DaVinci’s Real Life Masonic Secrets

When folks ask me what Freemasonry is all about, I usually answer at first by saying something about it being an ancient philosophical society dedicated to the idea of the universal Brotherhood of mankind under God, which, of course, is often met by blank stares.

But what is it that Freemasons actually do, they want to know, in those secret meetings? A fair question. I usually respond by talking about how we have a series of initiation lessons, called degrees, that use the implements of medieval stone architects such as the square and compasses metaphorically to teach life lessons.

More blank stares.

And here is where the conversation usually grinds to a halt. The problem is, I can’t tell a non-Mason specifically how we teach our moral and life lessons using these architectural implements because the exact contours of those lessons are traditionally kept private. We keep them private not because they are shocking (although our ideas of religious and social equality certainly were dangerously radical a few hundred years ago!) but because we are sensitive about “spoilers” in the same way a Hollywood director might want to conceal the big surprise ending of a movie. The degrees are more fun, and the lessons make a bigger impression, when there is some mystery involved.

After having gone down this conversational dead end a number of times, I realized that while I can’t say exactly what occurs in the degrees, I can give an extremely close approximation of the kinds of ideas expressed in them. As it turns out, some of the ideas I’m talking about are not unique to Freemasonry, but rather permeated the intellectual climate of the late fifteenth century, the period in which modern Freemasony began to take shape. This is where DaVinci comes in.

In one of the most famous images of Western culture, DaVinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” we see a human figure perfectly circumscribed within both a square and a circle. This simple but profound image was more than an artist’s observation of anatomical proportions. Rather, it was a statement that the physical body of the ideal man, the Vitruvian Man (so named after the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius who first described these proportions) literally participates in, and is symbolically representative of, the larger, divinely framed Geometry of the universe.

Further, according to this ancient tradition, the circle represents the spiritual realm and the square the physical — and Man is poised between them.

But what does this have to do with architectural implements? Here is the “a-ha” moment: What two architectural drafting tools would one need to draw the square and circle at the heart of DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man illustration? Intriguingly, the Square and the Compasses! As it happens, these are the very same implements that form the well known symbol of Freemasonry on car emblems, rings and headstones all over the world.

That is the kind of stuff we teach and talk about. And there have been no spoilers!