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THE LETTER Of The Master Of Lodge

- Ordo ab Chaos

 

Dearest Brother,

 

I would like to offer you some other considerations on the concept of "recursive symbology". Geometry is certainly well represented in the Lodge, both in terms of figures and of instruments suitable for using the principles for operational and then speculative purposes.

The idea that underlies the whole symbolic apparatus of the Lodge and the Ritual is, according to my current way of conceiving it, that it is possible to create a space and a time privileged, with unique characteristics capable of fueling inner evolution of the brothers. But this is possible because an order is established in this space and time extraneous to secular life (undoubtedly "chaotic" in comparison), an order that in somehow it is also reflected within us, since we are able to perceive it.

Masonic symbology itself uses regular geometric shapes they provide precisely this idea of ​​"ordo ab chaos", of passage from chaos to order: the circle, the triangle, the square stone, all forms that in nature do not exist with this one perfection, and which therefore appear sublimated in the various symbols.

When in 1975 the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot formalized the concept of “Fractal” (geometric object with internal homothety: it repeats itself in its form in the same way on different scales) he suggested that seemingly chaotic natural objects in reality are carriers of an exotic internal order: it looks like chaos, and instead it is order! (1)

This hypothesis suggested to me that perhaps there is an order we would call "superficial", that is easily grasped by everyone (the circle or the triangle are figures that appear no doubt at all as ordered) and a more subtle order that must instead be thoroughly investigated, such as that revealed precisely by fractal geometry.

Far from believing that our operative brothers had explicitly thought in fractal terms, we could however say with Mandelbrot that the fractal structure is innate in Nature and therefore in Man himself, and then also in the ancient mason, when he unknowingly (but inevitably) would thus have structured the symbolism of the Temple as a whole.

If Jung had known Mandelbrot's theses he would have concluded that the structure fractal is an archetype of the collective unconscious? Who knows, maybe maybe he would found a further element of development of his "magical" thinking, which could help us understand the ancient "what is below is equal to what is above" (2), which undoubtedly it also founds the sense of the geometry of our Temple.

 

Soon!
S&F
W.M. M.B. Master of Lodge

 

 

(1)“Gli oggetti frattali”, B. Mandelbrot, Einaudi, Torino 1975-19871
(2) “Tabula Smaragdina”, Pseudo Ermete Trismegisto