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You are here: Home / Featured / The Weeping Virgin

The Weeping Virgin

October 5, 2018 by Greg Stewart 1 Comment

In this episode of Symbols and Symbolism we look at a short entry from Albert Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry examining the figure of the weeping virgin. A newer invention in the symbolism of Freemasonry, Mackey draws an ancient parallel to its cryptic iconography.

Time, the weeping virgin and the broken column.

The Weeping Virgin with disheveled hair, in the Monument of the Third Degree used in the American Rite, is interpreted as a symbol of grief for the unfinished state of the Temple.

Jeremy Cross, who is said to have fabricated the monumental symbol, was not, we are satisfied, acquainted with Hermetic Science. Yet a woman thus portrayed, standing near a tomb, was a very appropriate symbol for the Third Degree, whose dogma is the resurrection.

In Hermetic Science, according to Nicolas Flammel (Hieroglyphics, chapter xxxii), a woman having her hair disheveled and standing near a tomb is a symbol of the soul.


Jeremy Cross (b.1783, d. 1861) became a mason in 1808 and soon became a student of Thomas Smith Webb. In 1819 he published The True Masonic Chart or Hieroglyphic Monitor, in which he borrowed liberally from the previous work of Webb. The Weeping Virgin first appeared as an illustration as rendered by the American copperplate engraver Amos Doolittle, appearing in Crosse’s The True Masonic Chart.

  • More on the Broken Column.
  • More on Time in Freemasonry.
  • More on Jeremy Cross at Phoenixmasonry.
  • More in the Symbols and Symbolism series.

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  • Time in Freemasonry
  • October 12, 2018
  • In "Featured"
  • The Broken Column
  • January 20, 2015
  • In "Featured"
  • What's on Freemason Information
  • September 13, 2016
  • In "Misc"

Filed Under: Featured, Symbolism, Video Tagged With: Freemasonry, hermetic, Symbolism, weeping virgin

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About Greg Stewart

A devoted student of the Western Mystery Traditions, Greg is a firm believer in the Masonic connections to the Hermetic traditions of antiquity, its evolution through the ages and into its present configuration as the antecedent to all contemporary esoteric and occult traditions. He is a self-called searcher for that which was lost, a Hermetic Hermit and a believer in “that which is above is so too below.” Read more about Greg Stewart.

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