The cloud filling the Temple
Fire as the central motif, with the Vessel and the Divine in a secondary part. From Masonic Chart.
What is happening
Jeremy L. Cross, 1826 “Most Excellent Masters Degree.”
Symbolica, 2026 Plate 29 of the chart, in the Most Excellent Master degree. Cross prints no lecture on this plate and no explanation of its emblems. What the degree does print, and what is read aloud while the plate is shown, is Solomon's dedication of the Temple and the cloud that filled it, so the picture has a text beside it even though it has no gloss. That scripture is quoted here as what the ceremony reads, not as a reading of the emblem.
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 · 1
The picture
An arched temple interior in perspective between two Corinthian columns, a two-handled urn on a stepped altar at the centre, and a great cloud of smoke pouring from it up into the vault. 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.
This is the plate the archive had wrong. It was titled the Ark within the Temple and its note said the ark stood on the altar at the centre. Look at it: there is no ark. A classical two-handled urn stands on a stepped block on a tiled floor, between two Corinthian columns, under a deep arch, and a cloud of smoke comes out of it and fills the whole vault. The title has been corrected to what is drawn.
Cross prints no lecture on this plate, but it is not the same silence as the letter G. The Most Excellent Master degree reads Solomon's dedication of the Temple aloud while the plate is shown, and that text is about the cloud: ‘the house of God was filled with a cloud. Nor could the priests stand and minister by reason of the cloud. For the glory of the Lord had filled the house of God.’ Solomon's own line follows, and it is the sentence the engraver has drawn: ‘The Lord promised that he would dwell in a cloud.’
What the scripture does not account for is the urn. The passage names a house and a cloud and no vessel, and Cross says nothing at all, so the urn stands on this page described and unread. It looks like the pot of incense that has its own plate three degrees earlier, and looking like something is not evidence.
The distinction this plate makes is worth keeping. A picture can have a text beside it without having a key. The scripture tells you what is happening in the room; it does not tell you what any object on the plate is for. The archive quotes it as the one and not the other.
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.
A count, a catastrophe, or the visible part of something that has no body. Note whether the flames are arranged in a number, breaking something, or standing where a figure would be.
In plain words The smoke is the largest thing on the plate. It leaves the urn as a thin column and opens into a mass that fills the vault from wall to wall. Cross writes nothing about it, but the degree this plate belongs to reads Solomon's dedication of the Temple aloud, and that passage is about exactly this: the house of God was filled with a cloud, and the priests could not stand and minister by reason of it. The cloud is not incense drifting. It is the thing that stops the service.
2 Paralipomenon 5:13 “So when they all sounded together, both with trumpets, and voice, and cymbals, and organs, and with divers kind of musical instruments, and lifted up their voice on high: the sound was heard afar off, so that when they began to praise the Lord, and to say: Give glory to the Lord for he is good, for his mercy endureth for ever: the house of God was filled with a cloud.”
2 Paralipomenon 5:14 “Nor could the priests stand and minister by reason of the cloud. For the glory of the Lord had filled the house of God.”
2 Paralipomenon 6:1 “Then Solomon said: The Lord promised that he would dwell in a cloud.”
Never the subject. What is inside it is.
In plain words A classical two-handled urn stands on a stepped block in the middle of the tiled floor, and the smoke comes out of its mouth. The archive filed this plate for years as the ark within the temple, and there is no ark on it: no chest, no carrying poles, no cherubim. What is drawn is a vessel. Cross says nothing about it and neither does the scripture the degree reads, so the record says what is there and leaves it unread.
Symbolica, 2026 Read off the plate. Cross prints no lecture on this picture and the scripture read in the degree names a cloud and a house but no vessel. The urn is described here and not interpreted.
Also carrying Fire
44 works carry it. The 6 where it is the central motif are here. The symbol.
Where the detail is the subject
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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