The Intendant of the Building is the eighth degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and the fifth in the Lodge of Perfection. Its question is a practical one: with the master builder dead, how is the Temple to be finished? The answer the degree gives is that knowledge must be handed on. Hiram had trained able young men, and they carry his work forward. From that story come the degree’s duties of benevolence and charity, and its lesson that what a person knows dies with him unless he teaches it to others.
The degree at a glance
- Body: Lodge of Perfection (4°–14°).
- Degree: 8°, Intendant of the Building.
- Setting: the period of mourning for Hiram has ended and King Solomon wants the work on the Temple resumed.
- Principal figures: King Solomon, King Hiram of Tyre, Adoniram as superintendent of the work, and a group of Hiram’s most capable pupils.
- Symbolic colours: crimson for fervency and zeal, green for renewal and purity of morals, and white; together, Hutchens notes, the three chief colours of Scottish Rite Masonry.
- In the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction: the degree keeps the name Intendant of the Building but is based on the Old Testament story of King David giving his son, the future King Solomon, the task of building the Temple. Its stated philosophy is that each honour we receive brings with it a particular duty.
The lesson
Hiram’s death left King Solomon with a half-built Temple and no master to finish it. In the legend, as Rex Hutchens retells it in A Bridge to Light, the solution comes from Hiram himself. He had enjoyed teaching the arts and sciences he had learned in Egypt and the East to a circle of eager young craftsmen, believing they could one day take his place. On that advice Solomon divides Hiram’s responsibilities among four of them, each placed in charge of a branch of the work (the workers in precious metals, the stonemasons, the carpenters and the bronze-workers), with Adoniram as superintendent over all. Each appointment comes with a moral duty, from setting a good example to encouraging the timid and rewarding the worthy.
The first lesson is about education. Civilisation, Hutchens observes, depends on knowledge gained in one generation being passed to the next, and Hiram understood this when he trained his successors. The second is about how a modern Mason should behave now that he no longer cuts stone. The Intendant of the Building is expected to sympathise with working people, to relieve need where he finds it, and to think of himself as a steward of God’s bounty rather than its owner.
The degree also does something new. Hutchens points out that it is the first of the Ineffable Degrees to sum up the political lessons hidden in the degrees before it. On his reading the Lodge of Perfection outlines the conditions of a free society: the 4th, 5th and 6th degrees call for an enlightened citizenry, the 7th for an independent judiciary, and the 8th for an economic order built on both capital and labour.
Albert Pike’s lecture in Morals and Dogma treats charity and benevolence in the broadest sense, and it contains some of his warmest writing. “A Masonic Lodge should resemble a bee-hive,” he says, “in which all the members work together with ardor for the common good.” He also insists that Masonry does not despise this world: life on earth is not merely “the portal to another”, but the place where our duties lie and where our work is to be done.
Duties of the degree
A Bridge to Light gives the Intendant of the Building one duty and three lessons:
- Duty: be benevolent and charitable. Wish others well and act on that wish.
- Lesson: benevolence and charity require us to correct our own faults, and to help others correct theirs. Real kindness is not flattery; it starts with honest self-examination.
- Lesson: what a man knows dies with him, so pass your knowledge on. Teaching is a duty, not a favour.
- Lesson: labour is honourable when it is done with sobriety, temperance, punctuality and industry. These four qualities are represented by lights in the lodge, grouped around a taller central light that stands for labour itself.
Symbols and regalia
The apron is white, lined with red and bordered in green. In the centre is an embroidered nine-pointed star with a balance above it, and on the flap is a triangle with a Phoenician letter at each corner. According to Hutchens, the three colours are meant to inspire the same purity of morals and zeal for Masonry that made Hiram’s memory immortal.
The jewel is a delta, or triangle, of gold, engraved on both sides with Samaritan or Hebrew inscriptions. Its triangular shape is, as Hutchens puts it, the most fundamental symbol of the Deity.
The cordon is a broad crimson watered ribbon worn from right to left, with the jewel attached to it by a separate green ribbon. Green, the colour of the acacia, recalls renewal and immortality. The gloves shown above complete the regalia pictured on this page.
The number nine. The nine-pointed star, which here represents divine truth, is part of a wider play on the number nine and its multiples. The lodge is lit by twenty-seven lights arranged as a triple triangle in three groups of nine. Hutchens explains that the ancient Pythagoreans prized multiples of nine, whose digits always add up to nine again (2 × 9 = 18, and 1 + 8 = 9), and especially 27, the cube of three. Twenty-seven is also the traditional number of members of a Lodge of Perfection.
Reflections
The question A Bridge to Light sets for this degree is: is this life more than a portal to another?
Pike’s answer is a firm yes. Masonry, he writes, teaches “that man has high duties to perform, and a high destiny to fulfill, on this earth” (Morals and Dogma, lecture VIII). That conviction links the degree’s themes together. If this life matters in itself, then the work we do, the knowledge we pass on and the help we give to others are not just preparation for something else; they are the point. Hiram’s pupils finishing his Temple are a fitting image of it. Hutchens adds a gentle warning drawn from Pike: understanding the symbols is not enough, and only those who actually practise the virtues are ready for the deeper philosophy of the degrees that follow.
Please view the video on the left, for a more detailed explanation of the 8th° Degree.
Sources:
– Rex R. Hutchens, A Bridge to Light: The Revised Standard Pike Ritual, 4th edition, edited by Arturo de Hoyos (Washington, D.C.: The Supreme Council, 33°, S.J., 2010), chapter “The 8th Degree – Intendant of the Building”. Purchase ‘A Bridge To Light‘ by Rex R. Hutchens
– Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), lecture VIII “Intendant of the Building”. Purchase ‘Morals & Dogma‘ by Albert Pike.
– Scottish Rite, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, “Scottish Rite 8th Degree”: https://scottishritenmj.org/degrees/degrees-8