St. John's Day in Winter Festive Board
Photos from last night's excellent Festive Board at Specialis Procer Lodge. A good time was had by all.
On the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, 2011
John M. Klaus
Specialis Procer Lodge No. 678, A. F. & A. M.
December 30, 2011
The Feast of the Holy Saint John the Evangelist
I’m regularly asked to address various Masonic functions. I’m not really sure why. I’m by no means a champion rhetorician; I’m not a silver-tongued orator; and Lord knows I’m no feast for the eyes!
Maybe I’m just not quite so grouchy or tongue-tied as some more distinguished dignitaries. I also work really cheap.
I always consider these invitations a privilege, and spend significant time preparing my remarks, though it doesn’t show much.
There are three inevitable responses from those I am called upon to cheer up, harass, or embarrass:
Some, perhaps 45%, have no intention whatsoever of listening to anything I—or anyone else—might have to say. These stalwarts would prefer to have a nice belt of a serious adult beverage and then to repair to the rear of the room for a nap. They skulk off in that general direction when it appears the delivery of my oral truculence is imminent.
Others, maybe 35%, have heard that I occasionally stir up a ruckus, and they come forearmed to the fray. They surreptitiously smuggle suspect sacks into the chamber. I saw them here this very evening. These people tend to migrate to the center of the facilities, so as to provide themselves with more pitching space and better aim.
The remaining 20% are willing to give me a chance, and they gravitate toward the front. They can, however, be fickle in their loyalty, and most are willing and more than able to sell out to one of the other factions with only slight provocation.
To accommodate those of a more soporific inclination, I have rhetorically requested that our genial host, Bro. Harshbarger, provide us with a supply of comfortable resting places and pillows. With his customary grace, generosity, and efficiency, he has provided a goodly supply of rhetorical pillows, and asked that his associates vacuum and fluff up the carpet at the other end of the room. I urge those who feel compelled to snore to do so in three- to five-part harmony, so as to provide a suitable background score for the impending disquisition.
I would request that members of the more belligerent caucus in the middle ground limit their physical missiles to those of a softer variety, so as to preserve the safety of other congregants. Thus, while over-ripe tomatoes and cabbages are appropriate ammunition for your catapults, coconuts and whole watermelons probably are not.
Finally, I urge the small flock of potential vacillators down in front to hang in there! Display the stoicism of those resident in a northern clime in midwinter! Oh, ye strong of conviction and character! Great will your rewards in heaven be!
Apparently it’s my job to mumble gently and politely and to make sure I don’t interrupt your devotions completely.
I’ll make a deal with you. If you promise not to disturb the solemnities of my ponderous discourse with unpredictable raucous outbursts, I’ll promise in return not to make my multifarious points with unprovoked fortissimo flourishes of rhetoric or pounding on the pulpit. If we can agree to those terms, and forego undue fisticuffs at the end of my peroration, most will be home by the time Marvin McNutt makes his first pass reception, and the rest of us can listen on WHO or WMT.
Let’s get to it. What the Sam Hill are we doing here?
Oh, sure. I know. Freemasons are supposed to whoop it up on the feast days of John the Baptist on June 24 and John the Evangelist on December 27. So we’re doing what we’re supposed to do, or approximately so.
But what’s up with those two Saints named John? What do they have to do with the price of milk at the Hy-Vee? And how’d those boys get to be Masonic saints in the first place?
Well, maybe we’ll figure some of that out before we strike the set and head for the barn.
For now, though, don’t worry yourself about our old buddy John the Evangelist. He and his pal John the Baptist are hanging out together in the 33° Room and playing cribbage. Either one of them would give Al Jensen or Dean Johnson a run for his money. Baptist brought a lovely hors d’oeuvres platter of local honeys and wild locusts, while Evangelist brought a tray of brine-cured olives, a hunk of home-made goat cheese, and a couple of amphoras of sour wine. We’d probably claim it was “an amusing and refreshingly regional little dry white with astonishing terroir.” One of them brought along some matzos and some chametz. Baptist’s shoveling it in pretty well and scratching himself, while Evangelist’s shining up his halo with his ink-stained robe. Don’t worry. We’ll get back to him directly, after Baptist joins the heavy-breathing contingent in the rear of the hall. I’d suggest you folks back there give him a wide berth. I think there are fleas in that camel-skin outfit of his.
Let me get to the text of my sermon.
I have chosen for this refined occasion two poems I consider to be among the greatest expressions in American English during the twentieth century. The two poets were born less than ten years apart, and died just months apart. Both were among the most influential writers of their time. The poems were written within three years of each other, in the early 1920s. Their styles, however, could not be more different from each other.
I won’t attempt to explain either poem. That’s your job. Great poetry is, I think, like Freemasonry: each who encounters it must discover its meaning individually; the meaning differs for each serious student, and the meaning does not appear without considerable contemplation.
I urge you to study these poems at your leisure, and to ferret out their specific meanings for yourself. So firmly do I believe in the value of these two brief poems that I have provided you with a lavish seasonal gift. Please don’t open it yet, but inside the envelope I’ve given you is a souvenir copy of the two poems, and a flash drive—formatted for Mac and PC both—with historic recordings of the two poets reading their own works.
Most poetry, I submit, should be read aloud and listened to. So I’d like to read these two poems to you.
The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)
William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.[1]
The Road Less Traveled (1920)
Robert Frost
(1874-1963)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.[2]
I told you I wasn’t going to tell you what these poems are about, and I lied. But just a little.
Both poems are concerned with history.
Williams paints a shatteringly vivid and visual image in words—an image almost surgical in its precision, as befits his profession as a physician—and tells us at the outset, “so much depends upon [what is to come].” He doesn’t give us a clue about what is to come.
Frost describes an incident in the past, and then tells us, “…that has made all the difference.” He consciously does not tell us what the difference is.
Part of what I want to address is history in general and Masonic history in particular.
Now, you need to remember that history is a sneaky critter. Just when you think it’s nowhere around, it’ll sneak up on you from where you’re not looking and bite you.
History is not linear. It runs around in circles screaming like a banshee for a while, and then hides under the couch for a while. Then, when you think it’s under the couch to stay, it pops its pointy head up ’way over yonder and yells, “Booga, booga!”
We tend to think history is linear, because we think of history and time as the same thing, or at least as closely related. To be sure, all history occurs in time—everything occurs in time. But history is almost never governed by time. That linear dictator, time, occasionally describes, but never contains history.
History is not isolated, either, and it usually needs a human around somewhere to figure it out. History, almost by definition, needs for something to happen, and then for someone to grapple with the meaning of what happened.
History is very much a causal factor of the human experience, and the human experience is equally a causal factor of history. As Shakespeare tells us in The Tempest, “what’s past is prologue.” What happened in the past got us here. Moreover, with the exception of geological history and other sorts of natural history, humans affect much of what happens in this world. What we do today can have profound effect on what happens (or doesn’t happen) tomorrow.
In addition, history requires facts. However, that’s been important only for the past 175 years or so, with a few remarkable exceptions before that time. That’s part of the problem.
See why history is so sneaky?
Let me give me an example from another life I once led.
In the fifteenth century, during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, there were two especially influential composers of music, one English and one French.
The Englishman, John Dunstable, probably spent most of his career in the service of the family of John of Lancaster, the first Duke of Bedford (that’s Bedford, England, not Bedford, Iowa). John of Lancaster was the fourth son of King Henry IV and younger brother of Henry V. More important, he was Regent of France from 1423 to 1429, and then Governor of Normandy until his death in 1435.
According to tax records of 1436, Dunstable owned property in Normandy, and in Cambridgeshire, Essex, and London.
So here’s a guy, by leaps and bounds the most influential English musician of his age, who moved in high circles in England, and not only spent time in France, but also owned property there.
Enter now the Frenchman, one Guillaume Dufay, a younger contemporary of Dunstable. Dufay was for years the foremost composer in the employ of the Dukes of Burgundy, the not-always-so-militarily-loyal cousins of the French Kings. Dufay had studied in Cambrai, in the far north of France, as a youth. He returned to serve in the cathedral there during the 1440s. And get this!—at that very time, the Duchy of Burgundy exercised a powerful hegemony over the cathedral city. One of the earliest documents from Dufay’s adult time in Cambrai dates from December 27, 1440, when he received a delivery of 36 lots of wine for the feast of St. John the Evangelist. I’ll bet he was getting ready for his Lodge’s celebration of the feast!
Dufay was, by far, the most influential European composer of his time, and his middle and later styles show strong influence of contemporaneous English music. So marked was this English influence on Dufay and his contemporaries that the poet Martin de Franc, in his immense poem—as in 24,000 verses immense—Le Champion des Dames, refers to the style as the “contenance Angloise,” or “English sound.” And guess to whom that big poem was dedicated? Why, it was none other than the old rascal Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. And it dates from the 1440s, just when Dufay was employed by Philip and living in Cambrai.
Got that? A Frenchman who lived near English continental territory and worked for a not-necessarily-patriotic French Duke is influenced by the style made famous by an Englishman who, about the same time, lived not far away in Northern France, actually owned property there, and worked for members of the English royal family who governed in France.
So here’s your essay question: Did Dunstable and Dufay ever get together, hoist a flagon or three, and have a good conversation?
You know, and I know, and even Jerry Levay, Ronnie Seale, Billy Koon, and Ed Fowler know that the answer is clearly, “Well, of course they got together!”
But here’s the feather in those scrambled eggs:
I have absolutely ZERO documentary evidence of that barn dance between Dunstable and Dufay—and nobody else has any either. There’s nothing. Zip. Nada.
And THAT, my brothers and friends, moves that delightful and convivial meeting between Dunstable and Dufay into absolute conjecture, a legend, a fairy tale, a story, and—given what we know at present—a complete historical fraud.
There’s the difference between history and legend. Facts are pesky things indeed.
There’s one more aspect of history I need to mention.
For some very human reason, history seems to be important to us individually. I don’t mean political or even regional history here, but rather personal and family history.
We seem to need to define for ourselves who we are in relation to the past, present, and future. The study we call genealogy is a part of this need. That’s part of the syndrome that guides some folks to insist, as their single claim to fame, that they are descended from, say, Millard Fillmore’s maternal grandfather.
So, to recapitulate, history is important, it is comprised of facts and not legends, and it is important at cosmic, international, national, regional, local, and personal levels.
Let’s get back on-task here.
Freemasonry has a lot of history, and Freemasonry has a lot of legends.
The problem is we don’t distinguish between the two very well. A lot—even most—of what too many Masons call “Masonic history” is nothing of the sort. It’s legend, and some of it is pretty silly legend.
[Yup. That rips it, doesn’t it? HEY! You in the middle back there! I SEE you sneaking your hand around that rotten cantaloupe! It’s not time to throw it yet, so put it down!]
Let me give you some examples of legends:
1. Hiram Abiff was some sort of Egyptian aristocrat and, moreover, a couple of Brits identified his mummy with more than a little enthusiasm.
UTTER, UNADULTERATED BALDERDASH! Those two can jump to a sketchy conclusion faster than a duck can hop on a June-bug.
2. There were three Grand Masters in an early Grand Lodge. Two were kings and one a commoner. Two were named Hiram.
Nope.
3. Adam, Noah, King Solomon, Pythagoras, Euclid, the Essenes, the Comacines, the Roman Mystery Schools, Jesus Christ and His Apostles, Muhammad, Charlemagne, King Athelstan, King Edward I, the Knights Templar, many Holy Roman Emperors, Santa Claus, the Easter Rabbit, the Tooth Fairy, and almost every other relatively benevolent or kindly famous man of the past were all Freemasons, and lots of them were Grand Masters!
Calm down there, now. Help is on the way.
4. Masons’ Guilds in Medieval Europe and England were comprised of at least some Freemasons.
Show me the facts.
5. Let’s try this: Certainly the Halliwell Manuscript (or Regius Poem), with its intimate descriptions of the duties of apprentices and masters, is proof-positive that Freemasonry was a thriving enterprise in the West of England sometime around 1400.
The only problem is that the manuscript says absolutely nothing about Freemasonry. It is what it is: an eloquent and beautiful description of a lodge of OPERATIVE Masons at the height of the Guild movement.
6. Surely you’ll admit that the Gothic Constitutions—the Cooke manuscript or the Schaw Statutes, for example—are among the early documents of Freemasonry.
No, I won’t. There’s no question that the Gothic Constitutions exerted a profound influence on Freemasonry, once Freemasonry existed as Freemasonry—but they pre-date Freemasonry.
In your little packet I’ve enclosed a most entertaining essay on this very topic by our very own JerryMarsengill. I urge you to read it at your leisure.[3]
So.
That’s it, boys! I’m personally not buying a LICK of that stuff as anything other than legend—as it describes the direct history of Freemasonry—but I also think legends, like symbols, have a lot to teach us.
[YOU, SIR! UNHAND THAT CANTALOUPE!]
Well, we could play this little game for a long time. So I’ll cut to the chase.
Here’s what I think I know about early Masonic history:
1. The structure of modern Freemasonry seems to be modeled in rudimentary form on the structure of some Lodges of Operative Masons in London and—probably—Scotland.
2. There is very little documentation of masons’ lodges—or of most other guilds, for that matter—during the time prior to about 1400.
3. Information we have between about 1400 and about 1600 is sparse, and applies to operative masonry rather than to Freemasonry.
4. The religious schism between Rome and England, and the English Civil War had, eventually, a profound influence on Freemasonry.
5. A few records, and more from Scotland than from England, between about 1600 and about 1700 show a very few non-operative members admitted to operative lodges of masons. There is a scant handful of such men, though the non-operative men admitted as masons were very interesting and influential men indeed.
6. As the seventeenth century matured and then waned, several non-operative masons appear to have had some association with the brand-new Royal Society (founded in 1660), even today one of the most eminent scientific groups in the world.
7. There seems to have been a growth in numbers of non-operative masons between 1700 and the founding of the Grand Lodge of England in 1717. By 1716 there were apparently sufficient numbers of Freemasons in and around London to make the new Grand Lodge of Freemasons viable.
Now let’s return briefly to history as a concept. No human action occurs in a vacuum. Whether of historical significance or not, whatever a person does is governed at the very least by who that person is.
The early eighteenth century, into which modern Freemasonry was born, was one of the most remarkable periods of human endeavor in all history, and London was one of the cultural epicenters.
I’ve already mentioned the Royal Society, one of the first organizations ever to use regularly what we call “the scientific method,” sometimes called the “Newtonian Method,” in honor of Sir Isaac Newton, who left this earth in 1727. Some would claim Newton as an early Freemason, but the documentation is lacking. He was, however, well-acquainted with early Freemasons, many of whom were members of the Royal Society, where he presided from 1702 until his death in 1727.
So let’s allow that the early eighteenth century was a time of great scientific investigation and discovery, and that the use of what we call “the scientific method” was a part of scientific investigation of the period.
In the fields of letters and the fine arts, English accomplishments of the period certainly rival those of English science.
Since music is allegedly my field of expertise, let me use it as a brief example.
Who are the major composers in the first half of the eighteenth century?
Well, there are four towering geniuses, and three of them were known throughout Europe and the British Isles at the time. They were the Italian priest Antonio Vivaldi; the head of the French Academy of Music, Jean-Phillipe Rameau; and the German who was educated in Italy and spent most of his career in England, George Frederick Handel (to use the English version of his name). Ironically, the one least known in his day was perhaps the greatest of the lot, Johann Sebastian Bach.
There were hundreds of other more-than-competent composers, some of whose names are well-known today, and others who are known only to specialists.
Perhaps no period in history, save our own, was so suffused with music. There’s one significant difference between then and now: today we often depend on others to make music for us. In the eighteenth century, anyone with any pretensions to couth and gentility could play several instruments to a level we would see today as semi-professional, and could sing with more than a little skill as well. So pervasive was music in England at the time that coffee houses, barber shops, and other places where people gathered had sets of musical instruments and various volumes of choral music for the use of their patrons. It was a given that everyone could read music fluently.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were also politically significant for Great Britain. Here things get a bit more complex.
Let’s go back to King Henry VIII, who was crowned in 1509 and reigned until his death in 1547. Sure, we all know he had six wives. But that’s not the point. I’d like to note five significant aspects Henry’s reign:
1. Henry was the first English king to have what we would call today a “real liberal arts education.”
2. Henry was an “absolute monarch,” but that notion began its decline during the sixteenth century, when Henry was king.
3. Henry was perhaps the most brilliant international and domestic politician of his age.
4. Henry’s serial marriages were a desperate attempt to produce a male heir.
5. Henry’s belief that his power as a sovereign monarch trumped the power of the Roman church, and Martin Luther’s contemporaneous attempts to reform the Roman church, led to the Continental and British Protestant Reformations.
Let’s move next to 1603, the year of the Great Plague, and the year Queen Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter, died. Elizabeth had been 26 when she succeeded to the throne, and she reigned for 46 years.
Elizabeth, like her father, was a strong and capable ruler, but her death brought in its train significant upheavals. For most of the rest of the century, questions of religion and royal succession of one sort or another rocked the British Isles. It was not until the Act of Settlement of 1701, that forbade a Roman Catholic ruler in Great Britain, and the eventual accession of George I in 1714, that these issues were largely put to rest.
This is neither the time nor the place to rehearse the complexities of these political upheavals, including the three parts of the English Civil War. Suffice it to say that, by very early in the eighteenth century in England, the divine right of monarchs had been called into question; a monarch’s right to rule without the assent of a parliament had been overthrown; the Roman church had been replaced by the Anglican church as the official state religion in England; and the stranglehold of a single religion on the British people had been loosened, as other forms of Protestantism gained strength and acceptance. Eventually, and with no small suspicion, Roman Catholicism could again be practiced openly. When George I, the first of the Hanoverians, acceded to the British throne in 1714, controversies about the British crown were solved in a dynasty that continues to this day.
Another essential factor in this political scenario is the death, on September 1, 1715, of wily old Louis XIV of France, who, despite his well-deserved flamboyant reputation, was nonetheless one of the ablest and most astute monarchs of his age. With the Sun King’s death, however, the French were more than willing to ally themselves with the English to protect the coasts of both countries from Spanish invasion—an alliance that proved very successful indeed.
Finally, the succession to the British monarchy and the calming of relations between England and France began a period of general stability in English government that has continued, with a few pronounced hiccoughs, to the present day.
Just who were the people of the early eighteenth century in England?
Most of the gentry could read Latin, Classical Greek, and Hebrew with fluency, and could speak at least four modern languages (including English, of course) with ease. The modern languages almost always included French, German, and Italian, and the more linguistically inquisitive could speak Spanish, Russian, Modern Greek, and other northern or central European languages as well. Generally these people—men and women alike—had traveled extensively on the continent as well as throughout Britain.
In addition, they were completely familiar with the Bible, Classical Latin and Greek literature and mythology, and the classic literary works of Europe and England.
In short, the gentry, at least, in eighteenth-century England, were remarkably well educated and culturally aware. This is NOT to say that everyone was in this serendipitous position. Poverty and appalling slums were as much a part of London life as were the benefits of excellent education, good family, and plenty of filthy lucre.
This heady philosophical, scientific, and cultural period is referred to today as “the Enlightenment.” Ring any bells?
There’s one more piece to add to this jigsaw puzzle. Beginning about 1700 in London and continuing informally throughout much of the century, to culminate more formally late in the century and into the nineteenth century, was a peculiar bent to form social clubs.
Harry L. Haywood and James E. Craig were among the twentieth-century pioneers of studying the history of Freemasonry systematically, and their History of Freemasonry, a volume that appeared in 1927, is a seminal work in many ways. While scholars of the past 90 years have disproved some notions in the book, they have also substantiated many others.
Haywood and Craig, in discussing the growth of social clubs in the eighteenth century note that these clubs were founded for just about any reason under the sun. They suggest that a man with a long nose, seeing another gentleman sporting a protuberant proboscis on the street, might approach him, and together they might seek out others of similar physiognomy for the purpose of establishing a Club of Long-Nosed Men. They would choose a local hostelry where they might meet, and then hold those meetings; the primary purpose would be to dine well, gossip long, and drink excessively. As other similarly-featured gentlemen learned of the existence of the club, they might apply to join it, and, once admitted, join in the pleasures of the board, scandal, and the bottle. Discussion at the meetings might well focus on current political and social occurrences. The club might be either conservatively or liberally positioned politically, depending on its membership—or it might be neither.[4]
In London, between 1700 and 1715, there appear to have been several lodges of masons whose membership included both operative and speculative masons. The number of such lodges is unclear. It does seem that the guild system in which many craft guilds had flourished for several centuries was on the skids, and, during the eighteenth century, all but a few guilds ceased to exist; those that continued tended to be guilds in name rather than in practice, and had little control over craftspeople who pursued the trades they represented.
The lodges of operative masons, with their inclusion of speculative members, however, were different. More and more, it appears, the speculative members began to outnumber the operatives.
How these lodges came to be is an open question. Facts are pesky things even in their absence, and between about 1650 and 1715, the documents about masons’ lodges are missing almost completely.
There appear, at least by tradition, to have been occasional meetings among two or several lodges.
These lodges of masons, as heirs of operative lodges, seem NOT to have existed primarily for the purposes of gluttony, scandal-mongering, and getting hammered. That’s very probably the reason that there is, in every Lodge of Freemasons, an officer whose duty it is to watch over members during refreshment, and see that they do not convert the purposes of refreshment into intemperance and excess. No, as descendants of lodges of operative masons, and with a number of operative masons still active in their membership, these “clubs” had another purpose from those espoused by many of the more ephemeral social clubs around them.
Into this rich stew was introduced, on June 24, 1717, the Grand Lodge of England. In fact, this apparently was a follow-up meeting from a less lavish meeting held sometime in 1716, when four London lodges met and decided they needed to meet together regularly. At that meeting they may have founded a “Grand Lodge pro tempore.”
As all here know, the June 1717 meeting was a big deal. In retrospect, it turns out to have been the founding of what finally would emerge as the United Grand Lodge of England, the organization from which all regular (as opposed to clandestine) Masonic Lodges are descended either directly or collaterally.
June 24, 1717 was a Monday. It was also the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. Since about the middle of the eighteenth century Freemasons have made a big deal of celebrating June 24, and of calling it a celebration of the Feast of John the Baptist.
And here’s where my heresy really begins.
You see, I don’t think those brothers who met at the Goose and Gridiron near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London gave a hoot about whose Saint’s Day June 24 was. If it had mattered that much, they could have waited about ten days, and met on Wednesday, July 3, the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, the patron saint of architects.
I strongly suspect that our London brethren in 1717 sought nothing more than to put their fraternity on a stronger foundation. By establishing a central administration, they could increase communication among the original lodges and any that might become affiliated, and provide for more efficient management of fraternal affairs.
I strongly suspect that the farthest things from their minds at the moment were minutiae of ritual, precedent, symbolism, genealogy, and history. All of that, I suggest was RESULT, rather than CAUSE of the 1717 meeting.
[Now put that cantaloupe DOWN!]
But remember who members of those four Lodges were! Operative stonemasons, to be sure. But also Royal Society members. Philosophers, clergymen, scholars, jurists, linguists, members of the peerage. Before anything else, they were men of the English Enlightenment, a movement characterized by skepticism of dogmatic religion, and by using reason rather than superstition as a tool to reform society and advance knowledge. Many of them were men of almost astonishing breadth of intellectual curiosity and knowledge.
Moreover, and even more important, they were Englishmen of the Enlightenment. They were skeptical not only of the absolute power of a single religious confession in their lives. They were equally skeptical of the divine and absolute right of any ruler to have complete power over their secular lives.
Many things we take for granted today were revolutionary concepts for these early brethren. From their guild past they inherited the singular notion (for their day) of the equality of their members. In the days when the masons’ guild flourished, this would have been a given. However, as more and more non-operative masons joined the fraternity, members of the aristocracy sat side-by-side with members of the working class—as acknowledged equals.
In a society deeply steeped in hereditary titles, the notion that leaders could be elected from among the membership, and changed annually, was very nearly political heresy. Yet, threatening as prevailing political power found this tendency to be, it persisted, and triumphed later in the century in the American and French revolutions.
These revolutionary political ideas were, of course, not original to Freemasonry, nor were they particularly novel concepts. However, the rapid spread of Freemasonry between, say, 1717 and 1750, with its ideas of equality, tolerance, and elected leaders intact, made these revolutionary ideas much more threatening to entrenched powers, and led very quickly to a vigorous opposition to the order.
While early Grand Lodge Freemasonry inherited only a rudimentary system of ritual and a number of relatively disjointed legends from its past in English guilds and lodges, early Grand Lodge Freemasons acted quickly and decisively to consolidate ritual, symbols—and fraternal government. It may have been only days, and certainly was not longer than a few months, before some of these clever chaps began to realize what they had by the tail.
From their immediate predecessors, the operative masons’ lodges of seventeenth-century England, they inherited a code of morality and conduct, a sense of the importance of religion (though, in their skeptical Enlightenment manner, they would soon abandon the insistence that doctrinaire Christianity be a requirement), and a rudimentary catechism (or ritual) for an initiatory and an advancement ceremony.
Since there had been a few men admitted to operative lodges beginning as early as 1600, they also had some notion of requirements for membership, and of the use of the daily tools of masonry to represent symbolically important behavior traits.
Now, in the interest of complete honesty, I need to note that the records of the Grand Lodge of England (or rather, of London, as it was then known) begin only in 1723. Thus what happened between 1717 and 1723 is necessarily supported only by secondary reports. However, those reports agree so completely that we can, I believe, depend on them until more precise data are uncovered.
The organizing of the structure of the fraternity proceeded with astonishing speed. The first Grand Master of the new Grand Lodge was one Anthony Sayer. We don’t really know much about him. He seems to have been a nice guy, popular with everybody else, and may have been an operative mason in his day. We do know that he ran into financial difficulties later in his life, and that he received some fraternal aid to get through the rough patches.
The next two Grand Masters, however, were very different from Grand Master Sayer. Neither had ever been an operative mason, and both were very interested in the structure of the fraternity.
The second Grand Master was George Payne, who was elected to the Grand Oriental Chair in 1718. A man with deep roots in the upper middle class, he was related to a number of members of the lesser aristocracy of England, and was, when he became Grand Master, a rising star in the Department of the Exchequer, where he was to become Head Secretary for Taxes in 1743.
It is probable that, among other pressing items, Grand Master Payne turned his attention to matters of lodge structure, governance, and ritual—certainly these matters were to interest him throughout his life.
Grand Master Payne’s successor, as the third Grand Master, was one of the most important, if most neglected, figures in early Grand Lodge Freemasonry: John Theophilus Desaguliers.
Grand Master Desaguliers was one of the most remarkable men in England when he was elected Grand Master in 1719. He had completed his doctorate—as Doctor of Civil Law—in Natural Philosophy (what we would call “experimental science”) at Oxford the year before, and had been lecturing on science, a novel undertaking at the time, in London since about 1710. Indeed, members of the Royal Family, including George I and the future George II seem to have attended his lectures and public experiments. In 1714 Desaguliers was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, where Newton was already a close acquaintance. He soon became secretary of the Royal Society, and was responsible for its publications, including his own work.
In short, when he became Grand Master, Desaguliers was a famous man, and extremely popular among the most influential members of London society.
Did I mention that he was also an Anglican priest?
Grand Master Desaguliers appears to have been an avid collector and assembler of ancient Masonic manuscripts, and he most certainly had the intellectual abilities to examine, understand, and collate them.
As a very well-known, well-liked, and well-respected man of affairs in London, he also attracted a large number of aristocrats and men of influence to the Fraternity, and set the course for Freemasonry’s rapidly growing favorable reputation.
Grand Master Desaguliers, as a clergyman in the Church of England, instituted another Masonic innovation.
George E. Maine, at the time the Grand Orator of the Grand Lodge of Washington (state) wrote in 1939,
[Desaguliers] brought to [Freemasonry] his experimental philosophy, and gave to it a touch of Newtonian Christianity, a belief in Newton’s God, now and for the first time, “The Great Artificer and Creator of the Universe.” The world had been openly venal and immoral. It had been attacking religion in self defense, and all the more easily because religion seemed but an ancient dogma. But here was a new idea in religion, one appealing to the intelligence instead of offering a creed, for it based upon analysis and reality. Here a contemplation of nature produced certain logical facts. It taught men to think.[5]
Grand Master Desaguliers was followed by Grand Master George Payne’s second term, in 1720.
In September 1721, a mere four years after the founding of the Grand Lodge, that body commissioned the Rev. Dr. James Anderson, a Scottish Presbyterian pastor long resident in London, to bring the history, ritual, rules, and customs of the order together in some sort of system. The result, of course, was Anderson’s Constitutions, still one of Freemasonry’s defining documents. Many scholars agree that Anderson depended on work by both Payne and Desaguliers in constructing his work. The Constitutions appeared in print in 1723, and again in a 1738 revision.
When the Grand Lodge was founded in 1717, it was for two purposes: to help to improve communication and government among the four original lodges and further lodges as they might be recognized, and to hold quarterly meetings—with associated feasts. Early on it was apparently recognized that June 24 was the feast day of St. John the Baptist. The feast day of St. John the Evangelist was almost exactly six months later, on December 27, and that became the December feast day.
Soon, however, and certainly by the time of Anderson’s Constitutions, more elaborate symbolism was assigned to these dates. June 24 and December 27 occur very close to the summer and winter solstices, and there have been solstice celebrations since the beginning of human life on this earth.
However, I can’t prove this. Right Worshipful Brother Phil Elam, who was Grand Orator of the Grand Lodge of Missouri in 1999-2000, in writing about the two Saints John, notes,
No satisfactory explanation has yet been advanced to explain why operative Masons adopted these two particular Christian saints, when, for example, St. Thomas, the patron of architecture and building, was already in wide use.[6]
I’d add to that observation that St. Stephen is the patron saint of operative masons—and his Feast Day is December 26. If the founders of the Grand Lodge had wanted patron saints related to the craft, they could easily have chosen St. Thomas (architects) on July 3, and St. Stephen (stonemasons) on December 26. That argues to me that the meeting on the Feast of St. John the Baptist on June 24, 1717, was not scheduled on the saint’s feast day with malice aforethought. That’s just the way it happened.
Nonetheless, the characters of the two Saints John are almost antipodal opposites. St. John the Baptist, the firebrand vagabond preacher, who lived in the desert and often appeared at times when he was least welcome, is contrasted with John the Evangelist, introspective favorite of Jesus’s apostles, and allegedly author of the Gospel that bears his name. He almost certainly did NOT write the book of Revelation, by the way—though that book was still ascribed to him in the eighteenth century.
Imagine now the Masonic symbol of the point within a circle. We use the symbol primarily to represent a single Mason surrounded by everything around him, but circumscribed with the circle of a compass, thus keeping his passions within control. The symbol is, however, much older, and would have been recognized by any alchemist of the early eighteenth century—Newton, for example—as one of the symbols for the Philosopher’s Stone. An astronomer would have seen it as the symbol of a sun-centered universe. Placing a pair of parallel lines on either side of the circle often represented the sun and the solstices.
It didn’t take much to replace those two parallel lines with the two Saint Johns to have a whole new Masonic symbol.
Interestingly enough, those two saints are much more important in American Freemasonry today, having been replaced in Great Britain by Solomon and Moses as less sectarian representatives of the Craft.
I suggest that many of the “trappings” we associate with Masonry today are not of ancient origin at all, but came into at least rudimentary use during the first several decades of the eighteenth century. Not only did the Freemasons who gathered in 1717 and immediately thereafter decide to have elaborate symbolism associated with their fraternity, but they also had the knowledge and ability to construct such symbolism with some credibility and cohesion.
And so we return to the texts of this sermon.
So much depends…
So much depends on the fact that four lodges of masons decided to meet together on June 24, 1717.
Two roads diverged that day. The meeting could have been nothing more than a festive banquet, replete with fellowship. good food, good drink, and good will. That would have been the well-traveled road. The less-traveled road led to the founding of a new organization, and endowing it with symbols and ceremonies of almost universal significance.
And that has made all the difference.
Thank you! You may open your envelopes at your leisure.
[1] “The Red Wheelbarrow” copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams.
[2] The poem is in the public domain.
[3] The Marsengill article may be found online athttp://www.yorkrite.com/ia/lodge2/05.html. It is part of a book of essays entitled How To Kick a Sacred Cow and Other Thrilling Tales From The Great Rebellion, by Jerry Marsengill (Iowa Research Lodge No. 2, second printing, 1978).
[4]H. L. Haywood and James E. Craig, History of Freemasonry, (New York: The John Day Company, 1927), p. 219.
[5]George E. Maine, “Desaguliers and The March of Militant Masonry,” reprinted in One More Time, Please, Vol. 5, No. 3, March 2000.
[6]Phil Elam, “Why St. John’s” on the web site The Masonic Trowel,http://www.themasonictrowel.com/Articles/Symbolism/st_johns_files/why_st_john.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment