How do the steps in the Craft and Royal Arch degrees align with solar movements?

Movements within the lodge, including circumambulation, follow the course of the sun 3. Lodge officers take and vacate their stations as the sun returns to and departs from the East, reflecting the diurnal solar circuit 3. Arthur Edward Waite notes that candidates in the Craft degrees perform circumambulations around the lodge following this sunwise direction, a practice early commentators explained as representing humanity's journey from ignorance to enlightenment 3. Walter Leslie Wilmshurst similarly reads the cardinal points of the Craft lodge symbolically, associating the South with the sun's meridian height, representing the apex of intellectual power, while the East represents spiritual intuition 1.

Regarding degree allegories in the Craft, Jaime Paul Lamb provides an astro-solar reading of the Master Mason degree, interpreting the raising of the Master Builder by the lion's paw as an astronomical metaphor for raising the anthropomorphized sun from a dead level to a living perpendicular, returning it to its zenith at High Twelve during the summer solstice 2.

In Royal Arch Masonry, solar alignment is expressed through the four fixed signs of the zodiac—Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius—represented on Royal Arch banners by an ox, lion, eagle, and man 2. Calculating from the Masonic chronology of Anno Lucis, which aligns with the historical Taurian Age, the equinoxes and solstices inhabit these four fixed signs 2. Under this precessional framework, the summer solstice occupies the house of Leo at the Keystone of the Royal Arch of the Heavens 2. On nineteenth- and twentieth-century Royal Arch tracing boards, this solstitial placement is updated to the sign of Cancer to reflect modern tropical calendrical alignment 2.