and the other by Hermes= {analogue vision}.

A tradition that manages to manifest itself through solid documentary references that frame this knowledge as coming from historical sources and Templar wisdom.

A tradition developed in Egypt and widely propagated through the well-known rigorous conceptual Pythagorean assimilation of the Geometer Euclid. (9)

In the Grand Lodge Manuscript no.1 (1583) we return to the Column, this time rescued or rediscovered by=''the Great Hermarines''.

Findel was of opinion that Freemasons are descended from Medieval Freemasons =''when Freemasons were really working with stones, chisels, and hammers''.

Just remember the antiquity of the Scottish Lodges and the Mother Lodge of Scotland on dates evidenced up to 1140 in Kilwinning. (10)

Sadly, some still believe – wrongly – that its origins are cemented in the creation of the controversial and discriminatory Grand Lodge of England until 1813. (11)

Evidently the most ancient traditions confess that ancestral wisdom and science are hidden in the two pillars of foundation.

Gould= ('History of Freemasonry'), refers to this legacy of Benedictines and other monastic orders.

Brand Builders or 'Sculpstores Lapidum Liberorum'.

During the French Gothic period (1140 - until the 15th century), they were known as: Maitre Macon de Franche and, magister lathomus liberarum petarum.

Wisdom is written in stone, Euclidean proposition 47 is written in stone.

Masters of operative stone since before the Gothic era.

But, internally purified, of geometrical science.

(Euclid, Elements, Book VI, Proposition No.30.)

In fact, the Cistercian Order and St. Bernard or St. Benedict and their monks who built Cluny are skillful reformers of architectural styles.

They are the ones who teach how to think, and their job is personal reflection and organized dissemination of constructive ideas.

''Masons told stories in stone and, in doing so, animated their material.'' (12)

Lucid page within the process of ancestral knowledge.

Originally, Freemasonry was derived from a strictly oral tradition and strict memorization = Oral Tradition, which managed to preserve and maintain knowledge in a perfect link between operative and speculative.

Ancestral wisdom that later the written tradition collects in the incomparable ANTEDILUVIAN tradition that builds Masonic Pillars.

Referring to this, A.G. Mackey: "We are forced to resort to Oral Legends."

It should be clarified that, in St. Bernard, lapidary art and the "sacred virtues of multicolored gems and stones" corresponded to cosmic sympathy within beautiful sacred ornamentation in concordances of an astrological nature-mathesis=learning=(Lapidaries).

Thus, at that time the tradition followed the 'ascending spiral ladder' or Golden Chain, almost without interruption for centuries.

Together with the Citeaux-Cistercian and Cluny, they extend throughout Europe = Prelude to the Gothic.

Similarly, Bernard of Clairvaux is the patron saint of Cistercian art, of vibrant wisdom that is received from above to be captured in Fontaney in the twelfth century.

The vision of the Master Builder Gauzon, in the apparition of the Apostle St. Peter, giving him the architectural plans of the temple of Cluny III, among the geometric-spiral floral motifs of the decoration of Santes Creus, is striking.

A style worn by nomadic brotherhoods of builders in that 'Coming and Going' to San Galgano, Fossanova or Casamari in Italy.

"In the hazards of monastic existence, clerics were momentarily able to take the place of teachers, scholars, writers." (13)

It should be clarified that at that time, through the establishment of 'Rules and Ordinances' of feudalism, the master builders of Abbeys and Monasteries covered their expenses through the power of royalties and tax contributions of common defense, since Carolingian times and even earlier.

''The most famous document to deal with the history of Masonry is the Regius MS. or Regius Poem (British Library)''...''The work of medieval masters was made possible through collaboration with the most intelligent men in the religious orders.'' (14)

For Masonic historian Gould, it relates Masonic history to the Benedictines and other monastic orders. (15)

Thus, the sacred stone is elaborated in a Sacred Square by means of spiritual virtue, sculpting in a geometric-mathematical human way and model.

It is a model of the ancients that master builders and mason architects add to their techniques of stone carving = Ars Tekné = Art with Technique.

Monks, Alchemist, Hermetic Masons and Old Charges

Victor. Arturo. Cabello. Reyes.

Bibliography:

1. Sir Lawrence Gowing {1918-91), A History of Art.

2. Sir Lawrence Gowing {1918-91), A History of Art. Romanesque Art, p.563)

3. Cooke Manuscript: 1410.

4. Luis E. Iñigo Fernández, Alchemy, p.139.

5. Jacques LeGoff, The Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, p.14.

6. Knoop, Douglas, and G. P. Jones, The Mediaeval Mason 1967.

7. Arnold Hauser, Social History of Literature and Art.

8. Matteo Martelli, The Four Books of Pseudo-Democritus, p.p.s18-ps.20.

9. Beswicke-Roys manuscript of the 16th century, the ''wisdom of Hermes-Pythagoras'' is mentioned.

10. Christopher Hodapp, Freemasons, p.26.

11. S. Brent Morris, Freemasonry, p. 18.

12. Tobias Churton, Freemasonry-The Reality, p.119.

13. Jacques LeGoff, p.27.

14. Tobias Churton, p.121.

15. Robert Freke Gould, The History of Freemasonry, 1884-1887.