Goblet d’Alviella Mausoleum

Court-Saint-Étienne is a municipality located 40 minutes by car south-east of Brussels. Upon entering the local cemetery, one monument clearly stands out among the other graves: a grey limestone mausoleum resembling an oriental temple. 

This mausoleum belongs to the Goblet d'Alviella family. Originally from Court-Saint-Étienne, this family is well known in Belgium: several members have distinguished themselves mainly in politics since the 19th century. When the municipality decided to create the current cemetery in 1885, Count Eugène Goblet d'Alviella seized the opportunity to create a mausoleum that paid tribute to his family. Being a Freemason, he asked the architect Adolphe Samyn (also a Freemason) to design the monument. The work of this Brussels architect, as short as it was prolific, is characterised by a wide variety of styles: Egyptian, Neo-Romanesque, Baroque. This mausoleum was built between 1886 and 1888 or 1889.

Eugène Goblet d'Alviella, who was a professor of religious history at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), asked the architect to incorporate the phrase ‘the one being with more than one name’ in gold letters on each side and in four different languages. This phrase appears in a virtually identical form in a text by Aristotle (in Greek), in the Vedas (in Sanskrit) and in a hymn in honor of Ammon (in Egyptian). On the outer faces of the monument's columns, we can see symbols representing or designating the main deity in a dozen religions. On the inner sides of the columns, there are symbolic representations of life, death and the afterlife, again from a dozen different religions.

Through this iconographic choice, Eugène Goblet d'Alviella wanted to highlight the elements common to all religions. This is a symbolic representation of a fundamental characteristic of Freemasonry: the desire to create a space where all people are equal and can engage in dialogue. The borrowing of architectural details from many cultures and eras can also be seen as reinforcing this desire for universal equality. There are few historical monuments relating to Freemasonry in Belgium. With its unique eclectic architectural style, the Goblet d'Alviella Mausoleum is unrivaled.