Welcome to my latest project (started March 2024, the book is from July 2024).
When I was working on the website about the Kirkwall Scroll I frequently wondered how I should find out if a certain symbol has anything to do with Freemasonry and if so, how it fits in the vast Masonic landscape. With this new website I hope to create some sort of searchable database of Masonic symbols. I suppose this will be long in the making (and growing) since there are, and have been, many different sorts of Freemasonry, sometimes with specific symbols. For people who prefer to have something in their hands, most information of this website can be bought as a hardcover, paperback or Kindle ebook. Use your local Amazon so that the book is produced closest to where you live.
I had a hard time finding a way to filter ‘like a webshop’ and I didn’t entirely succeed. The “advanced search” tab allows you to combine a “category”, a “tag” or a degree or multiple of both. For the book I had to come up with another way of searching. I merged some categories, which became chapters, and in the back you can use three different indexes (or combine them to narrow your search).
It also took some effort to find a way to display the filtering results that includes the image on the website, so that you don’t have to open every result. There is no deep reason for the use of grey. I just started with books with as Duncan’s Monitor and Pike’s Morals and Dogma and they have quite crude, black and white images. When I came to other sources with shiny, colorful photographs I thought things became to circus-like. I did retain the color of some images in descriptions.
Please do not see this website or the book as a complete encyclopedia of Masonic symbols. I suppose it will grow in time, but it will never by any means be exhaustive. Neither am I a Masonic expert or have a received all the degrees described. I just started to compile symbols that can already be found online and in publicly available books.
These sources got an extra dimension when I wanted to publish the book. When I thought I was ready, my book was ‘caught’ in the Amazon checks and copyright questions were asked. Perhaps I too easily assumed that when I would use images that can already be found online or in books, images that are usually hundreds years old, things would be fine. Apparently it is not that easy. You can quote a book, but you can’t just ‘quote’ an image from another book.
Waiting for a detailed check by Amazon, I started to create a ‘source index’ listing every symbol. I tried to retrace where I found it and -if possible- where it originally came from. Needless to say that the latter doesn’t work for many images. Who drew the square and compasses? Or even: who drew the famous Symbol Charts? In most cases we simply don’t know.
Klaus Dąbrowski published his Freemasons: 555 Illustrations in 2022, a massive paperback with over 555 Masonic images, also published by Amazon. I noticed that he makes a very general remark that as far as he knows, the images are over 100 years old and the designers have been dead for over 80 years. He does have some sort of source list, but usually he doesn’t say much more than: “Symbols of American Freemasonry”. So he doesn’t list his sources and Amazon thought it was okay.
I still decided to take it a step further and gave myself the task of trying to retrace the oldest possible sources. There is a great work of Klaus Feddersen with hundreds of tracing boards and other Masonic symbols (such as charts) (Die Arbeidstafel in der Freimaurerei Band I Klaus Feddersen (1982) (Band II deals with the symbolism in detail). Feddersen actually did take the effort of trying to find the sources. I refer to Feddersen a lot when he can’t help me to be more specific. Also Dąbrowski I used a lot. This has the simple reason that in a 555+ image book, there was a lot of useful material (symbols that I didn’t yet have). When possible, I tried to add some detail to Dąbrowski’s information, but this only worked on a handful of occasions.
The book had a ‘source index’, but it was too hard to enlarge the book that way, as I had to manually edit all page references. I decided to put the source immediately below the image. I’ve been adding that information to the website in the way way as well. One of (new) my aims was to provide information about the source of an image and/or to send the reader on the way with a bit more information than when that reader came to this website or the book. The website and book are only meant to be a guide, to point you in a certain direction. Not to be ‘the ultimate reference guide’ with comprehensive explanations, etc.
Therefor the information that you find is short. For new additions, not as short as when I started, but I do not intend to make an encyclopedia. As I said: my aim is to point you in a (hopefully the correct) direction.
On this website I have ‘tagged’ images with degrees when that was possible. Usually this is not the case, so I left out that ‘feature’ in the book. On the website you can combine “Memphis-Misraim” and “90th degree”. Not in the book, unless you check the page numbers in one index to that of another. Note that on the website you can make combinations with no results. “Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite” and “90th degree” obviously will give no results. Well, that is not entirely true, more about that below.
Several symbols appear in different degrees and in different systems. This was a challenge especially in the book. Should you know something that I haven’t mentioned yet, feel free to use the comment fields. Also, should you have things that you think should be added, contact me and we’ll see how we’ll work it out.
There are a few things that I’m not overly happy with or that I haven’t found a good solution for. For starters, a symbol such as the Hammer and Chisel is so common, that I wonder if I should categorise the symbol to every rite used. That would at least allow you to find it if you are looking for the symbols of a specific rite. On the other hand, many images would get a lot of categories in which my other point becomes bigger and bigger. When a symbol is used in, let’s say, the 30th degree of Memphis-Misraim and the 8th degree of the Swedish rite, you will also find it when you combine Memphis-Misraim with 8th degree. The more labels I put on a symbol, the bigger the chance that these incorrect combinations give a result. As of now I try to use the tag “general” when a symbol is very common. This way, when you look for “Emulation”, you will only get symbols that are (somewhat) specific to Emulation, but -of course- not symbols available on this website that are in use in Emulation, as the common ones are tagged “general”.
This website does not care about “regularity” and “recognition”. Indeed, you will find symbols coming from Memphis-Misraim and co-Masonry to “regular” Freemasonry, old and new. There are a few similar or aligned systems present, but I don’t yet have plans to also try to cover all Masonic-like organisations and their symbols.
Please also visit 3-5-7.nl for my other Masonic websites.