a primordial record of sacred science, hidden from the profane world, awaiting rediscovery by initiates who, like Hermes, can read the language of the stars and the stones.
The story of the two pillars found by Hermes originates from early Masonic and Hermetic lore, and ultimately from medieval and late–antique traditions about the preservation of sacred knowledge before the Flood. The account in the Cooke Manuscript (ca. 1390), one of the oldest known Masonic documents, integrates this myth into the legendary history of geometry and the liberal sciences.
According to the Cooke Manuscript, the antediluvian patriarchs—often identified as the sons of Lamech or the descendants of Adam—had discovered and systematized the sciences. Fearing that divine retribution (the Flood or a consuming fire) would destroy the world, they inscribed all their wisdom upon two great pillars, so that their knowledge would survive the coming catastrophe.
One pillar was made of marble, which could not be destroyed by water; the other of latres (later interpreted as brick or brass), which could not be destroyed by fire. After the Flood, Hermes the philosopher—identified with Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Egyptian sage and revealer of the Hermetic arts—was said to have discovered these pillars and recovered the knowledge inscribed upon them. From this rediscovered wisdom, the sciences, including geometry and architecture, were restored to humankind.
This motif has ancient precedents. Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews, I.2.3) recounts that the children of Seth, foreseeing destruction by fire and water, erected two pillars to preserve their discoveries in astronomy.
Early Christian and Islamic commentators preserved similar legends. Medieval writers, reading these through the lens of Hermeticism and Biblical genealogy, made Hermes or Enoch the postdiluvian discoverer and transmitter of the antediluvian wisdom. Thus, Hermes became the archetypal restorer of divine science—the bridge between the lost primordial knowledge and the re-civilized world.
In the Masonic tradition, the story serves two symbolic purposes. The two pillars embody the endurance of sacred truth through cataclysm, and Hermes personifies the recovery and transmission of that truth through reason and initiation. Later Masonic symbolism absorbed this legend into its own architectural language: the pillars Boaz and Jachin at Solomon’s Temple echo the same idea of dual foundations—one of strength, one of stability—standing as gateways through which the initiate passes toward the Light.
The legend of Hermes and the pillars expresses the continuity of divine wisdom across ages, from the pre-Flood sages to the builders of temples and cathedrals, framing Freemasonry as a modern inheritor of the ancient Hermetic and Sethian sciences.
Two Pillars: Two spiritual lineages
- West and East
Or two halves of the spiritual path
- right hand
- left hand
Surrender or Work,……
one enduring the purgation of fire (spirit, revelation), and the other enduring the deluge of water (matter, dissolution). Their dual composition embodies the eternal preservation of truth through the elemental cycles of destruction and renewal,
The Sethite pillars legend originates with the Antiquities of the Jews (Book I, 2:3) by the historian Flavius Josephus in the first century CE. Josephus recounts that the descendants of Seth, son of Adam, were righteous and deeply learned in the celestial sciences. They foresaw that the world would one day be destroyed—either by fire or by water—and so, to preserve their discoveries, they inscribed all their wisdom upon two great pillars:
- One of brick (or “latres,” later interpreted as metal or brass), which could not be consumed by fire.
- One of stone (or marble), which could not be destroyed by water.
When later ages arose after the Flood, these pillars remained, serving as testimony to the ancient wisdom. Josephus adds that one of them “stands to this day in the land of Siriad,” usually understood as Egypt, the mythic “land of the sun” and birthplace of the Hermetic sciences.
This story became a foundational myth of Hermeticism, Kabbalistic theosophy, and Freemasonry, interpreted as the origin of the “perennial wisdom”—the idea that divine knowledge survives every cataclysm, hidden in symbolic form until rediscovered by a new age of seekers.
In later Hermetic literature (especially Arabic Hermetica), Hermes Trismegistus was said to have found the Sethite pillars after the Flood, deciphered their inscriptions, and thus became the restorer of the sciences—astronomy, alchemy, geometry, and theology.
Islamic tradition identifies Hermes with Idrīs, the prophet-scribe mentioned in the Qur’an, who was “raised to a high place” and taught the knowledge of the stars. In some Christian esoteric writings, Hermes is equated with Enoch, who “walked with God” and recorded the secrets of heaven before the Flood.
In Masonic lore, the myth appears again in the Old Charges (e.g., the Cooke Manuscript, c. 1390). There, the story is Christianized and applied to the lineage of the liberal arts and architecture. The craftsman Hermes (sometimes “Hermes the father of wise men”) discovers the pillars and thus transmits geometry and the sacred sciences to humanity anew. This became the prototype for the Masonic myth of the preservation of the secret wisdom—the “Word” that survives destruction and must be rediscovered through initiation.