Λεύκωσις: The Rough Stone and the Living Statue

The Whitening in Plain Words

The second teaching answers the same 6 plain questions as the first.

What it is. The second stage of the Great Work in a human being: the forming of a self by deliberate work. In the blackening, the old order dissolved and the laboratory was cleared. In the whitening, the matter is washed and gathered, and the person begins to give his life and character the shape he chooses, under the measure of the Gods.²

What changes. The person stops reacting and starts building. In the first stage, things rose up and had to be met. In the second, the person decides what to make of himself, and makes it, day after day.

Who does it. The person, with the Gods. Plotinus addresses the reader directly: "never stop working on your own statue."³ Epictetus adds the partner: when a difficulty falls on you, "remember that the God, like a trainer, has paired you with a rough young man."⁴

How it's done. By habit, by trial and by measure. Aristotle states the law: "we become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts."⁵ The Masonic lodge gives the tools a name, the gauge, the gavel, the square, the level and the plumb, and the athlete's training gives them a daily form.

How long it takes. Years, and in some measure a lifetime. "Life is short, the art long," ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή, the first aphorism of Hippocrates begins.⁶ Michelangelo needed nearly 3 years to bring his David out of a block that others had spoiled and abandoned for a quarter of a century.⁷

How it ends. With a face on the statue. Plotinus promises that the work goes on "until the godlike splendour of virtue shines out on you," and the alchemists promised that the whitened matter, once fixed, is ready for the gold.^{3, 2}

From Chaos to Cosmos: Order as the Second Work

The Greek word κόσμος means order and also ornament: the arrangement of an army drawn up in good order, the adornment of a beautiful woman, and the ordered universe itself. To put a thing in order and to make it beautiful are, in Greek, the same act. When the God of the Timaeus brought the visible world "into order out of disorder," he made it a κόσμος, and the soul that wants to become like the Gods makes itself a κόσμος in the same way.⁸

Plato describes the ordered soul in the 4th book of the Republic, and his verbs are the verbs of building and tuning. Justice, he says, concerns what is within:

Plato, Republic 443d to e ⁹

ἀλλὰ τῷ ὄντι τὰ οἰκεῖα εὖ θέμενον καὶ ἄρξαντα αὐτὸν αὑτοῦ καὶ κοσμήσαντα καὶ φίλον γενόμενον ἑαυτῷ καὶ συναρμόσαντα τρία ὄντα, ὥσπερ ὅρους τρεῖς ἁρμονίας ἀτεχνῶς, νεάτης τε καὶ ὑπάτης καὶ μέσης … πάντα ταῦτα συνδήσαντα καὶ παντάπασιν ἕνα γενόμενον ἐκ πολλῶν, σώφρονα καὶ ἡρμοσμένον …

"He sets his own house in good order, rules himself, orders himself, becomes his own friend, and tunes together the 3 parts of himself like the 3 fixed notes of a scale, lowest, highest and middle … and having bound all these together, he becomes entirely one out of many, temperate and harmonised …"

Every verb in that sentence is an act of the whitening: setting in order (εὖ θέμενον), ruling (ἄρξαντα), arranging (κοσμήσαντα, from κόσμος), befriending (φίλον γενόμενον), tuning (συναρμόσαντα), binding (συνδήσαντα). The goal is the last phrase, "one out of many," and that unity belongs to the gold. The way to it is the patient arranging of the many.

The alchemists' whitening began with water. They washed the blackened matter again and again, a stage the Latin texts called ablutio, until the black gave way to white. Zevism enacts the same washing in its Baptism, where the initiate is washed of "falsehood, ignorance, and spiritual bondage" in the manner of the lustral waters of the ancient temples.¹⁰ The washing comes first because order can't be built on dirt. After it, the building begins.

Ὁ κοσμῶν ἑαυτὸν κόσμον ἐν ἑαυτῷ ποιεῖ.

Whoever orders himself makes a cosmos within.

Born of Stone: Deucalion, Pyrrha and the People of the Stones

The Greeks told of a time when Zeus resolved to end the bronze race of men, and flooded the earth. Deucalion, son of Prometheus, and his wife Pyrrha rode out the flood in a chest, landed on Parnassus, and gave thanks to Zeus. Then:

Apollodorus, Library 1.7.2 ¹¹

Ζεὺς δὲ πέμψας Ἑρμῆν πρὸς αὐτὸν ἐπέτρεψεν αἱρεῖσθαι ὅ τι βούλεται· ὁ δὲ αἱρεῖται ἀνθρώπους αὐτῷ γενέσθαι. καὶ Διὸς εἰπόντος ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς ἔβαλλεν αἴρων λίθους, καὶ οὓς μὲν ἔβαλε Δευκαλίων, ἄνδρες ἐγένοντο, οὓς δὲ Πύρρα, γυναῖκες. ὅθεν καὶ λαοὶ μεταφορικῶς ὠνομάσθησαν ἀπὸ τοῦ λᾶας ὁ λίθος.

"Zeus sent Hermes to him and let him choose whatever he wished, and he chose that human beings should come into being. At Zeus' bidding he picked up stones and threw them over his head: the stones Deucalion threw became men, and those Pyrrha threw became women. Hence peoples were called λαοί by a figure of speech, from λᾶας, 'stone.'"

Pindar tells the same story in a victory ode and draws the same etymology: by the will of Zeus of the flashing thunder, Pyrrha and Deucalion came down from Parnassus "and without the marriage bed founded a race of one people, offspring of stone; and they were called λαοί," λίθινον γόνον· λαοὶ δ᾽ ὀνύμασθεν.¹² In the Greek imagination, a people is a gathering of stones that have become human.

Ovid, who knew his Greek sources well, describes the moment of transformation, and he describes it as a sculptor would:

Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.400 to 406 ¹⁴

Saxa (quis hoc credat, nisi sit pro teste vetustas?) ponere duritiem coepere suumque rigorem mollirique mora mollitaque ducere formam. Mox ubi creverunt naturaque mitior illis contigit, ut quaedam, sic non manifesta, videri forma potest hominis, sed, uti de marmore coepta, non exacta satis rudibusque simillima signis.

"The stones (who would believe it, if ancient tradition weren't witness?) began to lose their hardness and stiffness, to soften slowly and, once softened, to take on shape. Soon, when they had grown and a gentler nature had come over them, a kind of human form could be seen, though not distinctly: like figures begun in marble, not properly finished, and very like rough statues."

Uti de marmore coepta, "like figures begun in marble." Ovid saw the first human beings as unfinished statues, and he ended the story with 2 lines that hold the doctrine of this teaching: Inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum et documenta damus qua simus origine nati, "hence we are a hard race, used to toil, and we give proof of the origin from which we were born."¹⁴

The Zevist reading follows the myth closely. Humanity came out of stone at the bidding of Zeus, by the hands of the pious; the stone softened "slowly," mora, and the form appeared by degrees. Every human being is a stone begun and left for its owner to finish. The hardness that resists the chisel is the same hardness that holds the finished form, and the toil is the proof of the origin.

Λᾶες τὸ πρῶτον, εἶτα λαός, τέλος θεοί.

First stones, then a people, at last Gods.

The Divine Craftsmen: Prometheus, Hephaestus and Athena

The Greek Gods are makers, and the human sculptor imitates them. Prometheus "fashioned human beings out of water and earth and gave them fire as well," Apollodorus records.¹¹ Hephaestus, the smith of Olympus, made golden handmaidens who moved to support their lord, "in the likeness of living young women," with "understanding in their hearts, and speech and strength."¹⁵ When the Gods wanted a first woman, Hephaestus moulded her from earth and Athena adorned her;¹⁶ Pandora, Pyrrha's mother, was in Apollodorus' words the woman "the Gods fashioned," ἣν ἔπλασαν θεοί.¹¹

A short Homeric hymn tells what the craftsman Gods did for the human race, and its story is the story of the second stage:

Homeric Hymn 20, To Hephaestus ¹⁷

Ἥφαιστον κλυτόμητιν ἀείσεο, Μοῦσα λίγεια, ὃς μετ᾽ Ἀθηναίης γλαυκώπιδος ἀγλαὰ ἔργα ἀνθρώπους ἐδίδαξεν ἐπὶ χθονός, οἳ τὸ πάρος περ ἄντροις ναιετάασκον ἐν οὔρεσιν, ἠύτε θῆρες. νῦν δὲ δι᾽ Ἥφαιστον κλυτοτέχνην ἔργα δαέντες ῥηιδίως αἰῶνα τελεσφόρον εἰς ἐνιαυτὸν εὔκηλοι διάγουσιν ἐνὶ σφετέροισι δόμοισιν. ἀλλ᾽ ἵληθ᾽, Ἥφαιστε· δίδου δ᾽ ἀρετήν τε καὶ ὄλβον.

"Sing, clear-voiced Muse, of Hephaestus famed for his skill, who with grey-eyed Athena taught glorious crafts to men on earth, men who before used to live in caves in the mountains like wild beasts. But now, having learned crafts through Hephaestus famed for his art, they live out their lives in ease the whole year round, untroubled in their own houses. Be gracious, Hephaestus, and grant excellence and prosperity."

Before the craft, the cave; after the craft, the house. The hymn compresses the passage from the first stage of the Work to the second into 8 lines. Plato's prisoners lived in a cave, and the hymn's ancestors lived in caves like beasts; the Gods taught them to build, and they came to live in houses of their own. The last line is a prayer that every Zevist can say before beginning a day's work on himself: ἀλλ᾽ ἵληθ᾽, Ἥφαιστε· δίδου δ᾽ ἀρετήν τε καὶ ὄλβον, "be gracious, Hephaestus, and grant excellence and prosperity."

Plato gives the philosopher the same office. Whoever has seen the divine order, he says, must set it into human characters, in private and in public, "and not only mould himself," μὴ μόνον ἑαυτὸν πλάττειν; such a man becomes a craftsman, a δημιουργός, "of temperance and justice and all the virtue of the people." The founders of a good city, he continues, are "painters who use the divine pattern," οἱ τῷ θείῳ παραδείγματι χρώμενοι ζωγράφοι, and the first thing they do with their tablet is to wipe it clean.⁹ The cleaning of the tablet is the blackening; the drawing with the divine pattern is the whitening. The order is Plato's own.

Πρῶτον καθαρὸν ποίει τὸν πίνακα, ἔπειτα γράφε τὸ θεῖον παράδειγμα.

First make the tablet clean, then draw the divine pattern.

Plato's Statues: Glaucus Under the Sea and the Gods Inside Socrates

Plato returns again and again to the image of the statue, and he uses it in 2 directions. The first image shows what the soul has become under the accretions of life. At the end of the Republic, Socrates asks Glaucon to picture the sea-God Glaucus:

Plato, Republic 611c to d ⁹

ὥσπερ οἱ τὸν θαλάττιον Γλαῦκον ὁρῶντες οὐκ ἂν ἔτι ῥᾳδίως αὐτοῦ ἴδοιεν τὴν ἀρχαίαν φύσιν, ὑπὸ τοῦ τά τε παλαιὰ τοῦ σώματος μέρη τὰ μὲν ἐκκεκλάσθαι, τὰ δὲ συντετρῖφθαι καὶ πάντως λελωβῆσθαι ὑπὸ τῶν κυμάτων, ἄλλα δὲ προσπεφυκέναι, ὄστρεά τε καὶ φυκία καὶ πέτρας, ὥστε παντὶ μᾶλλον θηρίῳ ἐοικέναι ἢ οἷος ἦν φύσει, οὕτω καὶ τὴν ψυχὴν ἡμεῖς θεώμεθα διακειμένην ὑπὸ μυρίων κακῶν.

"As those who see the sea-God Glaucus could no longer easily make out his original nature, because some of the old parts of his body have been broken off, others crushed and wholly maimed by the waves, while other things have grown onto him, shells and seaweed and rocks, so that he looks like any wild beast rather than what he was by nature, so we too observe the soul in a condition caused by countless evils."

The remedy, Socrates says, is to look at the soul's love of wisdom, "akin to the divine, the immortal and what always is," and to imagine what it would become if it followed that love wholly, "lifted out of the sea" and knocked free of the rocks and shells that have grown around it.⁹ The sculpting of the self is, first, a work of removal. The God is already there under the crust.

The second image shows what waits inside. In the Symposium, the drunken Alcibiades compares Socrates to the little figures of Silenus that sit in the sculptors' workshops, ugly on the outside, which "when they are opened in 2, are seen to have images of Gods inside," ἔνδοθεν ἀγάλματα ἔχοντες θεῶν.¹⁸

Then he tells what he saw when Socrates was once opened: "I don't know whether anyone has seen the images within. I once saw them, and they seemed to me so divine and golden, so wholly beautiful and wonderful," οὕτω θεῖα καὶ χρυσᾶ εἶναι καὶ πάγκαλα καὶ θαυμαστά.¹⁸ Divine and golden: the second stage of the Work uncovers the images that the third stage will make shine.

In the Phaedrus, Plato shows the lover doing the same work for the beloved: each chooses his love according to his own God, "and, as though the beloved were himself a God to him, he fashions and adorns him like a cult statue, in order to honour him and celebrate his rites," οἷον ἄγαλμα τεκταίνεταί τε καὶ κατακοσμεῖ.¹⁹ The Temple's teaching on ἔρως sets this passage in its Zevist frame.²⁰ The verb τεκταίνεσθαι, to work as a carpenter or builder, belongs to the same family as the τέκτων, the builder, whose craft the Freemasons would take for their own.

Plato also gives a warning about unfinished work. True opinions, Socrates says in the Meno, are like the statues of Daedalus, which were so lifelike that they ran away unless tied down: "to own one of his works untied isn't worth much, like a runaway slave, for it doesn't stay; but tied down it's worth a great deal." True opinions "run away from a person's soul" until someone ties them down "by working out the cause," αἰτίας λογισμῷ.²¹ A virtue practised once is a statue untied. Practised until it's understood and habitual, it stays.

Ἔνδοθεν οἱ θεοί, ἔξωθεν ὁ λίθος.

Within, the Gods; outside, the stone.

Plotinus: Never Stop Working on Your Own Statue

Plotinus, the greatest of the later Platonists, gave the myth its rule. In his treatise On Beauty, the first he wrote, he asks how a soul can see the beauty of the Good if it hasn't yet become beautiful itself, and he answers with a command:

Plotinus, Enneads 1.6.9 ³

ἄναγε ἐπὶ σαυτὸν καὶ ἴδε· κἂν μήπω σαυτὸν ἴδῃς καλόν, οἷα ποιητὴς ἀγάλματος, ὃ δεῖ καλὸν γενέσθαι, τὸ μὲν ἀφαιρεῖ, τὸ δὲ ἀπέξεσε, τὸ δὲ λεῖον, τὸ δὲ καθαρὸν ἐποίησεν, ἕως ἔδειξε καλὸν ἐπὶ τῷ ἀγάλματι πρόσωπον, οὕτω καὶ σὺ ἀφαίρει ὅσα περιττὰ καὶ ἀπεύθυνε ὅσα σκολιά, ὅσα σκοτεινὰ καθαίρων ἐργάζου εἶναι λαμπρὰ καὶ μὴ παύσῃ τεκταίνων τὸ σὸν ἄγαλμα, ἕως ἂν ἐκλάμψειέ σοι τῆς ἀρετῆς ἡ θεοειδὴς ἀγλαία, ἕως ἂν ἴδῃς σωφροσύνην ἐν ἁγνῷ βεβῶσαν βάθρῳ.

"Go back into yourself and look. And if you don't yet see yourself beautiful, then, as the maker of a statue that is to become beautiful cuts away here, smooths there, makes this part light and that part clean, until he has brought out a beautiful face on the statue, so you too: cut away what is excessive, straighten what is crooked, cleanse what is dark and work to make it bright, and never stop working on your own statue until the godlike splendour of virtue shines out on you, until you see Self-control enthroned on its holy pedestal."

Each verb in the passage is a tool. ἀφαίρει, cut away: the excess, τὰ περιττά, which the blackening has already exposed. ἀπεύθυνε, straighten: the crooked, τὰ σκολιά, which habit has bent. καθαίρων, cleansing: the dark, τὰ σκοτεινά, until it shines. And then the verb that governs the rest, μὴ παύσῃ τεκταίνων, "never stop working," from the root of τέκτων, the builder. The statue is σὸν ἄγαλμα, "your own cult image": the self that is shaped is shaped to be worthy of a God.

Near the end of the treatise Plotinus gives the condition of the vision: "So let each first become wholly godlike and wholly beautiful, if he means to behold God and beauty," γενέσθω δὴ πρῶτον θεοειδὴς πᾶς καὶ καλὸς πᾶς, εἰ μέλλει θεάσασθαι θεόν τε καὶ καλόν.³ Earlier in the same treatise he says what the purified soul becomes: "form and rational principle, altogether bodiless and intellectual, and wholly of the divine," ὅλη τοῦ θείου.³ The Temple's teaching on Παιδεία sets this passage at the centre of its account of education as μόρφωσις, the giving of form to the soul.²²

Ὁ μὴ παυόμενος τεκταίνειν ἑαυτὸν ἄγαλμα θεοῦ γίγνεται.

Whoever never stops working on himself becomes a statue of a God.

From Plotinus to Michelangelo: The Figure Inside the Marble

Plotinus' sculptor travelled to Florence. In 1492 Marsilio Ficino published his Latin translation of the Enneads, with a preface addressed to Lorenzo de' Medici.²³ In the same years, from about 1490 to 1492, the teenage Michelangelo lived in Lorenzo's household, where the circle of Ficino, Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola shaped the way he thought about art and the soul.²³ Decades later, as an old man, he wrote a sonnet on the art of sculpture for his friend Vittoria Colonna:

Michelangelo, Rime 151 ²⁴

Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto c'un marmo solo in sé non circonscriva col suo superchio, e solo a quello arriva la man che ubbidisce all'intelletto.

"The best of artists has no concept that a single block of marble doesn't hold enclosed within its excess, and only the hand that obeys the intellect reaches it."

The superchio, the excess, is Plotinus' τὰ περιττά, and the hand that obeys the intellect is the hand that "cuts away what is excessive." The sonnet was famous enough in its own time that the scholar Benedetto Varchi gave a public lecture on it at the Florentine Academy in 1547.²⁴ Michelangelo's teaching is the Plotinian one: the figure is already in the stone, and the art is the patient removal of everything that isn't the figure.

He left 4 statues that show the doctrine more clearly than any words. The Prisoners in the Galleria dell'Accademia, carved around 1525 to 1530 for the tomb of Pope Julius II and never finished, are men caught halfway out of the block: a shoulder free, a face still sunk in marble, a leg straining against the stone that still holds it.¹ To a Zevist they're finished portraits of the second stage, the self halfway out of its own rough stone.

The story of the David adds a lesson the newcomer especially needs. The block came from the Fantiscritti quarry at Carrara, for a statue that the board of works of Florence Cathedral commissioned in 1464. Agostino di Duccio roughed out its legs and torso and stopped; a 2nd commission, given to Antonio Rossellino in 1476, came to nothing.

The block lay exposed in the cathedral yard for about 25 years; an inventory of 1500 calls it "a certain figure of marble called David, badly blocked out and supine." The cathedral's board of works called it il gigante, the giant. In August 1501 the 26-year-old Michelangelo took the contract; he began carving on the morning of 13 September, and by June 1504 the spoiled block had become the David.⁷

Many who come to Zevism come as that block: worked badly by earlier hands, cut into a shape that wasn't theirs, left lying in the yard. The David is the answer to their fear. A block spoiled by others can still hold a masterpiece, provided the next hand obeys the intellect and doesn't stop.

Καὶ ὁ λίθος ὁ κακῶς ἐξεσμένος ἄγαλμα κρύπτει.

Even the badly hewn stone hides a statue.

The Masonic Myth: The Rough Ashlar and the Perfect Ashlar

The Freemasons made the self-sculpting stone the first lesson of their initiation. Their fraternity grew out of the lodges of working stonemasons, and its speculative form is traditionally dated to 24 June 1717, when 4 London lodges formed a Grand Lodge; recent historians argue that the Grand Lodge took firm shape only around 1721.²⁵ The working stonemason's tools became symbols of the moral life, and the stone itself became the symbol of the man. In Modern Greek a Freemason is still called a τέκτων, a builder.

The lesson of the Entered Apprentice, the first degree, was printed in America by Thomas Smith Webb in The Freemason's Monitor, the handbook that shaped the wording of the American lectures for generations:

Thomas Smith Webb, The Freemason's Monitor, about 1805 ²⁶

"The rough ashler is a stone as taken from the quarry in its rude and natural state. The perfect ashler is a stone made ready by the hands of the workman to be adjusted by the working tools of the fellow craft. The trestle-board is for the master workman to draw his designs upon. By the rough ashler, we are reminded of our rude and imperfect state by nature; by the perfect ashler, that state of perfection at which we hope to arrive, by a virtuous education, our own endeavours, and the blessing of God …"

Albert Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry draws out the meaning: the rough ashlar "is emblematic of man in his natural state," and when education has expanded his intellect, restrained his passions and purified his life, "he then is represented by the Perfect Ashlar, which, under the skillful hands of the workmen, has been smoothed, and squared, and fitted for its place in the building."²⁷

The working tools of the first degree carry the same doctrine. "The common gavel is an instrument made use of by operative masons, to break off the corners of rough stones, the better to fit them for the builder's use; but we, as free and accepted masons, are taught to make use of it for the more noble and glorious purpose of divesting our minds and consciences of all the vices and superfluities of life, thereby fitting our bodies, as living stones, for that spiritual building …"

The 24-inch gauge, divided into 24 equal parts, teaches the dividing of time: 8 hours for the service of God and of others, 8 for daily work, and 8 for refreshment and sleep.²⁶

The Masonic myth has a Greek root, and the Masonic books say so. Webb's Monitor names the 47th proposition of Euclid, the theorem of the right-angled triangle, "an invention of our ancient friend and brother, the great Pythagoras," who travelled among the priesthoods of Asia, Africa and Europe and was initiated into their orders.²⁶ James Anderson's Constitutions of 1723, the founding charter of the Grand Lodge, call "the Greater PYTHAGORAS" the author of the 47th proposition, "which, if duly observ'd, is the Foundation of all Masonry, sacred, civil, and Military."²⁹ The fraternity that built its initiation on the squared stone placed a Greek follower of the Gods at its foundation.

The Greeks had squared the man long before. The poet Simonides, around 500 BC, sang the ideal that Plato quotes in the Protagoras:

Simonides, quoted by Plato, Protagoras 339b ³⁰

ἄνδρ᾽ ἀγαθὸν μὲν ἀλαθέως γενέσθαι χαλεπόν, χερσίν τε καὶ ποσὶ καὶ νόῳ τετράγωνον, ἄνευ ψόγου τετυγμένον.

"For a man to become truly good is hard: foursquare in hands and feet and mind, fashioned without blame."

Τετράγωνον, "foursquare," is the perfect ashlar more than 2,000 years before the lodges. Τετυγμένον, "fashioned," is the participle of the verb for making and building. The good man of Simonides is a squared stone, wrought without a flaw, and he becomes so with difficulty, χαλεπόν. Masonry inherited the image; Zevism returns it to its source.

The myth has found a modern emblem in the bronze Self Made Man by the American sculptor Bobbie Carlyle, which the artist describes as "a man carving himself out of stone, carving his character and carving his future"; one monumental cast stands at Saint Louis University.³¹ The figure holds the hammer and chisel in his own hands and is still cutting the stone that holds him. The Greek and the Masonic myth say the same, and add what the bronze can't show: that the Gods stand beside the carver, and that the design he follows is theirs.

Ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς τετράγωνος· χαλεπὸν δὲ γενέσθαι.

The good man is foursquare, and hard to become.

The Sculptor's Tools and the Soul's Tools

The working tools of the Masonic lodge, the Greek sources behind them and the practices of the Temple line up closely. The table sets them side by side:

The Athlete and the Statue: Form Through Trial

The Greeks shaped bodies the way they shaped marble, and they understood both as the work of years. Their sculptors carved athletes, and their athletes made of their own bodies something like sculpture. The Discobolus of Myron, known from Roman copies, holds a discipline in a single instant of perfect balance, a form won by training.³⁹

Epictetus, the Stoic teacher of Nicopolis, made the athlete's training into a theology of trial:

Epictetus, Discourses 1.24.1 to 2 ⁴

αἱ περιστάσεις εἰσὶν αἱ τοὺς ἄνδρας δεικνύουσαι. λοιπὸν ὅταν ἐμπέσῃ περίστασις, μέμνησο ὅτι ὁ θεός σε ὡς ἀλείπτης τραχεῖ νεανίσκῳ συμβέβληκεν. ἵνα τί; φησίν. ἵνα Ὀλυμπιονίκης γένῃ· δίχα δ᾽ ἱδρῶτος οὐ γίγνεται.

"It's difficulties that show what men are. So when a difficulty falls on you, remember that the God, like a trainer, has paired you with a rough young man. 'For what purpose?' someone asks. So that you may become an Olympic victor; and that doesn't happen without sweat."

The trainer, the ἀλείπτης, was the man who oiled the athlete and set his training. He chose the sparring partners, and he chose rough ones on purpose, because a gentle partner makes a weak wrestler. Epictetus asks his students to read every hardship as a partner chosen by a God who wants them to win.

He also told them to count the cost before they began. "You want to win at Olympia? So do I, by the Gods, for it's a fine thing. But consider what comes before and what follows." The athlete "must keep to a discipline, eat by rule, stay away from sweets, train under compulsion at a fixed hour, in heat and in cold," and hand himself over to his trainer "as to a doctor"; and in the contest itself he may twist an ankle, swallow sand, and after all of it lose.⁴ The second stage asks for the same honest accounting.

Hesiod, 8 centuries earlier, had already set the price at the gate of excellence:

Hesiod, Works and Days 289 to 292 ⁴⁰

τῆς δ᾽ ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάροιθεν ἔθηκαν ἀθάνατοι· μακρὸς δὲ καὶ ὄρθιος οἶμος ἐς αὐτὴν καὶ τρηχὺς τὸ πρῶτον· ἐπὴν δ᾽ εἰς ἄκρον ἵκηται, ῥηιδίη δὴ ἔπειτα πέλει, χαλεπή περ ἐοῦσα.

"In front of excellence the immortal Gods have set sweat. Long and steep is the path to it, and rough at first; but when one reaches the top, then it becomes easy, hard though it is."

"Rough at first," τρηχὺς τὸ πρῶτον, is the same word, in its Ionic form, that Epictetus uses for the sparring partner, τραχεῖ νεανίσκῳ. The roughness belongs to the beginning, and Hesiod promises that it eases at the summit.

Aristotle explains why the training works, and his example comes from the builder's yard:

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 2.1, 1103a to b ⁵

ἡ δ᾽ ἠθικὴ ἐξ ἔθους περιγίνεται, ὅθεν καὶ τοὔνομα ἔσχηκε μικρὸν παρεκκλῖνον ἀπὸ τοῦ ἔθους … τὰς δ᾽ ἀρετὰς λαμβάνομεν ἐνεργήσαντες πρότερον, ὥσπερ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἄλλων τεχνῶν· ἃ γὰρ δεῖ μαθόντας ποιεῖν, ταῦτα ποιοῦντες μανθάνομεν, οἷον οἰκοδομοῦντες οἰκοδόμοι γίνονται καὶ κιθαρίζοντες κιθαρισταί· οὕτω δὴ καὶ τὰ μὲν δίκαια πράττοντες δίκαιοι γινόμεθα, τὰ δὲ σώφρονα σώφρονες, τὰ δ᾽ ἀνδρεῖα ἀνδρεῖοι.

"Moral virtue comes about from habit, and that's where its name comes from, a slight variation on ἔθος … The virtues we acquire by first exercising them, as with the other arts. What we must learn before we can do it, we learn by doing it: people become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts."

The Greek word for character, ἦθος, is born from the word for habit, ἔθος. Character is habit that has set like stone. Aristotle adds the decisive point: the virtues arise in human beings "neither by nature nor against nature; we are by nature able to receive them, and are brought to completion by habit," πεφυκόσι μὲν ἡμῖν δέξασθαι αὐτάς, τελειουμένοις δὲ διὰ τοῦ ἔθους.⁵ The figure is in the marble by nature, and it comes out only under the chisel of habit.

Quintilian, the Roman teacher of rhetoric, preserves the Greek tale of Milo of Croton, the most famous wrestler of antiquity: "Milo, having grown used to carrying a calf, was carrying a bull," Milo, quem vitulum adsueverat ferre, taurum ferebat.⁴¹ The calf grew a little every day, and his strength grew with it.

Modern training science says the same in its own terms. A training load disturbs the body; the body recovers and adapts above its former level; the next load builds on the adaptation. Sports scientists call the pattern supercompensation, and every coach plans around it.⁴² The soreness of the first weeks is part of the same process, and a familiar experience "for the elite or novice athlete."⁴³

The Temple's teaching on the body follows the same line. Physical training aims at a healthy person, never at a strained hyper-athlete; health doesn't by itself change a spiritual trajectory, but a body at a good level upholds the soul better, carries more energy and endures more, and those who reach an advanced physical level often make a real breakthrough in their spiritual evolution.⁴⁴ The trained body and the formed soul are 2 statues cut by the same hand.

Τραχὺς ὁ ἀντίπαλος· Ὀλυμπιονίκην δὲ ποιεῖ.

The opponent is rough, but he makes the Olympic victor.

Time: Why the Statue Is Slow

The first aphorism of Hippocrates is a sentence about time: "Life is short, the art long, the right moment fleeting, experience perilous, judgement difficult."⁶ The art of the self is the longest of all, and the Ancients never pretended it was quick.

The greatest statue of the Greek world, the gold and ivory Zeus that Phidias made for the temple at Olympia around 435 BC, was built over years in a workshop that archaeologists excavated in the 1950s, exactly where Pausanias had placed it; they found the goldsmith's tools, chips of ivory, terracotta moulds and a cup inscribed "I belong to Phidias," though some doubt that the cup is genuine.⁴⁵ A statue 12 metres high, seated, made to be worthy of the King of the Gods, came out of years of patient work in a single room.

Ovid's tale of Pygmalion adds what no sculptor can do alone. The Cypriot sculptor carved a woman of ivory more beautiful than any born, and fell in love with his own work. At the festival of Venus he prayed, and when he came home and touched the statue, "the ivory softens; it loses its stiffness and yields to his fingers, as Hymettian wax softens in the sun and, worked by the thumb, is bent into many shapes and becomes useful through use itself." Then: Corpus erat, "it was a body: the veins throb under his testing thumb."¹⁴

The sculptor does the work, and the Goddess gives the life. This is the theurgic truth of the second stage: the human hand prepares the form, and the Gods complete it in their own time. As the Temple teaches, all flowers bloom in their own time, and so do statues.⁴⁷ Ovid's simile also carries a practical lesson. The wax "becomes useful through use itself," ipsoque fit utilis usu: the self that is shaped becomes fit for its purpose by being used.

Ὁ μὲν τεχνίτης πλάττει, οἱ δὲ θεοὶ ἐμψυχοῦσιν.

The craftsman shapes, and the Gods give it life.

Trials as the Chisel

A chisel works by blows. The stone doesn't choose where the blows fall, and it can't see the figure the sculptor sees. In a human life the blows are trials: a loss, a failure, a betrayal, an illness, a long effort without visible reward. The Ancients read them as the strokes that free the figure. Epictetus says that difficulties "show what men are."⁴ Heracles, the model of the Work, became a God through 12 labours set on him by a hostile king, and the Temple's teaching on Theosis reads each labour as a step of the ladder.³⁸

Jung, who spent decades among the alchemists' texts, took up the mason's tools himself when the way ahead was blocked. In his memoirs he says that "at any time in my later life when I came up against a blank wall, I painted a picture or hewed stone," and that "each such experience proved to be a rite d'entrée for the ideas and works that followed hard upon it."⁴⁸ In 1950, for his 75th birthday, he carved a stone cube at his tower at Bollingen and cut into it a Latin verse from the alchemists:

Inscription on Jung's stone at Bollingen, 1950 ⁴⁹

Hic lapis exilis extat, pretio quoque vilis, spernitur a stultis, amatur plus ab edoctis.

"Here stands the mean, uncomely stone, 'tis very cheap in price! The more it is despised by fools, the more loved by the wise."

The philosophers' stone of the alchemists was famous for looking worthless. The newcomer at the start of the second stage often feels exactly so: rough, plain, unfinished, despised by the world and unsure of his own worth. The alchemists answered that the stone the fools pass by is the one the wise love, because they know what it will become.

The trials of the second stage differ from the confusions of the first. In the blackening, the soul is shaken by what rises from within. In the whitening, it's tested by what comes from without, and each test is met by the form already gained. A temperate person tempted, a just person wronged, a patient person delayed: each trial strikes the stone where it's still rough and leaves it smoother.

Αἱ περιστάσεις ἡ σμίλη τῆς ψυχῆς.

Difficulties are the chisel of the soul.

In Meditation and Theurgy: The Daily Chisel

The whitening lives in the daily practice. The Temple's Meditation section arranges its meditations by level and by the part of the person each develops, and in this stage the practice moves from cleansing to construction:³³

• The Foundation Meditation and the programmes. The Temple calls its foundation meditation the most important of all, and the Basic, Intermediate and Advanced programmes build on it in order.³³ A programme is a trestle-board: the design of the work drawn in advance, so that each day's labour fits the whole.
• The Pythagorean Day Meditation. The Pythagoreans divided the day and reviewed it at night. The Golden Verses give the rule: "Don't let sleep come upon your soft eyes before you have gone over each of the day's deeds 3 times: Where did I transgress? What did I do? What duty did I leave undone?"³² This is the 24-inch gauge of the Zevist.
• The Ethics meditations. The Temple's meditations on its Ethics, with instructions and a meditation on context, take the square to the conduct of each day.^{33, 34}
• Aligning and empowering the chakras. The meditations on correct alignment are the plumb line of the inner building: the centres of the soul set upright, one above the other, before they're empowered.³³
• Study. The Temple's study levels give the mind its own discipline. Plato's painters work from the divine pattern, and the pattern has to be learned before it can be followed.⁹
• The body. The Physical Exercise and Diet and Sleep pages move from beginner to intermediate in this stage, and the body takes its form alongside the soul.^{44, 36}
• Theurgy. The Theurgy section, the Heavenly Powers, begins with the banishing ritual and the meditation for protection: the sacred space is cleared and guarded so that the work inside it can proceed.⁵⁰ Iamblichus holds that union with the Gods comes through the sacred works themselves; the whitening is the stage in which those works become a habit.⁵¹

Τρὶς ἐπέξιθι τὰ ἔργα πρὶν ὕπνον δέξασθαι.

Go over your deeds 3 times before you welcome sleep.

In the Liturgy: The Washing and the Name

The whitening has its rite in the Zevist Baptism. The adult who has completed the Initiation bathes beforehand, chooses a spiritual name and comes before the altar. The water washes him "of falsehood, ignorance, and spiritual bondage," with the words "You are cleansed in the Name of Zeus"; the oil, which the rite links with Athena's gift of the olive, consecrates him as kings were anointed before the Gods: "The seal of Zeus is upon you."¹⁰ The washing is the ablutio of the alchemists, the white matter after the black.

Then the Name. The Baptism teaches that the initiate now has 2 names: the one his parents gave, which belongs to "the world of men," and the chosen name, which belongs to "the world of the spirit" and is "the name by which the Gods will know you." The initiate is told: "Guard this name. It is sacred."¹⁰ The face has appeared on the statue. The Temple counsels that the name be chosen with "thought, study, and prayer," from Greek, Egyptian, Vedic, Norse or another honoured tradition; a name such as Philalethes, "Lover of Truth," holds a programme of the whitening in a single word.¹⁰

The Temple's year marks the stage as well. The Anthesteria of 2 February is the festival of "purification by fire and water," and the Spring Equinox of 21 March celebrates "renewal and fertility."⁵² Between them the year is washed and begins to grow, as the soul does.

The Homeric hymn to Hephaestus gives a prayer for every morning of the second stage, short enough to say before any work on oneself: ἀλλ᾽ ἵληθ᾽, Ἥφαιστε· δίδου δ᾽ ἀρετήν τε καὶ ὄλβον, "be gracious, Hephaestus, and grant excellence and prosperity."¹⁷

Λουσάμενος ὄνομα λαμβάνει ὁ μύστης.

Washed, the initiate receives a name.

When the Chisel Slips: The Negative Outcomes

A sculptor can ruin a block in an afternoon, and a person can ruin the second stage in a season. The failures are as old as the art, and each has a name in the sources:

• The abandoned block. The David lay in the cathedral yard for 25 years because Agostino di Duccio roughed it out and stopped, and a 2nd commission came to nothing.⁷ The person who starts the forming of the self and gives it up leaves a block worse than raw: cut into, committed to a shape, and then left to the weather. The Temple's account of the striver describes the pattern in the life of faith.²⁰
• Cutting too deep. The chisel removes what is excessive, and a hand in a hurry removes what is essential. Self-improvement can turn into self-hatred, discipline into punishment, and the person ends with a statue too thin to stand. The page on overcoming obstacles counts self-hatred among the barriers to every working, and treats forgiveness of oneself and the removal of guilt as preparation for power.⁵³
• The hollow statue. Alcibiades' Silenus is ugly outside and golden within. Its reverse is the figure polished outside and empty within: correct manners, the right words about the Gods, Greek quotations on every occasion, and nothing underneath. Simonides asked for a man foursquare "in hands and feet and mind,"³⁰ and a squared surface over an unformed mind fails the third term.
• The statue in love with itself. Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away beside the pool that held it, as Ovid tells the story.⁵⁴ Pygmalion loved his work too, and the difference is instructive: Pygmalion turned to the Goddess and received life, while Narcissus turned only to his reflection. Self-cultivation turned into self-admiration stops the Work, and the Temple's teaching on hubris shows why its end is blindness.⁵⁵
• A borrowed form. Some carve themselves into a copy of someone else: a teacher, a hero, an idea of what a Zevist should look like. Pindar's command answers them: γένοι᾽ οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών, "become such as you are, having learned it."¹² The figure in each block is its own.
• The brittle statue. A training load without recovery breaks the athlete, and a practice without rest breaks the practitioner. Training science builds rest into every plan, because adaptation happens in the recovery.⁴² Hesiod's road is "long," μακρός, and it's walked by those who pace themselves.⁴⁰
• The runaway statues. Daedalus' statues ran away unless tied, and so do virtues practised by mood: a week of discipline, a month of neglect, a burst of zeal again, until consistency ties them down.²¹
• Handing the chisel to someone else. The Temple names the habit of waiting for "external saviors" among the marks of the old programming: the belief that a person can't change himself and must be rescued.⁵⁶ The Gods help the carver who keeps his tools in hand.

When the Face Appears: The Positive Outcomes

The second stage has its harvest, and the sources name it clearly. Plotinus promises "the godlike splendour of virtue" shining out, and "Self-control enthroned on its holy pedestal."³ Hesiod promises that the road, rough at first, becomes easy at the top.⁴⁰ Ovid's stones softened "slowly" and stood up as men and women.¹⁴ The person who has passed through the whitening knows its goods in the plain terms of a life:

• A character that holds. Habit has set into ἦθος, and the right act comes without a struggle each time. Heraclitus said "a person's character is his δαίμων," ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων:⁵⁷ the formed character becomes a guardian spirit that carries its owner through situations that would once have broken him.
• Self-government. Plato's just man "rules himself, orders himself, becomes his own friend."⁹ The inner parts stop quarrelling, and the person can be trusted by himself as well as by others.
• Freedom. The athlete who has trained moves without thinking about the movement. The formed self acts freely because it no longer has to fight itself for every decision.
• A vessel fit for the Gods. The Temple's teaching on Συνάφεια explains why form matters for the bond: in a chaotic vessel the energy of the Gods scatters; in an ordered one it gathers and flows.⁵⁸ The whitened soul can hold what is given to it.
• A place in the building. The perfect ashlar is "fitted for its place in the building."²⁷ A formed person strengthens a family, a community and a Temple, and others can build on him.
• The images within revealed. Alcibiades saw golden images of the Gods inside Socrates.¹⁸ The second stage opens the Silenus, and the third stage, the gold, makes the images shine.²

Ἐξ ἔθους ἦθος, ἐξ ἤθους δαίμων.

From habit, character; from character, a guardian spirit.

Objections and Replies

Objection I: "To sculpt oneself is pride; only the Divine shapes the soul."

The Greek sources make it a partnership. Epictetus' God is a trainer who pairs the athlete with his opponent; the athlete still has to wrestle.⁴ Ovid's Pygmalion carves and the Goddess gives life.¹⁴ Plato's lover shapes the beloved "like a cult statue" of his own God.¹⁹ The Theaetetus defines the aim as becoming like God "as far as is possible," and the possible is reached by work.³⁷ Refusing the chisel out of false humility leaves the stone to the weather.

Objection II: "Freemasonry is a modern fraternity, and its symbols aren't Zevist."

The Masonic books themselves trace their geometry to Pythagoras, "our ancient friend and brother," and their founding Constitutions call his theorem "the Foundation of all Masonry."^{26, 29} The squared man is in Simonides, the self-sculpted statue in Plato and Plotinus, the people born of stones in Pindar and Apollodorus.^{30, 3, 12, 11} The Temple reads the Masonic myth as a later branch of a Greek root, and honours the branch for keeping the image alive.

Objection III: "If the figure is already in the stone, why work?"

Aristotle answered it: human beings are "by nature able to receive" the virtues, and "brought to completion by habit."⁵ Michelangelo answered it in marble: the figure is in the block, and only the hand that obeys the intellect arrives at it.²⁴ The figure's presence is what makes the work succeed.

Conclusion: The Statue and Its Maker

The second stage of the Great Work is the stage of form. The laboratory has been cleared, and in it the person begins to build.

The Greeks told the story as the birth of mankind from stones that softened slowly and stood up like figures begun in marble; Plato told it as a sea-god freed from his crust and as golden images hidden inside a rough Silenus; Plotinus made it a command, "never stop working on your own statue"; Michelangelo carved it into the Prisoners and drew the David out of a spoiled block; and the Freemasons built their first degree on the rough stone of the quarry and the perfect stone fitted for the temple.

The method is the athlete's: daily habit, honest measure, rest in its season, and trials met as partners chosen by a God who wants the wrestler to win. The time is long, and the Gods give life to the work in their own hour. When the face appears on the statue, the person is ready for the third stage, in which the formed soul is tinctured into gold and its inner order becomes visible in every part of its life.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.414 to 415 ¹⁴

Inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

"Hence we are a hard race, used to toil, and we give proof of the origin from which we were born."

Λίθος ἦσθα· ἄγαλμα γενοῦ.

You were a stone: become a statue.