This blog entry is in english. Yet english is not my native language (italian is), so bear some indulgence with typos or grammatical mistakes. Also, I have been told that I write complex things - whether this is good or bad I don't know: but so, if you are unfamiliar with complex prose you may see grammatical errors not only where there could be some, but also where just a prose you're not acquainted with is. Native speakers with an A+ grade in english say my english, obviously not perfect, imports no major issues. Lend a deaf ear to the errors, vocally disagree with my thesis if you want, but enjoy the style all the while.
«That from which you are running is within you. Reform your own self.(...) Live with a hangman and you will never get rid of your cruelty. The miser, the swindlers, the bully, the cheat, who will do you much harm by being near you, are within you. (...) Nature has brought us forth brave of spirit and, as she has implanted in certain animals a spirit of ferocity, in others craft, in others terror, so she has gifted us with an aspiring and lofty spirit, which prompts us to seek a life of the greatest honour, and not of the greatest security»
Seneca * , EpistlesFreemasonry "
c'est moi", and thou shalt have no other FreeMasonry before me.
I want to ask you: how many among you would have found acceptable a statement of such a kind? Am I very far away from the truth if I respond: nobody?
And in this Lodge, you are all freemasons.
A FreeMasonry which you can define, isn't FreeMasonry: otherwise its followers would recognize it as such.
But then, what properly is FreeMasonry, for its disciples do share the very same roof? And how could we grow able to prevent it from undertaking the path which goes stray, if it escapes any localization?
Freemasonry is an institution which retrieves in its polyhedral features its own identity and its own reasons to exist and persist; and it is critical that the whole of the spectrum of the whole of the possible Visions of what FeeeMasonry is and might ever be, may also cohabit under the same sky; for this is the path upon which Freemasonry is Freemasonry: where the full polyphony of its many perspectives resounds.
On the other hand, if any peculiar Vision should perceive itself as exclusive and totalitarian, and therefore would deem itself entitled to inaugurate its own specific Grand Lodge, here it happens that its very bedrock feature would be missing, for under one roof would gather one unique Vision of FreeMasonry: it's no longer FreeMasonry, although it might well appoint itself with the empty title of Freemasonry: after all, even "some women embellish themselves with passion in the same way they put their lipstick on" (Marguerite Yourcenar
* ).
Where unilateralism dwells, namely there where dogma is, Freemasonry vanishes in thin air, for Freemasons themselves would not recognize it as Freemasonry any longer.
This is a first definition of FreeMasonry; and -I know I will raise more than an eyebrow- this definition puts the Tao among Freemasonry's siblings: that FreeMasonry you can tell FreeMasonry, is not FreeMasonry yet. It is because of this elusiveness, which seems to make FreeMasonry ubiquitous, that tragic misunderstandings might get engendered:
«While back and forth his steps were going aimless,
haunted with worries and thoughts,
Ferrau, Brandimarte, king Thug,
king Braggart and other cavalry
he found over there, busy running up and down,
all engrossed in vain paths alike;
and all were complaining about the vile
and invisible Master of such a Castle.
Everyone is in search of him, everyone puts the blame upon him,
some for any theft befallen upon them;
for the missing horse some are cursing after him, others about other things get concerned;
for their lost bride some are in anguish;
for another variety of charges other are busy bestowin' the blame.
And in such a fashion they stay
that from such a cage they're all unable to flee away;
And there are so many sized under such a façade,
that some have been there for weeks, and some for a decade.»
(Ludovico Ariosto * , L' Orlando furioso)Provided such an elusiveness, many an Entered Apprentice might believe somewhere there must be the true FreeMasonry, the unelusive FreeMasonry; and, since it appears so hazy and unsubstantial, it has to be found in within some obscure and remote crypt, where you'd get free access by virtue of seniority and by password, and within which the apotheosis of malversation might finally get substantial. Or there are many who believe that among the Visions of FreeMasonry you could include an opportunistic one.
And upon this ground we are allowed to define the only left parameter of Masonry we can be allowed to define ever: everything which involves the
particulare (Guicciardini
* ), can't be FreeMasonry. Why?
Because here come the Rituals.
If we would have constituted ourselves only as a network of acquaintances with business-lobbystic aims, we would not need any ritual any worse than a coward would have needed a crest on his helm: in fact, we could have garnered ourselves in private apartments, with much more profit (and indeed with much less visibility too), or we could have casted ourselves in the same mold of many other Associations, going downright to the heart of a selfish matter, without any need to resort to an alibi: in fact, do not raise upon me thinking that the Rituals have been introduced to provide ourselves with a cover-up: for, your Grace, before what Tribunal could we ply such an alibi? Answer my question and, acknowledging then it is an alibi as it can be legally wielded, I will shut up.
Rituals are there precisely to remind us that our profile escapes such a reductivism and that we, the FreeMasons, belong to something higher, since we are supposed and bound to share a yearning for grandness: otherwise ceremonials would be good at nothing but wasting time.
I won't mean that employing FreeMasonry as a network of acquaintances would be worse than put lobbyists on your payroll to hold hearings before a U.S. Senate Commission. I simply want to remind you that if the urge of such a perception of FreeMasonry is to become paramount for a Brother and such to obliterate anything else, provided the empirical feedback he'd better keep in mind this: if one wants to employ FreeMasonry as a profane network or tool, business assignments are the playground where this tool has proved to work at its worst and with less efficiency. For lobbyistic reasons Moon's advice is: search elsewhere.
It's often argued that the word which best describes FreeMasonry is "Tolerance", and it's ascribed to the implementation of this ethical virtue the indefinite nature of the Institution; even more, we have those who cherish a natural wariness for the similarly typical (to the point it flags upon the seats of Worshipful Masters in France and Italy) concurrent trinomial "Libertè Egalitè Fraternitè
* "; in fact the latter carries with itself revolutionary echoes, and any Revolution, it is argued, is anti-masonic: since, what has the Reign of Terror to share with Tolerance? Nothing. We ought to admit it.
In the archives of the Bastille
* are saved the trial records of the police interrogations of Freemasons. Do you know why FreeMasons were under suspicion? For the very fact they met after a summoning, and their Secretaries kept a diary. Police books put under the spotlight that the inquiries and the following intimation not to rally anymore, got started as in such meetings it got exercised -literally- "the
eloquence".
To a contemporary sensitiveness it makes no sense and the charge appears unsubstantial, but two centuries ago the term "eloquence" got a political connotation: whoever gathered in order to speak was downright under suspicion. In the Age of the Absolutism, where His Majesty enacts edicts, and where the only accepted religion was the Roman Catholic Religion meant under its stricter and inquisitive accent, why should you be summoned upon to a meeting in order to discuss? What would be up there to discuss? There's nothing at all to discuss about!! Hence, the police suspicions and the special signification of the term "eloquence".
Would you be surprised if I add that the term "Constitution" was under an identical police suspicion? The last time a british Parliament discussed "Constitution" it cut off a Monarch's head, embodiment of God on earth: king Charles. And FreeMasons declared to be set up as such exactly upon some "Constitutions". What ones? The ones they were pleased to call The Constitutions of Anderson
* .
Needless to add that the adjectivation was of no relevance to the Police of the King.
The same logics affect the term "tolerance": it has not been a word brought in by modern FreeMasonry, but a legacy which comes to us from that century, and that fully shares with the other terminologies their political heritage: "Tolerance", in fact, was a blatant reference to the first document which delivered such term to the European cultural asset: the Act of Tolerance of the english Parliament under Cromwell: the very same Parliament that first decapitated a Monarch.
Thus the word "Tolerance" stores a blasting semantic payload, like the one belonging to the trinomial outcry "Libertè fraternitè Egalitè": we can put up with it, but we can not recycle this aspect without throwing behind us, bundled with it, a bit of Freemasonry too.
To my feelings, it seems that here it's unfolding right before our eyes not a crack but a stunning breakthrough on that threshold which connects the profane world to the initiated one: that is, precisely on that edge whose guardianship is upon the Junior Warden. Maybe not everybody payed enough attention to the fact that when the masonic works get open, the Senior Warden lowers a small pillar on his altar and the Junior Warden raises it on its own altar: this occurs as soon as the Worshipful Master declares the Lodge regularly open. The meaning of the gesture is that Junior Warden's authority fades as soon as the Lodge opens, and comes back in force as soon as the Lodge gets closed: thereby we are bound to deduce that the Junior Warden is not monitoring what FreeMasons do within the Lodge: he is appointed to monitor what they do out of the Lodge: since out of the Lodge, none of them will cease being a FreeMason for even one second.
Therefore we'd wonder: has such junior Wardenship to be meant as a guardianship whose unique goal is to prevent profanes from getting into the Temple, or wouldn't it be better interpreted when we suspect a bi-directional duty in it? The Junior Warden is and remains a Brother, so its role should be geared most specifically towards the Brothers than towards the Profane. Couldn't be sounder a hypothesis that his function might be bicephalous, namely to ascertain either that no profanes get into the Temple (and nevertheless they get in, provided they are free born, of lawful age, and well reccommended) or to ascertain that the Freemasons will actually get out of the Temple?
It would seem that what a Freemason does inside the Temple is as much relevant as (I'd say functional to) what he does out of the Temple. Here it is why it's so ultimate to define what and how anything which can be properly defined FreeMasonry has to cope and deal with what is defined as the Profane: as FreeMasonry ought to deal with it, accordingly to the symbolisms involving the Junior Wardenship.
Beauty is Senior Warden's badge. In ancient Greece beauty was translated into cosmos, from which we derive the modern term: cosmetic, meaning a product which affects beauty. But cosmos too, similarly to Tolerance, stores an alternative significance, to blend with the former one: it also meant "order", from which we derive the acceptation of cosmos as the empyreal dome where the stars spin and revolve obeying the laws of the Universal Gravitation.
The acceptation of cosmos under the meaning of order, has to be split by the acceptation of order which ancient greek meant by the term nomos. Nomos was the order of the norm and of the nomenclatures, namely the heteronomous order, imposed by an act of outer force. Unlike nomos, cosmos meant the spontaneous order which blossoms naturally from within and, for instance, makes a flower thrive or a planet rotate. The implied idea in such mingled acceptation of cosmos as beauty/order, is that everything which attains a spontaneous order, is also aesthetically engrossing: and you don't necessarily share such a feature with the nomothetic order imposed by the outside (Iraq is an ordered country, who would dare deny it? Is it beautiful too?). Which confirms to us the the beauty addressed by the symbolism of the Senior Warden is the one which involves the word cosmos, and thus also hints to the Order.
But in the human world the order is challenged: isn't still true, and clashes in our ears, the sentence which starts the Social Contract by Rousseau: «Men born free, but everywhere they are fettered. How such a shift occurred? I don't know it.». Isn't this evidence that men born free and under the flags of the Cosmos, soon get bent under the flags of servitude?
Wouldn't you rank right here the symbol typically assigned to the Junior Warden: the strength? Isn't just on this joint that the synergy between the two Wardenships gets self-evident and overwhelming? Strength has to be used to break the spell and the chains and to return to the harmonic freedom and natural beauty/order that God gave to us and the doctrines of the natural law championed: we are borne free. But you get no freedom ship without engaging fighting once in shackles. And this fight cannot be arbitrary, or aimed at some human utopia, but has to be aimed at leading the world back to the natural harmony, where everything finds the place which suits it -and not the one which gets assigned to it- as everything is entitled to express at its best its singularity, and precisely by maximizing this aspect, the cosmos becomes true: a Masonic Order, where everything can cohabit and find peace under the very same roof.
You all know the astrological glyph of Mars, the planet of the strength: a circle from which an arrow stems out; and you all know the glyph of Venus, the planet of the Beauty: a circle under which a cross dangles. But maybe not all of you are aware there exists also a glyph for the earth: a circle upon which a cross stands out. The latter symbol is reproduced, surely with no awareness, by an human institution that represents the strength much more than many other human Institutions: the N.A.T.O.
*
At the N.A.T.O: Headquarters' main entry, can be found a giant iron four-pointed star that sticks like a stab into the ground: and since the ground of the earth is round, no doubts that the subliminal message is the one which hints to the glyph of the earth: a globe upon which a cross gets driven, and
in hoc signo vinces * !
Strength is strength as it copes with the matter, as it fights: in Paradise you won't need Force. There exist a third and more sublime symbol for the strength, and it's the one portrayed in the eleventh traditional Tarot card, whose title is precisely The Strength: a woman tearing apart the jaws of a lion, to demonstrate that the strength comes from the Spiritual: how could otherwise a woman win over a lion?
These two symbolisms are not opposed at all, and they do not integrate (as it would be simple to argue). They are the same thing. The strength is always a strength that cometh from within, and that will qualify itself only as long as it wins the unresponsiveness of the matter. You are not given an abstract strength except in Academies, on which Voltaire
* was used to rebuke: «It's funny to notice that neither one single masterpiece has ever come out of any Academy».
The strength is strength before matter. The masonic symbol of Hercules, assigned in latin Free masonries to the Junior Warden, stresses out once again that the strength you're referring to once into FreeMasonry, the masonic strength, is meant to emphasize its dialectic relation with the Earth.
But do notice the implied pattern: the lofty muscularity of Hercules, so obvious that it seems to leave no leeway to misunderstandings. The confrontation cannot be led through tricks or subterfuges: the Junior Warden's symbol is not David: it's downright Hercules: sheer matter.
We don't have the requirements to dissent from James Hillman when he persists into discrediting the myth of Hercules in many works of his: Hillman's genius is such that it would strike dumb whoever. None the less we should not give up retrieving in Hercules a crystal clear aspect at least: he is an happy union, with its outstanding muscles, between the tragic and dyonisiac features of matter and of the world (in the world you do die indeed: "Indeed death? Yes, indeed" said Tolstoj) and the possibility to challenge them following the linear and apollonian approach of the direct confrontation: forthright.
Which openly conflicts with the (wrong) assumption accordingly to which FreeMasonry would have to operate by means of secrecy and secretiveness; at least, the symbol of Hercules denies it. The etymology of the word "secret" is the latin word secretum, which is related to the glandular secretion: so it does not refer to secrecy but to intimacy; and I would really find it worth of a trivial man to spot no difference between secrecy and intimacy: secrecy is intentional, intimacy necessary. If FreeMasons have to better themselves, please do not make the mistake to believe that behind a virtue there must be some enviable talent, in the same way as Balzac was used to say that behind any great fortune there is a felony; behind any virtue, in fact, there is no fortune, but a grief. Our Lord doesn't make presents to anybody, since a God Who is par definition jealous, is as much jealous as He is avaricious.
The way such grief is managed will lead you to vice or to virtue. It is in the lifetime of such a management, in the scope of this ripening, that the secretion (the secretum) gets produced and consists of. It cannot be said in words and cannot be properly communicated as it is intimate, and not as it would have been intentionally cryptographed. The Masonic secret gets its birth in the sorrow, and once you've grieved long enough (s. Paul said), you're done with sin.
So here it is the birthplace of the possibility to deal with the world openly: once you've grieved long enough, you've no time left for tergiversating. And secret conceived as secretiveness gets a luxury you cannot afford any longer.
This is the masonic Strength.
If we have been initiated, we have been initiated to fight and bring Justice and Freedom back into the world, and not to cuddle ourselves with the agreeable deception that we would be the excellent ones and so we could (we'd even should, accordingly to some) stand idle by, just watching and with our hands in our own hands, relishing esoteric choiceness: «The refined castle within which you, Sir, entertain us at your will, boring us at your own will» (Denis Diderot
* ).
It is to make up for this limit that some rituals swap the myth of the Enlightened with the myth of the Templar: and not beacuse they are leaning towards merely operative attitudes.
The Junior warden lowers the pillar on his altar at the opening of the Lodge, and raises it back as soon as the Lodge gets closed. On closed works, his middle-reign opens.
He won't oversee, then, the still abundantly guarded and tyled threshold of the entrance to the Temple in the same way the several character charged with this duty guard and tile it: the inner tyler to allow no profanes in when the works are open, the outer tyler to allow no profanes in when works are closed, the Deacons to allow no cowans in when the works are open, and the Senior Warden to announce that somebody who might be a profane is knocking at the Temple's door. The Junior Warden is committed to a guardianship of the Temple's door which is different, subtler, and more complex and difficult to cling: he will ascertain that FreeMasons themselves won't be allowed back into the Temple when the works are closed! His authority comes back in force as soon as the masons have exited the Temple: he will so check they exit it indeed, and most of all that they won't come back to it earlier: he doesn't limit himself, by the symbol of the Strength, to remind the masons of the real world: he tosses them into it.
The Junior Wardenship, lifting its pillar on its altar, certifies the reanimation of his function and prerogative of Archon: he will make sure that the initiated would not linger more than their due inside the Temple, so that they will beware from escaping the grievances of the earth, believing that the Temple might make a haven to them, and that instead of being meant to push them to improve the world, it should have been meant to defend and shelter them from the the world.
Italian version - versione italiana
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