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BACK NEXT Summer 2008 Issue 45 Letter from the Editor Grand Lodge News News and Views On The Level International News Beyond the Craft Perambulating the Lodge Masonic Dining and Celebration Interview: The Grand Chancellor The Orator Walking the Way of Saint James Abd el-Kader: Algerian Nationalist and Freemason Province of Cambridgeshire Library & Museum Brother Lightfoote's Journal Review: Committed to the Flames Review: The Mythology of Secret Societies Review: The Dawn of Astrology Letters to the Editor Internet Library & Museum of Freemasonry Grand Lodge Quarterly Communication Convocation of Supreme Grand Chapter RMBI Masonic Samaritan Fund Grand Charity RMTGB Canon Richard Tydeman: Looking unto the Rock Copyright 1997-2008 Grand Lodge Publications Ltd Designed and Maintained by: Cyberpoint Limited

FREEMASONRY TODAY Hiding the Reality Travelling around as much as I do, I am constantly being told ‘Mind the gap between the platform and the train’. The phrase recently became mutated in my brain into ‘Mind the gap between the pretence and the reality’, reminding me how much and how often we substitute the semblance for the real thing. The playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht said that reality is not about the way things really are; it is about the way real things are. There’s an important difference. If we try to represent the way a thing ‘really’ is, we are bound to invest it with our own interpretation. If, instead, we stand back and consider what is real, what is true, what is beyond controversy and beyond debate, we have ... Respect of Persons Disrespect and violence so often occupy centre stage in life today. We have had instances recently where respect appeared to be, at best, lacking, perhaps wilfully ignored. Two such instances spring to mind. First, we have had a distressing instance of lack of respect in a recent reality television programme, where one participant was subject to racial abuse by some of the others. The target of this abuse was a lady who, by virtue of her own nobility of spirit, did not hit back, but maintained a serenity and composure which spoke volumes about her place at her own centre. Even worse of course are the tragic deaths resulting from the increasing gun culture in some of our cities ... The Three Degrees The temptation to see the three degrees as separate ceremonies in themselves is almost unavoidable; yet these three stages are in reality parts of a whole. There are many correspondences between the three degrees, and these need to be examined for what they can teach us. The first degree, we are told, deals with the emergence out of darkness into light. This is the journey from unknowing to knowing; the first stage on the path to ... To Dwell Together in Unity We are divided by much in the modern world. We are divided by language, and all the attempts to make the English language international won’t put that right. We are divided by cultural imprints, and no single one is superior to any other. We are divided by race, and we are only overcoming that division slowly and painfully. We are divided by religion, or we seem to think we are. We are divided by ideology and politics, often through our own blindness to see some truths parallel to the one we hold to. It seems impossible sometimes to have a view of unity, of one-ness, of those things which bring us together rather than those which cast us asunder. Even Freemasonry has ... In the Night of Fear Fear is a terrible thing. Fear is corrosive, eating away our confidence, sapping our creativity, tunnelling under our motivation. Fear alienates us from contentment, and stands in the way of true happiness. The power of pathological fear is so great as to prevent sufferers putting one foot in front of the other. The writer Franz Kafka, who spent his life in fear of his own father, wrote him a letter saying ‘I could not tell you I was afraid of you, precisely because of that self-same fear’. With the recent threat to air travel, we are once again gripped by fear, by events imposed on our lives by malevolence. No point here in talking about factions – who did this, who opposed that, what ... Symbols of High Resonance It has been pointed out to me twice recently that we more often use the word ‘compasses’ in Freemasonry, than ‘compass’. The compasses, of course, are a draughtsman’s, architect’s and mathematician’s implement for describing circular figures and for delimiting objects. Compass, on the other hand, has two principal meanings – in the concrete sense it is a device for determining the magnetic meridian or the relation to it, and in the figurative sense it is used to denote range or extent of something (‘within the compass of ability’). It got me thinking about symbols and allegories in the wider sense, those implements we, as Freemasons, would be lost without. Our Craft is full of them, and of course ... Rank is but the Guinea Stamp What originally did I join Freemasonry for? Comradeship. In that, I think I have a lot in common with many an aspirant. At the time of my initiation, I had only a hazy idea about the spirituality, the esoteric side. I had not done much research. True, I had been fascinated by Walton Hannah’s attack on Freemasonry Darkness Visible. Incidentally, I often wonder if Fr. Hannah knew that his book might encourage people to become Freemasons. What I had been told was that the lodge I was to join was a lodge of ritualists, and the idea of taking part in an arcane ceremonial sent a small frisson of excitement through me. But no, it was the prospect of closer comradeship with ... Beauty of Divinity Much of our time, for those of us who live and work in urban areas, is spent rushing around busy streets, or diving in and out of trains, buses and taxis. Everywhere I go in this environment, I am assailed by images of ugliness, some of it incidental, some of it actively contrived and devised ugliness. Advertising images I find absorbing. There is a great deal of good, clever advertising, some of it pleasing to the eye. But there is much that is gratuitously offensive and ugly, on television screens accompanied by loud discordant music and banal and corrosive script and dialogue. An image of a man with bloodshot eyes and a hideous blue face; people in ... The Spirit Rising over Dresden It was the light that really moved us. The soft, warm autumn glow that characterises rural landscape as well as city architecture in central Europe came flooding in from the west, bathing the side of the dome of this most beautiful of all churches, the Frauenkirche, the Church of Our Lady. A church, my wife and I had to remind ... A Perfect Freedom Freedom is regarded, in our century, as a precious and absolute right. That is as it should be. And, in an earlier century, the American Declaration of Independence tells us how highly freedom was prized then. ‘We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness...’. The founding fathers of the American republic certainly understood that liberty, freedom in an individual and in a social sense, was vital and essential. Those who have freed themselves from political, religious or military oppression have an appreciation of the value ... Insights of the Human Heart Once again, I have two subjects whose links I shall try to demonstrate. The first is this; some years ago, there was a lady of my acquaintance, who wanted guidance for her daughter in what subjects to suggest for her ‘A’ level exams. She asked me what subjects my own daughter was taking, and on learning that my daughter’s chosen subjects were classical Greek, Latin, and modern German, remarked with amazement: ‘That’s not going to be much use for her later in her career, is it?’. At that stage, over twenty years ago, I had not yet realised how endangered was the teaching of the humanities. At that stage, without my fully realising it, education had become the preserve ... Wisdom by the Grace of God There is no jolly message for you in this article. We have just witnessed the greatest tragedy in the living memory of many of us, and I believe we must not forget it unless and until we have learned something from it. We’re back with Chaos versus Harmony. In 1940, Bertolt Brecht wrote a play: The Life of Galileo. In the play Galileo, in exile after having recanted his assertion that the earth moves round the sun, is talking to his pupil Andrea and his daughter Virginia, both of whom are eager to continue scientific research on Galileo’s behalf, although he himself has lost his enthusiasm. Galileo urges caution ... Our Deeds Still Travel With Us As you know, Freemasonry this side of the Atlantic views with a good deal of dismay the practice of some Grand Lodges in the United States of mass initiations. I say mass initiations rather than the term they use, ‘one-day classes’, as that tends not only to mask this infamous practice, but to lend it an air of respectability, which it certainly does not deserve. Many Grand Lodges in the United States have not adopted this means of boosting membership, and in the interests of obtaining a broad view of how this practice is treated by all United States Grand Lodges, we conducted a straw poll of all of them ... The Day of Small Things A year ago I wrote an article on wisdom, strength and beauty, the three pillars which support a Freemason’s lodge. As we know, they are emblematically present in our lodges in the form of the three lesser lights. The Master’s words: ‘You are now enabled to discover the three lesser lights: they are situated east, south and west, and are meant to represent the sun, moon and Master of the lodge; the sun to rule the day,’ (but point to the south), ‘the moon to govern the night,’ (but point to the west), ‘and the Master to rule and direct his lodge’ (indicate the Master’s column). By doing it this way, the candidate is less confused than he might be! ... Neither Bending Towards Justice During a university lecture on the works of the novelist Gustav Flaubert, one of the students, not very fluent in French, was reading an English-language translation of Madame Bovary, half-concealed, under the table. The lecturer spotted it and said to him ‘Please put that book away. It has nothing whatever to do with the literature of Flaubert.’ Nothing whatever to do with it? The translator would not find that remark very complimentary! Yet the lecturer was right. There is something about a translation that removes the essential spark of the original. What we write, is conditioned by the language in which we write it. When we write, or speak for that matter, the message ... The Light of Truth Once again I have found myself impressed, in different ways, by images of events happening in the world around me. This time there are two of them, and they are at opposite ends of the same spectrum. The first was the image of Jonny Wilkinson in the Rugby World Cup. The second was the very disturbing spectacle of squabbling architects and developers concerned with the rebuilding on the site of the World Trade Centre in New York, that deeply painful scar that has come to be known as Ground Zero. You will wonder what these two have to do with each other. Taking the second image first, I see in the press that Ground Zero ... Kindle with Celestial Fire It seems to me that we expect a lot from our candidate for initiation. Apart from the principles of Freemasonry, he may have only a hazy idea of what is to come. Almost certainly he cannot yet grasp anything about the individuality of the lodge he is to join. I was initiated into a lodge of ritual perfectionists, but only found out about that after my initiation. It is a lodge which still boasts the largest number of holders of the coveted Emulation Silver Matchbox award for conducting a ceremony without need of correction. So the members spend a great deal of time concentrating on the words of the ritual and learning them to as near perfection as possible ... Wisdom, Strength and Beauty From the time when I was initiated, I found myself fascinated by the three ‘lesser lights’. Of course I understand why the three greater lights are the ‘greats’ of Freemasonry. The Volume of the Sacred Law, the Square and Compasses – these are at once the emblems of our ancient art and the implements we use for masonic development and progress. They constitute the true cornerstone of masonic practice. Yet for me personally, the three lesser lights have a true fascination, and are more personally relevant. Here’s something which relates to our individual aspiration, our journey. Here we are talking not about the attributes of the Almighty, nor the strict rules of the morality ... Modest Stillness and Humility There must have been contributors to this magazine who were tempted to write on political or religious issues but were reluctant to do so. As Freemasons we have an intuitive understanding that these are places where we do not go. We are reticent on the broad plane because discussing contentious issues can spread discord. We are reticent in particular because, as Freemasons, we are explicitly warned to avoid these topics amongst ourselves. The historical reasons for this verbot are not hard to understand. In the early eighteenth century the perceived Jacobite menace had not entirely been put to flight. The Hanoverian monarchy ... Freedom in Trust I continue to be fascinated by this contradiction: before initiation we are a part of the bedrock, not yet removed from the quarry. As a result of initiation we become an individual, a rough ashlar. And yet initiation makes us part of the lodge, an element of the greater whole. A seeming paradox, this. Let me put this paradox another way. An initiation, although principally for the initiate, is not only for him. We all join in it with our hearts so that the brotherhood of the many can contribute to the enlightenment of the one, that second freedom which the initiate is about to experience. So it’s a collective endeavour. Yet it’s also an individual undertaking. The initiate takes the step freely ... And Crown Thy Good with Brotherhood Have you read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar recently? It’s what they call a cracking good tale. But there is a passage which, for many years, I found profoundly depressing. It is this: ‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’ I found in these words a huge measure of despair. They are certainly true of such as Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler or any serial murderer. My youngest son read Julius Caesar for A level English Literature, and I told him then how profoundly nihilist I found this statement. He disagreed, pointing out that Mark Antony, or Shakespeare, was in fact expressing no more than a deeply-held irony. How much we do learn from ... Deliverance Offered From The Darts It has always puzzled me why, when two aircraft just miss each other, it is called a ‘near-miss’. Surely it would be more correct to call it a ‘near-hit’, and we have recently had a tragic demonstration of what happens when a near-hit becomes a direct-hit. As I write this I am sitting in the garden surrounded by evidence of life. I can see a butterfly fluttering round a bush. I can hear a bird showing off his vocal range. I can feel my own heart beating. I am not a fatalist, but I do recognise that at any moment the butterfly may stop, the bird fall silent and my heart seize up for ever. Some of us, without flying in aircraft, have had first-hand experience of near-hits ... And Hold Me Lest I Fall I must be watching too much television. In issue 19 I criticised television programmes such as Big Brother, The Weakest Link and Survivor and now, again on television, I have witnessed the perfect antidote to all this ritual humiliation. In April ITN’s Trevor MacDonald hosted a Survivor-type programme in which Protestants and Catholics from Northern Ireland were placed together in close proximity on the Isle of Man in an endurance test, physical endurance, endurance of cultural difference, endurance of reciprocal prejudice and mutual distrust. ... A Divinity that Divides Us A candidate came to be interviewed by the lodge committee recently, a man who was already well-known to many of the lodge members. One of the questions he was asked was ‘Do you believe in a Supreme Being?’ There followed a long and expectant silence, at the end of which the candidate said: ‘It depends on what you mean by believe’. In my view, he was right to hesitate. The question might have been taken to mean ‘do you believe there is a Supreme Being who orders all our lives and without whom we would be powerless?’ I know a lot of people for whom the statement implicit in that question is not tenable. To that question, for example, the candidate might have answered ... Straight in the Strength of Spirit A relative of mine from Texas has the happy knack of defusing quarrels by saying "Now don’t y’all go gettin’ bent outta shape!" Like all the best sayings, this one is marvellously descriptive, and very effective. It makes me think about our shape, our attitude. It’s easy to lose the integrity of our real shape, to fall off our perch, to let the personal gyroscope tilt sideways, and part of our ‘real shape’ is, of course, our approach to those around us. There is a principle you might like to consider in so-called ‘reality TV’ (I actually prefer to call it ‘unreality TV’). Big Brother and Survivor invite and require the participants (and even the television audience) to choose the least-liked or least-able person ... Prize Honour and Virtue Above Rank One of the best things about Freemasonry is the opportunities it gives us to be sensitive to other people – putting them at the centre so to speak, after having (yes, you’ve guessed it) spent some time there ourselves. So I hesitate to once again approach this question of rank in Freemasonry, because I know how much some Brethren seek rank as a reward for their masonic progress, not perhaps perceiving that it may appeal only to their ego and vanity. A brother who was mildly opposed to my point of view wrote to me. "I cannot tell you" he said (but he did anyway) "what a source of pleasure it is when yet another promotion in this or that order comes slipping through my letter-box..." Vision With The Song As if you needed reminding, we have been subject to serial mishaps in the past twelve months. A supersonic airliner hits a piece of metal shed by another airliner and is destroyed. The weather-shift causes flooding with disastrous consequences. Our computers are invaded by more and deadlier viruses. As if BSE hasn’t been enough, we are hit by foot and mouth disease. More miscarriages of justice are uncovered. Railway lines begin to show cracks, leading to fatal disasters. And in one of the cruellest twists of coincidence, a vehicle accidentally leaves the motorway causing a collision with two trains. Technology is complex, and we only notice how complex it is when it fails ... Sanctifying with Grace Fifteen years ago, the NASA space shuttle Challenger exploded seventy-three seconds after take-off, with the loss of the entire crew. Two engineers from the firm of rocket manufacturers had had serious reservations about the craft taking off, believing that the fuel seals would lose their integrity in the prevailing low temperatures. One of the engineers, acting partly on instinct, tried in vain to have the flight stopped, but the management made a decision based on expediency that the flight should go ahead. The rest is, as they say, history. A perverse and ironic triumph, you might think, of reason over instinct. In his Essay on the Puppet Theatre, Heinrich von Kleist tells the story ... Truth, Relief and Brotherly Love Oh dear, what have I done now? Truth, Relief and Brotherly Love? Shouldn’t it be the other way round? Well, I wanted to look at things from a different angle, to give myself a new perspective, a new view, a different horizon, like the teacher in Dead Poets’ Society who has his pupils stand on top of their desks to give them a new perspective on their surroundings. It simply occurred to me that, of our three Grand Principles, the third is the most important - Truth. The Cornerstone Society Conference on Saturday 13 May certainly gave us a new way of looking at things ... The Cornerstone Society More or less throughout the history of western civilisation there has been a general body of thought known as ‘the Mysteries’. In the ancient world, says W. Kirk MacNulty: ...the mysteries were a recognised public institution… based on a view of the world which is quite different from our contemporary scientific materialism. While our ‘universe’ is limited by physical phenomena, that of the ancient world contained, in addition, vast non-material realms which were not available to ordinary perception but were still considered to be part of the universe. Although the existence ... Dare to Know After I suggested that we were ‘about to reveal the clear, dynamic and powerful force of Freemasonry for the good of mankind and of society’, a Brother said that he had turned the page looking for the changes I was proposing, and was disappointed not to find any. I share his frustration. Our inability to change back to our true spiritual home, this great inertia of the Craft which ensures that we seem to be forever rooted in the 19th century, is actually based on a myth. It is based on a myth because the greatest period of change in Freemasonry actually occurred in the 19th century ... Man, Know Thyself I was very fortunate this summer to be impressed by two powerful images of spirituality. The first was a picture of the face of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Basil Hume, alongside an obituary to this simple, saintly, good man, at peace with and knowing himself, and therefore knowing God, as he approached his death: calm, composed, and with gladness. The second was the unabashed and honest gaze of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones as they exchanged their wedding vows, with sincerity and determination, oblivious to the circus around them ... The Secrets of Nature and the Principles of Intellectual Truth Before the photograph below brings down accusations of triviality on me, I should point out that our sister publication in Germany recently carried an article by an economist Freemason entitled Freemasonry - Key Qualification for Living, or Profession Without a Future? The question is, amongst other things, what does Freemasonry qualify us for, and how does it do that? With all the talking that’s going on nowadays in the Craft, I’m not sure we have yet addressed the vital questions: what are we as an Order? Are we faithful to the precepts of the early Freemasons? What ... The Word 'Brother' Among Masons is Something More Than a Name I was reminded recently that twists of fate can work in many and curious ways. Young Erwin (name changed) came from Germany in the 1930s to study medicine at Cambridge and so survived the Holocaust in which most of his family perished. Erwin graduated and was commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps, later becoming a prominent member of the medical profession in this country. He was also initiated into Freemasonry and in time became a member of a German-speaking lodge in London. This lodge, because of its international status, made and received ... By the Industry and Ingenuity of the Workman I am enormously encouraged to see the correspondence carried on in these columns regarding mentoring. Let us give whatever help we can to these pioneering brethren. Freemasonry has to live up to its promises or continue to see membership declining. Incidentally, some lodges report increasing membership - is anyone making a serious survey of this, to see what we can learn? Poor retention is not a new problem; the records in my own mother lodge in the early 1900s show a high proportion of members resigning after less than five years membership ... All Distinctions Save Those of Goodness and Virtue A brother was recently awarded a rather lowly grand rank. He was very pleased with the award. He would have been pleased with any award, but one of his friends expressed disappointment saying 'Oh, we should have done better for you than that'. It made me think about the whole complex business of rank, seniority, precedence and honours in the masonic system, and I have to tell you I am not sure I like what I see. We hear quite a lot about so-called senior chaps being there to encourage and motivate the more recently-joined brethren. But do they really? In individual cases I know that they do, and I have seen good instances of this. But sadly, all too often they do not ... Light Almost Invisible “It’s a blessing in disguise”, people say. They seem to mean, “Don’t take it so hard - things aren’t really that bad.” We have a problem when we confront adversity. We would like to be able to face trouble square-on - but we seldom feel we can. If you think about it, we often clothe problems in the appearance we prefer, rather than in their true colour. When we think of ‘realism’, in films say, we think of toughness, violence and we experience a frisson of fear. The great playwright Bertolt Brecht did not think this idea of ‘realism’ really got into reality : “Realism does not consist in reproducing reality, but in showing how things really are.” We must get beyond appearances ... So What Is This Freemasonry Anyway? If I say to a child "boat" and point to a picture of a boat, for her or him the picture itself becomes the boat. The child will not automatically call the real object "boat" because the picture now owns the name. I haven't yet imparted the essence of that object. We, and our children, find ourselves unable to relate to things that are nameless. Umberto Eco, interviewed on television some years ago about his novel The Name of the Rose opined that naming things destroys them. I call this flower "rose" and you, who are not looking at the same flower, have a peconceived notion of what is "rose" which does not do justice to the particular delicateness of the velvet on the petals, the subtlety of ... It Doesn't Have to Be Like This Try this and see how it fits. Freemasons belong to an organisation which ought to be dedicated to self-knowledge, the nature of being, love, tolerance, the brotherhood of man, liberty of conscience and, yes, perhaps a brush with the Deity on the way. However, we have become bogged down in systems resembling officaldom, obsession with promotion to higher rank, discussions about precedence, confused notions about God, the relative merits of this or that dining venue and the parrotting without meaning of what is in itself a very meaningful ritual. And perhaps worst of all, we call ourselves a charitable organization, when what we are really is an organisation with ... Why Ritual Excellence? Often enough it is said that to be a good mason does not require a man to have a photographic memory or an ability to repeat long passages of dense ritual, parrot-fashion. Allied to this sentiment and often running parallel with it are the excuses, sincerely believed and expressed, for not learning the ritual. People say: “Oh, you’re so lucky being able to memorize all that. I could never do it.” That’s what they say. Little by little we become attuned to the view that it is somehow not too smart to be able to work the ritual accurately; that there are more important things in masonry, that we do not have the necessary skills, and that as long as the sense is there in essence, then that is all ...   Julian Rees © Grand Lodge Publications Ltd 1997-2008