Acacia in Freemasonry

In addition to the working tools borrowed from operative masons' tradition, reminiscences of the Temple of Solomon, such as the B and J columns, and the Pythagorean emblem of the pentagram, Craft Freemasonry particularly honours a plant symbol, the Acacia. In Freemasonry, the Acacia is associated with the legend of Hiram and is often found on the Masonic regalia of the Master Mason and certain higher degrees. But did you know that other plants competed with Acacia in some 18th and even 19th century rituels of Freemasonry ? These included Cassia and Tamarisk. So, what is the symbolism of the Acacia and of these two other plants in Freemasonry ?

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Cassia, the first plant associated with the legend of Hiram

The legend of Hiram seems to have entered Freemasonry shortly before 1730 and is not part of the original core of 17th-century speculative Freemasonry. The scene of the raising of Hiram's body seems to have been borrowed from a similar Masonic legend, which dealt with the discovery of Noah's body by his three sons. It is mentioned in the Graham manuscript of 1726, but no plant symbol appears in the story.

The first description of the Master Mason degree as we know it today is in Samuel Pritchard's Masonry Dissected (1730). According to Pritchard, as is still the case today, Hiram's three murderers marked the spot where they had buried his body with the branch of a tree or shrub, but unlike the form adopted later, it was a branch of Cassia. 

Reception of a Master Mason in the 18th century

This is not intended to be a botanical treatise on the definition of Cassia. The term Cassia can refer to a variety of shrubs, including casse, senna, false senna (cassia fistula) and Chinese cinnamon (cinnamonum cassia). It is often compared to Qetsi'ah, which is mentioned once in the Bible and is sometimes translated as cinnamon. In any case, it is a shrub with yellow flowers and recognised medicinal and aromatic virtues. Cassia is known to many cultures, where it is often interpreted as a symbol of inner strength, resilience and endurance to hardships.

Cassia was also used in funeral rites, as the author of A Defence of Freemasonry (1731) recalled : "We are told that a Sprig of Cassia was placed by the Brethren at the Head of Hiram's Grave, which refers to an old Custom in those Eastern Countries of Embalming the Dead, in which Operation Cassia was always used, especially in preparing the Head, and drying up the Brain, as Herodotus more particularly explains."

Cassia therefore had good reason to be chosen for the legend of Hiram. Its bright yellow flowers evoke light, it is a symbol of perseverance in the face of adversity and it was used in funeral rites. So why was it replaced by the Acacia ?

The triumph of the Acacia

Today, practically all Masonic rituals have opted for the Acacia, but the question remains as to when and why this change took place. The answer is probably to be found in France.

As early as the 1740s, the Acacia was used in French Masonic rituals. This is particularly true of the Luquet MS, one of the two oldest known French manuscript rituals (circa 1745), and the disclosure Le Sceau Rompu (1745). But how did we get from Cassia to Acacia ? Probably by a simple French homophony between "La Cassia" and "l'Acacia”, which is all the more explicable given the essentially oral nature of the ancient ritual practices of Freemasonry.

But the homophony had to make sense. And it did, for the Acacia has even more credentials than the Cassia. It is said to resist rotting, to be able to regenerate after being burned, and is therefore a symbol of rebirth and immortality. But above all, according to the Bible, it was the wood used to build the Ark of the Covenant, the liturgical furnishings and the pillars of the Tabernacle, the travelling Temple built by Moses in the desert (Exodus, chapters 25 to 27). For its part, Christian tradition asserts, without reference to Scripture, that the cross of Christ and the crown of thorns were made of Acacia. And in some versions of the legend of Osiris, the body of the murdered god was buried next to an Acacia tree.

If the Cassia had good reasons for illustrating the legend of Hiram, the Acacia had better ones, because it linked Hiram's death to the Ark of the Covenant and to the idea of rebirth and resurrection evoked by the figures of Christ and Osiris.

Third degree Tracing Board, Emulation Working

But how can we explain that the homophony between "la Cassia" and " l'Acacia" in French language has imposed the symbol of the Acacia on the whole of Freemasonry ? English rituals (whether Emulation or the other rituals used in the United Grand Lodge of England, such as M. M. Taylor's, West End, etc.) all use the Acacia. Would it then be admissible that, on this point, French Masonic rituals have for once influenced English Masonic practice and not the other way round ? 

This seems quite likely to us and we will try to find an explanation. The Cassia was clearly the version used by the Moderns, i.e. the Lodges of the Premier Grand Lodge of London (1717), as a disclosure of their ritual shows (Pritchard 1730). However, we do not know whether an equivalent plant symbol appeared in the rituals of the Ancients, whose Grand Lodge was founded in 1753. In any case, there is no mention of it in The Three Distinct Knocks of 1760, which reveals the ritual customs of an Ancient Lodge. 

However, it is known that there was a great deal of contact between the Jacobite Freemasons in exile in France and the French lodges. The Jacobites generally had more affinity with the Ancients than with the Moderns, who were subservient to the Hanoverian dynasty. It was probably through them that the French Acacia penetrated the English Freemasonry of the Ancients. And when the two Grand Lodges merged in 1813 to form the United Grand Lodge of England, we know that the ritual practices of the Ancients were adopted, and it is very likely that from then on the Acacia replaced the Cassia in English rituals.

An outsider: the Tamarisk

While Acacia seems to have established itself in Freemasonry throughout the world, a third variant appeared in France within the Rite of Misraim. The Misraim ritual, written between 1815 and 1820, mentions neither Cassia nor Acacia, but Tamarisk.

Why this new variant and what does it add to the first two ? Known in the Bible and in many ancient cultures (Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia, China, Japan, etc.), the Tamarisk tree conveys a symbolism not far removed from that of Cassia and Acacia : strength, endurance, fertility, longevity and immortality. But it was obviously its place in Egyptian tradition that led the author of the Misraim ritual to choose it.

Egyptian sources generally state that the body of Osiris rested near an Acacia or a Sycamore tree. However, these sources remained inaccessible to modern readers until Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs in 1822. The founders of Egyptian Freemasonry therefore only had access to ancient Egypt through the writings of Greek authors (Herodotus, Diodorus of Sicily, Strabo, Plutarch, etc.) and, to a lesser extent, Latin authors (Pliny the Elder, Apuleius, etc.).

Egyptian Tree of Life

The author of the Misraim ritual certainly showed a certain erudition when he discovered in Plutarch’s writings the Tamarisk, which he introduced into his legend of Hiram, instead of the Cassia or the Acacia, in order to make his point more Egyptian. Plutarch recounts a version of the Osiris myth unknown in Egyptian sources : according to this version, the body of Osiris, placed in a chest, was exposed to the waves of the sea and drifted until it struck a Tamarisk near Byblos in Phoenicia (now Jbeil in Lebanon). The Tamarisk grew around the chest and eventually engulfed it, and the king of Byblos, amazed at the unusual growth of this tree, had it cut down to make a pillar in his palace. Isis, searching for her husband's body, managed to get hold of the  pillar, extracted the body of Osiris, embalmed it and brought it back to Egypt.

This legend had at least two reasons for attracting the attention of the author of the Misraim ritual : firstly, the Tamarisk was explicitly involved in the discovery of the body of Osiris and could therefore quite naturally find its place in the legend of Hiram. Secondly, the fact that Hiram's body was found inside a pillar must have been very significant for the author of a Masonic ritual. We could even add a third reason if we assume that the author was also aware of the botanical writings of Pliny the Elder, who states that Egyptian priests wore wreaths of Tamarisk branches.

The choice of the Tamarisk tree was therefore appropriate to emphasise the Egyptian dimension of the ritual, and it is a pity that the Misraim ritual in use today (known as the Venice Rite of 1788), which dates back only to the 1980s, did not follow its illustrious predecessor in this respect and choose the Acacia tree.

Conclusion 

Acacia, Cassia and Tamaris all have good reasons for being chosen to illustrate the legend of Hiram in Masonic rituals. Acacia was probably judged to be more prestigious than its rivals, but the various rites could well have retained different variants. Is it necessary to standardise ritual practices, as was often the case in the 19th century between the French Rite and the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite ? Not necessarily, because each Rite has its own history, its own style, its own sensibility and its own specificities, which must be respected. The universality of Freemasonry should be expressed through its diversity, not in spite of it, because standardisation necessarily implies impoverishment and the loss of symbolic elements that are nevertheless relevant.

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