The Symbolism of Freemasonry: XV. The Point Within a Circle

This is an excerpt from a 19th-century Masonic esoteric interpretation text, likely from Albert Mackey's *The Symbolism of Freemasonry* or a similar speculative Masonic treatise, working in the tradition of comparative religion and ancient mystery scholarship. The piece argues that the common lodge explanation of the "point within a circle" symbol — representing a brother, his moral boundaries, and the two Saints John — is a shallow modern gloss that obscures a far older meaning rooted in ancient solar and fertility religion. The author traces the symbol back to the phallic worship of Egypt, Greece, and India, equating the point with the sun (the male generative principle) and the circle with the universe or nature (the female principle), paralleling the union of Phallus/Cteis and Lingam/Yoni. He further argues that the two parallel lines flanking the circle do not originally represent Saints John the Baptist and Evangelist, but rather the solstitial points of Cancer and Capricorn marking the sun's extreme declinations — and that the saints' feast days were placed near those astronomical dates precisely because of this older symbolism. The text's distinctive claim is that Freemasonry's core symbols are a survival of ancient hermaphroditic solar theology, in which the divine creative force was conceived as a unified male-female generative principle, with Masonic lodge geometry encoding that cosmology.

The Symbolism of Freemasonry: XV. The Point Within a Circle

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