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What a HOOT! Reading once again through Brother/Author/Scholar Albert Mackey's Encyclopedia (1917 edition), and on the "History of Freemasonry". Paragraphs 2 through 7 are a riot to read especially in light of an article I wrote. paragraph 9's "history of a nation" might as well have read "history of an organization".
Enjoy!
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It is the opprobrium of Freemasonry that its history has never yet been written in a spirit of critical truth; that credulity, and not incredulity, has been the foundation on which all Masonic historical investigations have hitherto been built; that imagination has too often "lent enchantment to the view;" that the missing links of a chain of evidence have been frequently supplied by gratuitous invention; and that statements of vast importance have been carelessly sustained by the testimony of documents whose authenticity has not been proved.
And this leads me to the important question: How is the history of Freemasonry to be written, so that the narrative shall win the respect of its enemies, and secure the assent and approbation of its friends?
In the first place, we must begin by a strict definition of the word Masonry. If we make it synonymous with Freemasonry, then must we confine ourselves closely to the events that are connected with the Institution in its present form and organization. We may then say that Masonry received a new organization and a restoration in the beginning of the eighteenth century. We may trace this very Institution, with an older but not dissimilar form, in the Masonic gilds of Europe; in the corporations of Stone-masons of Germany; in the travelling Freemasons of the Middle Ages, and connect it with the Colleges of Architects of Rome. Such a history will not want authentic memorials to substantiate its truth, and there will be no difficulty in conferring upon the Institution an enviable antiquity.
But if we confound the term Masonry with Geometry, with Architecture, or with Moral Science, we shall beget in the mind, equally of the writer and the reader, such a confusion of ideas as can never lead to any practical result. And yet this has been the prevailing error of all the great English writers on Masonry in the last, and, with a few exceptions, even in the present century. At one moment they speak of Masonry as a mystical institution which, in its then existing form, was familiar to their readers. Soon afterwards, perhaps on the same page, a long paragraph is found to refer, without any change of name, under the identical term Masonry, to the rise of Architecture, to the progress of Geometry ( or perhaps to the condition of the moral virtues.
Thus Preston, in his Illustrations of Masonry, begins his section on the Origin of Masonry by stating that, "from the commencement of the world we may trace the foundation of Masonry." And he adds: "Ever since symmetry began and harmony displayed her charms, our Order has had a being." But, after we have read through the entire chapter, we find that it is not to Freemasonry, such as we know and recognize it, that the author has been referring, but to some great moral virtue, to the social feeling, to the love of man for man, which, as inherent in the human breast, must have existed from the very creation of the race, and necessarily have been the precursor of civilization and the arts.
Oliver, who, notwithstanding the valuable services which he has rendered to Masonry, was unfortunately too much given to abstract speculations, has "out-heroded Herod," and, in commenting on this passage of Preston, proclaims " that our science existed before the creation of this globe, and was diffused amidst the numerous systems with which the grand empyreum of universal space is furnished." But on further reading, we find that by Speculative Masonry the writer means " a system of ethics founded on the belief of a God," and that in this grandiloquent sentence he does not refer to the Freemasonry of whose history he is professing to treat, but to the existence of such a belief among the sentient intelligences who, as he supposes, inhabit the planets and stars of the solar system.
Anderson is more modest in his claims, and traces Masonry only to Adam in the garden of Eden; but soon we find that he, too, is treating of different things by the same name, and that the Masonry of the primal patriarch is not the Freemasonry of our day, but Geometry and Architecture.
Now, all this is to write romance, not history. Such statements may be said to be what the French call fayons de parler — rhetorical flourishes, having much sound, and no meaning. But when the reader meets with them in books written by men of eminence, professedly intended to give the true history of the Order, he either abandons in disgust a study which has been treated with so much folly, or he is led to adopt theories which he cannot maintain, because they are absurd. In the former case Freemasonry perhaps loses a disciple; in the latter, he is ensnared by a delusion.
The true history of Freemasonry is much in its character like the history of a nation. It has its historic and its pre-historic era. In its historic era, the Institution can be regularly traced through various antecedent associations, similar in design and organization, to a comparatively remote period. Its connection with these associations can be rationally established by authentic documents, and by other evidence which no historian would reject. Thus dispassionately and philosophically treated, as though it were the history of an empire that was under investigation, — no claim being advanced that cannot be substantiated, no assertion made that cannot be proved,—Freemasonry—the word so used meaning, without evasion or reservation, precisely what everybody supposes it to mean — can be invested with an antiquity sufficient for the pride of the most exacting admirer of the Society.
And then, for the pre-historic era, — that which connects it with the mysteries of the Pagan world, and with the old priests of Eleusis, of Samothrace, or of Syria, — let us honestly say that we now no longer treat of Freemasonry under its present organization, which we know did not exist in those days, but of a science peculiar, and peculiar only, to the Mysteries and to Freemasonry, — a science which we may call Masonic symbolism, and which constituted the very heart-blood of the ancient and the modern institutions, and gave to them, while presenting a dissimilarity of form, an identity of spirit. And then, in showing the connection and in tracing the germ of Freemasonry in those pre-historic days, although we shall be guided by no documents, and shall have no authentic spoken or written narratives on which to rely, we shall find fossil thoughts embalmed in those ancient intellects precisely like the living ones which crop out in modem Masonry, and which, like the fossil shells and fishes of the old physical formations of the earth, show, by their resemblance to living specimens, the graduated connection of the past with the present.
No greater honor could accrue to any man than that of having been the founder of a new school of Masonic history, in which the fictions and loose statements of former writers would be rejected, and in which the rule would be adopted that has been laid down as a vital maxim of all inductive science, — in words that have been chosen as his motto by a recent powerful investigator of historical truth:
"Not to exceed and not to fall short of facts
— not to add and not to take away.
To state the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth."
Source: OCR from Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 1917 edition pages 333-335
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Worth Watching if you want an example of musical mastery.
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"Now
comes the big point: the deities of vision are of this sphere and of
the same luminous stuff as dream. Accordingly the vision and the
visionary, though apparently separate, are one; and all the heavens, all
the hells, all the gods and demons, all the figures of the mythic
worlds, are within us as portions of ourselves—portions, that is to say,
that are of our deepest, primary nature, and thus of our share in
nature. They are out there as well as in here, yet, in this field of
consciousness, without separation.
Our
personal dreams are our personal guides, therefore, to the ranges of
myth and of the gods. Dreams are our personal myths; myths, the general
dream. By heeding, interpreting, and following dreams we are led to the
large, transpersonal fields of archetypal vision—provided, of course,
that rational interpretations are not binding us back continually to our
own chakras one, two, and three.
As
the Hindus say, 'To worship a god, one must become a god'; that is, one
must find that part within that is the deity’s equivalent. This is why
(in mythological language) God the Son, Knower of the Father, has to
become in each of us ghostly born before we can know, as He does, the
Father, and say with Him, in knowledge and in truth, 'I and my Father
are One' (John 10:30); or with Paul, 'It is no longer I who live, but
Christ who lives in me' (Gal. 2:20)."
-- Joseph Campbell, "The Interpretation of Symbolic Forms," The Mythic Dimension.
(courtesy of the Joseph Campbell Foundation)
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