The initiatic monogram (or trigram, but from now on I consider it as a symbol meant to be handled as a whole, for the monogram is unsuitable to be intended as disaggregated) isn't but that punctiform tripartition (.·.) so familiar to the Freemasons and by which they perform those abbreviations apparently meant to preserve and shelter the confidential nature of initiatic terminologies. You can thereby find curious expressions, and actually widely known also outside Freemasonry, such as:

W.·.M.·. for Worshipful Master
L.·. for Lodge
G.·.L.·. for Grand Lodge

Indeed the utility of these formulations rests also on the fact they allow Brothers to talk of masonic arguments in a crowded environment without fear that eavesdropping ears may clearly comprehend the topic of the dialogue. I myself took avail in an analogous circumstance (case in point: a public bar) of the locution WM not only to the effect that I could deal with an initiatic issue without others being aware of it, but even to the unexpected consequence of puzzling my interlocutor too, who, although a Free mason, was the first one who didn't catch immediately what I was referring to.
The reasons for this option do not repose on narcissism but merely denote a preference for a reserved attitude: subjectively, such preference may well be nothing more than a gratuitous choice, but as far as another Brother is concerned it has to be regarded as nothing short of a duty, because our partner may be utterly unwilling, for reasons it is not in my right even to argue let alone contend, to allow third parts learn his masonic affiliation/status from the context of the undertaken dialogue.
 

Fra Angelico: Angels Musicians, detail from The Virgin Of Humility, 1433

A great deal of authors have engaged their hermeneutic capabilities do decipher the meaning attached to the usage of a new peculiar symbol instead than ordinary typographical punctuations in order to achieve an effect that, after all, has also ordinary purposes of abbreviation: doesn't it sound a bit like reinventing the wheel?
In the trail of such interpretative efforts, we have arrived to spray around this symbol a whole glowing host of possible meanings, a few among them as much magniloquent as insipid, which stretched from suggestions that descried in the monogram an allusion to the catholic Holy Trinity, to others that made references to the far east Trimurti, to the Pythagorean legacies of the Institution and to the sacramental nature it bound to number 3, and even more interpretations we can find which saw in the monogram just a stylization of the edges of the triangle within which the all seeing eye is framed.
Needless to add that the three dots have also been described as nothing less than the "Pillars Of Wisdom": which solves nothing, for no one has a real clue about what they'd actually be... As a matter of fact, if we'd be to follow this stream, we could serenely maintain that the three dots are reminiscent of the three beats that the dead man speaking knocks on the table of the medium: and we'd still linger on the field of the plausible after all, and certainly within the realm of the esoteric, for quarterly numerology stems from the Kabbala: but we wouldn't be on masonic ground any longer, though.
 
All these specifications are therefore possible or partially true, none the less they're all spoiled by the same blemish: they do not let themselves being believed easily.
In fact they hint to a sublimation and to transfigurations so outstanding and remote that no one can really entertain them without feeling at the same time the grip and the pangs of a honest sense of embarrassment: for who could become so candidly and so easily persuaded that he is the peer of a favorite of the Divine Providence or an anointed of the Holy Trimurti? And believing that one is an anointed, the acolyte of an embrocated elite, most favored among the most favorite, does not only profile, unfortunately, a common misunderstanding of what the masonic status should entail (masonic works are called exactly works, not celebrations or epiphanies), but indeed it constitutes an idea remarkably counter-initiatic and un-masonic which is not acceptable and which as such should not go without some opposition and contrast.
Who can be persuaded out of humility that he is vested with the prerogatives of a most perfect and most refined Trimurti, when the wrecked way we die remembers us in a roaring fashion of the exact opposite of it, and does it day after day? I have a long list of dead, and none of them died nicely.
And who could be so conceited to be assured that so many merits one would have reaped given the way one led one's life, that one should come to believe that one has deserved or even accrued a right to such salaries, when considering without passion the failures, the weaknesses, the petty cowardices, and the more or less indispensable compromises we do collect in our existences?
Does anybody among us mortal really believe to partake in such exalted an apotheosis?
I don't.
 
Yes, all our mistakes were in good faith: would we dare contend? All our vices are venial: aren't they? All our compromises were essential: at that time we couldn't do otherwise, could we? No doubt we would invariably perorate the cause of their absolute necessity. None the less at least st. Augustine is not with us then:

«As for the paltry good and evils of this transitory world, these He allotted alike to just and unjust (...) However there is a vast difference between the manner in which men use what we call prosperity and adversity. A good man is neither puffed up by fleeting success nor broken by adversity; whereas a bad man is chastised by failure of this sort because he is corrupted by success (...) Though the good may not fear the wicked to the point of stooping, under intimidation, to their villainies and knavery, they often are unwilling to denounce such things (...) Here again they fear that a possible failure to effect reform might jeopardize their security and reputation. (...) hence this seems to me sufficient enough reason why the good are scourged with the wicked as often as it pleases God»

Therefore I'd say that the punctiform tripartition appears really clear in its recondite meaning under one fold alone: namely that it is not a mere abbreviation, but it is something more: it holds an identifying and distinctive value, and constitutes itself as a seal.
It establishes a chrism of identification, for its presence is paradoxically charged with the committment of openly betraying the masonic affiliation of its compiler: when spoken it may be implied, but when seen written, being not a mere punctuation, it releases the hint immediately. Undoubtedly, we're in the presence of an emblem, of kind of an heraldic escutcheon declaring the Army of the knight.
Therefore we're not just confining ourselves to curtail a term by its agencies, and we do not even just grant by its services the confidential nature of our communications (for I insist: to achieve that the mere three and traditional linear dots of suspension would have outlandishly sufficed: ...): on the contrary it seems that the monogram has been dispatched to convert the written speech, nearly to redeem and ennoble it, for the traditional allusive nature of an ordinary abbreviation is here missed and another overtakes it, and the latter oversteps the former by such wide a compass that the monogram nearly incinerates ordinary punctuation's roles on the spot. Beholding the initiatic monogram is not an experience that merely defers to the elided word, but which summons a masonic identity and that therefore must provide with indications about what such identity may be, about its configuration.
 
Of course, unless we want to argue that the monogram has been invented downright. In such case anyway whatever other glyph would have accomplished its duties as long as formal consent would have been reached on it: we could have therefore used ° or ÷ or § or ¾ or ± or µ ...
 
We have already marked here a coherent conclusion: the initiatic monogram must include a cryptographic instruction about what a Free mason is, namely about what his exemplary set up is, or should be, under a psychological point of view.
Which clears the field from the notorious "Three Pillars of Wisdom", and spares us the pindaric odyssey and torture of explaining where the fourth would have ended up...
 
The three masonic dots seem to transmit a hint which is as much obscure as it is drastic and lapidary, and about whose authority none the less we can't appreciate the exact standing yet.
If you imagine them imparted in a cadence of three distinct times, their scansion appears lightening, as if from the inception of the first one you'd already be anxiously expecting the climax of the third to appear. If you imagine them bestowed in an unique movement, as if they were a wax seal, it seems printed summarily and imperiously in a gesture alone, which inflicts to the speech the blockade of a cubic allusiveness, shipped to solve its whirlwinds definitely and to recapitulate in it an emphatic meaning.
It nearly looks like a princely decree: a dixi repeated thrice and upon these three times bolted crucified and then crowned: INRI.
Which marks a second conclusion if we give an eye to the templar elements of Freemasonry, for Christ was crucified with three and not with four nails: I mean we could suggest with much higher pertinence than "the three pillars of wisdom", that the three dots could have something to do with the concept of the crown of thorns, with the idea of a majesty that doesn't don helms studded with diamonds (should I remember that Freemasonry has almost always found itself at odds with Courts?), but which conversely lives within a contradiction between two polarities: spiritual value and temporal recognition.
 
However, uniquely this appears fully clear: the three dots cannot but allude to a position which is third in regard of some original situation which, being the latter now confronted with a third position, couldn't be but a binary one. Now the more typical juxtapositions where a third is called in can be:

• Fusion of the opposites.
• Mediation between two positions.
• The unilateral election of one among the original two (that is, the third isn't but the chosen among the two).

Alright, none of the above really suits our case, because standards are precisely what less resembles Freemasonry as an association with esoteric implications.
Moreover, if the fusion of the opposites would belong to the Emerald Table and therefore to an initiatic ascendency, none the less it would lead us once again to an incredible and not sustainable role because it would be quite analogous to those already rejected at the beginning of this treatise: namely that of defenders, and thereby holders, of a 'secret' so exquisite and high (you rarely get as high as the Emerald Table...) to collide sharply with a reality whose facts persuade us we master them not. Intermediation, on the other hand, would swing open so many gates to the squalid corrupting temptations that so often accompany compromises, that it is unfitting assuming it as the object meant and implied in such prestigious a precipitation like that which synthesizes and gives birth to an emblem: men that by choice fix things just as they can, by a makeshift, are a caricature; and they are in need of an heraldry only in satiric plays.
 
Therefore the third position may beckon only one last thing: the choice between two original opposite elements. And this is a third conclusion: the initiatic monogram provides us with hints about the identity of a Freemason stating that it is connoted by the fact he has undertook, at some point, a choice.
 
What choice? The authority of the chrism must therefore dwell and nourish itself upon the peculiar nature of this choice.
So arranged, the matter gets enriched with an implication: this choice may constitute a task, even a mission. It wouldn't be reasonable, in fact, assuming that this choice is already representing something secured and conquered, but it is more befitting assuming it is something that although chosen, still has to be attained. This corollary is not indispensable to my theory, but it provides me with a greater coherence with the conception of Initiation in Freemasonry. In Freemasonry you are not initiated because of a predilection for you: it is not a recognition in the sense of a reward (for what? For not being initiated yet?), but a recognition meant as supposed fitness to an enterprise; namely an entitlement to something which has to be still accomplished: in fact, we don't speak of 'ultim-ation' but of 'initi-ation'! It's a road that starts and that begins, not which closes.
 
None the less, as you perhaps have guessed or sensed, this choice cannot be an unilateral option for one or the other of the two opposite polarities, for if it would have been such we would have had no longer three dots, but one dot alone; maybe, arguably, centralized, namely like this · which would have preserved singularity enough to the abbreviation to maintain its emblematic implications.
But the fact that such is not our masonic monogram reveals that this is not the case, and that consequently the choice meant as a synthesis or as some one sided predilection for one of the terms is precisely what is turned down.
If we would have had one centralized dot alone, it would have meant either the good or the evil, and in such disjunctive perspective one of the two polarities would result discarded and therefore abrogated: we'd have had one dot alone, within which man would be distinguished for being either the holiest of the upright men or the most wrecked of the daemonic, luciferin ones: midnight in the Garden Of Eden, depending upon which polarity prevails. Nor the third dot can hint to a synthesis, as we said: for then we'd have had once again one centralized dot alone, within which man would stroll as the master of good and evil both. Which we are not.
 
Therefore the choice which is alluded must be a choice that was operated in a time subsequent the consummation of the above mentioned stages because all the three moments appear simultaneously present under the eye. You'd rather imagine a spirit unsatisfied both by an unilateral choice between good and evil, and by the egoistic gratification that you'd experience in the unification within a supreme Nirvana. In fact both good and evil (I use this polarity but I use it as a mere example: the reader could well swap it with a different one like Love and Hate, or Life and Death. Anyway, certainly not with Montecchi and Capuleti from, say, Shakespeare's Juliet and Romeo: for in Freemasonry you can discuss neither religion nor politics, you do not take political sides, and it is a tenet which is never condoned) persist being portrayed and rendered, and the third position, the third dot of the initiatic monogram, gets dislocated in an equidistant proximity with the other two and cohabits with them so to depict a type of third choice which has not eclipsed the original terms at all, but which on the contrary has fully respected and conserved the identities of the two native options.
 
Thus, the solution to our riddle consists in locating an instance of this type of choice: and such type would be the one prescribed to us by our monogram; we'd namely be Freemasons because we observe such type of choice (even if its contents have not emerged clearly yet) and not another type.

Does the initiatic monogram provide us with additional information that can facilitate us in a more precise definition of the fore mentioned choice? Affirmative, it does.
You just have to consider the different types of combinations in the spatial arrangements of the three dots: they could be four and only four:

1. .·.
2. ·.·
3. :·
4. ·:

Since our combination is the one I labeled as A, its implications alone are those that may relinquish information about the type of choice the monogram recommends; and the best way to enucleate this information is to infer in what the combination tagged A differs from all the rest.
 
It doesn't require any implausible effort: in A the two parallel dots seem to spring from the third, whereas in B they would appear as about to reflux within it; in C and D instead the ambivalence is total: the two parallel points (the 'columns' say) could spring forth or be about to plunge in the third.
Actually whatever of these combinations is fit to raise significant sets of pregnant interpretations. Therefore the fact that the masonic Tradition has prescribed and elected one alone (A) does not mean that the other ones would not have been endowed with enough masonic meaning; conversely, it would imply that among all the kits of meanings that were at disposal, the masonic Tradition invites us to cling to the specific implications of one alone among the whole of them: A.
 
It is possible, of course, to allege that symbolisms are chosen upon arbitrary grounds, and that thus any exegesis isn't but a solipsism deprived of any audience. None the less what I'm pursuing here is not an interpretation whatsoever, or an interpretation because a Lodge lecture demands it, but I'm after a plausible interpretation, an interpretation for men of a real world, not for unicorns.
You don't have to be an entered sorcerer, but you have to be a realist sorcerer. We could even dare say that the monogram has been casually adopted and that it withholds no metaphoric payload, but no one can realistically hypothesize that those who upon an immemorial time chose the symmetry A for Freemasonry weren't immediately presented with the obvious alternatives B C and D, or that they were obtuse enough to be even utterly unaware of them. And they chose A. Why? Possibly, even here by chance? But when so many fortuitous circumstances are crammed together so that they become statistically too many, it is more likely it is a plot than a chance, likewise it is true that a great deal of lies would end up putting you on the right track.
 
Of course it can be objected that in the symmetry A the two dots could be envisioned as about to plunge into the third, thus dashing upward. The reason I exclude this is puzzling in its simplicity: the monogram is a meta-language, namely a language that allows the conversion from an abstruse language (the esoteric) into a standard language (the human): I therefore believe it has been conceived to be understood by men, not to be misunderstood by them, for symbols are for men and not men for symbols.
Therefore the reading must be the most obvious one: from the sky to the earth. Our necessity to interpret it doesn't derive from the fact that the monogram would have been intentionally concealing its treasures, but from the fact that it has to condensate in an elliptic conformation a whole constellation of meanings which would be pretty unpractical if we would have been to redraw all of them in their extensive form every time we want to be mindful of them. Moreover in A the precipitation seems to be the most widespread one: the gravitational one. Which would hint at a situation that has to be necessary, universal, and natural: the choice the monogram refers to is therefore not a nomos, namely a norm that gets imposed on men by outside, but must be a cosmos, namely a norm that spontaneously blossoms from within as a natural arrangement of things when a supreme harmony guides us.
 
Consequently the monogram calls in a situation such that:

• it is without ambiguities, eternal.
• it implies a disclosing, not a concealing.
• being universal, it must be enforced everywhere: like gravitation, there are no oasis.
• represents a fact, not a human aspiration.

The two parallel dots seem to rain from the third: they do not converge, they depart: the meaning is therefore the one of a fission, not of a fusion. In alchemic terms, it is not a coagulation, it is a solution. The symbol is opening, not closing.
 

Angels ready to fight in a Guariento di Arpo painting: The Celestial Army, 1378

Therefore the choice which is alluded is a choice of intervention. And since it is imbued with an implacable nature because it gave up the alternative and more ambiguous versions C and D, its meaning is: in a situation whereas your choice shall be between to intervene or not to intervene, between appearing or withdrawing, your prescription as a Freemason is to intervene without hesitations, namely not even, but possibly especially, when you judge that your intervention may be doomed to failure and the mission appears: impossible.
Here indeed rests a reason to be proud.
When we draw the initiatic monogram, we commit the paper with the task of echoing this powerful commandment: since YOU chose to be a Freemason, THOU SHALL NEVER REFRAIN FROM ACTING, THOU SHALL NEVER TURN YOUR HEAD AWAY, THOU SHALL NOT STAND IDLE BY, even if the forces that face you are overwhelming, victory is invisible, and reward laughable. You'll make this choice, and you'll show up afield.
 
The sky is traditionally represented by a circle whereas the earth is represented by a square. Freemasonry employs exactly these symbolisms but instead than the circle and the square what does it use? The tools that are wielded to draw them. There is then little to do: whether you like it or not, or whether we realize it or not, the masonic Tradition demands pragmatic implications: adopting as a symbol an instrument instead than its abstract result is a clear clue in this direction.
 
Still one question: why Freemasonry prescribes this? Because there must be a reason that goes beyond the mere ethic implication. Freemasonry cannot be attempting here to rear an unlikely breed of titans. Men are weak. You cannot saddle them with a promethean burden with the fatally ensuing intention to humiliate them.
 
First of all, the indication is smooth: it commands to put the esoteric under the rule of the pragmatic commitment, it calls for an integration between these two dimensions. The esoteric should not conjure forces for its own glory, or for the trivial pleasures of a siddhi, of a personal power; no meaning is attached to an esoterica simply concerned with one's own hereafter salvation, or to an esoterica of king Midas, an esoterica for one's own personal interest, one's own faustian, terrestrial, sublunar stakes. Esoterica has a meaning exclusively if it is open to pragmatism, and is therefore at everybody's disposal, to the salvation of all. An esoterica for all: contradictory? I wouldn't say it at all, for among the four great votes of the Buddhist monk (an esoteric character indeed!) is:

«Regardless of how innumerable the living beings can be, I swear I shall save them. Regardless of how impossible to tame the passions can be, I swear I shall tame them. Regardless of how limitless knowledge can be, I swear I shall apprehend it. Regardless of how uncomparable the Truth of the Buddha may be, I swear I shall attain it.»

Should I stress that an initiatic choice is the same as a monk's vote, for its bond commits us in a nearly identical manner?
 
THOU SHALL INTERVENE WITHOUT HESITATION. Isn't this commandment terrible and grand? Exactly because it imposes an intervention as something which cannot be derogated, it is also ruling it as unconditioned, namely you don't undertake it only if the outcome is harmless for you; and there is no limit attached to competence: you cannot abstain from it because you regard yourself unfit:

« Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.» [Jeremiah]

It is, in a way, an allusion to a war. A war is being fought. This war is not a material one. This war is called life. Islam has a beautiful term for this conception, a wonderful term that got a bad name because as I often say the Koran is a profound book which rarely found men high enough for its depths. It is a war and therefore there must be somewhere an Army. Freemasonry is exactly set up as one of the Armies that are sent along to fight this battle, this horrendous war. For if this war is life, this is a war that exacts a toll of real victims. It is not a pic nic. It is not a stroll. It is not a sinecure: it is a memorandum for the real condition of real men who fight and die, and who die really not on the paper, in their every day life and also without any declared confrontation: as Tolstoi wrote: "Really death? Yes, really". Is really a war out there? Yes, it is really out there. But where is it engaged? Wherever. It's a world war, it's all out. In fact: really Life? Yes, really. Indeed.
 
Now, since in the initiatic monogram either the choice made by the freemason and both the two poles among which he chose, face each other and are all coexistent, the implication is that the adverse polarity is not presented inasmuch it would have been to be defeated and obliterated. If it were so, the fact that none the less its presence, the presence of the negative pole, is still in place despite the raging of the battle and of the defections and of the delations, should have been read not like an uncertainty about the success but should have been read as certainty about the failure: for how much you fight, nothing would be affecting it. But if so, why struggling. Isn't a farewell to arms better? Of course, only the pharisees get engaged exclusively when victory is certain, and only the lackey and the toady rush to relieve the winner.
 
But the reason both good and evil are coexistent doesn't insist on this ground. What is hinted is not the inanity of the efforts. What is hinted at is another shade, much more dramatic: realism. Evil, whatever it is, is not perennially present with its dot because it is unvanquishable, but because it is in the field with the whole of his might and stature. The Freemason, to be a Freemason, must be aware of the type of battle he's being called to fight: a battle where what dominates is Evil, the true Evil, folly, and where nothing is really granted, nothing is really safe -"safe, a word that in my business we never use" wrote Raymond Chandler- nothing is really mitigable, all the medals might be in memoriam, and nothing less than desolation, ignominy and abomination are to be his unique, sole, and authentic counterparts.
 
The choice of the Freemason is therefore the choice which demands his intervention in any circumstances, within an environment whose features are populated with the most violent traits that one can retrieve and recall.
 
The esoterica can work, and the intervention of the Freemason has a real meaning, only insofar as it evokes and copes with a realistic eschatology (escatos=elsewhere, and logos=discourse: namely a speech on the afterlife): namely as long as a Freemason's aim is not that of diluting the palmar iniquity of life withdrawing him/herself within the Chartreuse of Parma, but that of acknowledging the conditions of a world as it is, and not as it could be idealized: namely a world where he who delivers him(her)self to the doctrinal virtues and should win, wins nothing but a canonic kick in the butt; and he who is the wicked who should lose, it is perfectly pointless that you attempt to make him innocuous, for he has already robbed the casino and he is already sipping some excellent Pimm's at the Bahamas.
 
Blasphemy? But:

«My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath» [Job]

And we all know what Job said. We can misunderstand this how long as we prefer, but the conception of mutual help within Freemasonry derives, in its symbolic denotation, from the enormous dangers to which a Freemason is exposed in his Mission. For it is exactly in the nature of such missions that they regularly end badly for those who less deserved it.
 
So when in some meetings you'll see again that man, rest assured a Freemason most certainly, who elects to sit back in the gloom of the last row and with the concentrated melancholy of his silence he gapes at you, or lowering his eyes in muteness and perfectly still he listens, you shall remember that what compelled him to this was not the affected way of he who plays the enigmatic role of the man of mystery, of the man from the rain: but the unadvised urgency of this unconscious warrior Myth which none the less lives, which none the less palpitates, and which from within the midnight of his soul summons him to his desperate, and necessarily clandestine, mission.