Ancient Craft Masonry purports to aspire to the symbolism of the 'Lost Word' and is, allegedly engrossed in a quest for it's rediscovery. Yet there seems to be a lack of explanation throughout the many rituals of the craft. So what is this 'word' and why is it so important?

Linguists have observed that language does not come all at once, but develops over a period of time. Words are given life by man and each carries with it an electromagnetic bar-code, different to and significant to each and every word. Some of these codes, expressed emotionally, ferment hatred and revenge, while others embrace love, sacrifice, hope, joy, agony, fear etc.

So what has this got to do with the quest? Human instinct coupled with the egocentric nature of Man makes 'self-preservation' his first law of nature. Such instincts have led Homo sapiens to leave their caves and go forth into the world to eventually organize social governments and even attempts at Democracy. But true Democracy has been lost since Solon's days, as has the word, the quest of the Masons.

It is not so much the word itself but what it represents to humanity that makes it so very important. It is believed that this word, or electromagnetic bar-code, can awaken in Man a consciousness - a link back to a time when religions, such as that of the Kemetian (Egyptian) deity, Maat, evoked natural law and order in society to prevent the universe from falling into chaos.

Herein lies a clue as to the nature of this missing word and the purported quest of the Freemasons. Another clue is constituted in the first two lines of a Babylonian hymn, discovered on a 5,000 year old clay tablet. It came from the great wisdom of an ancient religion that celebrated the might and power of the word. To these people the word was 'Aum'. Pronounced €oom€, it is purported to be the oldest omnific name of God, who or whatever we intuit that to be.

Aum is the sound that needed no cause. It can be reasoned to represent the nous of the ancient Greeks and, recently, Higgs Boson, the so-called €God Particle€ of modern physics. However, mystics and ancient sages have recounted their experience of this singular energy, which can manifest in our hearing awareness as a quiet, high frequency vibration around and within everything that exists.

In Sanskrit, the word is described as the 'Unstruck Sound'. This understanding separates Aum from all other sounds, which need at least two elements at play to cause them. Every sound within our hearing range is caused by things, whether visible or invisible, striking each other, as the hammer and the anvil in the middle ear. Created waves of air molecules, caused by this percussion, pulse into the inner ear to be interpreted, by the brain, as sound. Joseph Campbell likened this unstruck vibrations, which is constant and infinite, to the unheard humming of atoms and molecules - The Music of the Spheres of Platonic Ethics.

This missing word, the unstruck sound, is the electromagnetic bar-code of primal energy, the Greek Nous. Anaxagoras was the first Cosmologist to explain the concept of 'Nous' which he saw to be an uncaused whirling force that acted upon primeval particles to create worlds. Plato added ethics to the Nous with his concept of worlds creating other worlds in infinite space.

The ancients have it that the audible sound that is closest to the unstruck vibration is the syllable 'Om'. It is said that this ancient mantra is comprised of four elements. The first three 'A', 'U', and 'M' are vocalised. Whereas the fourth, unheard, sound is the silence, the space between the beginning and the end of each round. This is where the Om is brought into being. This is the missing word of the Mason's quest.

It can be reasoned that Freemasonry is mostly indebted to the Hebrews for the legend of The Lost Word. Words are either names of things or aspects to do with that name. The meaning of names was most important to the Jews, who saw names to be personality descriptions of those who were so named. For example Joseph meant 'increaser' and Moses, 'drawn from water'. Israel, a combination of 'Isis', 'Ra' and 'El', meant 'Prince of God.' As these Old Testament writings are taken from the Babylonian tablets, which, in turn, were copied from the earlier Sumerian cuneiform writings. Therefore the Mason indebtedness to the knowledge of the word, must be extended to the ancient Sumerians, from whence the Biblical Old Testament came.

The third commandment allegedly delivered by Moses from Mount Sinai, stated, 'Thou Shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God in vain.' The Jews took this very seriously in deed. Blasphemers were put to death. Only the high priest was permitted to use the word (name of God) and then, only once a year, on the day of atonement. And even then in the holy of holies, accompanied by beaten cymbals and the blasts of trumpets, so as to completely extinguish the sound of the human voice. Such were the extremes of secrecy and sanctity with which the Jews enshrouded the name of God.

This also showed a dogmatic power-play that went totally against the ethics of the word, the infinite unstruck vibration that is free to be experienced by all, without priestly tyranny. All that was ever seen of the Hebrew 'word' was JHVH, the four energy vibrations of the Tetragrammation, the symbolic name of God, which made hardly any sense to anybody.

According to Biblical interpretation, Babylonian captivity left the Hebrews without a High Priest, the sole custodian of the word. With the end of that captivity, priests and scribes began a search for the lost name, a quest that has met with failure for around two thousand five hundred years. Yet, in Ionia at that time, Anaxagoras had his theory of the 'Nous' the intelligent universal mind, which he saw to be an innate property of every single atom. It is with some curiosity that the writer mentions the word 'atom' is also 'at-Om', linking the work of both the Greek and Vedic atomists.

As the Hebrews had the Enigmatic consonants JHVH it can be reasoned that the missing 'word' comprised of vowel vibrations. After the Captivity nobody could supply the sounds of the vowels to balance the Chaos with Order. The Maat religion went some way to achieving this but the Hebrew religion did not. It is believed by some members of the craft that this four-lettered name of God, with the vowel sounds is the Lost Word of Masonry today.