In our study of the former degree it was stated that as the Candidate advanced in the Order he would find a corresponding change and beautifying in his apron. Those changes are the "marks of his progress" of both his ceremonial and his personal spiritual advancement. Mind moulds body. It can dominate, and suffuse the animal tendencies of the flesh or be smothered by them. The fleshy clothing can become sublimated and transfigured by the wisdom, strength and beauty of the soul within, or if that soul be itself impure and sensual, its defects will display themselves in its outward body.
"For of the soul the body form doth
take,
For soul is form and doth the body make."
This elementary psychological truth is exemplified by the altered form of the Apron with which the Candidate is directed to he invested "to mark his further progress in the Science". Note that it is not the W. M. who invests, but his chief officer, acting under delegated authority. The point is a subtle one, but symbolically and psychologically justified. The supreme principle or spirit, being above all form and embodiment, does not directly create form or "clothe"; it is the soul or derivative principle which by its own thought and actions clothes itself, taking on form of embodiment which is then tested by the Divine Square to determine whether it be "wrought into due form". Hence the Master (representing the spirit) delegates the actual clothing to his subordinate chief officer, signifying thereby that the soul fashions body for itself out of its own substance and by its own actions, and marks its own progress by its own self-made vesture.
The Apron's form becomes altered in this Degree in two respects; (1) the triangular flap is lowered and identified with the quadrangular part; (2) blue rosettes burgeon forth upon the formerly unadorned lower part of the Apron. These must be explained in turn.
(1) The triangule flap has already been said to signify the spiritual, and the quadrangular base the material or bodily, aspect of man: the soul attaching itself to body as it approaches birth,
Incarnation of the soul, however, is not complete or total at birth; it is a gradual process covering many years and marked by well defined physiological changes every seven years. And because it is not assumed to be complete until that "mature age" and those "years of discretion" are reached when a man is accorded full civil rights and treated as a fully responsible being, it is on this account that no one is permitted to seek initiation till of "the full age of twenty-one years", till then he is deemed psychologically immature and physiologically unfitted for the strain which real initiation involves.
As the Apron with the raised flap refers to "the entrance of man on this their mortal existence", so the lowering of the flap testifies to that entrance becoming complete; the soul has now descended fully into incarnation, has become completely involutionised, and must now begin its evolutionary re-ascent, just as a seed sown in the earth begins at once to struggle back to the air and light. This descent of the soul into body is, in the mystical language of Scripture, the "going down into Egypt", (Egypt denoting the bondage and constriction of material existence), and the purpose of this descent is that the soul may gather experience and wisdom and develop its innate faculties as it could not do in any other way. For "there is corn in Egypt"; there are lessons to be learned and experience to be acquired which can only be learned in the flesh and by "spoiling the Egyptians", i.e., by extracting the full Value of all mundane experience. By so doing the soul is raised from unconsciousness to self-consciousness, brought from nescience to "knowledge of itself"; from the seed state it becomes the growing "ear of corn" which, as previously shown, is so prominently associated with this Degree.
(2) But birth and involution of the soul into body sets up reactions. There is opposition, conflict, constant warring between the higher and lower natures; our rational and irrational principles are at strife. One or the other of them must prevail, for a divided house cannot stand for any length of time. We need not consider here what. happens when the lower or animal man prevails, but if the higher man dominates, if the submerged involutionised soul-energies struggle forth from the grave of the body and "acquire dominion over the passions", then they begin to manifest as virtues, faculties, and graces of character. Like yeast pervading a mass of dough and causing it to rise, the soul suffuses, sublimates and gives glory to the body, which proceeds to bring forth the flowers and eventually the fruits, of its indwelling spirit.
This flowering is figured in our symbolism by the blue rosettes which now for the first time appear upon the Candidate's Apron. They are the symbolic evidences of the further progress his soul is making. The former bare wilderness of his personality is now beginning to `rejoice and blossom as the rose."
Why are the borders and rosettes of the Apron blue? Why is our Craft System called "Blue Masonry?" For the same reason that the sky is blue. Blue is the highest color in Nature, and at the summit of the spectrum of light. Nature, the garment of God, is a "coat of many colors", of which three are primaries and most in evidence. Her mantle is red at her volcanic fiery depths; green in her seas and surface vegetation; blue in her airy heights. As we look up in wonder to the blue heaven, so the Apron calls us to lift our ideas from mundane levels into limitless, "the blue". When the visible sun shines upon massed unclouded air, we see the latter as blue sky; and when the invisible Sun at the Center of each of us gets the chance to shine through a purified personality, the mind is raised to its highest power and becomes illuminated with the azure light of "the place of sapphires" (Job 28, 6).
Those who devised our system and clothing
were expert symbolists, well versed in much higher branches of
our science than are taught in our elementary Craft. The blue
and the rosettes of our Apron derive from the stream of Rosicrucian
influence which contributed so largely to the formation of our
Craft in the 17th century, and they have a much deeper significance
than can be explained here. Both the rose and the cross are Rosicrucian
symbols, and we are given the rose in our Second and Third Degrees,
whilst the cross (in the form of the Hebrew Tau-Cross) supersedes
it on the Apron of every Master and Past Master of a Lodge. Would
that every Brother who wears them realized their meaning!
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