Masonic Symbols and Their Meanings

Most Masonic symbols fall into three families: the working tools of the stonemason, the furnishings and architecture of King Solomon’s Temple, and a handful of emblems of conduct and mortality. The glyphs below show the most common ones at a glance, with the meaning each carries inside the lodge. The sections that follow take the major emblems in turn.

The square and compasses is the chief emblem of Freemasonry, a builder’s square joined with a pair of compasses, and it stands for the moral lessons the Craft draws from the mason’s trade. The square teaches a Mason to square his actions by the rule of right conduct, the standard a stonemason uses to prove a true corner. The compasses teach him to keep his desires within due bounds, the way a craftsman steps off a measured circle. The two together represent the balance of reason and conscience in a well-ordered life. It is also the emblem most often set into a Masonic ring.

At the center of the emblem, in most American lodges, sits the letter G. It carries two meanings held at once: geometry, the science on which the building art rests, and God, addressed in the lodge as the Grand Architect of the Universe. Freemasonry asks each member to believe in a Supreme Being but leaves the name and form of that belief to the man himself, and the same plain emblem serves a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, or any other monotheist at the altar. Whether the symbols carry a religious meaning is a fair question, and one we take up in our guide to whether Freemasonry is a religion.

The all-seeing eye, also called the Eye of Providence, represents the watchfulness of God over the thoughts and deeds of mankind, a reminder that a Mason is observed even when no other person can see him. It usually appears as a single eye set within a triangle and surrounded by rays of light. The emblem entered standard Masonic iconography in 1797, when Thomas Smith Webb published The Freemason’s Monitor in the United States, and it had become a settled feature of the third degree by the early 1800s.

The eye is the symbol most tangled in misunderstanding, chiefly because a version of it appears on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States and so on the one-dollar bill. That design was adopted in 1782, fourteen years before Freemasonry put the eye to common use, and the only Mason among the men who served on the seal committees was Benjamin Franklin, whose proposals for it were not adopted. The Masonic eye carries no pyramid. The fuller account of where this confusion comes from is set out below.

Boaz and Jachin are the two bronze pillars that stood at the porch of King Solomon’s Temple, described in the Hebrew Bible at 1 Kings 7:21 and again at 2 Chronicles 3:17. In Hebrew the names carry plain meanings: Boaz is read as in strength, and Jachin as He will establish, so the pair together form a single statement of divine establishment achieved through strength. In the lodge they flank the entrance and mark the threshold a candidate crosses as he begins his work.

The pillars belong to the wider Masonic use of Solomon’s Temple as the setting for the Craft’s ritual and teaching. The building of that Temple, and the figure of its master builder, gives Freemasonry much of its allegory. Which pillar stands to the right and which to the left has varied between rites and across the centuries, a difference of vantage point rather than of meaning, and both columns appear in lodges throughout the world.

The Masonic apron is the badge of a Mason, a plain white covering of lambskin presented to every candidate during his first degree. It recalls the leather apron the operative stonemason wore at the bench, and the white lambskin is given as an emblem of innocence and of honest labor. A Mason is taught to regard it as a badge more ancient and more honorable than any worn by rank or wealth, a reminder that the worth of the work, not the standing of the worker, is what the Craft measures.

The apron is among the first things a man receives when he joins, and for many it remains the most personal of the symbols, kept through a lifetime in the Craft. How a man comes to receive it, and what the path into Freemasonry involves, is described in our guide to how to become a Freemason. The apron itself, with its history and the forms it takes from one degree and jurisdiction to the next, is the subject of our full guide to the Masonic apron.

The working tools are the operative stonemason’s implements that Freemasonry turns into moral lessons, with a different set presented in each of the three degrees. The Entered Apprentice receives the twenty-four-inch gauge and the common gavel: the gauge marks the twenty-four hours of the day, to be divided between labor, rest, and service, and the gavel is used to break off the rough edges of the stone, and so of the man.

The Fellowcraft receives the square, the level, and the plumb. The square stands for morality, the level for the equality of all brethren meeting on common ground, and the plumb for uprightness of conduct, the rule that a life, like a wall, should stand true and perpendicular. The Master Mason receives the trowel, the tool that spreads the cement that binds a building into one, taken in the lodge as the brotherly love and affection that unite the members into a single body. The tools are humble, and the lessons are meant to be carried out of the lodge and into ordinary work.

Several of the most important symbols are not objects a Mason carries but features of the lodge room itself, where the floor is laid out as a small image of the world. The mosaic pavement, a field of alternating dark and light squares, represents the good and evil interwoven through human life, and the checkered floor reminds a Mason that fortune is mixed and that he should meet both with an even temper.

At the center of older tracing boards sits the point within a circle, a single point ringed by a circle and bounded by two upright parallel lines. The point is the individual Mason, and the circle is the boundary of right conduct he is taught never to cross; the parallel lines are commonly explained as the two Saints John, the patrons of the Craft. Above the pavement, the blazing star is generally read as a symbol of divine providence, the light by which a Mason is guided, and in some workings it stands for the sun at the center of the heavens. Together these furnishings turn the lodge floor into a lesson a member stands inside of.

Beyond the chief emblems, Freemasonry keeps a wide vocabulary of smaller symbols, most of them teaching industry, learning, or the shortness of life. The beehive is the emblem of industry, the lesson that members should be busy in good work and that a community thrives when each adds his labor to the common store.

The hourglass and the scythe both speak of mortality, the hourglass for the steady passage of time and the scythe for the moment it is cut short, lessons the third degree treats with particular seriousness. The sprig of acacia is the emblem of the immortality of the soul, an evergreen set against the fact of death. The 47th problem of Euclid, the geometric proof known to the wider world as the Pythagorean theorem, stands for a love of the arts and sciences and appears on the jewel worn by a Past Master in several jurisdictions. The anchor signals a well-grounded hope. Each is a small teaching, and a Mason gathers them across years rather than learning them at once. The same emblems, with the same meanings, are used in mainstream and Prince Hall lodges alike.

A few Masonic symbols carry more legend than fact, and setting the record straight matters as much as explaining the emblems themselves.

The eye on the Great Seal is the most persistent case. The seal was adopted in 1782, fourteen years before Freemasonry put the eye to common use, and the Masonic eye carries no pyramid; the resemblance reflects the shared visual fashion of the late 18th century, not a hidden hand. The link to the Illuminati is equally thin. The first Grand Lodge was formed in London in 1717, while the Bavarian Illuminati was founded in 1776 and suppressed by about 1785, a separate and short-lived society with no organizational connection to the Craft. The square and compasses, finally, is sometimes taken for an occult sign; it is a working tradesman’s emblem of upright conduct, and nothing in mainstream Masonic teaching treats it as magical.