Checkered pavement
A floor of black and white squares. Masons call it the Mosaic Pavement and read it as human life, checkered with good and evil.
Meaning
The Mosaic Pavement is one of the three ornaments of a lodge, with the Indented Tessel, a border around it, and the Blazing Star, in the words of the American monitors. George Thornburgh's 1903 monitor reads the pavement as human life, checkered with good and evil, and the border as the blessings and comforts that constantly surround us.
Origin and history
The monitors say the pavement represents the ground floor of King Solomon's Temple. Albert Pike, writing for the Scottish Rite in 1871, disagreed: 'there was no stone seen' in the Temple, whose floor was covered with planks of fir, and there is no evidence of such a pavement there. He added that in England the indented border anciently surrounded the tracing board, and that only in America was it put around the pavement.
Write in the Freemasons’ cipher
stringmash.comPigpen cipherThe grid cipher once used for lodge records, drawn from any text you type.Read next
- Next in Masonic symbolsRough and perfect ashlarsTwo blocks of stone, one rough from the quarry and one smooth and squared. Masons read them as a person before and after the work of self-improvement.
- The same shape in Taíno symbolsZemí (cemí)Zemí (or cemí) is the Taíno word for the spiritual force of a god or an ancestor, and for the carved figures of wood, stone or cotton it lived in. Groups in the Taíno movement today speak of cemís as ancestral guardians.
See also
Square and compasses, The letter G, All-seeing eye, Double-headed eagle, Boaz and Jachin, Level.
Sources
- Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason, George Thornburgh, 1903, approved by the Grand Lodge of Arkansas, Project Gutenberg, Entered Apprentice degree
- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Albert Pike, 1871, Project Gutenberg, Chapter I, Apprentice
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 25, 2026. How we research
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