The Masonic myth of the murdered temple-builder, which Steiner read as the buried record of two streams running through all human history.
The Temple Legend in Anthroposophy is the Masonic myth that Rudolf Steiner read as a hidden record of two streams within humanity. He told it in The Temple Legend (GA 93, lectures of 1904) as the story of the sons of Cain, the Sons of Fire who wrest culture from dead matter, set against the sons of God descended from Abel, who receive their wisdom as a gift. Solomon belongs to the line of Abel; the master-builder Hiram-Abiff to the line of Cain, and the legend turns on the conflict between them. Steiner placed it among the secret societies, especially Freemasonry, where the lost temple and its future rebuilding are described. He saw it as an image of the great question of human evolution: whether the future belongs to inherited grace or to forms that humanity itself creates.
The Temple Legend is the founding narrative of Freemasonry, the story of the master-builder Hiram-Abiff, who raises Solomon's Temple and is murdered for refusing to give up the Master Word. Steiner devoted a 1904 Berlin lecture cycle to it, reading the tale not as builders' folklore but as a veiled account of how two kinds of human being came to stand against one another at the dawn of culture.
In Steiner's Own Words
Once one of the Elohim united with Eve, and out of that Cain was born. Another of the Elohim, Adonai or Jehovah-Yahveh, thereupon created Adam. The latter, for his part, united with Eve, and out of this marriage Abel was born. Adonai caused trouble between those belonging to Cain's family and those belonging to Abel's family, and the result of this was that Cain slew Abel. But out of the renewed union of Adam with Eve the race of Seth was founded.
What it Means Today
The Temple Legend lives on inside Craft Freemasonry, where every candidate raised to the third degree still re-enacts the death of Hiram in the lodge room, lying in a symbolic coffin before the Master Word is restored to him. The ritual itself dates to the early eighteenth century, when the legend first appears in print, though the United Grand Lodge of England, formed in 1717, treats it as far older. Steiner read this drama against the grain of its own keepers. He told his Berlin listeners in 1904 that present-day Freemasons "usually have no notion" of what the story carries, and traced its real authorship back to Christian Rosenkreutz and the small Rosicrucian circle of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who clothed an esoteric teaching in the form of a myth.
What that myth records, in Steiner's reading, is the parting of two human streams that scripture names in Cain and Abel. The sons of Abel receive their world as a gift and keep it as they find it; the sons of Cain, the Sons of Fire, wrest culture from dead matter through their own labour, and Hiram and Tubal-Cain stand among them. For anyone tracing the lineage of Western initiation, from the medieval cathedral guilds Steiner so admired through the Rosicrucian brotherhoods to the eighteenth-century lodges, the legend is the place where that lineage tells its own origin story, and where it asks whose work will build the future temple of humanity.
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