Part 4 of 13 in Masonic Symbols & Symbolic Thinking
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A rough stone gives you somewhere to begin. You can see that work remains to be done.
Two pillars are less forthcoming.
They look important. They stand in a deliberate relationship to one another. They suggest an entrance, a building, or something that has survived long enough to acquire a respectable amount of interpretation.
But looking significant is not the same as explaining yourself.
Why are there two? What do their names mean? Are they holding something up? And what can a pair of ancient columns reasonably tell us about conduct?
Before asking the pillars to explain life, it helps to establish which pillars we are discussing.
Begin With the Biblical Description
The two pillars familiar in Masonic symbolism refer to the bronze pillars associated with Solomon’s Temple in the Hebrew Bible.
First Kings describes their manufacture and decoration, then identifies them by name: Jachin and Boaz. Second Chronicles also places and names the pair.[1]
These are public biblical references, not information that requires membership in a lodge to discover.
The names are commonly rendered along the lines of “he establishes” or “he will establish” for Jachin, and “in him is strength” for Boaz. Translations differ, and the brief Hebrew names should not be treated as though they arrive with a single, fully developed philosophical explanation attached.
Still, establishment and strength provide a useful beginning.
There is also a practical detail worth getting right. The pillars are often understood as freestanding rather than columns carrying the Temple roof. Their precise architectural arrangement has been debated. We should therefore be cautious about explaining their meaning by confidently assigning them a structural job.
Symbolic support and physical support are not the same thing.
A monument can give a community something to gather around without preventing the town hall from falling down.
Why Freemasonry Uses Them
Freemasonry draws extensively on the imagery of Solomon’s Temple. The pillars belong to that inherited vocabulary, alongside building, measurement, craftsmanship, and the arrangement of space.[2]
That does not make a lodge a surviving branch of the Temple’s workforce. The use of a biblical image establishes a symbolic relationship, not an institutional genealogy.
Nor should we assume that every lodge represents the pillars in the same position or explains every detail identically. Ritual traditions differ. A particular arrangement needs to be understood through the practice and sources of that tradition.
For this essay, I want to explore one reading: the pillars as a way of thinking about approach, establishment, and the responsibilities of entering a shared undertaking.
That is an interpretation of the image. It is not a claim that the biblical account secretly contains this article.
What Two Pillars Make Us Notice
A single column can be a monument. Place another beside it, and something else becomes noticeable: the space between them.
The pair may frame an approach or suggest a passage. Our attention moves from the objects to their relationship.
This is not a universal law of architecture. Two columns might simply be two columns. But where their position marks an entrance, the interval becomes part of the design.
We understand this without much instruction. A doorway tells us where to enter. A gate distinguishes an approach from the surrounding ground. A change in steps, lighting, or enclosure can make us aware that we are leaving one setting and entering another.
The boundary need not be mysterious to be meaningful.
A courtroom does not become a magical realm when someone crosses its entrance. It becomes a place where particular procedures and responsibilities apply. Whether everyone inside behaves accordingly remains to be seen.
That gap between entering and behaving is where the symbolism becomes interesting.
Crossing Is the Easy Part
A threshold can mark a change without accomplishing it.
Walking into a library does not make a person studious. Entering a lodge does not make him considerate. Buildings admit people more readily than habits admit correction.
But an entrance can provide an occasion to notice what is being asked.
Am I arriving simply to occupy a seat? Am I prepared to listen? Do I understand that this meeting involves obligations to people whose preferences differ from mine?
These are ordinary questions. Their ordinariness is part of their value.
It is easy to speak of passing into a higher state of awareness. It is more useful to notice that we have brought an argument from the car park into the meeting and are now distributing it among people who were not involved.
A deliberate entrance might include leaving some of that behind.
The pillars, read as a threshold, give this pause a visible form. They cannot make it happen. They can help us remember to attempt it.
Strength for What?
Strength sounds desirable until we ask what it is being used to do.
Persistence can sustain a worthwhile effort. It can also prolong a mistake. Firmness can protect a principle or protect a person from admitting that he has misunderstood it.
The word requires a purpose.
In reading the pillars through strength and establishment, I find it useful to distinguish the capacity to act from the work of making something dependable.
A person may have considerable energy and leave others uncertain whether he will finish what he begins. An institution may possess elaborate procedures and lack anyone willing to undertake the work.
Neither problem is solved by praising strength in the abstract.
What is being established? Through what means? Who must rely on it?
Those questions bring the image back to conduct. A promise needs more than emphasis. A responsibility needs more than enthusiasm. Something has to remain dependable after the first burst of interest has passed.
This is my practical reading of the paired ideas, not an attempt to settle their original meaning.
Does a Pair Always Mean Balance?
A pair invites comparison. It does not prove that the objects represent opposites.
That caution is worth keeping close when reading symbols.
Interpreters can assign paired qualities to the pillars: action and restraint, energy and order, judgment and mercy. Some comparisons may be illuminating within a particular system. Others may tell us chiefly what the interpreter was already thinking about.[3]
We need to ask where the proposed pairing comes from.
Is it explained in a ritual? Does a historical writer develop it? Is it a later philosophical interpretation? Or is it our own comparison?
There is nothing wrong with the last possibility. It simply needs its own label.
Two objects do not become evidence for every duality we can name. If they did, a pair of boots would present an exhausting research problem.
Balance may be a useful theme to explore. But we should not quietly promote a possible reading into the one meaning of the pillars.
What a Room Can Ask of Us
Architecture can influence expectations.
We often adjust our voices on entering a library. A memorial may make us slow down. Seating can direct attention toward a speaker or arrange people to face one another.
The room does not dictate the response. Some people will continue a loud conversation in almost any surroundings. The rest of us have met them.
Nevertheless, arrangement gives behavior a setting. It can make an expectation easier to recognize.
A lodge room combines spatial organization with offices, ceremonies, and rules of conduct. Historical accounts of Freemasonry place these forms within the fraternity’s wider social and institutional life.[4]
The pillars participate in that symbolic environment. Their meaning is not exhausted by how they look in isolation.
This also explains why a photograph is only a beginning. It shows the objects, but not necessarily the words, actions, and expectations that accompany them.
To understand a particular use, we need its context. To propose a further interpretation, we need to acknowledge that we are doing something different.
Can an Entrance Become a Habit of Mind?
This is where an architectural image may become personally useful.
We cannot put two bronze pillars in front of every difficult conversation. Apart from the expense, they would make a small kitchen troublesome to navigate.
We can, however, develop the habit of marking a transition.
Before answering a criticism, pause long enough to understand it.
Before assuming an office, consider what its responsibilities will require on an ordinary, inconvenient day.
Before making a promise, ask whether the person receiving it can reasonably depend on its fulfillment.
These are inward thresholds in the limited sense that we interrupt one mode of behavior before entering another.
The comparison does not require us to imagine a complete building inside the mind. It asks whether an external form can remind us to make a deliberate change in attention.
A doorway is an opportunity to notice where we are going. The moral equivalent is an opportunity to consider what we are about to do.
The Trouble With Serious Appearances
Formal entrances can also flatter us.
We pass through an impressive setting and begin to feel that our presence there is itself an achievement. The institution looks dignified. We are inside it. Some of the dignity seems bound to rub off.
Perhaps. But it is not a reliable process.
The important question is whether the setting makes us more attentive to our obligations or more satisfied with our importance.
A lodge can preserve handsome furnishings while treating a newcomer carelessly. It can explain a symbol of strength while avoiding a difficult responsibility. The mismatch does not require a complicated interpretation. It requires correction.
This is one reason to resist saying that architecture is inherently moral. A building can frame conduct without making it good.
The pillars may suggest seriousness. The people must supply reasons to take that seriousness seriously.
Are the Pillars Esoteric?
The answer depends on what is meant by the word.
If it means that their interpretation develops within a particular tradition, through teaching and repeated examination, then the description can be useful.
If it means that no ordinary reader can understand anything about them without access to a hidden cosmic formula, it is less helpful.
We can begin with available evidence: biblical passages, historical representations, ritual explanations where publicly documented, and identifiable interpreters.
Then we can examine what the image makes possible.
Two named bronze pillars. A position associated with the Temple’s approach. Ideas of establishment and strength. A later Masonic life within ceremonies, illustrations, and instruction.
There is already plenty to investigate.
We do not improve the subject by making it obscure before we have understood what is visible.
Do Not Enter Important Things Carelessly
The reading developed here is deliberately modest.
The pillars can prompt us to think about approach: how we enter a place, accept a duty, or join a shared undertaking.
Their names can direct attention toward strength and establishment: what enables something to endure, and what makes it worth sustaining.
Their relationship can invite reflection without proving every interpretation offered in their name.
That is enough to make them useful.
The next time we encounter the image, we might ask less about what impressive secret lies beyond it and more about what responsibility begins here.
A threshold does not require us to become a different person in one step.
It gives us a place to stop behaving as though we had not noticed the step.
Continue the Series
Next: Rough and Perfect Ashlar: The Masonic Work of Self-Improvement →
Sources and Further Reading
The biblical references establish the described pillars and their names. Historical and Masonic works provide context for their later use. The discussion of thresholds, responsibility, and habits of attention is the author’s interpretation.
- [1 Kings 7:15–22](Bible Gateway passage: 1 Kings 7:15-22 - King James Version
Bible Gateway passage: 1 Kings 7:15-22 - King James Version For he cast two pillars of brass, of eighteen cubits high apiece: and a line of twelve cubits did compass either of them about. And he made two chapiters of molten brass, to set upon the tops of the pillars: the height of the one chapiter was five cu
Inline image
[2 Chronicles 3:15–17](Bible Gateway passage: 2 Chronicles 3:15-17 - King James Version
Bible Gateway passage: 2 Chronicles 3:15-17 - King James Version Also he made before the house two pillars of thirty and five cubits high, and the chapiter that was on the top of each of them was five cubits. And he made chains, as in the oracle, and put them on the heads of the pillars; and made an hundred pomegr
Compare translations when considering the names Jachin and Boaz. The precise architectural function of the pillars should not be assumed from the modern use of the word “pillar.”
John Hamill, The Craft: A History of English Freemasonry (Crucible, 1986); W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry: Symbols, Secrets, Significance (Thames & Hudson, 2006).
Albert G. Mackey, The Symbolism of Freemasonry; W. Kirk MacNulty, Freemasonry: A Journey Through Ritual and Symbol (Thames & Hudson, 1991). These are examples of Masonic interpretation, not interchangeable statements of a universal ritual meaning. Cite the edition and relevant passages actually consulted.
Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
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Continue the Masonic Symbols Series
This essay is part of Masonic Symbols: Stones, Tools, and the Work of Character. From the ashlars, the reading path moves to the pillars and questions of support, thresholds, and deliberate entry. Continue with the twenty-four-inch gauge, where symbolic reflection meets the practical use of time.
Previous: Rough and Perfect Ashlar: The Masonic Work of Self-Improvement
Next: The Twenty-Four-Inch Gauge, Benjamin Franklin, and the Problem of Time
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Related Articles
- Geometry, Architecture, and Moral Proportion — Continue into a companion discussion of measure, building, and moral reflection.
- The Golden Bough Is Not a Shortcut — Compare a different classical reading of entry and preparation without assuming the traditions have identical meanings.
- The Tree, the Ladder, the Road, and the Labyrinth — Explore other symbolic images of passage, movement, and development.
