-------------- PAY ATTENTION! --------------
If It doesn't Make you Think,
Question your Assumptions
and Rethink your
Conclusions,
You've not been Paying Attention
or Practicing Masonry!
-------------- SEEK! --------------
-------------- MACKEY ON: HISTORY--------------
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!
-------------
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
-------------- MASTERY --------------
-------------- THEOLOGY --------------
Worth Watching if you want an example of musical mastery.
-------------- MYTH --------------
"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)
-------------- THEOLOGY TOO --------------
Those who do not study Theology
are doomed to repeat it.
-------------- STUDY! --------------
Before
you Study Ancient Texts,
first Study the Seven Liberal Arts and
Sciences.
Before you Study these,
you had Better Study your Heart.
-------------- PLAN! --------------
To Brighten a Day
For just one Human Spirit
Is Worthy of
a Lifetime of Planning.
Plan Ahead!
-------------- ALLURING LORE --------------
Some Members get
so Enamored by Alluring Lore
that they Forget to
Determine
if its Supporting Data
is Based upon Actual Realities
or
Veiled Truths.
By what I have observed in Lodge
I am absolutely convinced
that copper
wire was invented
by two old Past Masters
fighting over a penny.
-------------- END --------------
Be Well and Travel Light!
-- Coach Nagy ;-)
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