The All-Seeing Eye, the Sun, the Moon, the Comet and the Heart
The Eye as the central motif, with the Sun and the Moon, and the Heavens in a secondary part. From Masonic Chart.
Key · 3 motifs
Tap a motif on the picture, or a line below. Its note opens under the line, with the reading its author gave it.
- Primary motif
- Secondary motifs · 2
The picture
The eye in a glory of rays at the top, the sun with a face, the moon, a comet and seven stars, and a naked heart at the foot of the plate. By eye
The reading
The picture read whole, in the archive's words, from the sources quoted on the marks. Read on, and the picture follows: the motif under discussion keeps its colour.
Cross's chart of 1819 was made to be lectured from, and for this plate the monitor prints the lecture, in the third section of the Master Mason degree. It reads the emblems from the bottom up, and it begins with a sword that is not on the plate: ‘The Sword, pointing to a Naked Heart, demonstrates that justice will sooner or later overtake us’. The heart alone stands at the foot of the page, the largest thing on it, drawn plain with nothing pointing at it.
The eye is the sentence's subject. ‘Although our thoughts, words and actions, may be hidden from the eyes of men, yet that All-seeing Eye, whom the Sun, Moon, and Stars obey, and under whose watchful care even Comets perform their stupendous revolutions, pervades the inmost recesses of the human Heart, and will reward us according to our merits.’ The engraver has put it in a cloud with a glory of rays that reaches nearly across the page, and set the heart directly under it, so that the eye at the top and the heart at the bottom are the two ends of one line of sight.
The sun and the moon are there as the Eye's subjects, ‘whom the Sun, Moon, and Stars obey’. The sun has a face and the moon is a dark disc with a thread of light, and neither is doing anything but being there. That same pair stands over the two pillars on the Master's Carpet, a plate the monitor names once and never lectures as a whole.
The comet is the lecture's proof, and the word that matters is even: ‘under whose watchful care even Comets perform their stupendous revolutions’. The comet is the extreme case, the body that looks lawless, and Cross's point is that it too is under care. It crosses the middle of the page on a long straight tail, past seven stars, which the lecture counts only as Stars.
Cross published pictures for a spoken teaching, and this plate shows the arrangement at its plainest: every emblem is a noun in one sentence, and the sentence is about being watched.
Decoded: every motif is marked, and each mark carries the reading its author gave it, quoted from the text, or says that it is observed on the picture and not read. The reading above is the archive's own, made from those sources and no others.
Attention from outside the frame. Note it is almost always placed at a boundary rather than at the centre.
In plain words An eye in a cloud, with rays spreading from it most of the way across the plate. Cross's lecture for the Master Mason says what it is: the All-seeing Eye, which the sun, moon and stars obey, and which looks into the heart drawn at the foot of the plate however well our thoughts, words and actions are hidden from other people. It watches in order to reward.
Jeremy L. Cross, 1826 “The Sword, pointing to a Naked Heart, demonstrates that justice will sooner or later overtake us; and although our thoughts, words and actions, may be hidden from the eyes of men, yet that All-seeing Eye, whom the Sun, Moon, and Stars obey, and under whose watchful care even Comets perform their stupendous revolutions, pervades the inmost recesses of the human Heart, and will reward us according to our merits.”
Gold, the perfected metal, and the illuminated intellect. The most overloaded symbol in the tradition.
In plain words The sun has a face and the moon is drawn dark, with a crescent of light along its edge. The lecture gives them one job: they obey. They are here as the Eye's subjects, not as lights of their own.
Jeremy L. Cross, 1826 “yet that All-seeing Eye, whom the Sun, Moon, and Stars obey”
A diagram of everything, drawn so that a person can be found inside it. Note where the human figure stands in the scheme.
In plain words Seven stars are scattered at the right and a comet crosses the plate on a long straight tail. The lecture's word is even: even comets, the bodies that look lawless, keep their courses under the Eye's care. The stars are counted by the engraver and not by the lecture, which says only Stars.
Jeremy L. Cross, 1826 “under whose watchful care even Comets perform their stupendous revolutions”
Also carrying the Eye
8 works carry it. The 3 where it is the central motif are here. The symbol.
Where the detail is the subject
the Sun and the Moon · the Heavens
Each of these is in the picture without being what it is about. Below, one work that is about each.
In the same series
Record
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