It is a symbol of divine truth.

The search for it was also made by the philosophers and priests in the
Mysteries of the Spurious Freemasonry.

LOTUS.  The sacred plant of the Brahminical Mysteries, and the analogue of the acacia.

It was also a sacred plant among the Egyptians.

LUSTRATION.  A purification by washing the hands or body in consecrated water, practised in the ancient Mysteries.  See Purification.

LUX (light).  One of the appellations bestowed upon Freemasonry, to indicate that it is that sublime doctrine of truth by which the pathway of him who has attained it is to be illumined in the pilgrimage of life.  Among the Rosicrucians, light was the knowledge of the philosopher’s stone; and Mosheim says that in chemical language the cross was an emblem of light, because it contains within its figure the forms of the three figures of which LVX, or light, is composed.

LUX E TENEBRIS (light out of darkness).  A motto of the Masonic Order, which is equivalent to “truth out of initiation;” light being the symbol of truth, and darkness the symbol of initiation commenced.

M

MAN.  Repeatedly referred to by Christ and the apostles as the symbol of a temple.

MASTER MASON.  The third degree of Ancient Craft Masonry, analogous to the epopt of the ancient Mysteries.

MENATZCHIM.  Hebrew superintendents, or overseers.  The Master Masons at the temple of Solomon. (2 Chron. ii. 2.)

MENU.  In the Indian mythology, Menu is the son of Brahma, and the founder of the Hindoo religion.  Thirteen other Menus are said to exist, seven of whom have already reigned on earth.  But it is the first one whose instructions constitute the whole civil and religious polity of the Hindoos.  The code attributed to him by the Brahmins has been translated by Sir William Jones, with the title of “The Institutes of Menu.”

MIDDLE CHAMBER.  A part of the Solomonic temple, which was approached by winding stairs, but which was certainly not appropriated to the purpose indicated in the Fellow Craft’s degree.

The legend of the Winding Stairs is therefore only a philosophical myth.

It is a symbol of this life and its labors.

MISTLETOE.  The sacred plant of Druidism; commemorated also in the Scandinavian rites.  It is the analogue of the acacia, and like all the other sacred plants of antiquity, is a symbol of the immortality of the soul.  Lest the language of the text should be misunderstood, it may be remarked here that the Druidical and the Scandinavian rites are not identical.  The former are Celtic, the latter Gothic.  But the fact that in both the mistletoe was a sacred plant affords a violent presumption that there must have been a common point from which both religions started.  There was, as I have said, an identity of origin for the same ancient and general symbolic idea.