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Tree of Life - Jean Marie Ragon

terrabyte

Registered User
I came across this web page that used to sell a poster of a Tree of Life, created in 1815.
  • The design incorporates the names and passwords of the degrees of the Scottish Rite of thirty-three degrees and the French Rite of seven degrees.
https://bit.ly/3iSIZpX

Has anyone come across this specific picture before? Which book of his it might be in? The image is too small to read, and I only found one other snapshot of it online (below), also too small to read. I would love to be able to see what correspondences that were made to the sephirot & paths, if any.
th
 
Last edited:

terrabyte

Registered User
Update! Success!

Thanks to some extra information from Brother Arturo de Hoyos, I was able to find a great copy online from a French Museum. It turns out that the key was knowing the actual artist of the lithograph. (Seems obvious after-the-fact!)

Here is the web page I found it at:

Unfortunately, if you want to zoom in and see details, you can only see a fraction of it at a time. I took screen shots and assembled it into 1 full picture here:
Download Link

This and more is hosted at the "Bibliothèque nationale de France". Here is their full online Masonic display. LOTS of pictures & history to explore:

Here is the letter from Brother AdH:

Following below is the description I wrote, when the posters were available in 2009.

“A Masonic Tree of Life”

This engraving was produced for the “Loge des Trinosophes,” founded c. 1815 at Paris by the prolific French masonic author Jean Baptiste Marie Ragon (1781–1862). Ragon was considered by his contemporaries to have been “the most learned Freemason of the 19th century,” and the Loge des Trinosophes was his elementary system of “de-bible-ized” and “de-Solomon-ized” Masonic instruction, organized under the auspices of the Grand Orient of France.[1] The design, incorporating the names and passwords of the degrees of the Scottish Rite of thirty-three degrees and the French Rite of seven degrees, was created and engraved by Bro. David Rosenberg in 1832. Bro. Rosenberg was also the creator of the allegorical lithograph, Le Miroir de la Sagesse (1834), and the author of the Explication du Tableau Maçonnique (1839),[2] which was used by the Rev. George Oliver in his Historical Landmarks of Freemasonry 2 vols. (1867). His best known work was his Explication of an engraving called The Origin of the Rites and worship of the Hebrews: together with remarks on creation, and a brief account of some Observances and their Symbolical Signification (1859),[3] a copy of which is in the Albert Pike Library at the House of the Temple. This latter work included a “Table of the Ten Cabbalistic Spheres in Their Mystical Order.”


It is believed that the purpose of this engraving was to serve as a “Tyler,” to be hung outside the lodge room and to act as a memory aid to members. The center of the design is the kabbalistic “Tree of Life,” and shows an attribution of the lodge officers to the Emanations of the Deity. It is surrounded by the wheel of the Zodiac sphere of the planets.
 

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