‘Happy to receive Lodges of Sorrow after all’

    

I wasn’t looking forward to reading this latest bonus book from the Scottish Rite Research Society. There’s more than adequate morbidity in the world, so the title Lodges of Sorrow conveyed all I needed to form an irrational aversion, but never judge a book by its title. Lodges of Sorrow. Craft, Rose Croix, Kadosh contains much beautiful language our ancestors composed to provide solace and purpose for the most trying of times, and I was extra pleased to see it reached deeper into the past, before Scottish Rite’s birth, to eighteenth century London and America.

In their Introduction, Arturo de Hoyos and Chris Ruli begin at the beginning: our first clue of the existence of a Third Degree. Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected ritual exposure from 1730 tells of KS ordering HAB be “decently buried.”

“The theme of Hiram’s burial was an important feature of the Scots Master degree, which was the earliest known ‘high degree’ after Master Mason,” they add. “Conferred in London as early as 1733, the Scots Master degree soon spread to continental Europe.”

In actual funerals, they recall the burial of a Bro. Ellis, “a member of the ‘lodge at Antwerp Tavern,’” who was said to have been interred in the presence of his lodge brothers which itself was said to have been a first since 1717. They then note how decades later William Preston published the basis of our funerary rites in his book Illustrations of Masonry in 1772.

Returning to historic events, the Masonic funerals, with processions, of both Joseph Warren in 1776 (like HAB, Warren was disinterred and buried again properly) and George Washington in 1799 are recounted.

Unsurprisingly, Albert Pike authored a Funeral Ceremony and Lodge of Sorrows ritual for Scottish Rite Masons. Intended to be worked by Chapters of Rose Croix, but to honor anyone of the A&ASR, these later were put into practice for murdered President James A. Garfield, 14°.

In 1887, Pike additionally wrote ceremonies specifically for degrees 30 to 33, and, four years later, these would be employed for their author in a private midnight ceremony inside the Scottish Rite Cathedral in the District of Columbia. Days later, his coffin was transferred to a Congregational church, where a second midnight Kadosh service was performed, this time in the presence of Supreme Council, Grand Lodge, and the Masonic Veteran Association (where Pike had been president).

This Introduction merits twenty pages in a Heredom, but here it primes the reader for the following 130+ pages of funeral rituals and their contexts. First come five optional versions of Lodge of Sorrow and Ceremony at Final Resting Place, and here is where we find much of that gorgeous rhetoric that seemed to have been so common in the nineteenth century. One excerpt I especially like:

The lips of the departed speak to us sermons that cannot be translated into words. Most eloquently, they tell us how vain, and empty are all the ambitions, the disputes, the rivalries, and the struggles for rank and reputation in human life. Our Brother, whose soul has now departed, is indifferent to praise or censure, to undeserved eulogy or equally undeserved blame, to all the prizes of human greatness, to all the beatitudes of human love. Often it is said, yet it is always a solemn and impressive thought, that in the grave all men are equal, the prince and beggar, the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable.

And, later, from that Knight Kadosh piece:

It is midnight, and a new day begins for us. Our Brother has finished his earthly probation. Death is the inexorable creditor whose indulgence nothing in the world can purchase. Every moment that sees a newborn child laugh at the light, sees also a man die, and hears the cry of a breaking heart, and the lamentations of those who sit, lonely and in the desolation of affliction, no longer seeing the faces dearly loved.

Round the little island of our being on which we follow our various pursuits of toil and craft, of usefulness or mischief, throbs the illimitable ocean of Eternity upon which, round the isle, a broad circle of impenetrable darkness brooding lies. But beyond that zone the outer ocean sparkles, and its white-crested waves dance in the light; and somewhere in the distance the Islands of the Blessed are dreaming, girdled by the peaceful waters. here, in our present home, we live our little life, waiting to be called to other duties elsewhere; and one by one our loved ones and our cherished friends glide away from us unseen, and are swallowed up in the darkness which is the shadow of the broad wings of Death.

Each of us belongs to some little colony of hearts that hath a life of its own, its private and inner life, apart from that of the mass of Humanity which eddies round it in endless agitations, having with it no sympathies nor any memories of association. When one of its members dies, it is as if a limb were severed from the body. The wound heals, but the limb is missed as long as the body lives. Thus is the body of our Order here mutilated today, and therefore we mourn.

I was pleased also to see an illustration from Thomas Johnson’s A Brief History of Freemasonry from 1782.

I can’t say Lodges of Sorrow is mandatory reading for Freemasons. It is a window—a tall and wide and colorfully stained glass aperture—overlooking part of our past. If you’re going to read it, do so while keeping in mind the Masonic obsequies you have witnessed, and consider the possibility that today’s ceremonies lack a weighty sincerity. The standard lodge service has become just another piece of ritual work to memorize, which too often—at least in my experience—results in a perfunctory and fast recitation.

I wonder if there is a grand lodge in the country that even allows a Scottish Rite service, whether at midnight or high twelve.