‘Sing a song of seasons!’

     

Autumn Fires

Robert Louis Stevenson

In the other gardens

And all up in the vale,

From the autumn bonfires

See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over,

And all the summer flowers,

The red fire blazes,

The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!

Something bright in all!

Flowers in the summer,

Fires in the fall!

There isn’t much talk in Freemasonry of the equinoxes. It’s all about the solstices, starting, even, with an allusion during the First Degree—as another dichotomic pair, like checkered pavement, directional opposites, twin pillars, spirit and matter, and other contrasts balanced for harmony.

My lodge is located in the middle of Manhattan, so an autumn bonfire like Stevenson recommends would be impractical. The building trustees would suffer paroxysms of all sorts. Still, there is much the individual can do to acknowledge the quick period of “equal night” that strikes at this very moment. For me, the autumn fires will involve the transition from Virginia pipe tobaccos to mixtures containing healthy doses of Latakia. Maybe wear some tweed to lodge. Nothing pumpkin spice, thanks.

Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have been a Brother Mason in Scotland. My query via social media to the Grand Lodge there went unrequited, but in his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he delves very much into paradoxical human nature: good versus evil; public versus private; civilization versus barbarism. Just as we do in our lodges.

From Stevenson’s novella: “I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”

And so it goes in our initiatic rituals. Darkness overcome by Light at first; Ignorance cleansed by Knowledge in the second; and Death defeated by Eternal Life in the Sublime Degree. We can’t have one without the other in the perpetual labor.