well hung

Music: Between Interval: The Edge of a Fairytale (2009)

This weekend was a lovely mix of work and friendship. I attended a beautiful wedding reception on Saturday, followed by the Austin Air Sex Finals with some folks at the Alamo. Christopher popped by on Sunday, and we had a leisurely visit (with a fun visit to Shangri-La, hardly a natural paradise but certainly a good place for conversation). I've also been working on a speech I've been asked to give tonight at my lodge's annual Festive Board, a formal black-tie dinner with lots of toasts and speeches celebrating fellowship. Last year I spoke on the topic of Masonry's oral tradition. This year is a follow up, a defense of our secrecy. I cannot share the whole speech, but I thought I'd post a teaser, per usual on work in progress:

On the Well Hung Tongue,
Or
An Understanding of the Esoteric in Freemasonry

Brethren, it is my distinct pleasure to speak before you again at our annual festive board, an exclusive meeting intended for a certain ear---an open or catholic ear, to be more precise. Many of you will recall that last year I argued that speech was to the nourishment of the ear as food was to the mouth and body. A festive board is a total feeding, if you will, of bodies and minds, of eating and saying, of digesting and hearing. Tonight I intend to expand my argument about the importance of speech to an analysis of its counterpart: silence. Or to put the matter differently, tonight I shall argue that the counterpart to Masonic speech is a certain willful silence, a silence most of us understand as the keeping of secrets. Because the Masonic obligation all of us have taken-not once, not twice, but three times-is fundamentally a promise to never reveal the signs, tokens, and passwords of each degree, I take it as axiomatic that a certain willful silence is just as important to our fraternity as speech.

Of course, by suggesting that Masonic silence is just as important as Masonic speech-and here I mean principally the ritual and catechism-I do not mean to suggest silence in an ordinary sense. Silence in Freemasonry is willful and contemplative; for example, from time to time, sadly, we have silent moments to reckon with the dead and dying. Silence is symbolic, since the absence of speech is a reminder that we are all united by a coming silence of our own. Yet Masonic silence is also a recognition of the obligation, in a sense the sonorous trace of what was once the blindfold of a candidate.

I am beginning, however, to get ahead of myself. So let me simply state, at the outset, that tonight I offer you an argument, an argument with which you are invited to agree or disagree. In fact, I would be honored with open disagreement, as this is what the original speculative lodges were created to protect; in the 18th century men went to the lodge to talk about ideas that may not please the king or pope-ideas like the pros and cons of republican democracy. Nevertheless, my argument is this: the dialectic between speech and silence--that is, the movement from one to the other, the shifting from the saying to the unsaid---is the cornerstone of esoteric work. Esotericism cannot be understood simply as the oral transmission of the catechism. Rather, esotericism must be understood as a kind of dynamic, a kind of logic, that ceaselessly moves from speech to silence. This movement includes the telling and keeping of secrets, but this movement is also between men, good men who are permitted to pass seated men and who are, in the end, raised in a reckoning with death. Movement between that which is present and absent, that which is said and unsaid, those who are in the know and those who are not, those who are blind and those who can see, those who hear jibberish and those who hear meaning, the movement between life and death, in other words, is central to understanding the esoteric.

I will also argue that, by definition, the esoteric work of Masonry requires us to be mute in respect to some teachings and modes of self-recognition. Of course, there are, in my view, a large number of Masonic truths and teachings that are NOT secret that many believe are, in fact, secret---and we'll get to that too. However, we do have secrets and are required-or as I shall suggest, are unavoidably compelled-to remain silent about them when among non-Masons. Unfortunately, owing to the pressures of popular culture and the misguided pursuit of publicity for its own sake, a number of prominent Masons have been disavowing esotericism and its mechanism of secrecy as a synonym for the occult. I shall return to the perils of recent Masonic publicity shortly, as I think it poses the most serious threat to the Craft, though, as I shall also soon discuss, this has been the since the inception of speculative Masonry.

In any event, to make my case the remainder of my talk is organized into three parts. In the first part, I shall discuss the esoteric tradition and define what it is. After defining the esoteric, I will then move to a discussion of secrecy and its relationship to elitism. To confront the elitism inherent in the esoteric is to confront the largest paradox of our fraternity: equality through privilege. Finally, I will turn my attention to recent attempts by very prominent Masons to downplay our esoteric traditions in what is, I think, a shift from republicanism to outright populism, of which I am unabashedly if not righteously against.

THE MASONIC ESOTERIC TRADITION

As a kind of self-evidence, I begin by telling a secret. That secret is the full title of my talk tonight. I confess I withheld part of the title from Brother Sterzing for fear that y'all might get the wrong idea. The full title is this: "On the Well Hung Tongue, or, An Understanding of the Esoteric in Freemasonry." Of course, in the parlance of the young, rightfully vocal and liberated women of our time, a well hung tongue is a much different desideratum than it was for our 18th century brothers. Even less than a century ago, the word "tongue" was a synonym for speech, and especially speech that carried information about a person. For example, you've all heard of a candidate "coming under the tongue of good report." Consider this excerpt from a now defunct catechism as it was known in 1723 and published in a British newspaper titled, The Flying Post:

QUESTION: Is there a Key to your Lodge?
ANSWER: Yes.
QUESTION: What is't?
ANSWER: A well hung Tongue.
QUESTION: Where is it Kept?
ANSWER: In an Ivory Box between my Teeth, or under the Lap of my Liver, where the Secrets of my Heart are not.
QUESTION: Is there a chain to it?
ANSWER: Yes.
QUESTION: How long is it?
ANSWER: As long as from my Tongue to my Heart.

Today we no longer speak of a "hung tongue," but apparently it was a central concept to the earliest recorded catechism---this being the first of what would become a floodtide of subsequent exposures. A hung tongue, of course, was one that was put away, a tongue that did not wag, a tongue incapable of telling the secrets that it swore to keep. Ironically, the more our 18th and 19th century Brethren stressed the importance and necessity of a hung tongue, the more and more were bookmakers, pamphleteers, and eventually newspaper publishers anxious to expose the Masonic ritual and catechism. In a very real sense, the history of Masonry is the history of the unhung tongue!

The well hung tongue, however, is not simply about keeping one's obligation. Metaphorically, the well hung tongue is the door to the outer chamber of the Masonic temple-or better, to the outer door of our Masonic university. The promise to keep a secret is the promise to participate in the esoteric, and yes, it is properly understood as an initiation into the occult tradition.

. . . .