Barry Imber Grand Lecturer glect@grandlodgens.org 2006-08-13

Difference between Emblem and Symbol What is a symbol? What is an emblem? When should one be used and when the other? Or is there really no difference? These are questions that must often arise in the minds of the Mason, and an answer would point out that the difference is not always clear in a specific instance, and some things at one and the same time are both. The word “emblem” is derived from the Greek word en, in or into, and ballien , to cast, or put, so that emblem meant literally to “cast in”, and was applied to inlaid work, mosaic, to raised or indented pottery, and so on. Most of the designs thus used were conventional, formal, and often geometrical; in the course of time “emblem” came to be applied to the designs themselves, and in this manner came at last to mean some idea or intellectual conception represented by a picture or pattern. Thus the Greek key design – also called “fret”. Or “meander” – was the emblem of a river; the eagle used on the American silver dollar is an emblem of the United States. In other words, the fact or object is represented by a design or picture instead of a word. Thus the hour-glass is an emblem because a picture of it says the same thing as “time”. “Symbol” also is from the same Greek root ballein, but the prefix, the Greek sym, means “together” instead of “in”, hence a symbol originally signified two designs, patterns or pictures matched together. A symbol, therefore, means that one thing stands for (or means) some other thing. A pen is the symbol of literature because the writing instrument is made to represent the book that is written. In one essential, “symbol” and “emblem” differ widely. For whereas an emblem is little more than a name in picture form: a symbol is itself an instance of that which it represents. An elephant is used as the emblem for the Republican party, a mule for the Democratic, but neither animal as such plays any part in politics; its selection for emblem purposes was accidental or arbitrary. The pen, on the other hand, is itself used in the process of writing a book, and since that process is highly significant it is made to stand for everything else in the production of literature. As stated above, a symbol is itself an instance of that which it represents. An emblem is not. The New York Masonic Outlook: October 1938