Category: Other Authors

Freemasonry’s Relationship to Astronomy, Part of Solar and Astrological Symbolism in Freemasonry

On By jmjlevesqueIn Fre. Jaime Paul Lamb, VII, Other AuthorsLeave a comment

Throughout Freemasonry’s initiatory degrees and the accompanying lectures, explanations of the various sets of symbols are given which primarily constitute their moral and ethical interpretations. There are, however, several alternate keys of interpretation that may be applied to Masonic ritual and symbolism to great effect, yielding a greater insight into the Fraternity’s contextual history and wide range of derivational inspiration and influence. Among these alternate interpretive keys is the astrological. Freemasonry abounds with allusions to various celestial objects and phenomena in addition to allegorical content, unique to Masonic ritual, which can be understood to represent cycles such as the annual and diurnal solar circuits, planetary orbits and even axial precession.

There is a distinction made in Freemasonry between the Operative and the Speculative Crafts. The beginnings of Operative Masonry can be seen as early as the Neolithic Era [20]. It is here that we begin to see the earliest examples of edifices composed of quarried and worked stone. Many of these early structures betray an inordinately high level of geometrical and astronomical proficiency, particularly when considered in the context of the accepted cultural development of the period. When the application of geometrical principles in architecture becomes apparent, we can begin to trace the Operative origins of Freemasonry; most clearly evidenced by the conception and execution of megalithic structures in prehistory. Many of these edifices were oriented to astronomical events, such as the solstices and equinoxes, serving to further establish the irrefutable fact that these structures were conceived and raised in keeping with the […] Hermetic Principle of Correspondence.

We must then further consider the fact that this information was limited to the class of the architect and builder, among whom these practices had become trade secrets [21]. That these masons, with the probable addition of the priestly class and hierophants of the Mysteries, were in possession of the astrological keys that yielded the science of geometry (and the consequent arts dependent upon it) is incontrovertible when considered in light of their work. Thus we see the gradual stratification of a class of craftsmen who had designed and erected these ancient and astronomically-oriented structures in stone, many notable examples of which remain standing to this day, which is itself a physical testament to the quality of their workmanship.

The word geometry has its etymological roots in the Ancient Greek – γεωμετρία (geo “earth” and metron “measurement”). The fact that the word itself is referential to the measurement of the Earth is significant to our subject in that the only means by which the topography of the Earth may be terrestrially measured is in juxtaposition to the celestial sphere. Otherwise, the process of “Earth measurement” would be akin to measuring a ruler with the same ruler – one will always arrive at a 1:1 ratio. Bearing this in mind, it is difficult to say, conclusively, if the science of astronomy is dependent upon geometry, as it is inferred in a Lodge of Fellowcraft Masons, or whether geometry is, itself, an abstraction drawn from astronomical observation.

By marking the solstices, equinoxes and other sidereal phenomena, mankind gradually became able to gain a sense of space, time and the rhythms of the Earth. By extrapolating the accumulated data and the procedures used in the observance of astronomical events, he was able to apply this knowledge to other areas such as agriculture, navigation and architecture – i.e. the arts and sciences upon which human civilization is contingent.

Music: The Trauermusik

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That Mozart and other luminaries of his time, not least among them George Washington, should have been Freemasons is not surprising. Although secretive in their way – no small inducement to making governments suspicious of them – the Freemasons embodied the humanitarian principles of the Enlightenment, of universal brotherhood, of “light” (education, knowledge) versus “dark,” which is to say ignorance and bigotry.

The Austrian Empress Maria Theresa made Freemasonry illegal in 1764: the Freemasons were, to her mind, secret societies aimed at toppling “legal” governments, or at least the divine rights of emperors. The Emperor Joseph II lifted the ban, but in 1785, Joseph, the so-called liberal, decided that there were too many lodges in Vienna and decreed that the several should be reduced to a few, the more easily to be kept under his watchful eye. One result was the creation of the “Loge zur gekrönten Hoffnung” (Crowned Hope Lodge), which opened in 1786 and of which Mozart was a prominent member. (Leopold II, Joseph’s successor, re-imposed the total ban. Hitler and Stalin, not surprisingly, banned Freemasonry from their realms.)

What we know of Mozart’s Masonic activities is embodied in his music, of which the prime example is his opera Die Zauberflöte, which, in the words of David Mailton in The Compleat Mozart, “celebrates Masonic ideals of truth, brotherhood, and love”. Mozart composed several other ceremonial pieces for the lodges to which he belonged, including the Trauermusik (Funeral Music): a work of striking, profound dignity.

The score came into being in 1785, in response to the deaths on consecutive days of two of his lodge brothers. On November 17, 1785 the Trauermusik was performed at a double memorial service at the Crowned Hope Lodge. The score is, in fact, an arrangement of Mozart’s Meistermusik, for men’s voices, winds, and strings, written for another, non-funereal occasion a few months earlier.

The Trauermusik is scored for 2 oboes, clarinet, basset-horn, 2 horns, and strings, with two additional basset-horns and contrabassoon added for a second performance, which took place on December 9. The piece is in three interlaced parts: a dirgelike march, out of which emerges a stark chorale melody which is interrupted by convulsive stabs of brass and jarring harmonic shifts; and, finally, a coda which offers a relatively soothing finale to these five-plus minutes of anguished grandeur (Los Angeles Philharmonic, 2020).

– Herbert Glass, after many years as a columnist-critic for the Los Angeles Times, has for the past decade been the English-language annotator and editor for the Salzburg Festival.https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/2307/masonic-funeral-music

If

On By jmjlevesqueIn Other Authors, Rudyard KiplingLeave a comment

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son

Bro.. Rudyard Kipling

Reblog: Freemasonry in the Age of Woke

On By jmjlevesqueIn Christopher Hodapp, Other Authors, ReblogLeave a comment

There’s a disappointingly superficial piece on the Washington Post website today by feature writer Sadie Dingfelder about the George Washington National Masonic Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia. As I read it, I was immediately struck by a picture it paints of a growing number of Americans these days and how Freemasonry is seen by them.

Here are some excerpts from Dingfelder’s article, ‘Unlock the secrets of the Freemasons – or at least gawk at their strange costumes‘:

“Is it usually pretty quiet here?” I asked the person checking me in, who later turned out to be my tour guide.

“It can get pretty busy in the summer,” he replied. In warm months, busloads of Masons visit the memorial, he said.

“I must admit, I don’t know much about Freemasons,” I said, which prompted my guide to launch into a short history of the group.

“It’s basically a fraternal organization,” he concluded. “They do a lot of service and charity work.”

“Oh, so it’s like the Rotary Club, but with costumes and secret handshakes,” I said…

[snip]

The memorial also houses a museum of Masonic history, and we’d just arrived on a floor devoted to that when a muffled voice emanated from my guide’s walkie-talkie. He rushed off to fetch a late-arriving tourist, leaving me alone in a room full of creepy mannequins attired in the costumes of various Freemason subgroups and affiliated societies, including Shriners’ fezzes, Arabic-looking turbans, militaristic uniforms and one costume with a jeweled breastplate, an imitation of vestments worn by ancient Israelite priests.

I found this to be a fascinating glimpse into a less-woke era, but I was disappointed that I couldn’t find any explanatory text about why these groups of (I imagine) white men wore Middle Eastern-ish garb, and whether similar costumes are still used today.

Some of the Freemason costumes on display struck this reviewer as Orientalist,
militaristic or just plain strange.

Scattered around the mannequins were displays of random club ephemera — plus a few inexplicable objects, including a jaunty bobblehead doll of the controversial Christian figure Jacques de Molay, a monk who fought in the Crusades and was later sentenced to death. De Molay’s medieval order, the Knights Templar, inspired the modern-day Knights Templar — a Christian-focused subgroup of Freemasons, my guide explained after returning with a mysterious man in a trench coat…

[snip]

If I’m right, he’s an increasingly rare breed. Freemason membership has been in decline since the 1960s, according to a chart on display in the museum’s basement. “Civic life declined as people spent more time alone in front of a television or computer screen,” the accompanying text explains. Fair enough, but I’m betting that the Masons’ fraught racial history and continued exclusion of women have also contributed to their diminishing relevance.

I mention this because the Masonic memorial may be on its way to becoming just that: a memorial to a bygone organization, where powerful men once gathered to socialize, plan charitable work and wear Orientalist costumes. Perhaps a lot of this is best left in the past, but it seems to me — a person who spends way too much time alone, in front of a computer — that there’s something here worth bringing into the future.

The benefit of resources like LinkedIn is that you can go and find out about the background of people whom you otherwise don’t know at all, and Sadie’s profile yields a few items worth noting. She’s not a teenager or a college student — she graduated in 2001, so she’s in her mid- or even late-30s. Sadie’s a graduate of Smith College (a private liberal arts college for women only in their undergrad program), and she’s been working as a writer for the Post in the Washington D.C. area in various capacities for ten years. She lives and works in the very city that a lot of Masons (and even non-Masons) regard as one heavily influenced by Freemasons from the past, and (if you believe in such things) filled with Masonic symbolism even in the street map. TV producers of programs about Freemasonry are obsessed with the idea. So it surprised me a bit to see just how little knowledge or awareness of Freemasonry she seemed to have when she walked into the Memorial — and apparently, how little she had actually learned by the time she left. After touring the place, she declared that Freemasonry is little more than a bygone organization.

This isn’t a hit on Ms. Dingfelder, not at all. It’s a comment on how diminished we have become in the collective American psyche. I thought we had reached rock bottom in that regard back before novelist Dan Brown put Freemasonry back on the map in the early 2000s. Since those dark days, cable television has had loads of programs about Masonry. Stacks of factual, intelligent, and truthful books (including mine and Brent Morris’) got poured onto the market. Freemasonry worked its way into pop culture references like movies, music and TV shows. I had thought we had even turned a tiny corner and tipped the scales slightly back into our favor, at least as far as a basic awareness of Freemasonry was concerned.

Indeed, the Scottish Rite NMJ did a survey two years ago and discovered that a full 81% of respondents had at least heard of Freemasonry, even if they didn’t know what it was. But as I think back over the last five or six years now, and reflect on my own contacts with the public about it, I fear more people are even less aware of what Freemasonry actually is than in the 1990s. In that same survey, less than 30% actually knew what the values of Freemasonry were. And the most common question I get asked by non-Masons under 35 these days once I get my basic elevator speech out of the way is, “But just what is it that you guys DO? What’s the point?”

That shouldn’t be a shock, since we are about one generation removed from the 1990s. The adults in 1990 were having children at that moment in time, and we are now encountering those former infants as adults today. Already by 1990, Freemasonry had been waning, along with a raft of other social changes taking place then. By 1990, the fraternity was already down in membership by more than 30% from its 1958 height. It was blatant that the Baby Boomers had steered clear of Freemasonry, just as they had so many other so-called “Establishment” ideals of their parents. Organized religious attendance was decreasing. Divorce rates had skyrocketed. Childbirths were down substantially, and most concerning, single parent households (usually single moms) were taking a major upswing. It was into this period that today’s current Millennial adults now in their late-20s and 30s were born.

FT_Family_Changes

According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than half (46%) of American kids under 18 years of age are living in a home in 2018 with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage – what is quaintly called a traditional family household. This is a huge change from 1960, when 73% of children fit this description, and 1980 when 61% did. At less than 50% today, it’s certainly a dwindling tradition.

One of the most enormous shifts in family structure is this one: 34% of American children today are living with an unmarried parent—up from just 9% in 1960, and 19% in 1980. In most cases, these unmarried parents are single, without a live-in partner of any kind to help raise and educate the children.

When I wrote Freemasons For Dummies in 2004, there was still a reasonable chance that enough grandfathers had been Freemasons in sufficient numbers that their grandchildren had at least encountered the fraternity in their lives. But that percentage has done nothing but drop since then.

Fewer children today have full-time fathers than ever before in recorded history, and even fewer of them have a grandfather to pass along older traditions like Freemasonry and numerous other important values.

(Interestingly, 5% of children are not living with either parent at all. In most of these cases, they are living with a grandparent—a phenomenon that has become much more prevalent since the recent economic recession.)
When you take into consideration all of this stew of statistics, it’s clear that Freemasonry as a subject for observation by children has a pretty paltry chance of being passed along to the current and future generations by many fathers, grandfathers, siblings, uncles or other influential men in their lives.
In other words, there’s no statistically significant reason why Sadie Dingfelder would have encountered Freemasons in her family. She doesn’t mention any sort of family connection to the fraternity, so the only way she knows anything at all about us is from what she picked up by cultural references she has encountered as a teenager and adult. Like going to the Memorial, poking around on the Internet, or catching a rerun on A&E or the History Channel. I suspect she may not have a single family member, friend or acquaintance who is a Mason, or was in recent memory.
Mull that over. And if she has children of her own today, what chance will they have as adults to inherit any sort of collective, cultural knowledge of Masonry in another 20 years?

Note her comments about Masonry being from a “less-woke era” (a colossally imbecilic adjective if ever there was one) and her pronouncement that our “fraught racial history and continued exclusion of women have also contributed to their diminishing relevance.” Whether you believe that or not, that is one narrative being circulated about us today in this hyper-heightened period of describing every single subject on the face of the Earth in terms of gender, race, offense, privilege  and oppression. Young people are being taught a dramatically different (and arguably damaging) version of Western and American history now than older generations, and the values, traditions and institutions of the Founders and prior important historical figures are being derided or ignored altogether. The images of George Washington and Ben Franklin as Freemasons don’t carry the sort of influence and impact they had even 20 years ago – some today would even argue that they are a negative.  And let’s not even venture into the demographics regarding religious beliefs among Americans in 2018, or how religious Americans are almost uniformly portrayed in a negative light by the pop culture.

None of this is an indictment of anyone, because there’s no single villain we can isolate and counter, argue with, or shoot out behind the barn. These are simply the current circumstances we find ourselves struggling in. That’s what we’re facing going forward as we try to craft messages for the profane world, design our museums, and sit for interviews with the press. Once again, the culture has shifted under our feet, and this time, we find ourselves potentially tap-dancing on a minefield.
As bleak as all of this may seem, at its core, Freemasonry is and will remain important and relevant and needed as time marches on, but it’s up to each of us to do our part to ensure its future by not hiding what’s left of our light under a bushel and permitting ourselves to be ignored to death. Remember that even Sadie recognizes this, and concluded her essay with this thought: “Perhaps a lot of this is best left in the past, but it seems to me — a person who spends way too much time alone, in front of a computer — that there’s something here worth bringing into the future.”
 

There is indeed.

This article was reblogged from: https://freemasonsfordummies.blogspot.com/2018/11/freemasonry-in-age-of-woke.html?m=1

A Pilgrim’s Way

On By jmjlevesqueIn Other Authors, Rudyard KiplingLeave a comment

I do not look for holy saints to guide me on my way,
Or male and female devilkins to lead my feet astray.
If these are added, I rejoice—if not, I shall not mind,
So long as I have leave and choice to meet my fellow-kind.
For as we come and as we go (and deadly-soon go we!)
The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!

Thus I will honour pious men whose virtue shines so bright
(Though none are more amazed than I when I by chance do right),
And I will pity foolish men for woe their sins have bred
(Though ninety-nine per cent. of mine I brought on my own head).
And, Amorite or Eremite, or General Averagee,
The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!

And when they bore me overmuch, I will not shake mine ears,
Recalling many thousand such whom I have bored to tears.
And when they labour to impress, I will not doubt nor scoff;
Since I myself have done no less and—sometimes pulled it off.
Yea, as we are and we are not, and we pretend to be,
The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!

And when they work me random wrong, as oftentimes hath been,
I will not cherish hate too long (my hands are none too clean).
And when they do me random good I will not feign surprise.
No more than those whom I have cheered with wayside charities.
But, as we give and as we take—whate’er our takings be—
The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!

But when I meet with frantic folk who sinfully declare
There is no pardon for their sin, the same I will not spare
Till I have proved that Heaven and Hell which in our hearts we have
Show nothing irredeemable on either side of the grave.
For as we live and as we die—if utter Death there be—
The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!

Deliver me from every pride—the Middle, High, and Low—
That bars me from a brother’s side, whatever pride he show.
And purge me from all heresies of thought and speech and pen
That bid me judge him otherwise than I am judged. Amen!
That I may sing of Crowd or King or road-borne company,
That I may labour in my day, vocation and degree,
To prove the same in deed and name, and hold unshakenly
(Where’er I go, whate’er I know, whoe’er my neighbor be)
This single faith in Life and Death and to Eternity:
“The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!”

By Brother Rudyard Kipling