dum-dum occultism

Music: Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd: The Moon and the Melodies (1986)

Here's part three of the Freemasonry essay as I plug right along. I regret I cannot write the conclusion today; I need to read Jodi Dean's book first, and it still hasn't shipped! Our library has a copy that's checked-out (I HATE my university library anyway, about which more perhaps one day). Doncha just get your panties in a wad when you're on a writing roll and have to stop because you don't have what you need? Panty-wadism during productivity sucks green donkey dicks.

Oh well, I need to clean the condo anyway. Must wash the cat.

No secrets here, just bitching and moaning about my fellow brethren:

The Perils of Publicity, or, Dumbing Down the Mystery

The conflict between secrecy and democracy would appear to be a recurrent phenomenon in our national history. Indeed, since the flowering of the modern secret society in the eighteenth century, antisecretism as a state of mind has been an enduring fiber in the patter of Western culture.
--Leland M. Griffin[i]

In his classic study of the rhetorical structure of the Anti-Masonic movement, Leland Griffin carefully traces how the murder of an anti-Mason, allegedly committed by a gang of Masons (which known in the Masonic literature as the "Morgan Affair)," sparked an anti-Masonic social movement that culminated in the development of a political party and "the first Antimasonic candidate for the Presidency" in 1831. [ii] According to Griffin's account,

in the fall of 1826 rumor was circulated among Freemasons of western New York to the effect that a former member of the lodge at Batavia, a bricklayer named William Morgan, was planning to publish the secret signs, grips, passwords, and ritual of Ancient Craft [Blue Lodge] Masonry. The anger of the Masons was soon translated into those actions that were to initiate the [Antimasonic] movement. . . . Morgan . . . was imprisoned on a false charge and shortly thereafter, abducted from his cell by a small band of Masons and driven in a closed carriage more than one hundred miles to Rochester; from there he was taken to the abandoned fort above Niagara Falls. . . . Morgan was locked in the castle of the fort--where, from that moment, all historical trace of him vanishes.[iii]

After Morgan's death, his book was published and became an instant bestseller, and an Anti-Masonic uproar led to twenty-one indictments and a trial for six, none of whom charged with murder (it turns out the prosecutor and a number of jurors were Freemasons). After the trial, over a hundred Anti-Masonic newspapers sprung up and, as Hodapp puts it, helped to generate a "hysteria" that was "so bad that for nearly two decades, a toddler couldn't get sick in the United States without someone claiming the Masons had poisoned the kid's porridge."[iv]

From a rhetorical vantage, what is particularly interesting to Griffin is the way in which the Anti-Masons created a "fund" of public argument via various channels of media circulation (newspapers, tracts, public lectures, sermons, and so on), and the rhetorical strategies of Masons in response to the many accusations against them: it was claimed that the Masons killed Morgan as a part of their bloodthirsty rituals; that they were conspiring to take over the newly established and united republic; that the Masons were in cahoots with the Devil, and so on.

The first strategy the Masons used, which Griffin speculates may in part rely on common beliefs about persuasion at the time (e.g., the work of George Campbell), was to attack

The character and motives of Antimasons . . . . [Masons] charged that [Antimasons] were merely trying to 'raise an excitement,' and declared that the 'blessed spirit' [viz., grace claimed by Anti-Masons] was rather an inquisitorial spirit, a product of delusion as the Salem witchcraft trials had been.[v]

Apparently the counter-attack strategy was a disaster. Griffin argues that it led the Anti-Mason's to extend their agenda to the complete destruction of Freemasonry itself, and later, "the destruction of all secret orders then existing in the country."[vi]

Griffin argues that the second rhetorical response of Masons was no more effective, at least for the next decade as Masonic supporters or "Mason Jacks" stopped defending the fraternity. In 1830, under the "tacit leadership of President Jackson" (also a Mason), the Secretary of State Edward Livingston gave a speech to a number of Masons in which he urged "'dignified silence' in the face of the opposition's attack."vii After this talk was circulated among Masons, Griffin notes that "the Masons became, in fact, virtually mute."[viii] Meanwhile,

States began to pass laws against extrajuridical oaths, legislation which was intended to emasculate the secret order; lodge charters were surrendered, sometimes under legal compulsion but often voluntarily; Phi Beta Kappa abandoned its oaths of secrecy; Masonic and Odd Fellows' lodges began to file bankruptcy petitions; and membership rolls in the various orders began to dwindle to the vanishing point. [ix]

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the fraternity began to recover and slowly increased in numbers. Membership steadily increased for decade after decade until it ballooned to four million members in the modern heyday of contemporary civic engagement in the post World War II United States.[x] Nevertheless, the rhetorical strategy of absolute silence in response to questions regarding Masonry--and especially in response to attacks--would persist until relatively recently. Hence, the tight-lipped response of an uncle or grandfather when questioned about the teachings of Freemasonry are not only a consequence of misunderstanding (e.g., that there really are no secrets anymore) or the consequence of revolutionary politics, but also a defensive impulse rooted in the Fraternity's response to the Anti-Masonic crisis of the 1830s.

Owing to its commitment to tradition and ritual precedent, as well as the emphasis placed on scholarship and the study of its symbols and history, many Freemasons are aware of the history of Anti-Masonry and at least tacitly inculcated with the rhetorical habits of the fraternity. Shaking the defensive response of the past when confronting popular publicity has been a long process. Because of the recent, positive portrayals of the fraternity in contemporary popular media, however, a number of prominent Masonic leaders, perhaps taking lessons from the past, have adopted a newer strategy: (seemingly) a complete openness about the fraternity, its histories, its rituals, and its symbols. As the membership numbers plummeted in the mid-nineteenth century, effectively threatening the survival of the fraternity, the Masons chose to continue their charity and ritual work behind the closed doors of the lodge without a word. Today, as the fraternity faces a similar, though less dramatic, decline, a number of Masonic leaders have chosen to embrace recent publicity as an opportunity to stress the non-mysterious aspects of the Order.

One reason that contemporary Masons have decided to appear more open to public curiosity is the recognition that publics--and their habits of information gathering--have changed dramatically in the twentieth century. Pierre G. Normand, editor of Plumbline, the newsletter of one of the largest Masonic scholarly societies, the Scottish Rite Research Society , writes:

I suppose the big news in the Masonic world of late is the onslaught of mixed blessings attendant to the release of The Da Vinci Code movie. [It] . . . mentions Freemasonry, however briefly and inaccurately, and, as a result, everyone's interested in the fraternity again. . . . We live in a world of tabloid journalism and conspiracy theories where the average American learns everything, not in the history section of the local library or bookshop, but at the checkout counter of the local grocery story [sic], or the movie theatre.[xi]

Apparently mindful of this attitude, Masonic officials made a number of strategic choices when ABC television network approached the Scottish Rite headquarters and requested a live broadcast. Decisions were made to downplay the mystery-effects of Masonic symbolism as well as the spiritual teaching occult practices of Masonry. "Secrecy" was deliberately re-coded as "private," disarticulating the fraternity from the long history of clandestine clubs in the language of publicity (e.g., the right to keep some "private" things from public scrutiny, and so on). For example, when Richard E. Fletcher, Executive Secretary of the dominant Masonic PR association, spoke with the reporter Charles Gibson on national television, he flatly denied the label "secret society":

Charles Gibson: . . . Do you accept this idea it's [Freemasonry] a secret society?
Richard E. Fletcher: No, sir.
Gibson: Not secret?
Fletcher: It isn't.
Gibson: Then why the secret handshakes and the secret rites, etcetera, that go on?

Fletcher: Well, the handshakes--if you want to go in that direction--the handshakes are a throwback to our early days when Freemasonry was related to the actual builders in stone.

Fletcher then explains the function of handshakes and passwords in medieval masonic guilds, but Gibson was determined:

Gibson: But you know secret societies today raise suspicions. Now, you say it's not secret. But there are parts about it that we don't know.
Fletcher: There are parts that are private. Now, if you're talking about what goes on behind closed doors and all those secret things. They're not secret. They're private. What we are doing is taking an individual man, bringing him into the fraternity through a series of degrees, and in those degrees, he is going to be challenged to look at such things as honesty, honor, integrity, how to make oneself a better person . . . . [xii]

The mere fact that the top leaders of the Scottish Rite allowed a popular morning news program to film inside the House of the Temple in Washington D.C., of course, betokens a very different approach to and attitude toward publicity than in its almost three-hundred year history.

So, too, is "privacy" the replacement of "secrecy" in a number of the books written for the express purpose of popularizing the fraternity since the Da Vinci Code catalyzed popular curiosity. "Masons like to say that Freemasonry is not a secret society," reports Christopher Hodapp in his Freemasons for Dummies, "rather, it is a society with secrets. A better way to put this is that what goes on in a lodge room during its ceremonies is private."[xiii] Like Fletcher, Hodapp similarly downplays the centrality and function of mystery central to Masonic philosophy. For Hodapp, although "it is tempting to believe that there are hidden mysteries and even magic contained in" Masonic symbols, "in fact, they're used to simply imprint on the mind the lessons of the fraternity."xiv In the same spirit of simplicity, Hodapp not only downplays the drama of Masonic ritual as a "throwback," but--and surprisingly so--dismisses the entire body of modern Masonic philosophy. In an offset blurb box titled "Mysticism, magic, and Masonic mumbo-jumbo," Hodepp writes:

If you read enough about Freemasonry, you'll soon come across the writings of Albert Mackey, Manley Hall, Arthur Edward Waite, and Albert Pike. These men and many others have filled reams of paper with scholarly observations of Freemasonry. They eloquently linked the Craft to the ancient Mystery Schools of Egypt and elsewhere. They wrote that Masonry was directly descended from pagan rites and ancient religions. . . . The works of these men were filled with fabulous tales and beliefs and cultures and cryptic theories of the deepest and earliest origins of Freemasonry. In short, they wrote a lot of crap.[xv]

Hodapp continues by denying Masonry has any relation to the occult, and that writers like "Pike, Mackey, and Hall" wrote "big, thick books" that created all sorts of problems since "Freemasons [now] have to explain all over again to their relatives and ministers that, no, they aren't . . . making pagan sacrifices to Lucifer." Hodapp concludes, "let's just say their [Pike et al.] vision of the history of modern-day Freemasonry is not accurate and leave it at that."[xvi] Either Hodapp does not understand the internal function of Masonic rhetoric, or he has deliberately chosen to mischaracterize the fraternity.

That Hodapp can be so dismissive of Masonic philosophy is, in fact, protected by the organizational structure of the fraternity. As previously discussed, all Masonic authority is invested in a given region's Grand Lodge, and lodge officials are the ones who determine what is and is not properly "Masonic." Combined with the general commitment to the right of each individual to interpret Masonic symbolism for himself, the tribal structure of Masonic authority has contributed to a general tolerance of freethinking and polite disagreement among Masons in the United States. Unquestionably, that a Master Mason from a California jurisdiction could publish something titled Freemasons for Dummies is a testament to this ideology.

Although decidedly more serious and less anti-intellectual, a number of recent Masonic publications reflect a downplaying of the mystical and occult teachings of the Craft. For example, Arturo de Hoyos and S. Brent Morris' Is it True What They Say About Freemasonry? downplays Pike's Morals and Dogma as a product of its time: "Just because Albert Pike was a brilliant ritualist, an able administrator, and a well-respected Mason doesn't mean all his opinions are right in light of today's knowledge."[xvii] Such an observation is certainly true, however, it is made in the absence of any explanation of Pike's commitment to the Ancient Mysteries and the central function of Masonic symbolism, which comprised Pike's fundamental teaching in Morals and Dogma. Despite the fact that each is hundreds of pages long, similar publications like Morris' The Complete Idiot's Guide to Freemasonry and The Everything Freemasonry Book (the latter by non-Masons) also downplay the occult origins of the fraternity and as well as the dramatic and mysterious aspects. Although tone of the latter books is much more respectful of Masonic tradition and philosophy than Hodapp's, they join Freemasonry for Dummies in presenting the fraternity as the antithesis of the mystery-effect of the strange symbol. As Walter Benjamin might say, each book attempts to evaporate the aura of mystery that surrounds the Craft in the language of transparency and contemporary argot.[xviii] Given the Anti-Masonic movements of the past, it is understandable why this third strategy was adopted. And yet, when viewed from the perspective of ritual drama and mystery-effect, this rhetorical trend is, not surprisingly, ironically deceptive: not only does it seem to divest the fraternity--at least for the outsider--of one of its two major practices (no one disowns charity, of course), the strategy is more commonly known as "lying." In our age of surveillance and publicity, lying may prove to be the absolute worst strategy of all.

Notes

i Leland M. Griffin, "The Rhetorical Structure of the Antimasonic Movement." Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Carl R. Burgchardt (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 1995), 371.

ii Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia, sv. "Morgan Affair."

iii Griffin, "Antimasonic Movement," 373. Of course, many Masons have disputed this account stressing that no one knows what really happened to Morgon; see Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Morgan Affair," as well as Hodapp, Dummies, 45-47.

iv Hodapp, Dummies, 46.

v Griffin, "Antimasonic Movement," 374.

vi Griffin, "Antimasonic Movement," 374.

vii Griffin, "Antimasonic Movement," 377.

viii Griffin, "Antimasonic Movement," 378.

ix Griffin, "Antimasonic Movement," 377-378.

x Holly Lebowitz Rossi, "Masonic Membership is Declining." Detroit Free Press (15 July 2006): available http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060715/FEATURES01/607150329/1026 accessed 10 August 2006. Also Cite something here from Bowling Alone, perhaps a Masonic factoid.

xi Pierre G. "Pete" Normand, "SRRS Bulletin Notes." The Plumbline: The Quarterly Bulletin of the Scottish Rite Research Society 14 (2006): 2.

xii Cited in Morris, "Good Morning, America, paras. 7-15.

xiii Hodapp, Dummies, 17.

xiv Hodapp, Dummies, 132.

xv Hodapp, Dummies, 61.

xvi Hodapp, Dummies, 61.

xvii De Hoyos and Morris, Is it True, 26.

xviii See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," second version. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2002), 101-133.