In the Kloss collection there is a set of rituals ascribed to Baron von Löwen. On the tracing board for the degree “Maitre Parfait” there is a rope connecting what appears to be both halves of the tracing board. It goes from the St. Andrew’s Cross (rather: crossed pillars) to the coffin.
There are also simpler “Maitre Parfait” tracing boards without the two halves. In a somewhat different form, you can see the same image on the “Scots Master” tracing board (see sanctuary).
In Exploring the Vault (2024) an old “Maitre Parfait” catechism is translated. It contains the question:
What is the meaning of the rope that hangs from the coffin and ends up in the sanctuary?
It represents the rope the brothers used to pull Hiram’s corpse down into the coffin.
In the “Maitre Parfait” degree in the Baylot collection, the rope is rather:
the rope that was used to lower the body of Hiram into the second grave when Solomo had him buried in the Holy of Holies
Later in the same Baylot collection there is a degree “Knight of the Eagle and the Sun or Untangled Chaos” where there is a hole with a rope, but the rope is tied around the candidate and it is pulled a few times, similar to some variations of the Royal Arch. The rope is also referred to as the cord that was used to pull up the body of Hiram, so that is similar to the imaginary we saw earlier.
Interestingly, I ran into a “Maitre Parfait” drawing of a lodge which actually has a scaffold from which a rope hangs that leads towards a coffin. Now you may think, isn’t that just a hoist to pull up the coffin? But there is actually a “Maitre Parfait” degree (in the book Sarsena, or the Perfect Architect) which explicitly describes a scaffold being put in the south of the lodge, just like on this image. It appears that the rope has (had) different meanings.
Another beautiful example can be found is the one below, but here the coffin is actually within the tracing board.
It seems that a very similar tracing board in still used in the French Rite Écossais Ancien et Accepté.
Also see pyramid.
Top: collection (1844) of Georg Kloss (1787-1854) (Collection de 84 tableaux, Kl.MS:XXV.1)
Middle left: 18th century painting from Mons, Belgium. They are reprinted online and in print on several places. Facsimiles of the entire collection appear in Dix-Sept Tableaux Symboliques du XVIIIe Siecle (1992) by Maurice-Aurélien Arnould (1914-2001)
Middle right: Feddersen (Die Arbeitstafel in der Freimaurerei Band I (1982) SD/5, P. 487) from 1748
Bottom: Bibliotheque Nationale de France – Fonds Maçonnique – FM4 (74)