MASONIC SECRETS

In view of the increasing number of publications purporting or affecting to give particulars of the secrets and inner proceedings of the Craft, the Board desires to notify that the preparation, publication, sale, or circulation of such works is a Masonic offence, and that when reported and proved, the offending Brother will be dealt with by disciplinary methods. The Board would add a strong warning to Brethren generally to be extremely cautious in any allusions, whether spoken, written or printed, to Masonic matters which may thus come into the possession of unqualified persons.

43 Paradoxically, the Working Group had no difficulty whatsoever in obtaining copies of the Emulation Ritual, one of the several ‘workings’ of Lodges under the Grand Lodge of England. The Emulation Lodge of Improvement itself operates under a committee, all of whose members are senior, bonafide Freemasons, and its version of Masonic ‘workings’ is recognised and authenticated in its submission to the Grand Lodge. This proved only one of several paradoxes of Freemasonry the Working Group were to notice.

44 Nevertheless an essential feature of the rituals of Craft Masonry is that the candidate undertakes ‘without evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation of any kind’, never to reveal to a non-Mason any of the steps, signs and grips and words which are disclosed to a candidate in the initiation ceremony, the ceremonies of Passing from the Degree of Entered Apprentice to that of Fellow Craft and Raising from Fellow Graft to that of Master Mason. ‘The marks by which we are known to each other and distinguished from the rest of the world’ should not be revealed to non-Masons.

45 Seeking admission to the Royal Holy Arch, the candidate not only swears that he

  • will always hele, conceal, and never divulge any of the secrets or mysteries restricted to this Supreme Degree, denominated the Holy Royal Arch of Jerusalem, to anyone in the world unless it be a true and lawful Companion of the Order whom I shall find to be such after strict examination.
    •

    He also solemnly promises

  • that I will not dare to pronounce that Sacred and Mysterious Name which may now for the first time be communicated to me, unless in the presence and with the assistance of two or more Royal Arch Companions, or in the body of a lawfully constituted Royal Arch Chapter, whilst acting as First Principal.
    •

    46 In Darkness Visible, however, Hannah published the full rituals of the first three Masonic Degrees and of the Royal Arch; the accuracy of his account remains unchallenged and is agreed by the Grand Lodge. Hannah’s book has gone through fifteen impressions and more than 50,000 copies and still sells steadily. The Emulation Ritual itself was first published in 1969. Stephen Knight’s The Brotherhood, which in an Appendix gives a brief account of the initiation ritual of the First Degree, appeared in 1984 and was reprinted nine times in that year alone. Any good library will have yet other books which contain or explain the "Secrets" of Freemasonry. Yet Craft members continue to swear a solemn oath on the Bible not to reveal secrets, which are not secrets at all!

    47 This, to a non-Mason, may appear more than a little odd, even farcical, but one Freemason wrote to the Working Group that the ‘secrets’ are regarded as signs and tokens, as symbolic: ‘they represent something deeper — that bond of brotherhood, which only those who are Freemasons can understand. In other words, what is sworn to is fidelity and friendship towards his fellow-Masons.

    48 However, the traditional penalties for breaking the oaths, for revealing the ‘secrets’ of the Graft, have been a matter of some anxiety in Masonic circles for many years. They are spelled out in the Obligations which until recently (see para. 53) candidates were invited to undertake for admission to the three Craft Degrees and for installation as the Worshipful Master of a Lodge.

  • These several points I solemnly swear to observe, without evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation of any kind, under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them than that of having my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the root, and buried in the sand of the sea at low water mark, or a cable’s length from the shore, where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in twenty-four hours, or the more effective punishment of being branded as a wilfully perjured individual, void of all moral worth, and totally unfit to be received into this worshipful Lodge... (First Degree).
    •

    Again:

  • These several points I solemnly swear to observe, without evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation of any kind, under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them, than that of having my left breast laid open, my heart torn therefrom, and given to the ravenous birds of the air, or devouring beasts of the field as prey... (Second Degree).
    •

    Or again:

  • All these points I solemnly swear to observe, without evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation of any kind, under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them, than that of being severed in two, my bowels burned to ashes, and those ashes scattered over the face of the earth, and wafted by the four cardinal winds of heaven, that no trace or remembrance of so vile a wretch may longer be found among men, particularly Master Masons (Third Degree).
    •

    In the case of the installation of the Worshipful Master, the penalty for revealing the secrets of the Lodge was:

  • to have the right hand struck off and slung over the left shoulder, there to wither and decay.
    •

    The penalty attaching to the obligation at the ceremony of Exaltation to Royal Arch Masonry was ‘that of suffering the loss of life by having my head struck ofF.

    It is difficult to reconcile these extravagant oaths with the dominical injunction in the Sermon on the Mount to ‘swear not at all’ and to ‘let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No" (Matt. 5. 33-37). As for the barbaric penalties invoked, honoured more in the breach than in the observance, they were an abuse of language.

    49 The present Grand Master first voiced his misgivings about the physical penalties as long ago as 1979, when, addressing the Grand Lodge at the Annual Investiture of that year, he said:

  • I remember feeling a very definite sensation of repugnance when I came to repeat the penalties clause in its old form.
    •

    He went on to refer to ‘the distasteful aspect of calling upon God to witness an Oath which is scarcely practical and certainly barbarous’. He referred to the matter again when presiding at the Quarterly Communication of the Grand Lodge in March 1985:

  • It seems to me that it would not be a very radical step, and would in no way affect the meaning of the Ritual, if the penalties were removed entirely from the Obligations, and treated as a form of traditional history.
    •

    50 Twenty years earlier, a discussion of the matter had been raised by Bishop Herbert, a prominent Freemason himself, as a consequence of which a ‘permissive variation’ was allowed (and subsequently printed in Emulation Ritual) in which the Obligations were changed to indicate that reference to the penalties was traditional, not an indication of practice.

    51 Not surprisingly, the nature of the obligations has been a feature of Masonic ritual to which public attention has been drawn and one of the reasons why Freemasonry has been condemned by its critics, who remained unimpressed by the conventional defence that, in any case, the penalties were never taken literally; that they are clearly symbolic. The very fact that they were undertaken with the candidate’s hand on the open Bible has always added weight to such criticism. ‘If it [the oath] is not taken seriously’, wrote Canon Demant to Walton Hannah, ‘or taken very symbolically (in contravention of the oath’s words: without evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation of any kind) then the oath comes under the heading of vain swearing or profanity. If it is taken seriously, then it must be put down as rash swearing ...‘ (Darkness Visible, p.24).

    52 There can be no doubt that the Grand Lodge has been sensitive on the matter of the physical penalties: ‘The existence of the physical penalties ... gives ready material for attack by our enemies and detractors’, the Board of General Purposes observed in its ‘Report on the Penalties in the Obligations’ in 1986. It was the last but probably not the least of their reasons for proposing a resolution for the approval of the Grand Lodge in June of that year that ‘all references to physical penalties be omitted from the Obligations taken by Candidates in the three Degrees and by a Master Elect at his Installation but retained [i.e. referred to in detail] elsewhere in the respective ceremonies Indeed, specific reference to the traditional penalties in other parts of the ceremonies is necessary to give meaning to the ‘signs’ of the Degrees.

    53 The Grand Master wished it ‘to be clearly understood that any change... will be of our making, and not because people outside Freemasonry have suggested it’. Whatever the reason for the change, the Resolution was in fact approved by a large majority of the Grand Lodge, which exercised its powers to direct that the necessary alterations to the rituals be put into effect as soon as possible and in any event not later than June 1987 (cf. Appendix VII).

    54 Members of the General Synod will be interested in the arguments in favour of the change advanced in the Report of the Board of General Purposes which, because of the importance of the change, are reproduced in full in Appendix VIII. But the change does not and cannot wholly meet all criticism of the Obligations, since it remains a fact that candidates are still required never to reveal ‘secrets’ the nature of which has not yet been revealed to them.

    55 There is no gain saying the fact that, since it is perfectly possible for any man wishing to become a Freemason to read up on the Craft be fore applying for membership, he need not necessarily be unaware of the nature and character of Freemasonry. It is certainly not correct to claim that ‘a candidate [is] required to join before he can [our italics] find out what he has joined’ (Arbuthnot, op.cit.). Nevertheless, the rituals of Initiation, and indeed of Passing and Raising, are certainly based on an assumption of ignorance and the Working Group are led to believe that candidates are not encouraged to get their subject up before applying for membership of the Craft. It is assumed that the integrity of Freemasonry is guaranteed by the integrity of those they already know to be members.

    56 It is the assumption of ignorance which prompts the question: Is it right to expect Christians to swear on the open Bible that they will not reveal the ‘secrets’ of an organisation whose rituals clearly state that they will only be revealed when the candidate has accepted the Obligations of membership? It is on these grounds that Canon Demant concluded his observations on the Obligations: ‘there is no certainty that the Christian initiate will not find afterwards that he has joined an alien cult’ (Darkness Visible, p.24).