What is the significance of the North being called a place of darkness?

Darkness in the North symbolizes the unilluminated world and profane ignorance, standing in contrast to the illumination of the East. The Grand Lodge of India notes that the lodge represents the world as it was understood in ancient times, featuring a dark North, a radiant East, a square surface, and a canopy of sky.

In *Introduction to Freemasonry: Entered Apprentice*, Carl H. Claudy explains that the North represents the darkness of profane ignorance 1. The Northeast corner is treated as the point of beginning because it sits midway between the darkness of the North and the light of the East 1. Standing in this position places an Entered Apprentice midway between the dark, uninstructed state and the full light found in the symbolic East 1.

The tradition that the North represents a place of darkness originates in part from natural solar phenomena in the Northern Hemisphere, where the sun moves through the East, South, and West in its ecliptic path, leaving the northern side of buildings in shadow at meridian height, according to the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction. Ritualistic explanations build upon this by describing the orientation of King Solomon's Temple, which was constructed so that the sun's rays at meridian height could not enter a window on the north side, as the Grand Lodge of Texas notes.

This architectural and astronomical symbolism draws on ancient pre-Masonic folklore and churchyard customs, where the north side of a church was traditionally associated with darkness and desolation and consequently avoided for burials, as the Grand Lodge of Texas explains. The 1726 *Graham Manuscript*, an early Masonic catechism, shows this tradition carried directly into early operative and speculatively oriented practice, recording that because Masons live in the northern part of the world and do not bury their dead on the north side of churches, they leave a vacancy on the north side of their lodges, according to the Grand Lodge of Texas.

Within philosophical interpretations of the Craft, Walter Leslie Wilmshurst characterizes the North as the sphere of benightedness, sense-impressions, and physical sense-nature, forming the lowest point in a fourfold progression of consciousness that moves through reason in the West and intellectuality in the South toward spiritual intuition in the East 2.