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THE DOUBLE-HEADED EAGLE AND WHENCE IT CAME from Masonic Dictionary
By Bro. Arthur C. Parker, New York

Here is the type of article that makes glad the heart of an editor. With its lack of guesswork and with its wide-sweeping learning, it may well serve as a model and an inspiration to budding students. Brother Parker has recently completed an eight hundred page work on archaeology; when it is published we shall hope to review it in THE BUILDER. For some strange reason the two-headed eagle, for all its symbolical appeal, has seldomly attracted the attention of Masonic scholars. The most able treatment of it thus far has been the chapter in The Migration of Symbols by Count Goblet d'Alviela of Belgium; Brother Parker's own article loses nothing by comparison with that chapter. Indeed, it carries the symbolism back to a far earlier time, and embodies more recent information. A student who may care to launch out upon researches of his own will find, along with the present article, that the references in the Encyclopedia Britannica, are valuable; consult the index volume under Double-headed Eagle; also see the articles on Heraldry and Hittites. For a reliable but rapid survey of what is known of the Hittites see Jastrow's chapter on the subject in Exploration in Bible Lands, by Hilprecht (1903). See also Mackey's Encyclopedia, Vol. I., page 225; and Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, Vol. III, page 104.

THERE IS SCARCELY a symbol in any of the philosophical or chivalric degrees of the Scottish Rite so striking in design and import as that of the double-headed eagle...cont'd @ The Masonic Dictionary