JOHN AS DIVINE MERCURY
Renaissance philosophy revelled in allegories, visual and literary puns, dynamic riddles, and multiple meanings. Renaissance man sought unity of being through the diversity of the world. He confronted chaos and disorder with a faith in hidden harmonies and higher orders on which he depended and with which he could operate. Symbolic links between the pagan gods of the classical period and corresponding “principles” perceived in the church’s approved biblical figures were not only highlighted for moral and philosophical uplift but, in many a learned in-joke, sported with. At least one of these correspondences may illuminate some of the mystery of Leonardo’s John the Baptist, if not the mystery of “the Baptist” himself.
Less than a decade before Leonardo painted his late masterpiece, the considerably less talented German artist Conrad Celtes adopted the then-current fad for presenting biblical figures as pagan deities. Celtes produced a woodcut wherein, among other obvious correspondences, the goddess Minerva appeared as Mary while the Greek god Hermes appeared as a straight stand-in for John the Baptist. There was no mystery or allegorical depth to this cross-identification of John and Hermes. Celtes simply hooked into the idea of Hermes as the divine messenger and made the not-very-startling, or not-very-original, identification of John-Hermes by reference to the ecclesiastically acceptable understanding of John the Baptist as revered “forerunner” or herald of Christ: the one crying in the wilderness. Once appreciated, however, the link of John to Hermes turns out to be highly suggestive.
In ancient times, the “herald” or “ambassador” (Greek: kērux) enjoyed an important presiding role at official ceremonies. Like the god Hermes, the herald was the mouthpiece of the sovereign power: the messenger with the message. In Leonardo’s day, Hermes was not understood simply as the classical divine messenger with wings on helmet and feet—a kind of Olympian mailman—he was also seen as the divinity active within Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice Great Hermes), the divine philosopher par excellence and legendary giant of patriarchal science. Thrice Great Hermes (today we might say Super-Mega-Awesome Hermes) was thought to have been a kind of incarnation of Hermes the god, as well as being the prophet Moses’s human contemporary and even inspiration.
Writings attributed to Thrice Great Hermes were collected together as the Hermetica. Much later Latin versions of the “Corpus Hermeticum” were also called the “Pymander” or “Divine Pymander.” These were named after the first treatise in the collection, called in Greek the Poimandrēs. First printed in Treviso, northern Italy, in 1471, the Pymander revolutionized Renaissance thinking, pointing the way to the divine mind through inner ascent to the heavens. In fact, since at least the late fourteenth century, Hermes had been known as a kind of honorary patron of freemasons (master masons of freestone), a paternal status Hermes had anciently enjoyed in the world of alchemy, the art of chemical transformation and first foundation of modern chemistry. In alchemical “recipes,” Hermes often played the role of “psychopomp”: leader of souls across the waters of corruption and decay to rebirth and psychic integration: a spiritual-physical ascent-master. It was thought that the “souls” of metals could be acted on by appealing to higher, spiritual influences; man, too, was a “metal” with hidden “virtue” or power.
The Hermetic writings available to Leonardo were composed in the early centuries of the Christian era, probably in Egypt, though nobody in Leonardo’s time thought so. They were considered as either antecedent to, or contemporary with, the “philosophy” of Moses. The Hermetica appeared to prophesy the “son of God,” Jesus. Hermes also spoke of a “herald” (Greek: kērux). In Corpus Hermeticum IV, this herald was sent by God to mankind with a bowl of nous (divine mind) in which men could be baptized if they chose to heed the call and accept the offer of gnosis or higher, divine knowledge and consciousness. The “mixing bowl” or krater in which the willing initiate could be baptized also enjoyed an alchemical meaning. We see here an obvious link between John the Baptist and the Hermetic revelation: John as Baptist, or spiritual operator and agent of transformation.
Perhaps you have seen old alchemical images of the Hermaphroditic (male/female) rebis, the divine Child of the “mysterious conjunction” of the divine Sun and goddess Moon. The rebis was usually illustrated as being masculine on one side and feminine on the other: sometimes rendered as a king and queen in one body. The hermaphroditic rebis symbolized the combination of contrary or opposite principles at a higher level of chemical transformation processes. The very word hermaphrodite calls us to observe a spiritually generative conjunction of the gods Hermes and Aphrodite: Mind and Beauty, where Mind is both lunar and mercurial, and Beauty, both solar and Venusian: an ecstatic combination!
Thus, the apparent “androgyny” or Hermaphroditic quality of Leonardo’s Baptist may reflect experience of the Hermetic androgyne who points the way to a higher state of being and consciousness. Is this a pointer to a way back to a lost primal condition from which Man had fallen, or a way forward to an evolutionary destiny? It is both. One by-product of the way is the perception that masculine and feminine characteristics will no longer be perceived as being at odds, but unified in joyous harmony: a return to the “One.” Leonardo was perhaps looking ahead to a new age. His John pointed the way.
French King François I, who liked to visit Leonardo’s apartments at the royal château at Amboise in the Loire Region, stated privately that Leonardo had been not only the most outstanding genius of art and science, but a uniquely gifted philosopher as well: a man to enlighten a king. Did the king get the message?
If he did, he kept it to himself.
That Leonardo’s “John” emerges from blackness (ignorance?) may also be significant. The lowest or primary stage of the alchemical art was called the nigredo or blackness, from which low material state the transformative principle (sometimes referred to as the “stone”), redeemed the secreted “gold” or hidden virtue of alchemical potential. We are thus at liberty to see Leonardo’s John the Baptist as an image of the Hermetic principle of spiritual and material transformation: the “ascent of Man” to a higher stage of psycho-spiritual awareness.
Leonardo’s John is therefore not only transformer, but transformed: herald and initiator. He is a kind of Christ, symbolizing a higher principle: the divine Self.
He knows.
We have come a long way from the image of John the Baptist up to his knees in the Jordan torrent, baptizing Judeans and calling out from the wilderness for national repentance. Or have we? I might have thought so until I received an invitation that arrived on the wings of cyberspace around Easter 2010. It was not an invitation to a mixing bowl of noetic baptism, nor to an alchemical wedding: I was invited to bring my own bowl of inspiration to the presence of the Brethren of Alexandria-Washington Lodge No. 22, Alexandria, Virginia, in time for their annual St. John the Baptist Day feast at Gadsby’s Tavern in Alexandria. The date: June 24, traditional birthday of St. John the Baptist.
Alexandria-Washington Lodge No. 22 is no ordinary Masonic Lodge. It is one of the oldest Free and Accepted Masonic Lodges in the United States and is famous for once having enjoyed as its Master General George Washington. The Lodge meets today at the remarkable George Washington Memorial in Alexandria, an architectural wonder paid for by Masonic subscription and modeled on the more ancient wonder of the world, the Pharos, or lighthouse of Alexandria, Egypt.
Inspired by the thought of a modern Lodge that linked the light of ancient Alexandria to the modern world and that still honored the age-old link between masonry and St. John the Baptist, the theme for my proposed address came immediately to mind. Would it not be appropriate to delve into just why it was—and is—that the figure of St. John the Baptist holds a special place in Masonic mythology? I anticipated a fairly routine investigation into the usual Masonic sources, with a pleasant mixture of entertainment and, hopefully, a sprinkling of enlightenment for all.
I was in for a surprise.
Though dimly aware that there
was more to St. John the Baptist than met the eye, I very soon found my researches taking an unexpected path. What had begun as a literary peregrination into obscure folklore quickly grew beyond the bounds of a forty-five-minute celebratory address into a compelling journey into the shadows of history.
Whether I have emerged from the darkness with pearls rather than “chimaeras of little worth” I must leave for the reader to decide. As the quality of baptisms may certainly differ, so everyone’s John will not, and cannot, be the same. I hope, however, that at the end of this journey you will feel you know something of value about the man whose greatness Jesus is reported to have declared unsurpassed by any man born of woman.
Chapter Two
ST. JOHN’S MEN AND THE PASSION OF THE CORN
There were three men came out of the west, their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow:
John Barleycorn must die.
They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed him in,
Threw clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow:
John Barleycorn was dead.
They’ve let him lie for a very long time, ’til the rains from heaven did fall,
And little Sir John sprung up his head and so amazed them all.
They’ve let him stand ’til Midsummer’s Day ’til he looked both pale and wan,
And little Sir John’s grown a long long beard and so become a man.
They’ve hired men with their scythes so sharp to cut him off at the knee.
They’ve rolled him and tied him by the waist serving him most barbarously.
They’ve hired men with their sharp pitchforks who’ve pricked him to the heart—
And the loader he has served him worse than that, For he’s bound him to the cart.
They’ve wheeled him around and around a field ’til they came unto a barn,
And there they made a solemn oath on poor John Barleycorn.
They’ve hired men with their crabtree sticks to cut him skin from bone—
And the miller he has served him worse than that,
For he’s ground him between two stones.
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl and his brandy in the glass,
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl proved the strongest man at last.
The huntsman he can’t hunt the fox nor so loudly to blow his horn,
And the tinker he can’t mend kettle or pots without a little barleycorn.
JOHN BARLEYCORN,
TRADITIONAL ENGLISH BROADSIDE SONG,
SIXTEENTH–SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
Centrally organized symbolic Freemasonry was allegedly instituted in 1716 when, according to the Rev. James Anderson’s Constitutions of Free and Accepted Masonry (1738), “Free Masons” from four London lodges met together at the Apple Tree Tavern in Charles Street, Covent Garden, during the second year of the reign of the Hanoverian King George I. These four lodges of Free Masons agreed to form a “Grand Lodge,” apparently to “revive” what the writer considered a neglected institution. The Masons put the oldest master mason (or architect-builder) present in the chair to center the union. The Rev. James Anderson’s account is the sole record of the proceedings.
On June 24 the following year (1717), according to Anderson, the Goose and Gridiron Ale-house in St. Paul’s Churchyard accommodated this “Grand Lodge” of “Free and Accepted Masons” for a midsummer feast, again under the eye of the curiously unnamed, oldest master mason. The presence of the oldest master mason lends some authenticity to the account since it had been established as a rule in 1663 that a Lodge convened without the presence of at least one working stone mason was not properly constituted; it would be Anderson himself who oversaw the “disappearance” of this significant requirement.
From a list of candidates, the Goose & Gridiron’s summer feasters elected one Antony Sayer, gentleman, to be “Grand Master” of their “Grand Lodge.” New though this Grand Lodge certainly was, the custom of meeting to oversee business—and to feast heartily—on June 24 was long established among the master masons, interested gentlemen, freestone carvers, stonecutters, carpenters, plasterers, painters, glaziers, and tilers who appear to have constituted the greater part of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Free Masons’ lodges.
Why did Masons meet on June 24?
June 24 was St. John the Baptist’s Day.
Unusual for a saint’s day, June 24 was the date Christian tradition allotted to John’s birth, not his death. In fact, John’s birthday was the accepted date of Midsummer, close to the summer solstice, when the Earth receives her most intimate embrace from the visible source of light and life at our system’s center. Seventeenth-century Free Masons called the sun the “jewel” of the Lodge. The Jewel was said to rest first on the Lodge’s Master, who, like the Sun and the Square, was called a “Light” of the Lodge, enthroned in the East where the sun rose. The Free Mason works in the day, in the light, in conformity with the pattern of the universe. The symbolic Masonic Lodge is effectively a microcosm, a “little universe”: as above, so below.
Since time immemorial, St. John the Baptist, who slept beneath the stars, had been an established patron saint of “Free Masons.”
In 1723, what is now the City of London’s Old Dundee Lodge No. 18 was affiliated to the new Grand Lodge. The Lodge received a number. Taking a number brought it into conformity with the new Grand Lodge’s regulations, published that year by Scottish clergyman and dutiful record keeper the Rev. James Anderson. Surviving Lodge minutes show that between 1748 and 1775 brethren received six visits a year from persons signing themselves “St. John’s Men.” These 162 St. John’s Men would not be numbered; so they paid a visiting fee, a kind of penalty for having come from lodges outside the Grand Lodge rolls. Their lodges had not, would not, or had not yet conformed to the new system. Instead, they were distinguished by looking to St. John as their seal of authority. Even though independent of the Grand Lodge, St. John’s Men were permitted to visit “regular” brethren accepted by the Grand Lodge. Since London’s Grand Lodge did not absorb all Masons at once, and since it certainly encountered resistance to its advances on existing lodges around the country, especially in the north, we may reasonably suppose that there lived around the kingdom, during this period, a goodly number of “St. John’s Men” or “St. John’s Masons.”
St. John appears to have been an identity focus for pre-Grand Lodge fraternities who valued their autonomy. An anonymous “irregular” Masonic catechism called The Grand Mystery of Free-Masons Discover’ d, published without Grand Lodge authority in 1725, insists on the St. John identity in greeting fellow Masons: “I came from a right worshipful Lodge of Masters and Fellows belonging to Holy St. John who doth greet all perfect Brothers of our Holy Secret; so do I you, if you be one.”
Evidence from the late seventeenth century confirms the Baptist’s significance to Free Masons, before the appearance of the Grand Lodge. A rare Masonic catechism named after its preserver, the antiquarian and botanist Sir Hans Sloane, is headed “A Narrative of the Freemasons word and signes” (Sloane Manuscript 3329, British Library). It contains questions and answers that once passed between fellows and candidates for admission to lodges. Here is an example:
Q: Where was the first word given?
A: At the Tower of Babylon [Babel].
Q: Where did they first call their Lodge?
A: At the holy Chapel of St. John.
We may justly suspect the “holy Chapel of St. John” to have been a euphemism for the wilderness, for that is where St. John the Baptist stood in communion with God, and where he centered his upright spiritual building. The wilderness is the place where the divine voice, or Word, declares that a path will be made straight, as John the Baptist famously declared, echoing Isaiah’s ancient prophecy. The voice crying in the wilderness announces the Way, the straight way, the way of return to the true Temple of God. On this principle John stood, a
nd endured to the end. And it is worth adding that while we automatically think of John’s path in the wilderness as a horizontal road of returning exiles to Zion, that is, a path or even new construction across the earth and stones, we should consider the possibility that enlightened Masons and others may have understood the path to be vertical, to the stars and heavens beyond: a Jacob’s ladder or upstanding Square. We may recall an Leonardo’s John, pointing upward. The straight road is a spiritual path and operates in both directions. A path is made so that a higher principle may descend by it as the restored spirit of fallen Man simultaneously “ascends.”
Distance from the stain of a corrupt civilization is recommended elsewhere in the Sloane Manuscript. A catechism asks the Candidate to consider that the “just and perfect lodge” is to be found “on the highest hill or Lowest Valley of the world, without the crow of a Cock or the Bark of a Dog.” This is of course the perfect Lodge. It is constituted in the imagination, as becomes clear when the Candidate, on being asked, “How high is your Lodge?” is to answer, “Without foots, yards, or inches it reaches to heaven.” This ideal, microcosmic Lodge appears to have been enacted in the upper rooms of taverns in the teeming city that emerged in the forty years after London’s Great Fire of 1666, when the work of members of the London Masons’ Company (formerly the London Freemasons’ Company) was in great demand.
The Mysteries of John the Baptist Page 2