‘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.

     

‘Weird Fact Wednesday: A Monument in Honor of a Great Artist’

     

Before I begin, happy 303rd anniversary!

Depending on where you are in the Masonic world, the Master Mason Degree ritual employed by your lodge might, or might not, include a quick discourse on the final resting place of our GMHA. I think the rituals lacking this explanation intentionally seek continuity with the overall point about the immortality of the soul, meaning the disposition of the body simply does not matter. The ritual of my lodge does include this bit of legendary history; I won’t quote that here, but instead will share the version found in the unauthenticated Duncan’s Ritual—which no regular lodge uses—even though my New York ritual has a better written telling of it. From Duncan’s monitorial text:


After prayer…the body was then carried to the Temple for a more decent burial, and was interred in due form.

The body of our Grand Master was buried three times: first, in the rubbish of the Temple; secondly, on the brow of a hill west of Mount Moriah; and, thirdly and lastly, as near the Sanctum Sanctorum, or Holy of Holies, of King Solomon’s Temple, as the Jewish law would permit; and Masonic tradition informs us that there was erected to his memory a Masonic monument, consisting of “a beautiful virgin, weeping over a broken column; before her was a book open; in her right hand a sprig of acacia, in her left an urn; behind her stands Time, unfolding and counting the, ringlets of her hair.”

The beautiful virgin weeping over the broken column denotes the unfinished state of the Temple, likewise the untimely death of our Grand Master, Hiram Abiff; the book open before her, that his virtues lay on perpetual record; the sprig of acacia in her right hand, the divinity of the body; the urn in her left, that his ashes were therein safely deposited, under the “Sanctum Sanctorum, or Holy of Holies,” of King Solomon’s Temple.

Time, unfolding the ringlets of her hair, denoted that time, patience, and perseverance accomplish all things.


Monuments are in the news lately, as statues and other public memorials have been defaced, smashed, toppled, and burned during many violent rampages across the United States and beyond. It’s not about the Confederacy or slavery or Black lives mattering. It’s about cultural revolution, which we can see plainly because plenty of the monuments targeted have nothing to do with the Confederacy. Statues of Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant, Miguel de Cervantes, and others have been ruined. Abolitionists, like John Greenleaf Whittier and Hans Christian Heg, have had their statues attacked. On May 31, which was the 123rd anniversary of its dedication, the Shaw Memorial, which memorializes the first African-American volunteer regiment of the U.S. Army in the Civil War, was vandalized with all kinds of graffiti by those claiming to be demanding justice for African-Americans, so don’t think for a minute this destruction has even a veneer of justice on it. It is about erasing history in a manner described by George Orwell in 1984.

But this edition of Weird Fact Wednesday concerns our monument found in certain MM° rituals. Why is it there?

The monument, as described in the drama, clearly would be an anachronism, as no such thing would have existed at that historical time and in that place. Even the book, as depicted in the monument, would not have been known then. So where did this symbol come from?

We don’t find it in Preston’s Illustrations, but being a Tiler myself, I am inclined to trust the judgment of Bro. Thomas Johnson, who served as Grand Tiler of the Grand Lodge of England when he published A Brief History of Freemasonry in 1782. Therein we find a “Design for a Monument, in Honor of a Great Artist.” This shows the three Great Lights, adorned with laurels, and an urn decorated with the letter G, with the sun and moon on the sides of the monument.

Two hundred years ago, long before Freemasons could obtain official—or other—ritual ciphers or monitors, there necessarily were competing forms of Masonic works spreading across the United States. Grand lodges had to investigate and determine for themselves which systems were most authentic and useful, which I think explains why some Third Degree rituals, but not others, include this monument discussion. One of the ritual systems to emerge in the early 19th century was that promulgated by Bro. John Barney of Vermont, who is credited with innovating the icon of the marble column and the weeping virgin and Father Time, with the open book, sprig of acacia, and urn.

No doubt you are wondering where Jeremy Cross, who I think deserves third billing with William Preston and Thomas Smith Webb for creating the rituals most of us Americans have today, fits into this. It seems Cross made that column into the Broken Column, denoting how one of the principal supports of Freemasonry has fallen.