The Blazing Star

Documented origin

The Blazing Star is one of the most prominent furnishings of the Masonic lodge, a five-pointed star set at the center of the mosaic floor or suspended from the ceiling above it. Masonic ritual manuals document its central place in lodge instruction from the eighteenth century; Avery Allyn’s A Ritual and Illustrations of Freemasonry (1831) records it as a standard working symbol of the Craft. The affiliated Order of the Eastern Star — formalized in the mid-nineteenth century by Rob Morris — adopted the same five-pointed star as its governing emblem, with one point downward and each point assigned a biblical heroine and a symbolic color.

The reading

Éliphas Lévi taught that the Blazing Star is the pentagram of the microcosm — “the sign of intellectual omnipotence and autocracy,” the figure of the perfected human being whose five points correspond to the four elements crowned by spirit. Manly P. Hall reads the star as the emblem of divine intelligence at the heart of the Craft — the hidden light toward which the initiate orients all work and conduct. The astrotheology tradition that Hall draws on also links the Blazing Star to the star Sirius, the heliacal rising of which marked the Egyptian new year and the annual inundation of the Nile — the brightest fixed star made a lodge symbol.

Where it hides today

Blazing Stars appear on lodge floors and ceilings from Edinburgh to Buenos Aires. The Eastern Star’s reversed five-pointed star is among the most widely distributed fraternal emblems in North America — on rings, pendants, and chapter buildings. The shape the tradition insists is a symbol of light appears wherever the Craft marks its presence.