Early
Hand-painted
Limoges
Style Masonic FOB
Front
Back
This
beautiful Masonic FOB or Collar Jewel is hand-painted in the Limoges style and
in this curators opinion it originates from France. The front depicts
the symbolism of Blue Lodge Masonry and the back pictures the Rose Croix Cross
and Crown of the 18th Degree in Scottish Rite Masonry.
The
main symbol featured on the back of course is the mother Pelican pecking her
breast to feed her babies. The pelican feeding her young with her blood
is a prominent symbol of the Eighteenth or Rose Croix Degree of the Ancient
and Accepted Scottish Rite, and was adopted as such from the fact that the
pelican, in ancient Christian art, was considered as the emblem of the Savior.
Now this symbolism of the pelican, as a representative of the Savior, is
almost universally supposed to be derived from the common belief that the
pelican feeds her young with her blood, as the Savior shed his blood for
mankind; and hence the bird is always represented as sitting on her nest, and
surrounded by her brood of young ones, who are dipping their bills into a
wound in their mother's breast. But this is not the exact idea of the
symbolism, which really refers to the resurrection, and is, in this point of
view, more applicable to Christ, as well as to the Masonic Degree of which the
resurrection is a doctrine. In an ancient Bestiarium, or
Natural History, in the Royal Library at Brussels, cited by Larwood and Hotten
in a recent work on the History of Signboards, this statement is
made: "The pelican is very fond of his young ones, and when they
are born and begin to grow, they rebel in their nest against their parent, and
strike him with their wings flying about him, and beat him so much till they
wound him in his eyes. Then the father strikes and kills them. And
the mother is of such a nature that she comes back to the nest on the third
day, and sits down upon her dead young ones, and opens her side with her bill
and pours her blood over them, and so resuscitates them from death; for the
young ones, by their instinct, receive the blood as soon as it comes out of
the mother, and drink it." Dr. Mackey believed the true theory of
the pelican is, that by restoring her young ones to life by her blood, she
symbolizes the resurrection. The old symbologists said, that the male
pelican, who destroyed his young, represents the serpent, or evil principle,
which brought death unto the world; while the mother, who resuscitates them,
is the representative of the Son of Man of whom it is declared, "except
ye drink of His blood, ye have no life in you." Hence the
pelican is very appropriately a symbol of Freemasonry, whose great object it
is to teach by symbolism the doctrine of the resurrection, and especially in
that sublime Degree of the Scottish Rite wherein, the old Temple being
destroyed and the old Word being Lost, a new temple and a new word spring
forth -- all of which is but the great allegory of the destruction by death
and the resurrection to eternal life.
