‘Freemasonry in Popular Culture: call for papers’

    

The 2024 conference was only days ago, but the call for papers for 2025 is out.

From the publicity:

Call for Papers

13th International Conference

on Freemasonry

April 2025

We are now accepting proposals for academic paper presentations for the 13th International Conference on Freemasonry, sponsored by the Grand Lodge of California, to be held in April 2025 on the UCLA campus.

The theme for the conference is “Freemasonry in Popular Culture: 1700 to Yesterday.”

Susan Mitchell Sommers

Topics are open but should be closely matched to the theme of the conference. Proposals dealing with print, music, theater, film, and architecture are especially welcome. Successful proposals will adhere to academic standards of research and composition and pursue original analyses. Please send CV and 500-word proposal to Susan Mitchell Sommers here. 

Proposals are due August 1, 2024.

Travel and accommodations will be covered for those speakers who are selected.

     

‘From the Attic of the Grand Lodge’

     

From the Attic

of the Grand Lodge

No, that’s not a horror movie about the “grand lodge” in New Jersey. It’s the theme of the 2023 International Conference on Freemasonry!

That’s next April in California. From the publicity:

We’ve all had the experience—or at least dreamed of it—of crawling through the attic or the basement and discovering a hidden treasure. For many California Masons, whose lodges have histories going back to the founding of the state, that Antiques Roadshow fantasy isn’t a fantasy at all. From centuries-old aprons and officers’ jewels, to paintings, ornaments, and documents, Masonic lodges can be a treasure trove of curiosities. But what are we supposed to do with this stuff?

That’s the question at the heart of the 11th International Conference on Freemasonry, taking place April 8, 2023 at the University of California-Los Angeles. The annual event, presented by the Grand Lodge of California, is an exploration of the vast collection of material culture—the technical term for that “stuff.” What should lodges do with it? How do we know what’s valuable and what isn’t? And how do these items, from Bibles to regalia to aides de memoire, help tell the larger story of Freemasonry?

The presenters:

Dr. Mark Dennis on “The Material Culture of Freemasonry: Not a Thing Apart from the World.”

Leigh Ann Gardner on “Obeyed the Last Summons and Entered the Grand Lodge Above: Fraternal Cemeteries as Material Culture.”

Adam Kendall on “Listening to the Secret and Silent.”

Dr. Aimee Newell on “Expressing Brotherhood and Nationhood Through Symbols: Masonic Material Culture in the United States.”

Read all about it here.

     

‘UCLA’s Esotericism and Masonic Connections’

     

Next April will see the ninth annual International Conference on Freemasonry at UCLA, this time with the theme “Hidden Meanings: Esotericism and Masonic Connections.”

The theme is important, because the conference is moving forward without the political content that characterized previous events there, and now is organized under official California Masonic auspices.

From the publicity:

Hidden Meanings: Esotericism

and Masonic Connections

UCLA International Conference

on Freemasonry

Saturday, April 18, 2020

9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

UCLA: 330 De Neve Drive

Covell Commons, Grand Horizon Room

Los Angeles

Tickets here

Freemasonry offers everyone a pathway to self-improvement, fellowship, and community. For the committed few, it holds the promise of even more.

For more than 300 years, Masonic teachings and symbolism have attracted those in search of deeper, secret meanings about the natural and even supernatural world. These esoteric pursuits, shrouded in mystery and mysticism, have endured through the centuries and even today continue to fascinate seekers around the world.

On April 18, 2020, experts and scholars on Freemasonry will meet on the campus of UCLA to discuss the eternal quest for esoteric knowledge and its broader relationship to the craft. The ninth annual UCLA International Conference on Freemasonry is a rare chance for Masons and non-Masons to dive deep on metaphysics, antiquity, and the occult.

Freemasonry and the Esoteric:

Elitism, Insecurity, and

Unenlightened Self-Interest

Ric Berman, author of several books

on Freemasonry, including Espionage, Diplomacy & the Lodge

Although Masonic esotericism hints at ancient secrets, it was in fact not widely introduced into the craft until the 1730s—a means of appealing to an elite aristocratic and mostly French audience. The success of that marriage in the eighteenth century led to Freemasonry’s systematic introduction into the United States, a consequence not of politics or spirituality but economic self-interest.

The Esotericism of the Esoteric

School of Masonic Research

Henrik Bogdan, professor of Religious Studies, University of Gothenburg

The founding of London’s Quatuor Coronati Lodge in 1884 gave birth to a new school of Masonic history and research, based on legitimate texts and study rather than the subjective or “inspired” Masonic writers of the past. However among this new school were a subset of scholars approaching research from what historian R.A. Gilbert called the “Esoteric School of Masonic Research”—part of a broader milieu of fin-de-siecle occultism.

Hidden and Visible:

Mormon Garments in Community

Nancy Ross, assistant professor, Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences,

Dixie State University

Weighted with meaning, sacred (and secret) undergarments have long been a highly important, though seldom discussed, part of the Mormon church. Indeed, across religions, sacred garments like these have presented profound dilemmas and indicated deeper meanings for wearers and their broader communities.

Freemasonry and Neoplatanism

Jan Snoek, historian of religions,

Institute of Religious Studies,

University of Heidelberg

Several philosophers, expanding on the teachings of Plato, developed theories without which Freemasonry could never have found its form. From Abbot Suger’s construction of the church of St. Denis—Europe’s first gothic cathedral, dedicated to light and beauty—to the third-century parable of the sculptor who must perfect himself, meet the thinkers who paved the way for modern Masonry.

Stephen Freeman

on Antigua and London:

A Respectable Rosicrucian

Susan Mitchell Sommers, professor

of history, Saint Vincent College

The recent discovery of a single surviving pamphlet by a quack doctor, Stephen Freeman, living in Antigua in the late 18th century offers a rare glimpse into not only the thinking of a fringe medical professional, but also paints a stunning portrait of the lives of striving middle-class emigrants in the West Indies struggling for respectability. Largely by leaning on connections through societies including the Freemasons and esoteric Rosicrucians, those like Freeman hoped to improve their lot in society and find deeper meaning—in both cases, often unsuccessfully.

The UCLA International Conference is sponsored by the California Masonic Foundation and the Grand Lodge of California.
     

‘Goldberg variations: the new class of polyhedra’

     
If you are the kind of thinker who hears the Divine in the language of geometry, then this news is for you. The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America has just published a paper it received for review last spring that gives the world a new—fourth—class of convex polyhedra. In short, Plato, Archimedes, and Kepler have company, and his name is Goldberg. As you’ll see in the article below, these Goldberg variations (sorry, I couldn’t resist) are not true polyhedra solids, so “Goldberg” is a misnomer, albeit a well-intentioned one. It is believed this discovery can bring researchers closer to finding cures for a variety of viruses, if you’re curious about practical significance.

It’s not every day that something like this pops up, so for only the second time in Magpie history I’m going to reproduce an entire news story—replete with art—here, with thanks to The Conversation, the “academic rigor, journalistic flair” journal you all should have bookmarked for reference. Enjoy, and please discuss among yourselves.

After 400 years, mathematicians find

a new class of solid shapes

Not so special anymore.

The work of the Greek polymath Plato has kept millions of people busy for millennia. A few among them have been mathematicians who have obsessed about Platonic solids, a class of geometric forms that are highly regular and are commonly found in nature.

Since Plato’s work, two other classes of equilateral convex polyhedra, as the collective of these shapes are called, have been found: Archimedean solids (including truncated icosahedron) and Kepler solids (including rhombic polyhedra). Nearly 400 years after the last class was described, researchers claim that they may have now invented a new, fourth class, which they call Goldberg polyhedra. Also, they believe that their rules show that an infinite number of such classes could exist.

Platonic love for geometry

Equilateral convex polyhedra need to have certain characteristics. First, each of the sides of the polyhedra needs to be of the same length. Second, the shape must be completely solid: that is, it must have a well-defined inside and outside that is separated by the shape itself. Third, any point on a line that connects two points in a shape must never fall outside the shape.

Platonic solids, the first class of such shapes, are well known. They consist of five different shapes: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. They have four, six, eight, twelve and twenty faces, respectively.

Platonic solids in ascending order of number of faces.

These highly regular structures are commonly found in nature. For instance, the carbon atoms in a diamond are arranged in a tetrahedral shape. Common salt and fool’s gold (iron sulfide) form cubic crystals, and calcium fluoride forms octahedral crystals.

The new discovery comes from researchers who were inspired by finding such interesting polyhedra in their own work that involved the human eye. Stan Schein at the University of California in Los Angeles was studying the retina of the eye when he became interested in the structure of protein called clathrin. Clathrin is involved in moving resources inside and outside cells, and in that process it forms only a handful number of shapes. These shapes intrigued Schein, who ended up coming up with a mathematical explanation for the phenomenon.

Goldberg polyhedron.

During this work, Schein came across the work of 20th century mathematician Michael Goldberg who described a set of new shapes, which have been named after him, as Goldberg polyhedra. The easiest Goldberg polyhedron to imagine looks like a blown-up football, as the shape is made of many pentagons and hexagons connected to each other in a symmetrical manner.

However, Schein believes that Goldberg’s shapes – or cages, as geometers call them – are not polyhedra. “It may be confusing because Goldberg called them polyhedra, a perfectly sensible name to a graph theorist, but to a geometer, polyhedra require planar faces,” Schein said.

Instead, in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schein and his colleague James Gayed have described that a fourth class of convex polyhedra, which given Goldberg’s influence they want to call Goldberg polyhedra, even at the cost of confusing others.

Blown up dodecahedron.

A crude way to describe Schein and Gayed’s work, according to David Craven at the University of Birmingham, “is to take a cube and blow it up like a balloon” – which would make its faces bulge (see image to the right). The point at which the new shapes breaks the third rule – which is, any point on a line that connects two points in that shape falls outside the shape – is what Schein and Gayed care about most.

Craven said, “There are two problems: the bulging of the faces, whether it creates a shape like a saddle, and how you turn those bulging faces into multi-faceted shapes. The first is relatively easy to solve. The second is the main problem. Here one can draw hexagons on the side of the bulge, but these hexagons won’t be flat. The question is whether you can push and pull all these hexagons around to make each and everyone of them flat.”

During the imagined bulging process, even one that involves replacing the bulge with multiple hexagons, as Craven points out, there will be formation of internal angles. These angles formed between lines of the same faces – referred to as dihedral angle discrepancies – means that, according to Schein and Gayed, the shape is no longer a polyhedron. Instead they claimed to have found a way of making those angles zero, which makes all the faces flat, and what is left is a true convex polyhedron.

Their rules, they claim, can be applied to develop other classes of convex polyhedra. These shapes will be with more and more faces, and in that sense there should be an infinite variety of them.

Playing with shapes

Such mathematical discoveries don’t have immediate applications, but often many are found. For example, dome-shaped buildings are never circular in shape. Instead they are built like half-cut Goldberg polyhedra, consisting of many regular shapes that give more strength to the structure than using round-shaped construction material.

Only the one in the right bottom corner is a convex polyhedra.

However, there may be some immediate applications. The new rules create polyhedra that have structures similar to viruses or fullerenes, a carbon allotrope. The fact that there has been no “cure” against influenza, or common flu, shows that stopping viruses is hard.

But if we are able to describe the structure of a virus accurately, we get a step closer to finding a way of fighting them.

If nothing else, Schein’s work will invoke mathematicians to find other interesting geometric shapes, now that equilateral convex polyhedra may have been done with.