The master-builder of Solomon's Temple, whom Steiner reads as the representative of the sons of Cain, the human stream that wins its wisdom through work and will.
Hiram Abiff is the master-builder of Solomon's Temple in the Masonic legend that Rudolf Steiner took up in 1904. He stands for the line of Cain, the workers who labour to draw the living from the lifeless, in contrast to Solomon, who belongs to the line of Abel and receives wisdom as a gift. The figure carries an entire reading of human history.
In Steiner's Own Words
Those who regard themselves as Sons of Cain are they who understand the Temple Legend and wish to live by it. Out of the race of Cain spring all those who are the creators of the arts and sciences of mankind: Tubal-Cain who is the first true architect and the God of smithies and working tools; and also Hiram-Abiff, or Adonhiram, who is the hero of the Temple Legend. This Hiram is sent for by King Solomon, famous for his wisdom, who belongs to the race of Abel, those who receive their wisdom from God.
What it Means Today
Hiram Abiff is not a biblical character. He surfaces in the eighteenth-century ritual of Craft Freemasonry, where the candidate for the Master Mason degree lies in a coffin and re-enacts the builder's murder by three jealous journeymen. Steiner traced the legend further back, to the small circle around Christian Rosenkreutz in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who clothed a Mystery teaching in the story of a builder and a king. When you meet Hiram in a present-day lodge, you are meeting that transmission, worn down by centuries of repetition yet still carrying its kernel.
The comparative-esoteric reading Steiner gives is what makes the figure legible. Hiram and Solomon are not rivals over a queen; they are two halves of one humanity. Solomon receives his wisdom ready-made, as the sons of Abel receive their flocks. Hiram earns his by striving with fire and metal, as the sons of Cain wrest grain from hard soil. Read this way, the Master Word that Hiram guards and refuses to the three unready journeymen is not a password but the hard-won fruit of inner work, kept from those who have not done the labour. The three blows that kill him, and the loss and recovery of the word in the later degrees, sketch a path of initiation in dramatic form. Hiram is the patron, in Steiner's account, of every worker who would rather build than inherit.
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