Luigi Visentin
Registered User
In Prichard's "Masonry dissected" this lenght appears in a fully different meaning:
"All this under no less Penalty than to have my Throat cut, my Tongue taken from the Roof of my Mouth, my Heart pluck’d from under my Left Breast, them to be buried in the Sands of the Seas, the Length of a Cable-rope from Shore, where the Tide ebbs and flows twice in 24 Hours, my Body to be burnt to Ashes, my Ashes to be scatter’d upon the Face of the Earth, so that there shall be no more Remembrance of me among Masons. "
It was indeed a part of punishment to indicate a ground not consecrated. It comes from a Middle Age belief that excommunicated persons could not be buried on the ground because the solid ground would have spit them out. A tidal plain was not solid ground and neither "sea", therefore was considered a good solution. In other words the crime or revealing something of Freemasonry was considered equal one o the crime which cause the Church to excommunicate a man.
"All this under no less Penalty than to have my Throat cut, my Tongue taken from the Roof of my Mouth, my Heart pluck’d from under my Left Breast, them to be buried in the Sands of the Seas, the Length of a Cable-rope from Shore, where the Tide ebbs and flows twice in 24 Hours, my Body to be burnt to Ashes, my Ashes to be scatter’d upon the Face of the Earth, so that there shall be no more Remembrance of me among Masons. "
It was indeed a part of punishment to indicate a ground not consecrated. It comes from a Middle Age belief that excommunicated persons could not be buried on the ground because the solid ground would have spit them out. A tidal plain was not solid ground and neither "sea", therefore was considered a good solution. In other words the crime or revealing something of Freemasonry was considered equal one o the crime which cause the Church to excommunicate a man.