This article is taken from the August 2021 issue of Fraternal Review titled, “The Matrix and Freemasonry”.
The word matrix is of Latin origin and refers to a female animal used for breeding. If we think along these lines, we can see that escaping the Matrix is essentially escaping the womb of our mother. Only by clearing the embryonic fluid from our lungs and eyes and unplugging the umbilical cord, or cable-tow, can we be reborn in a different world.
SYMBOLISM IN THE MATRIX
In the beginning scenes of The Matrix, we watch Neo retrieve a program from inside a book. That book was Simulacra and Simulation by French intellectual Jean Baudrillard. In the movie, the book serves as a sort of womb for the program. This meta symbolism is among the deepest in the entire film. It is also among the most overlooked.
MATRIX AND THE WOMB
In his treatise on the nature of reality, Baudrillard writes the following: “Clones. Cloning. Human cuttings ad infinitum, each individual cell of an organism capable of again becoming the matrix of an identical individual. In the United States, a child was born a few months ago like a geranium: from cuttings. The first clone child (the lineage of an individual via vegetal multiplication). The first born from a single cell of a single individual, his “father,” the sole progenitor, of which he would be the exact replica, the perfect twin, the double.
Dream of an eternal twining, substituted for sexual procreation, that is linked to death. It is a cellular dream of scissiparity, the purest form of parentage, because it finally allows one to do without the other, to go from the same to the same (one still has to use the uterus of a woman, and a pitted ovum, but this support is ephemeral, and in any case anonymous: a female prosthesis could replace it). Monocellular Utopia which, by way of genetics, allows complex beings to achieve the destiny of protozoa.”
LODGE AND THE WOMB
If we reflect on Freemasonry, we can see that the Craft itself is a type of womb or, more specifically, that “female prosthesis.”
To begin with, we call the Lodge we are “raised” in our Mother Lodge. Our first entrance into this Lodge can be seen as a symbolic birth into a new world. We start in darkness, clothed in white, travel through a narrow passage into an inner chamber, and eventually, after three trimesters, we completely open our eyes.
I used to think that this process was symbolic of birth, but now I see it more as conception. After our first entrance into the Lodge, or egg, our three degrees serve as an incubation period for our eventual spiritual rebirth.
The Master of the Lodge acts as a doctor, or midwife, as he assists us in this process. Only this time, our death is actually our conception. After three trimesters of disintegration of skin, flesh, and bone, we are reborn into a new life without a body.
The candidate is, in the words of Baudrillard, “The first born from a single cell of a single individual,” and the Master is “‘his father,’ the sole progenitor, of which he would be the exact replica, the perfect twin, the double.” Likewise, each Masonic Lodge serves as its own “Nebuchadnezzar,” broadcasting the illuminated minds of its crew into the Matrix to free the minds of other humans.
Having been brought to life in this fashion, it is now the choice of every Mason to decide whether he trades the womb of the world for the womb of the Lodge. Whether he stays in the warm security of his Mother Lodge, or is returned to the place whence he came, to lead others to his newly found light.
Written by Michael Jarzabek