From the Narrow Desert: Freemasonry

Showing posts with label Freemasonry. Show all posts

Monday, May 8, 2023

Crowns, martyrs, and Mithras (sync but not only sync)

My last post dealt with syncs related to the Ace of Swords and the cover of the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash.

Later I noticed that, in addition to passing through Stephen (from the Greek for "crown"), the sword on the Snow Crash cover also passes through the letters of the English word crown.

The Ace of Swords also resembles the coat of arms granted to Joan of Arc. Since the sword-and-crown design originates in France (Tarot de Marseille) and does not appear on pre-Marseille Italian cards (Visconti-Sforza), this is probably not a coincidence. The Snow Crash cover features the the word Arc spelled backwards.

On May 4, I happened to read this in Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages:

Initiation into the rites of Mithras, like initiation into many other ancient schools of philosophy, apparently consisted of three important degrees. Preparation for these degrees consisted of self-purification, the building up of intellectual powers, and the control of the animal nature. In the first degree the candidate was given a crown upon the point of a sword and instructed in the mysteries of Mithras' hidden power. Probably he was taught that the golden crown represented his own spiritual nature, which must be objectified and unfolded before he could truly glorify Mithras; for Mithras was his own soul, standing as mediator between Ormuzd, his spirit, and Ahriman, his animal nature.

Is this relevant to the image on the Ace of Swords? The bolded passage could mean that a crown is hung on the point of a sword and thus presented to the candidate, but Hall's Masonic background suggests another reading:

Senior Deacon steps back, while the Junior Deacon, with candidate, enters the Lodge, followed by the two Stewards. As they advance they are stopped by the Senior Deacon, who presents one point of the compasses to the candidate's naked left breast, and says:
S. D. -- Mr. Gabe, on entering this Lodge for the first time, I receive you on the point of a sharp instrument pressing your naked left breast, which is to teach you, as it is a torture to your flesh, so should the recollection of it ever be to your mind and conscience, should you attempt to reveal the secrets of Masonry unlawfully.

In the above passage, from Duncan's Masonic Ritual and Monitor, receiving the candidate "on the point of a sharp instrument" means receiving him while pressing the point of such an instrument against his body. In the same way, "upon the point of a sword" may have a meaning corresponding to that of "at gunpoint," meaning that the candidate is threatened with a sword as he is given a crown, as if the crown is being forced upon him.

Trying to track down Hall's possible sources in ancient literature, I found only a couple of passages in Tertullian. The first is from Prescription Against Heretics, Chapter LX:

He [the devil], too, baptizes some -- that is, his own believers and faithful followers; he promises the putting away of sins by a laver (of his own); and if my memory still serves me, Mithra there, (in the kingdom of Satan,) sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers; celebrates also the oblation of bread, and introduces an image of a resurrection, and before a sword wreathes a crown [sub gladio redimit coronam].

The translator calls the clause I have bolded "obscure," which it certainly is. A strictly literal reading would be "under a sword redeems a crown." Whatever that may mean, sub gladio ("under a sword") can't very well mean that the crown was on the sword.

The other Tertullian passage, from De Corona, Chapter XV, goes into somewhat more detail and seems likely to be Hall's source:

Blush, ye fellow-soldiers of his [Christ's], henceforth not to be condemned even by him, but by some soldier of Mithras, who, at his initiation in the gloomy cavern, in the camp, it may well be said, of darkness, when at the sword’s point a crown is presented to him [coronam interposito gladio sibi oblatam], as though in mimicry of martyrdom, and thereupon put upon his head, is admonished to resist and cast it off, and, if you like, transfer it to his shoulder, saying that Mithras is his crown. And thenceforth he is never crowned; and he has that for a mark to show who he is, if anywhere he be subjected to trial in respect of his religion; and he is at once believed to be a soldier of Mithras if he throws the crown away -- if he say that in his god he has his crown. Let us take note of the devices of the devil, who is wont to ape some of God’s things with no other design than, by the faithfulness of his servants, to put us to shame, and to condemn us.

This is literally "he is presented a crown with a sword interposed," which again seems unlikely to mean that the sword itself was "crowned," as in the Ace. I think that what Tertullian means is that the candidate is "forced" at swordpoint to accept the crown but is nevertheless supposed to reject it, expressing the fact that he would rather die than accept any other crown than Mithras himself. (Is there a pun here on Mithras and mitra, "mitre"?) It seems strange to us today, when almost nobody ever wears a crown, that not wearing one could be "a mark to show who" is a true follower of Mithras, but things were different in Tertullian's time. De Corona opens with this anecdote:

Very lately it happened thus: while the bounty of our most excellent emperors was dispensed in the camp, the soldiers, laurel-crowned, were approaching. One of them, more a soldier of God, more stedfast than the rest of his brethren, who had imagined that they could serve two masters, his head alone uncovered, the useless crown in his hand -- already even by that peculiarity known to every one as a Christian -- was nobly conspicuous. Accordingly, all began to mark him out, jeering him at a distance, gnashing on him near at hand. The murmur is wafted to the tribune, when the person had just left the ranks.

The tribune at once puts the question to him, "Why are you so different in your attire?"

He declared that he had no liberty to wear the crown with the rest.

Being urgently asked for his reasons, he answered, "I am a Christian."

O soldier! boasting thyself in God. Then the case was considered and voted on; the matter was remitted to a higher tribunal; the offender was conducted to the prefects. . . . and now, purple-clad with the hope of his own blood . . . and crowned more worthily with the white crown of martyrdom, he awaits in prison the largess of Christ.

Apparently, it was common practice for all the soldiers in a victorious army to be given laurel crowns, thus making Christians (and Mithraists) conspicuous in their refusal to wear them. In this story, the Christian expects to be put to death for this refusal, so he has, figuratively speaking, been presented with a crown "at the sword's point." Since Tertullians point is that the Mithraists sometimes put Christians to shame, we may presume that the Mithraic story has the same meaning: The sword symbolizes a threat should he refuse to wear the crown, and yet he is to defy the threat and refuse.

Tertullian's reference to "the white crown of martyrdom" is curious, since the term "white martyr," as contrasted with "red martyr," typically refers to someone who is persecuted for his faith but not killed. In the 1906 vision of Maximilian Kolbe, the white crown "meant that I should persevere in purity and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both." White apparently did not yet have this connotation for Tertullian, though, since he describes his white-crowned martyr as "purple-clad with the hope of his own blood."

Whatever Tertullian's reason for calling the crown of martyrdom "white," it syncs with the Snow Crash cover, where the word snow appears in place of the crown.

Saturday, December 4, 2021

G-Eye Joe?

Is this what Jay-Z is getting at with his notorious hand sign?

Why "Joe," you ask? Shouldn't it be "G-Eye Jay"? No, he's Joe, too.

Or is the diamond shape just a reference to one of his other nicknames?

The first HOV "diamond lane" in the US opened in 1969, the same year Jay-Z was born. Coincidence?

Friday, December 3, 2021

Gee, I think Guénon underestimates "modern" languages

I've been reading some René Guénon essays, including one on the meaning of the Masonic letter G. He begins by dismissing the idea that the Roman letterform itself could have any special meaning, since unlike Hebrew and Greek, "modern languages" (like Latin!) are devoid of sacred significance.

He then proceeds to analyze G only as a stand-in for other letters from other languages -- "sacred" ones, unlike Latin, English, and his own native French. For example, a newly initiated Mason is at first told that G stands for geometry. Geometry is from the Greek γεωμετρία, and so the G represents Γ -- the Masonic square!

Well, why didn't those learned Masons, who apparently knew enough Greek to know that G = Γ = a square, just use a gamma in their symbol? And why would that symbol consist of a square, a compass, and in the center -- another representation of the square? You'd think someone whose own name begins with la lettre maçonnique would have tried a little harder than that.

Well, let's take a look at the Masonic G -- not mentally substituting some other letter, but seeing it as itself.

Isn't it obvious? Of what does the letter G consist but a right angle (such as is made with a square) combined with an arc (such as one uses a compass to draw)? It's not just a redundant second square in a symbol which already explicitly includes a square; it symbolizes the unity of the square and the compass, with all that implies (squaring the circle, heaven and earth, etc.) Furthermore, the angles of the square and compass suggest a square (the polygon) and an equilateral triangle, respectively. The combination of the two is 4 + 3 = 7, and G (unlike gamma) is the 7th letter of the alphabet.

Guénon also connects G with the Hebrew letter yodh -- and this is where he really should have started to question his assumption that certain "sacred languages" were divinely inspired whereas all the rest, I s'pect they jes' growed. G corresponds to yodh because it is the initial letter of God, just as yodh is the initial letter of the Tetragrammaton -- and, he notes, the word God itself strongly suggests yodh.

But if God resembles Yodh -- God's initial -- is that just a meaningless coincidence, or is it evidence that "modern" languages do have sacred significance? Éliphas Lévi made much of the fact that the Bacchic exclamation Io! Evoe! resembles a spelled-out Tetragrammaton, Yodh He-vau-he -- which I guess is kosher because Greek is a certified "sacred language." When similar parallels are found in "modern" languages (among which Latin is for some reason included), they are dismissed. The similarity of Jove to Jehovah is just a coincidence, as is that of God to Yodh.

Besides its resemblance to Yodh, God also represents the Tetragrammaton itself by way of gematria. In Hebrew numerals, yodh he vau he = 10 + 5 + 6 + 5 = 26. In English ordinal gematria, God = 7 + 15 + 4 = 26. This should make 26 the most sacred of numbers -- and guess which language's alphabet is based on that number? It ain't Hebrew or Greek.

Guénon should have known all this. I mean, in interpreting a symbol consisting of a square, a compass, and a letter representing geometry, how could he possibly have overlooked the importance of the language of the Angles?

Friday, June 11, 2021

Synchronicity: The locusts of Joel, and the traveling man

The synchronicity fairies have been drawing my attention to the biblical Book of Joel recently, as I mentioned in my post on last month's lunar eclipse:

The lunar eclipse ("blood moon") made me think of this solar eclipse, and the combination of the two made me think of the second chapter of Joel: "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come" (Joel 2:31).

A few days ago, I was looking through this blog's drafts folder, found an old unfinished post called "Do the locusts have a king?" [since finished] and started working on it again. It begins by quoting the bit about the locusts in Revelation 9, mentioning parenthetically that John had pinched his imagery from Joel 2.

(There was a solar eclipse yesterday, by the way, but it was not visible in Taiwan.)

Yesterday, I checked John C. Wright's blog and found this Prayer Request:

Time for a Prayer:
Father, we ask you to Thwart the plans of those who wish to destroy our Republic.
Deliver us from Marxism.
Preserve our Republic.
O God of Justice and Judgment, bring back President Trump to his rightful place.
Restore what the locust has eaten.
Be exalted, in Jesus name, Amen.

The line I have bolded is an allusion to, you guessed it, the second chapter of Joel: "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten" (Joel 2:25). The full text of that verse lists various types of locusts:

Then I will compensate you for the years
That the swarming locust has eaten,
The creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust --
My great army which I sent among you (NASB).

When I was a kid in Ohio, we had names for all the different local species of grasshopper. The small green ones were called Green Guys. The ones with red legs were Pigeons. The kind that are part green and part brown were called, for reasons that remain obscure, Breakfast at Tiffany's. The biggest, baddest kind, with rough sand-colored armor and chattering wings, were called Lokeys -- from locust.

I note from online ads that a TV series called Loki -- featuring the Norse god turned comic-book character, Thor's brother -- premiered a day or two ago.

⁂

In another recent post, I relate an encounter with a cabbage butterfly which inexplicably made me think of a Masonic dialogue about traveling from west to east.

As I looked at the butterfly, a question suddenly popped into my head out of nowhere: Are you a traveling man? -- quickly followed by the rest of this stock Masonic dialogue: Yes I am. Traveling where? From west to east.

In that post, I also connected this butterfly with some material from Whitley Strieber's book The Afterlife Revolution, and with a "Masonic" incident in one of his other books.

Yesterday I was once again going through my blog's drafts folder and found one called "The nihilism of Strieber's mature vision." To complete it, I needed to track down some quotes from one of his more recent books, but I wasn't entirely sure which book it was. I decided to begin by rereading Solving the Communion Enigma (2012) first. So far it doesn't have what I'm looking for, but today I read this. Strieber is talking about leaving behind his cabin in upstate New York and moving back to his hometown of San Antonio, Texas.

As we drove down the highway on that sad morning, my cell phone rang. It was an old, dear friend, the filmmaker and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, who had been the first person I'd told about my 1985 encounter. . . .

Now he said, "Whitley, I just saw your woman, the [alien] woman on the cover of Communion. She came up to my car and leaned in the window while I was stuck in traffic on Fourteenth Street. . . . She asked me if I was going west. I said, 'No, I'm going east,' and she said, 'Well, that's good.'"

I knew exactly what this meant. She was not only expressing gladness that Timothy was staying but also regret at my departure.

The passage I have bolded above was also highlighted by me the first time I read the book. Strieber connects it with his own move from New York to Texas, but I saw it as a Masonic reference. However, I had completely forgotten about it until I reread it just now.

⁂

This anecdote from Greenfield-Sanders also reminds me now of a story I heard a long time ago about a Ute Indian's encounter on the road with a person he took to be Sinawava, a tribal deity known as "he who leaves footprints of light." I heard this secondhand from Stan Bronson of Blanding, Utah, a historian of the Ute tribe. (Bronson believed that Sinawava is the same person as Jesus Christ.) As I recall, Sinawava also asked the Ute which direction he was traveling and expressed approval of the answer. I think Sinawava was also carrying some watermelons, which he offered to the Ute -- recalling an incident in one of Strieber's books where alien "visitors" show up at Michael Talbot's door with a bag of pumpkins. My memory of the anecdote is a bit hazy, so I suppose I should try to track down Mr. Bronson, if he's still around.

Thursday, June 3, 2021

A butterfly Mason?

Sometimes I write something I think is just too bizarre to publish -- and then I usually publish it anyway, and as often as not I soon get an email from some stranger saying, "You too? What an amazing coincidence!"

⁂

Early this afternoon, I was sitting in my living room. We have a large window in the front, but it was a very sunny day and the curtains were drawn. Suddenly, my tomcat Geronimo (a highly accomplished jumper) got between the window and the curtain and started jumping up on the glass again and again like a maniac. My wife said there must be a bird or something outside, so I popped out to take a look.

It wasn't a bird; it was a white cabbage butterfly, steadily beating its wings and flying directly into the windowpane. The glass was of course an impassable barrier, but it wouldn't alter its course in the slightest, and the result was that it just sort of hovered there. Now everyone knows that a normal butterfly's flight path resembles that of a drunken skywriter. Straight lines are simply not in their repertoire; nor is this sort of persistence when confronted with an impassable obstacle. Nevertheless, it persisted.

As I looked at the butterfly, a question suddenly popped into my head out of nowhere: Are you a traveling man? -- quickly followed by the rest of this stock Masonic dialogue: Yes I am. Traveling where? From west to east. (I'm not a Freemason, but one picks up these things.) The feeling that I was somehow having this dialogue with the butterfly -- ridiculous on its face! -- was unmistakable. The whole time, the butterfly kept flying persistently straight into the windowpane, and on the other side of the glass, a highly neurotic tomcat kept bouncing up and down like a superball.

Finally I snapped out of whatever passing trance the butterfly had put me in and gently shooed it away from the window. It immediately resumed normal butterfly behavior, and the cat settled down.

Checking a compass later, I found that it had indeed been flying at a perfect 90-degree azimuth, from west to east.

⁂

The weird feeling that I had been "communicating" (if reciting a stock dialogue can be called that!) with the butterfly made me remember that last year I had experienced a synchronicity in connection with the idea that the spirits of the dead can appear as moths -- I had read about this in Whitley Strieber's Afterlife Revolution and then heard the same thing shortly thereafter from a Taiwanese associate. Well, I thought, this was a cabbage butterfly, not a moth, but it's close anyway.

When I looked up my old post about the moth synchronicity, though, I found something that I had forgotten. The post showed the cover of The Afterlife Revolution -- illustrated with a picture of a white cabbage butterfly!

I ended the post thus:

I wonder how common this association is? I know Aristotle used the same Greek word to refer both to the soul and to the cabbage butterfly. (By coincidence, this same species of non-moth appears to have been chosen by Strieber's entomologically confused cover illustrator.)

I had forgotten that about Aristotle, too, but he does in fact use the word psyche ("soul"), in History of Animals 5.19, as a name for those insects that arise "out of those caterpillars which arise on leaves of green, especially on those of the cabbage-plant."

⁂

Coming back to the ridiculous idea of a butterfly being a Mason, I remembered that Freemasonry's central symbol is the building of the Temple of Solomon, and that in the Rudyard Kipling story "The Butterfly That Stamped," a butterfly stamps its foot and makes King Solomon's palace (close enough!) disappear and then reappear. (It is actually Djinns that do this, but Solomon has arranged for them to make it look as if the butterfly is making it happen.)

Suleiman-bin-Daoud laughed so much that it was several minutes before he found breath enough to whisper to the Butterfly, "Stamp again, little brother. Give me back my Palace, most great magician." . . . So he stamped once more, and that instant the Djinns let down the Palace and the gardens, without even a bump.

Then I thought about the song "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations.

Building up foundations sounds like a mason's work, does it not? Buttercup is a bit like butterfly, but not quite close enough to be satisfying. Ah, but what's the very first thing Wikipedia has to say about the Foundations? "The Foundations were a British soul band." Soul = psyche = cabbage butterfly.

⁂

Since Whitley Strieber had entered into this synch-stream, I thought of his "nine knocks" incident, documented in Chapter 11 of his book Transformation (a synonym for butterfly-style metamorphosis). Strieber recounts how he was at home, reading an essay by John Gliedman about quantum entanglement, when he noticed that his two cats were beginning to behave strangely, as if they are terrified.

The cats' fear didn't make sense to me at all. I decided there must be some animal outside, perhaps a deer. I returned to Dr. Gleidman's essay.

I read the following sentence: "The mind is not the playwright of reality."

At that moment there came a knocking on the side of the house. This was substantial noise, very regular and sharp. The knocks were so exactly spaced that they sounded like they were being produced by a machine. Both cats were riveted with terror. They stared at the wall. The knocks went on, nine of them in three groups of three, followed by a tenth lighter double-knock that communicated an impression of finality.

In his book A New World, Strieber refers back to this incident and connects it with Freemasonry.

I cannot know if this was intended, but the knocks reflected a tradition in Masonry where when someone is elevated to the 33rd Degree, they knock in this way on the door of the hall before being admitted.

He repeats this assertion in The Super Natural.

Also, when entering the thirty-third degree, a Mason must knock on the door of the lodge nine times in three groups of three.

I know basically nothing about the higher degrees of Masonry, but certainly "three distinct knocks" is a thing, and it wouldn't be surprising if they sometimes did three groups of three. Anyway, the point here is that Strieber, just like me today, (1) saw his cats behaving strangely, (2) assumed it was because of an animal outside, and then instead (3) observed something which he connected with Masonic ritual.

Friday, January 8, 2021

They received every man a penny

And the guy's name is Pence. I'm really starting to believe in this "nominative determinism" thing. (By the way, the etymology of my own name ultimately goes back to Tyche, the goddess of fortune.)

I've never been one for conspiracy theories about Freemasons, but that handshake is without any doubt a Masonic pass-grip. We can't see the coin or token being passed very clearly, but it certainly looks as if it might be marked with a pentagram or a square-and-compasses.

Thanks to commenter Mr. Andrew for bringing this to my attention.

Tuesday, August 27, 2019

The secret of Masonry

A carving on a wall of the Salt Lake Temple, showing a perfectly ordinary handshake

When he comes to the point in his memoirs where he is "initiated in the sublime trifles of Freemasonry," Casanova offers the following commentary on its mysteries, and on initiatory mysteries generally.

Mystery is the essence of man's nature, and whatever presents itself to mankind under a mysterious appearance will always excite curiosity and be sought, even when men are satisfied that the veil covers nothing but a cypher. . . .

Those who become Freemasons only for the sake of finding out the secret of the order, run a very great risk of growing old under the trowel without ever realizing their purpose. Yet there is a secret, but it is so inviolable that it has never been confided or whispered to anyone. Those who stop at the outward crust of things imagine that the secret consists in words, in signs, or that the main point of it is to be found only in reaching the highest degree. This is a mistaken view: the man who guesses the secret of Freemasonry, and to know it you must guess it, reaches that point only through long attendance in the lodges, through deep thinking, comparison, and deduction. He would not trust that secret to his best friend in Freemasonry, because he is aware that if his friend has not found it out, he could not make any use of it after it had been whispered in his ear. No, he keeps his peace, and the secret remains a secret.

Everything done in a lodge must be secret; but those who have unscrupulously revealed what is done in the lodge, have been unable to reveal that which is essential; they had no knowledge of it, and had they known it, they certainly would not have unveiled the mystery of the ceremonies. . . .

In the mysteries of Ceres, an inscrutable silence was long kept, owing to the veneration in which they were held. Besides, what was there in them that could be revealed? The three words which the hierophant said to the initiated? But what would that revelation have come to? Only to dishonour the indiscreet initiate, for they were barbarous words unknown to the vulgar. I have read somewhere that the three sacred words of the mysteries of Eleusis meant: Watch, and do no evil. The sacred words and the secrets of the various masonic degrees are about as criminal. . . .

In our days nothing is important, and nothing is sacred, for our cosmopolitan philosophers. Botarelli publishes in a pamphlet all the ceremonies of the Freemasons, and the only sentence passed on him is: "He is a scoundrel. We knew that before!" . . . In our days everything is inconsistent, and nothing has any meaning. Yet it is right to go ahead, for to stop on the road would be to go from bad to worse.

I am not a Mason myself, but thanks to pamphlets published by scoundrels, I am quite familiar with the content of the blue lodge ceremonies. I have also participated dozens of times in the Mormon version of a Masonic initiation, known as the Endowment, and it was on this latter experience, as much as on my knowledge of Freemasonry properly so called, that I found myself reflecting as I read Casanova's assessment. In what follows, I will pass freely between the two, considering them (and the Eleusinian mysteries) to be instances of the same sort of thing. (I trust my Mormon readers need not fear any bandying-about of the sacred; I will be discreetly vague.)

"Sublime trifles," though it seems merely flippant at first, strikes me as a very perceptive characterization of Masonry. The secrets revealed to Masonic initiates consist primarily of (1) secret handshakes and passwords and such, the only purpose of which can be the safeguarding of the real secrets; (2) injunctions to be good and true and other such moral platitudes (analogous to the Eleusinian secret of "Watch, and do no evil"); and (3) some rather straightforward symbols representing said moral commonplaces, such as a draftsman's compass as a symbol of "keeping within due bounds"; and (4) a simple allegorical drama about the assassination of a master mason, the main thrust of which seems to be the importance of protecting the handshakes and passwords. So, yes, these are trifles. Those "secrets" that are truly secret (i.e., no one but a Mason or a reader of scoundrelly pamphlets would know them) are in themselves of little meaning or importance, and those that are meaningful are the common property of all mankind and may be known intuitively or by cultural osmosis without the need for secret initiatory ceremonies. Yet there is a secret -- so Casanova says, and I believe him -- something to be gotten from those trifles which is sublime and worth getting.

As for the Endowment, I would certainly balk at using the word "trifles," mostly because, while the handshakes and passwords and straightforward symbols and moral commonplaces are all there, the content of the drama -- drawn from the opening chapters of Genesis, one of the deepest parts of one of the deepest books in the world -- is so much richer than that of its Masonic counterpart. Then again, it's all based rather closely on the Bible -- i.e., the most familiar and widely read book in the history of the world and as such the farthest thing possible from "secret" knowledge. Since virtually everything taught in the Endowment is also taught in publicly available scriptures, it is not clear what purpose is served by the pretense of secrecy. Mormons will say that the content of the Endowment is particularly sacred -- but what about it makes it more sacred than what may be read in the Bible? While there are of course some departures from and additions to the Mosaic narrative, I think it's safe to say that no great secrets are revealed, no startling new doctrines kept hidden from the uninitiated. Casanova's suggestion that "the veil covers nothing but a cypher" made me think of how the Endowment ceremony culminates in the initiate's finally being allowed to pass through the Veil of the Temple and discover what lies on the other side -- which turns out to be essentially a large living room, well appointed but not otherwise out of the ordinary, where nothing in particular is done, said, or revealed.

Yet there is a secret, something undeniably sublime about the Endowment, and the secrecy/sacredness is part and parcel of it, which is what makes me so ready to believe Casanova when he says something similar about ordinary Masonry.

Joseph Smith is reported to have said, "The secret of Masonry is to keep a secret." Éliphas Lévi listed "to be silent" as one of the four magical Powers of the Sphinx. Some of the Gospels have Jesus stress secrecy so much that Frank Kermode called his book about the Gospel of Mark The Genesis of Secrecy. Secrecy and silence seem to be something more than mere prudence -- seem to be seen as positive goods in their own right.

*

The purpose of Masonic (and Mormon) secrecy is not to keep information from the general public. This can clearly be seen in the way those institutions have reacted (or failed to react) to leaks, exposés, and the like. Masonry has been using the same passwords and secret handshakes for centuries, even though they have been revealed to the public many times over and are now trivially easy for anyone to find out. If you really care about protecting private information, then when someone hacks into your account, you change your password. In fact, you change your password from time to time regardless, just to be safe. The Masons have never changed their passwords, even though everyone knows them by now. (Even in Casanova's time, the reaction to a Masonic exposé was "He is a scoundrel. We knew that before!") If the Masons really cared about information security, good old Jachin and Boaz (really terrible passwords; anyone who knows the first can easily guess the second) would have long since been replaced by something more like "correct horse battery staple."

I can only conclude that the importance of the secrecy lies not in the supposed result (outsiders not knowing things) but rather in the act of secret-keeping itself. Masonry (and Mormonism, and the ancient Mysteries) is based on the principle that keeping secrets is good for the soul. Is that true? I can think of three possible reasons that it may be.

First, it is a form of discipline, a way of practicing self-control. "If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body. Behold, we put bits in the horses' mouths, that they may obey us; and we turn about their whole body" (James 3:2-3).

Second, very often our reasons for talking about things are unworthy and related to pride. When I post to this blog, for example, I constantly have to watch myself, to make sure that I am honestly expressing the truth to the best of my ability and not just trying to seem interesting or insightful to others. "Climb a mountain, tell no one" was a meme going around the Internet a while back -- tell no one, not because no one must know that you have climbed a mountain, but because the policy of telling no one ensures that you climb for the right reasons.

Third, there is the idea that non-communication may facilitate deeper and more thorough thought. As Robert Frost puts it in "Build Soil,"

I will go to my run-out social mind
And be as unsocial with it as I can.
The thought I have, and my first impulse is
To take to market I will turn it under.
The thought from that thought I will turn it under
And so on to the limit of my nature.
We are too much out, and if we won't draw in
We shall be driven in.

This idea exists in tension with the idea that communication leads to clear thinking, that you don't really understand something until you have tried to explain it to someone else. I find truth in both views, and perhaps Frost's agricultural metaphor acknowledges as much. After all, you don't keep turning your crops under forever; in the end you do want to take something to the market. So perhaps there is value to the Mormon distinction between the scriptures, which may be publicly discussed, and the Endowment, which must be contemplated in silence. Both social and unsocial thinking are necessary.