Grand Master Architect

• Source for the masonic rankings listed (at bottom).
• A masonic dictionary of symbolism, pertinent terms, etc.
• A mason's retelling (also some cultural history of the embellishment and recasting) of the legend of Hiram Abiff, King Solomon's martyred architect.
• And, ditto.
• Jewish Encyclopedia entry for Solomon's Temple.
• Further Reading: Matthew Barney and the Secret Knowledge. 
• c/f Artist Matthew Barney Discusses His Influences -- New York Magazine
• Official site of the Cremaster cycle. 

Freemasonry, with its lengthy list of shadowy attributions, its perverse legibility to those versed in the symbolism but also blasphemies, marginalia and apocrypha of the Judeo-Islamo-Christian tradition, yet its virtual institutional invisibility in our culture, has earned Masonism its honorary place as a magnet (or bottomless pit) for the gaudy laughter of the mainstream, and grandiloquent, speculative paranoia of the disquieted. Over a decent slog of the last several decades, her devotees have come to populate a veritable pantheon of comic, malevolent stock types, fair use for caricaturists, artists, film, TV and thriller writers. For examples, look no further than this cameo, The Stonecutters Song, during an episode of the oft-clever Simpsons. Or, here, a depiction of Mr. Burns during a spell of Howard Hughes-esque dementia.

 

Matthew Barney, above--whose relative earnestness as an artist compounded with his old-timey,Wagnerian seriousness of purpose make for a kind of complicated relationship to laughter--borrows from Freemasonry its abundant arcana and metaphor-rituals with obvious connections to the arts: The pursuit of architecture as Utopian, rites of passage as structurally, often violently complex, craftsmanship as tantamount to being, knowledge and mastery as mysterious. It is specifically his move to borrow from this cultural event (for Freemasonry is shared now, via popular culture) and take its symbolism on the level.

(From Mathew Barney, Interview in Art 21)

ART:21:

Could you explain the significance of masons and Freemasonry in the story?

BARNEY:

The story has primarily to do with the construction of the Chrysler tower. And, as the Architect is described, it starts overlapping with the mythology of the Freemasons. Hiram Abiff, the architect of Solomon's Temple, is the martyr in Freemasonry, in that he was killed by corrupt stonemasons who worked beneath him. They believed he knew the name of God and they wanted to be told the name of God. Hiram wouldn't tell them so he was killed by a plumb and a level to the temple and a maul to the forehead. So "CREMASTER 3" starts to fold into some of the mythologies of Freemasonry that way. Richard Serra's character, the Architect, becomes like Hiram at a certain point. And the Chrysler tower is actually never completed in the same way that the Temple of Solomon is never completed.

The sheer wantonly baroque detail of its backing mythology make Freemasonry a sort of site of one-stop shopping for Cremaster, an art film so visually and expensively extensive, so broadly improvised despite its hyper-conceptualization, so sprawling in structure, that certainly a symbology which could rival its own internal complexity was wanting to reign in it. Mathew Barney mines the intriguing origins story for plot-points.


As mentioned, King Solomon is central to the system of Masonic symbolism. More precisely, King Solomon's architect as master architect and King Solomon's Temple as material and architectural perfection on Earth. Inherit in this reading of the Biblical story, architecture has occult properties retrievable from the lore of a mystical past, structures are perfectible, geometry metaphysical and the material universe susceptible to mastery. One needs only delve. Each architectural component of a mythologized King Solomon's temple responds to a place-holder in the Masonic hierarchy, the route by which an initiate gradually, excruciatingly climbs to the post of creator, of wise seer. The ends of this system of occult study and hierarchical pursuit are Enlightenment, or a mystified variant thereof. The secrets of nature can be at one's command and in one's ken. Hardly Buddhist, this is a sorcerer's conceptualization of scientific advance, rooted in historical alchemy. (One needs only recall that scientific discovery, deep under the warm sleep of the European dark ages, was occasionally the accidental bi-product of lay scientists trying to discover the quickest route to transform debased metals into valuable gold). It is an optimistic retelling of the allegory of the Tower of Babel.

Tellingly, the most elevated symbol in the masonic code is simultaneously reductive and vertiginous to the point of inaccessibility. For in relearning the lost builder's arts, one must ultimately chase after the master word, the secret name of god, the ultimate simplifier of all systems' complexity. Like many secret societies, the aims being so steeply ideal, so unabashedly beyond use, immersion in the mystical symbolism itself--highly tangled, highly coy interrelations that beyond their own book-binding denote nothing--stands in for the stated pursuit. Building then becomes reading, interpretation--and also exclusion of more debased elements. Barney, being a bright graduate of the arts, has this come to mean something akin to the unachievable ends of the progress myth, the necessary incompleteness of all systems. In the heavily infrastructure-laden, labyrinth urban and suburban swells of advanced technological societies, one might detect why this yearning after code-simplification finds a resonance.

Richard Serra stars as The Architect

Barney is about the most respectful of contemporary borrowers. For many, Freemasonry is of the last auk's egg of the antiquarian bourgeoisie: with its secret, honorary societies (bureaucracy as religious order), belief in alchemy as synonymous to scientific pursuit (magical acquisitiveness), a loose connection to gnosticism akin to new agers' or hippies' annoyingly demode spiritual dabbling, their hard-rationalist, anti-clerical strain confounded by a cartoon-like mysticism of individual Will, ludicrous titles meant to convey a dubious exceptionalism, funny hats, funny costumes, secret handshakes. Clearly here I am conflating the popular conception with the actual thing, Masonry as it is currently practiced, the exact nuanced workings of which I am more or less ignorant of plus uninterested in. For those of us who are blissfully uninitiated in its esoteric rites, its tortured passages, and to remain so, the popular conception is often hilariously more than enough to derive a social meaning. Similar to both Mensa and Scientology, this is a private club exaggerated to the solemn heights of Platonic Ideal.

And so the satirist's sense of it. For if one were inclined to portray bourgeoisie rank, cliques and honours as the occasional or often relapse into magical thinking, below would be our culture in the funny mirror. And despite my inability to see my subject totally clear from a jocular, diminishing lens, one certainly can sense by Masonic nomenclature the mythological inwrought-ness of the creature; its poetic charms. Still, one would need a heart of stone not to find it all a little funny. I am no doubt siding with the untutored borrowing from it; I am certainly recommending it for further study to the anthropologist from Mars. And herein, for you young seeker, lies your path to the top of Burger World. 

Enjoy!

Blue Lodge (Craft Lodge or Symbolic Lodge) 

This is starting point for all men who wish to become Masons. The Blue (Craft or Symbolic) Lodge confers the following degrees: 

1. Entered Apprentice

2. Fellow Craft

3. Master Mason 

The 3rd Degree, that of the Master Mason, is the "highest" degree the can be given in all of Freemasonry. 

Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite - Northern  

Lodge of Perfection

4° - Master Traveler

5° - Perfect Master

6° - Intimate Secretary

7° - Provost and Judge

8° - Intendant of the Building

9° - Master Elect of the Nine - North

10° - Master Elect  - North

11° - Sublime Master Elected - North

12° - Grand Master Architect

13° - Master of the Ninth Arch

14° - Grand Elect Mason

Council of Princes of Jerusalem

15° - Knight of the East or Sword

16° - Prince of Jerusalem

Chapter of Rose Croix

17° - Knight of the East and West

18° - Knight of the Rose Croix

Consistory

19° - Grand Pontiff

20° - Master ad Vitam

21° - Patriarch Noachite

22° - Prince of Libanus

23° - Chief of the Tabernacle

24° - Prince of the Tabernacle

25° - Knight of the Brazen Serpent

26° - Friend and Brother Eternal

27° - Commander of the Temple

28° - Knight of the Sun

29° - Knight of St. Andrew

30° - Grand Inspector

31° - Knight Aspirant

32° - Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret

33° - Sovereign Grand Inspector General

An honorary 33rd° is conferred annually to certain 32nd° masons who have exemplified, in their daily lives, the true meaning of the Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God. The recipient must be at least 33 years of age and may not apply for the degree.