THE BEEHIVE REVISITED
Valley of Corinth,
Orient of MS
The [larva] of a bee is scarcely worthy to
be called a life, but after it is transmuted by death, it appears in a more
excellent and glorious condition…
The beehive, like
the honey which it houses, is a fecund symbol, both rich and enduring. In my
previous treatment of this subject,
I provided a decidedly limited overview of the symbol of the beehive and its
cognates, bees and honey, as they were understood in the mythologies and
folklores of various cultures. In the present treatment, I will be exploring
the possible significance of the symbol as it most readily relates to the
actual arcana of Freemasonry, i.e., as an emblem of resurrection and of
the immortality of the soul. For this we need but make a return to the remnants
of ancient Greece and the neighboring shores of the Mediterranean where,
according to scholars,
the symbol of the bee and its correlating hive were popular objects of worship
and veneration, serving as the bridge between this world and that of the
hereafter.
If the reader will recall, in The Beehive: A Migration of Myth I touched
upon Ovid’s account of the youthful shepherd Aristaeus and the tragic loss and
miraculous, resurrection-like restoration of his cherished beehives. However, in
Virgil’s version of the same story, we learn that the initial misfortune which
was visited upon Aristaeus was not simply a random act of fate, but was actually
orchestrated by the hero-poet Orpheus. But, before we get to that, it will be
helpful to first explain a little bit about the colorful figure of Orpheus and,
by extension, some of what it is that his corresponding Mysteries entailed.
According to Greek
myth, Orpheus was the son of Calliope,
the muse of epic poetry, and Apollo,
the god of music. As the offspring of these two deities, Orpheus was destined
for a fame and charisma that could charm even the Lord of the Hades. Indeed,
for this is precisely what he did when, armed only with his voice and his lyre,
he descended into the Underworld for the purpose of persuading the god Pluto,
Lord of Hades, to consent to the return of Orpheus’ deceased wife Eurydice to
the realm of the living. And it is here that we come back to our unfortunate
beekeeper Aristaeus, whose romantic advances Eurydice was fleeing when she ran
upon the fatal serpent, the sting of which was to prematurely end her life and
land her in the subterranean Hades. It was in retribution for this fact that
Orpheus destroyed Aristaeus’ beloved hives.
Ill. Bro. Albert G.
Mackey once said that “the intention of the ceremonies of initiation into [the
Mysteries] was, by a scenic representation of death, and subsequent restoration
to life, to impress the great truths of the resurrection of the dead and the
immortality of the soul.” It was with the above narrative of Eurydice’s death
and subsequent resurrection that the Orphic priests indoctrinated the
participants in their Mysteries regarding the truth of the soul’s immortality,
and the possibility of its resurrection into the realm of the living. Both
Aristaeus and Orpheus, the latter for only a short time, were in the end
reunited with that of which they had previously mourned the loss. In Orpheus’
case, it was his beloved wife Eurydice who was restored to life, and in that of
Aristaeus, his cherished beehives.
According to
Apollodorus, Orpheus was also said to have been responsible for creating the
Dionysian Mysteries. As a type of what Sir J.G. Frazer called the dying god, i.e., a deity whose tragic death is followed by his miraculous
resurrection, Dionysus, with his corresponding Mysteries, also taught the truth of the immortality of the soul. Like
his father Zeus, as an infant Dionysus is said to have been tended by the Meliai, a sisterhood of bee-like nymphs
associated with the ash tree, who fed him on a diet solely of honey, instead of
milk. A god of wine and resurrection, Dionysus was frequently depicted as a
swarm of honey bees. Greek scholar Károly
Kerényi postulated that the association between bees and resurrection in the
figure of Dionysus stemmed most likely from the ancient sacramental use of
mead, an alcoholic honey drink that was fermented in great subterranean vats,
whose use as an entheogen preceded
the discovery of the intoxicating potential of the Dionysian vine.
Similarly,
Dionysus’ brother and more ‘civilized’ counterpart Apollo who, if the reader
will recall, was also the father of talented Orpheus, too was frequently
associated with the hive. For it is said that Apollo’s prophetic ability was
the gift of the Thiai who, like the Meliai of Zeus and Dionysus, were a
bee-like sisterhood of goddess-nymphs. Additionally, in his manifestation as
the solar Phoebus, Apollo could also be considered a dying and resurrecting
god, although his myth does not specifically hymn him as such. On the other
hand, according to the Greek epic poet Nonnus of Panopolis, Apollo was
responsible for the resurrection of his close companion Hyacinth, whom Apollo
fatally wounded, though an accident. So, although Apollo himself was not known
to have been venerated as a dying god,
he bears connotations to the motif of resurrection nonetheless. Further
associations of Apollo with the hive could be found at Apollo’s famous Oracle
at Delphi, where the curious Omphalos
or Navel Stone, a beehive-shaped
stone covered with a representation of knotted net-work which is suggestive of
stylized bees, was housed. Leicester Holland associated the Omphalos with the Oracle at Delphi’s ability
to prophecy, proposing that it served to channel the intoxicating, chthonic vapors from the very Underworld
itself which would impel the Oracle to ejaculate the strange utterances for
which she was so famous. Tended to by a wholly masculine priesthood, the
prophetic Oracle at Delphi was regarded as “Queen Bee” in her hive of otherwise
all-male workers – an arrangement that
hearkened back to a time when the people which inhabited what would come to be
known as Greece were still one of matrilineality and goddess worship – which
brings us to our closing discussion regarding the relationship of the beehive
to the motif of resurrection.
Carl A.P. Ruck, the
professor of Classics at Boston University, and Daniel Staples, Ph.D. observed
in their The World of Classical Myth
that at what was once Mycenae in present day Greece can still be seen standing,
for the most part intact, the well-preserved remains of the famous Lion Gate, an arching gateway topped
with a detailed carving of two lions flanking a single pillar, the same of
which serves as the city’s sole entrance. A short distance from this Lion Gate, we are told, can be found the
so-called Grave Circle. According to
the authors:
“Beyond the [Lion] Gate to the right lies the Grave Circle,
a cemetery within the city, where the dead were buried at the bottom of deep
shafts…where the corpses were laid temporarily to rest in state, until they
rotted, on a bier in grand subterranean vaulted chambers within the
characteristic domed shape of a beehive, the…Tholos Tombs. These…tombs imply a
belief in the regenerative transition through death, since they were reused
over and over again for successive burials…”
What Prof. Ruck & Dr. Staples rightly observe is that
the ceremonial removal of the deceased from the womb-like, beehive structure
following the body’s decomposition would naturally lend itself, if that in fact
was not already the idea intended, to the notion of a deathly transmutation –
as well as a seemingly miraculous resurrection, when it was discovered by the
survivors of the deceased that the remains had mysteriously disappeared from
the tomb, perhaps unbeknownst to any but the priests who had tended them. And even in tombs which are seemingly in no
way associated with this manner of bee worship, there are still commonly found during
archaeological excavations small, golden amulets depicting the bee-like Thiai sisterhood, whose task it is thus believed
was to transport the souls of the dead to the next life, implying a direct
connection within the minds of the ancient Greeks between the symbol of the beehive
and their belief in the immortality of the soul.
In closing, I
would like to share with the reader a quote from English cleric and scholar
Samuel Purchas, who noted so perfectly the relationship between the beehive,
deathly transmutation, and miraculous resurrection when he wrote:
“The [larva of the bee] lies dead and entombed in the cell
wherein it was bred; but wait with patience a score of days, and you shall see
it revive, and appeares a farre more noble creature than it was before. What is
this, but an emblem of the resurrection?”
REFERENCES
Apollodorus.
The Library
Bullamore,
Geo. W. The Bee and Freemasonry
Frazer, J.G. The Golden Bough
Holland, Leicester. The Mantic Mechanism at Delphi
Hunt, Charles Clyde. Masonic Symbolism
Kerényi , Károly. The Religion of the Greeks and Romans
Mackey,
Albert G. The Symbolism of Freemasonry
Meyer,
Marvin W. The Ancient Mysteries
Ransome,
Hilda M. The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times
and Folklore
Ruck, Carl
A.P. The World of Classical Myth
The Homeric Hymn to Apollo
Virgil. Goergics
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