In our Twentieth Century America, the word "industry" denotes
manufacturing and factories classified as heavy industry and light
industry; and connote machines and factory workers. When the Beehive is
said to be an emblem of industry the word is not used in that sense,
indeed, is used with an almost opposite meaning-for it is used in the
sense of centuries ago, which was the true sense.
Industry was the employment of a very large number of men, tens of
thousands in many instances, on one undertaking at one place and at the
same time, and they might or might not use machinery. It was the method
by which in the ages before heavy machinery vast building enterprises
were accomplished, some of which have so long mystified modern men, the
building of the pyramids, of the ancient Egyptian canals, of the hanging
gardens of Babylon, of the Ziggurats, of vast Hindu temples, of the
Chinese Great Wall and Grand canal of the Mayas' City of Chichen-Itza,
etc. the same method by which in World War II the Burma and Ledo roads
were constructed as well as great airfields in the remote hills of
China; and the method by which from Caesar's time until modern times the
Dutch have built their hundreds of miles of dykes. The Beehive is the
perfect emblem, or typical instance of the power of industry, because
what no one bee'or succession of separate bees could accomplish is easy
where hundreds of them work together at one task at one time.
The Medieval Freemasons did not study and think about ¨he same
subjects that architects and builders now except in fundamentals, did
not secure the elements of a building ready-made from factories, had no
steam or electric or magnetic tools to use; chemistry and physics were
forbidden sciences, and could be studied by the initiate only in secret
or under a heavy camouflage of symbolism. They had two great subjects:
materials and men. A modern architect knows far more about materials
than the Medieval builder because he has universities, literature,
laboratories, and factories to draw on; but he knows far less about men,
indeed, he knows almost nothing about men.
Where a modern builder looks to machines as the means to accomplish
his results, the Medieval builder who had no power-driven machines had
to look to men. For this reason the Medieval builder knew far more about
work than his modern counterpart because work is nothing other than a
man making use of himself as a means to get something made or produced
or accomplished. Where a modern foreman thinks of himself as a
supervisor of a building full of machines the Medieval foreman thought
of himself as a Master of workmen. By the same token a workman had to
know himself, instead of a machine, because he was his own machine.
Skill is the expert use of one's self.
It was for such reasons that Medieval Freemasons thought much about
and had a wide knowledge of the forms of work. There are some fifty-two
of these.
Industry itself is one of them, the most massive and most dramatic,
but not the most important. Where a man makes everything by himself from
the raw materials to the finished product, is another. Where a number
of men work in a line at the same bench and where the first does one
thing to the "job, " the second does another, and so on until the "job"
is completed by the last man, so that it is the job and not the men who
move, is another form of work. Where one man completes one thing,
another, perhaps in another place, completes another, and so on, and
where finally a man combines a number of completed things to make one
thing, is another form of work; etc., etc.
The general organization of a Lodge is based on the principle of
forms of work; so are the stations and places of officers. Though as an
emblem of the form of work called industry the Beehive symbolizes only
one in Particular it at the same time represents the system of forms of
work, is, as it were, an ensemble of them; and from it a sufficiently
well-informed thinker could think out the system of Masonic Philosophy.
In our Craft the whole of fraternalism is nothing other than the
fellowship required by the forms of work, because the majority of them
require men to work together in association, in stations and places, and
therefore in co-operation.
It is strange that in its present-day stage of development the so-called
science of economics should concern itself solely with such subjects as
wages, machines, money, transportation because these are but
incidentals and accidentals. Work is the topic proper to economics; and
the forms of work are its proper subject-matter. Any scholar or thinker
who chances to be a Mason could find in his own Fraternity a starting
point for a new economics, as fresh and revolutionary and revealing as
was the work of Copernicus in astronomy, of Newton in physics, of Darwin
in biology. A beehive itself is a trifle, and scarcely worth ten
minutes of thought; what it stands for is one of the largest and most
important subjects in the world, and up until now one of the least
understood.
Source: Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry
http://www.masonicdictionary.com/beehive.html
