On the past 29th of November 2025, in yet another event sponsored by the Portuguese National Grand Lodge (GLNP), active member of the Association of Masonic Architecture and Heritage (AAPM), more than four dozen visitors lined up before the iron gate of the Prazeres Cemetery.
The light mist that hovered over Lisbon seemed to guard, with ancient discretion, the silence of the centuries.
The grounds opened before them like a book of stone, where each page is written with marble and memory.
As they crossed the long corridor of cypresses, trees that time adopted as guardians of the dead, they walked towards the monumental Mausoleum of the Dukes of Palmela.
The pyramid, with its severe columns and the chequered pavement that leads to the portico, rose before the visitors like a true symbolic temple.
The geometry erected there recalls, to those who know how to see, the eternal tension between Light and Darkness, Life and Death, Earth and Spirit, the primordial dialectic engraved in funerary architecture.
Proceeding through narrow galleries, they reached the mausoleums of more reserved symbolism, erected between the thirties and fifties, when Masonic expression required discretion.
There, veiled triangles, geometric stone arrangements, suggested shafts of light and discreetly patterned pavements revealed to the visitors the silent language of Tradition, the symbolic presence hidden from the profane eye, yet evident to those who know the alphabet of symbols.
The visit then led them to the tomb of Sarah de Mattos, whose gravestone, profoundly marked by meaning and tragedy, awakened intimate reflections among all.
The engraved figures, the radiant Delta, the compasses and the square, the endless vegetal crown, the wounded rose, compose a symbolic language that challenges the conscience and summons greater values, Justice, Truth, Memory.
That space does not tell only a story of sorrow, it silently calls upon the ethical responsibility of the living before those who have already departed.
As they walked along other avenues, sombre angels, winged hourglasses, eternal flames and discreet geometries revealed to the visitors the continuous presence of a spiritual language that crosses the century and perpetuates itself in Stone.
Each one interpreted the signs in his or her own way, in an intimate dialogue with the past and with one’s own interiority.
At the end of the visit, gathered in an inner courtyard, under the oblique light of the late afternoon that projected itself upon ancient marbles, they gathered in a brief silence.
Not an empty silence, but a silence full of the echo of everything the stone had told them.
There, among tombs and cypresses, each visitor recognised, without the need for words, the importance of memory, continuity and reflection in the Initiatic path.
They left the cemetery certain that the visit had ended only on the physical plane.
What each one carried with them, the reading of the symbols, the vibration of the place, the silent communion with history, will remain as a fragment of Light for the journey ahead.