Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Fall 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Grasse, Ray, "At the Still Point of the Turning World"  Quest 112:4, pg 33, 44

By Ray Grasse

In the yogic traditions of the East, samadhi is a term used to describe a state of meditation variously defined as “transcendental consciousness,” “one-pointed absorption,” and “effortless concentration,” among other terms.

The yogic tradition states that samadhi isn’t simply one singular level or stage of consciousness, but actually has various stages, ranging from the comparatively mundane (think of a sports player going “into the zone” in the midst of a game, or a musician in a moment of peak improvisation), all the way up to a completely formless and transcendental state, sometimes known by Buddhists as “mind and body dropped.”

To be clear, samadhi is not the same as full-blown “enlightenment,” but is rather a useful stage in its attainment. As the Zen teacher John Daido Loori once said, “Samadhi is the vehicle by which we arrive at enlightenment.”

In my book The Sky Stretched Out Before Me, I wrote about a meditative experience I had at Zen Mountain Monastery in New York back in the mid-1980s, which was likely a state of samadhi, although a very rudimentary one.

It was the last hour of an all-day meditation period, and I had begun to feel stuck in a rut. The sun had just set, the sounds outside had grown quiet, and the sensation of my breath rushing in and out became subtly more pronounced. My mind was restless, and the sensations in my legs had become painful again, worsening by the minute. I decided, almost out of desperation, to pour every last drop of energy into the meditation technique itself, largely to escape from the discomfort. Throughout the day, I’d been counting my breaths silently while staring down on the floor, as I had been instructed to do. But now I began throwing my whole being into the technique, zeroing in like a laser beam on my breath, the counting, and the floor, all at once, in hope of breaking through the pain.

After a few minutes, something surprising happened: I simply became present. I left behind the past as well as expectations about the future, and I was simply there in the moment. No desire or grasping, just pure contentment with what was.

With that, the previously ordinary floor became extraordinary, luminous, and vibrant as an indescribable sense of peace flooded through me. The tremendous discomfort I’d been feeling up to that point immediately vanished as if it had been turned off like a switch—and my entire being exploded into a radiant field of light. The sensation was so palpable that I felt sure anyone looking in my direction would have seen visible waves of light emanating from my body. It was pleasurable beyond words: even the thought of sex paled by comparison. More importantly, there was a peacefulness about it unlike anything I’d experienced before. I had been told about the “peace that goeth before all understanding”—and I was getting a very tiny taste of that now. I sat in that condition for another ten minutes or so, marveling at what was going on, until the bell rang to signal an end to the period, as I walked out of the hall feeling overwhelmed with joy.

This experience was nothing that an advanced meditator would find particularly unusual, but for me it was valuable in providing some useful insights into meditation. With that experience under my belt, I’d modestly venture my own very simple definition: samadhi is a state of being totally focused in the present moment, a deep dive into the Now, unencumbered by memories of the past or expectations of the future.

In that earlier book, I tried to explain that experience and drew on an astronomical metaphor of how a star arises out of a nebula, with matter floating around in deep space, condensing so tightly over time that the energy and light inherent in that matter breaks open—and a star is born, as it were.

Another metaphor has come into my mind since that time, which may help to explain samadhi in a slightly different way—in this case, not so much in terms of energy or light but in terms of time.

Imagine you’re at a carnival or amusement park, and at the center of the park there’s a merry-go-round or carousel, the kind with horses on poles that bob up and down, all of them going around and around. Since this merry-go-round is moving quite fast, you’d have to run quite fast to catch up and hop onto it. Imagine you’re doing just that: running alongside it, faster and faster, exerting yourself in order to catch up—at which point you finally do catch up and hop on board.

At that point, you realize something quite startling and unexpected—namely, that the merry-go-round has actually been standing still the entire time, and it’s really the whole amusement park that’s moving round and around it. So there you are, at the still point of existence, with everyone out on the fairgrounds thinking they’re the ones standing still, and these passengers up here on the merry-go-round are the ones who are moving.

While all such metaphors are imperfect, I’d suggest this one says something useful about the nature of samadhi. When you hone in on the present moment, there’s a sense of profound stillness—not stagnancy or boredom, because it’s actually very vibrant and alive—just stillness. But once you start drifting off into thoughts of the past or expectations of the future, you begin falling off the carousel and drifting back into the world, into the amusement park, with all of its movement and time. You fall out of the Now.

That, I’d suggest, is a simple way to think about samadhi—if indeed you plan on thinking about it rather than attempting to experience it.

In which case you might as well enjoy the amusement park while you’re there. After all, that has a truth of its own too. 

Ray Grasse is author of nine books, including An Infinity of Gods, The Waking Dream, and When the Stars Align. He worked for ten years on the editorial staffs of Quest magazine and Quest Books. His website is www.raygrasse.com. This article has been excerpted from his latest book So, What Am I Doing Here, Anyway? (London: Wessex Astrologer, 2024).

Printed in the  Fall 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Orvetti, Peter, "The Theosophist Who Was Nearly President: The “Heart Trust” of Henry A. Wallace"  Quest 112:4, pg 34-36

By Peter Orvetti

On July 20, 1944, the second night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Florida Senator Claude Pepper pushed through the sweltering crowd in an attempt to reach the podium. The event scripted by party leaders—the hostile replacement of the incumbent vice president on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ticket with a more malleable senator from Missouri—was going off the rails. Progressive delegates chanted the name of the vice president, and Senator Pepper wanted to force a vote to save him while the crowd was hot. Seeing Pepper approach, and with gesticulating party insiders cajoling him to act, the convention chair brought down the gavel, ending the proceedings for the night.

The next night, with passions cooled and deals cut, Harry Truman was nominated as FDR’s running mate. Less than nine months later, Truman—not Henry Agard Wallace, mystic, chela, and erstwhile Theosophist—would become president of the United States.

History turns on such moments. If Pepper had made it to the stage, the closing days of World War II and the course of the fragile peace that followed would have looked quite different. Historians have mused that a President Wallace would have been loath to use the atomic bomb against Japan and would have pursued a more conciliatory (or, as some have argued, more naive) policy toward the Soviet Union.

FDR was not prone to sentimentality. He had anointed Wallace, then agriculture secretary, as his vice-presidential pick in 1940 to shore up support among farmers and liberals. By 1944, Roosevelt needed to bolster a different coalition. Roosevelt also knew that his health was failing and that the candidate he selected would probably become president sometime during the next four years. Wallace had to go.

But Roosevelt liked Wallace personally, in part because of Wallace’s interest in esoteric matters. Roosevelt had little personal interest in the worlds beyond this one, but his beloved mother had been interested in Asian mysticism, and FDR liked to listen to Wallace speak on the subject. These friendly conversations stand in sharp contrast to how FDR’s advisors and other Wallace opponents would use Wallace’s occult interests as a weapon against him in the years ahead.

Henry Wallace (1888‒1965) was an unlikely politician. The vice presidency was the first and only office to which he was elected, and a decade before he rose to that office, few in Washington knew who he was. Wallace was an Iowa crop scientist and livestock breeder; seed and poultry companies he founded still thrive today. He was also the editor of an agriculture journal founded by his grandfather: Wallace’s Farmer, which is still being published under the title Wallaces Farmer. Wallace was blunt, long-winded, and had a tendency toward pomposity; he was not the sort who seemed likely to enter public life.

The Wallaces were Presbyterians, but young Henry, an insatiable reader, developed an interest in comparative religion, with a particular interest in traditions rooted in the land. His discovery of the works of the Theosophist Irish poet and essayist George William Russell, who published under the pseudonym Æ, resulted in a correspondence between the two, and in 1919, Wallace attended his first meeting of the Theosophical Society’s Des Moines branch. Wallace joined the TS several years later and even helped to organize a local branch of C.W. Leadbeater’s Liberal Catholic Church.

In 1927, Dmitry Nikolaevich Borodin, a Russian agronomist who had been working on seed exchanges between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, came to Des Moines to deliver a speech. There he met the young editor of Wallace’s Farmer, and when he learned of Wallace’s interest in spirituality, he urged him to familiarize himself with the mystical Russian artist Nicholas Roerich.

A few months later, while on a business trip to New York, Wallace visited the Roerich Museum, an imposing twenty-four-story art deco skyscraper and the first museum in the U.S. dedicated solely to a single artist. When he stepped through the door, Wallace froze and stood in silence for long enough for the receptionist to seek help. The museum’s vice president, Roerich acolyte Frances Grant, asked the visitor if he was feeling ill. Wallace assured her that he was not; rather, he said he was experiencing “vibrations” from a Tibetan prayer mat near the entrance.

Roerich had a knack for nurturing relationships with powerful people, but the obscure farm journalist was at the time beneath his attention. Wallace met Roerich at the museum in 1929, but it was a cursory encounter. Wallace and Grant corresponded regularly, but the Russian sage paid Wallace little heed. That would change in the new decade.

The Wallaces had been Republicans for generations, but the calamity of the Great Depression led Wallace to break with tradition and endorse Roosevelt in his magazine in 1932. FDR swept the traditionally Republican Midwest in his landslide victory that November, and Wallace was rewarded with Cabinet consideration. The two men had met just once before the election, and it had not gone well, so Wallace considered the new president-elect’s interest to be a matter of courtesy. Instead, Roosevelt, seeking radical and innovative solutions to the crisis, made Wallace his secretary of agriculture—a position much more prominent then than it is today.

Secretary Wallace went from obscurity to national prominence nearly overnight, becoming a favorite of progressives and New Dealers for his radical, try-anything approach to righting the nation’s farm policies. He also saw his post as a means to spread the Ancient Wisdom to a larger audience. He attended the 1934 annual convention of the TSA, and that same year he persuaded FDR to add the Great Seal of the United States, with its Eye of Providence hovering above an unfinished pyramid, to a redesign of the dollar bill, where it remains to this day.

Roerich had brought the image—also known as the “All-Seeing Eye”—to Wallace’s attention. But this was not the only way in which Roerich would influence Wallace’s official actions, to the secretary’s ultimate regret.

Roerich and his wife, Helena, had developed a plan to carve a spiritual kingdom out of East Asia, based on the principles of their Agni Yoga system, with its capital in the mystical city of Shambala and possibly with Roerich himself as king. (Roerich began insisting that he was the reincarnation of Tibet’s greatest leader, the seventeenth-century Fifth Dalai Lama, though whether he truly believed this or used the claim as a political tool remains up for debate.) Roerich easily convinced Wallace to place him and his son on a Department of Agriculture expedition to collect drought-resistant grasses in the Gobi Desert, and then got Wallace to put him in charge of the expedition, outranking experienced researchers and scientists, over the objections of Wallace’s top advisors.

The expedition was a disaster, and Wallace broke with Roerich for good, even having the Russian mystic audited by the Internal Revenue Service. In 1935, Wallace resigned from the Theosophical Society, but this was a result of his painful education in political realities as a result of the Roerich affair and not because he had terminated his esoteric quest. He was still, as he had told a friend years before, “a searcher for methods of bringing the Inner Light to outward manifestation.” He had simply realized that as a public figure—and one with nascent presidential ambitions—he had to keep it to himself.

In the five years following the Roerich expedition, the public scandal died down, eclipsed by Wallace’s prominent and successful role in forging agriculture policy. By 1940, Roosevelt felt it safe to name Wallace as his running mate as he sought an unprecedented third term. Frances Grant, ever loyal to Roerich and furious with Wallace over his spurning of her teacher, reached out to anti-Roosevelt operatives with a bombshell: there were letters.

In the period of their acquaintance, and while he was already serving in the Cabinet, Wallace had penned multiple letters to Roerich, sometimes starting with the greeting “Dear Guru.” In these missives, Wallace referred to himself as “Galahad” and to FDR as “the Flaming One.” In one representative segment, Wallace wrote, “Long have I been aware of the occasional fragrance from that other world which is the real world. But now I must live in the outer world and at the same time make over my mind and body to serve as fit instruments for the Lord of Justice.” In another, he recounted a dream in which he was talking with Roosevelt and “was amazed to see that instead of eyes there was swirling black smoke. And out of the mouth came swirling black smoke.”

One Democratic donor who opposed Wallace’s vice-presidential nomination said of him, “He was so much the prophet, an unworldly man of mysterious leanings and ideas, that it was obvious to all who knew him that he would only make the country a mighty strange president.” But Roosevelt pushed him through anyway, daring the Republicans to use the so-called “Guru Letters” against him.

Republicans did acquire the letters, but their presidential nominee, industrialist Wendell Willkie, refused to use them. In part, this was because Willkie feared the Democrats would retaliate by spreading unsubstantiated stories of an extramarital affair. But also Willkie—an uncommonly idealistic politician who would later become a leading advocate for a democratic world government—just thought it would be wrong to do so.

When Wallace was dumped from the ticket four years later, after an uneventful term as vice president, the Guru Letters were barely mentioned. They only came to light in 1948, when Wallace ran a third-party candidacy against the incumbent Truman and Republican Thomas Dewey on a platform of peace and accommodation with the Soviet Union. Wallace never stood a chance, but any hopes of a respectable showing were lost after right-wing syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler splashed excerpts across the nation’s newspapers. Wallace limped to a fourth-place finish with just over 2 percent of the national popular vote, trailing even the segregationist Strom Thurmond.

Wallace lived on for nearly two decades after that defeat, gradually withdrawing from the public sphere and returning to his first love, crop science. Whatever metaphysical pursuits he engaged in until he died in 1965 he kept to himself. But Wallace seemed to never abandon the view he espoused in an essay titled “Statesmanship and Religion,” published at the height of his prominence in the 1930s:

We need a “heart trust”—a trust in the innate goodness of the human heart when it has not been warped by the mammon worship, the false science, and the false economics of the nineteenth century . . . I cannot but feel that the destiny of the world is toward far greater unity than that which we now enjoy, and that in order to attain such unity it will be necessary for the members of the different races, classes, and creeds to open their hearts and minds to the unfolding reality of the immediate future in a way which they have never done before.

Sources

Culver, J.C., and J.  Hyde. American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace. New York: Norton, 2001.

Kleinman, M.L. “Searching for the ‘Inner Light’: The Development of Henry A. Wallace’s Experimental Spiritualism.” The Annals of Iowa 53, no. 3 (1994), 195–218.

McCannon, J. Nicholas Roerich: The Artist Who Would Be King. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. Reviewed in Quest, spring 2024.

Steil, B. The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2024.

Peter Orvetti is a writer and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C., who writes frequently for Quest.

Printed in the  Fall 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Digitalis, Raven, "Exploring the Craft of Freemasonry"  Quest 112:4, pg 20-22

By Raven Digitalis

Freemasonry, or Masonry for short, is a fraternal order that is often considered to be shrouded in secrecy. Actually it is not a secret society, but is better described as a society that happens to have a few secrets. Masonry is a global spiritual brotherhood with long-held traditions and solid codes of ethics. It has had a lasting influence on both Western history and a wide array of esoteric systems.

It is said that to become a Mason, one must know a Mason. That individual can vouch for the applicant’s character, which is followed by a meeting with members of the lodge. The Craft of the Masons consists of three primary degrees (called the Blue Lodge). Additionally, there are a number of optional “addenda” degrees expressed in the branches of the York Rite and Scottish Rite.

Masonry makes use of symbolism derived from ancient Egypt, Hermetic philosophy, alchemical principles, stories of the Knights Templar, the legend of King Solomon’s Temple, select stories from the Bible, and numerous other ancient milieus.

Freemasonry in its present form originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a development of the late medieval stonemasons’ guilds of Scotland and England. The organization is officially styled the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons (AFAM). The “Free and Accepted” portion of the name is derived from around 1640, when ordinary men were permitted to join operative Masonic clubs, which had up to that point consisted of men working in building trades. These nonoperative Masons were called accepted Masons because they were allowed to join the Masonic fraternities without necessarily holding careers in “operative” building trades. In modern times, only a handful of initiated Masons work as actual stonemasons or architects. The United Grand Lodge of England was established in 1717, a date generally taken to mark the modern history of the Craft.

A well-known phrase used by Masons to describe the Craft is, Making good men better.” Masonry’s goal is to help men alchemize their minds and emotions through lesson, discourse, and brotherhood, helping refine their characters into spiritual gold.

Craft Symbolism

The Craft of the Freemasons makes use of countless esoteric symbols and philosophies. While we don’t have room for great detail here, readers are invited to research the numerous books and articles that examine Masonic symbolism in depth. Just be sure to keep away from the articles that discuss Satanic or Illuminati conspiracies: Masonic lodges are much more concerned with raising money for charity than with raising demons! In her monumental Isis Unveiled, H.P. Blavatsky professes, “The accusations against Masons have been mostly half guess-work, half-unquenchable malice and predetermined vilification. Nothing conclusive and certain of a criminal character has been directly proven against them.”

As far as Masonic secrets are concerned, don’t believe the hype. Virtually anything about the organization, including its secret words, grips, and gestures, can be researched on the Internet. Like many other initiated Masons, I personally don’t see much of a problem with this, because regardless of how many “secrets” are exposed online, they remain theoretical, empty of meaning. Perhaps these “exposed” secrets can be understood intellectually on some level, but this is hardly comparable to the actual practice of learning these codes within the paradigm of a loving, fraternal brotherhood. Masonry is experiential, not merely theoretical.

Some esoteric symbols within Freemasonry are strictly initiatory, while others are quite common. The square and compass is easily the best-known Masonic symbol and is found in all Masonic lodges around the world. The emblem is also common on virtually all “brotherly bling,” such as rings, necklaces, pocket watches, compasses, pocket knives, coins, and bumper stickers, and so on. It is also a popular tattoo!

The simple symbolism of the architectural square is to “square” our actions with virtuous conduct. The compass represents keeping our actions within “due bounds” (meaning the restraint of immoral behaviors). During initiation, a Mason is given various meanings of the divine letter “G,” which graces the interior of the symbol.

Another highly popular Masonic symbol is the Eye of Providence. In simplest terms, the Eye of Providence represents the eye of God. Identifying the “God” in this equation is up to individual practitioners themselves. This symbol takes a multitude of forms and is commonly depicted atop a pyramid. Freemasonry utilizes a hefty amount of ancient Egyptian symbolism, and the pyramid is no exception; after all, could there be a better symbol of humankind’s architectural genius? The Eye of Providence and pyramid are famously depicted on the back of the American dollar bill. This certainly seems appropriate considering that many of the nation’s Founding Fathers were Freemasons, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and James Monroe.

Masonic Evolution

Masonry and its offshoots are social clubs: nonprofit organizations that perform a wide variety of civic and social work to raise funding and awareness for individuals in need, whether they be school kids, the elderly, or those with disabilities, and so on. Just look at the work of the Shriners, whose hospitals provide treatment to children with illnesses and injuries. (Although being a Freemason is a prerequisite for becoming a Shriner, the organizations are separate.)

Freemasonry is historically a masculine brotherhood, though a number of Masonic appendant bodies (allied organizations) are predominantly female, such as the Order of the Eastern Star, Daughters of the Nile, and Job’s Daughters International. Others are male-oriented, such as the Shriners and the Order of DeMolay (the latter being a character-building organization for young men between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one).

Traditional Freemasonry prohibits women from being initiated, and modern Masonry upholds this principle chiefly for the sake of tradition. Nonetheless, something called Adoptive Masonry exists exclusively for women, while Co-Masonry welcomes all gender identities. But these branches are often considered clandestine and have challenging relationships with traditional brotherhoods because they utilize traditional (male) Masonic lessons and initiations rather than independent structures.

Masonry also prohibits the initiation of atheists, since the organization requires members to be believe in a “supreme being” or higher power, although, again, the nature of this higher power is up to individual interpretation. Regardless of Masonry’s emphasis on certain Judeo-Christian and biblical allegories within their initiations, the Craft is open to a wide variety of spiritually minded individuals who embrace positive spiritual paths.

One of the “Old Charges” of Freemasonry, which has its origin at least as far back as 1723, is called Concerning God and Religion, and has long been read by many lodges at the Entered Apprentice (first) degree ritual for new brothers of the Craft. This charge asserts that all good men are candidates for Masonry regardless of one’s religious preference. A section of it reads as follows : 

[In] ancient Times Masons were charg’d in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet ’tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves; that is, to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, by whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguish’d; whereby Masonry becomes the Center of Union, and the Means of conciliating true Friendship among Persons that must have remain’d at a perpetual Distance.

Masonry distinctly celebrates religious and spiritual diversity, recognizing the forces of honor and honesty as the center of union. Virtually every modern metaphysical school of thought has ties with Freemasonry in some manner.

Masonry in the New Age

Although the term “New Age” did not become widely used until the 1960s and ’70s, many ideas and outlooks prevalent in Freemasonry have become integrated with New Age thought and its innumerable derivations. The New Age movement includes a massively expansive and evolving collection of ancient wisdom, Indigenous practice, and century-spanning philosophical approaches. Of these, ancient ideas expressed in Freemasonry are aplenty.

Masonic philosophical threads are present in H.P. Blavatsky’s presentation of the Ageless Wisdom teachings, which sought to encompass spiritual, moral, and scientific achievements across numerous world religions, cultures, and orders. This is also in line with the evolution of New Age thought, which itself is considered an “approach” rather than a system or religion. The same can be said for Freemasonry.

According to the Universal Co-Masonry website, “Blavatsky was a Russian aristocrat whose childhood was heavily influenced by Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. She spent her formative years in the vast library of her great-grandfather, a well-known Mason. It is very likely she came to know of the Masonic teachings of the Fraternity and that of Rosicrucianism during this time.”

To conclude this article on an interesting note, one of Masonry’s distinct phrases is “so mote it be,” which has been utilized since at least the fifteenth century. This is an archaic form of “so it shall be.” During the time as chaplain in my own Masonic lodge, Sentinel Lodge 155 in Missoula, Montana, it was my duty to conclude the opening prayers with “Amen,” which was followed by all other brothers stating, “So mote it be.” This is part of the standard Masonic procedure for opening a lodge as a sacred meeting ground, and is one of the steps performed for every stated meeting around the world.

In its current incarnation, particularly considering its plentiful offshoots and associated organizations, Freemasonry is here to stay as an evolving brotherhood aimed at self-improvement and the betterment of communities and the world at large. To that, I say, Amen! So mote it be.

Sources

Blavatsky, H.P. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. New York: J.W. Bouton, 1877.

Greer, John Michael. The New Encyclopedia of the Occult. St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2003.

Hughan, William James. Constitutions of the Freemasons. London: R. Spencer, 1869.

Kinney, Jay, ed. The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West. New York: Penguin, 2004.

“Theosophy and Freemasonry: The Influence of Blavatsky on Universal Co-Masonry.” Universal Co-Masonry website: https://www.universalfreemasonry.org/en/masonic-theosophy-freemasonry.

Raven Digitalis is the author of the Empath’s Trilogy, consisting of The Empath’s Oracle, Esoteric Empathy, and The Everyday Empath, as well as the Shadow Trilogy of A Gothic Witch’s Oracle, A Witch’s Shadow Magick Compendium, and Goth Craft. Raven has been an earth-based practitioner since 1999, a priest since 2003, a Freemason since 2012, and an empath all of his life. He holds a degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Montana, jointly operated a nonprofit Pagan temple for sixteen years, and is a professional Tarot reader, editor, card-carrying magician, and animal rights advocate: www.ravendigitalis.com; www.facebook.com/ravendigitalis; www.instagram.com/ravendigitalis.

PHOTO CREDIT:

Forrest Hardin Photography

Printed in the  Fall 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Rees, Julian, "Co-Masonry Revealed"  Quest 112:4, pg 28-32

By Julian Rees

What would you say if you knew there was a worldwide pursuit of nonreligious, secular spirituality over three hundred years old? It is called Freemasonry, a pursuit that has been wrongly characterized in many ways: as a rich men’s social club, as an excuse to dress up in elaborate regalia, as a sinister movement whose aim is worldwide domination, as a charitable foundation whose primary aim is the relief of distress, as a men-only organization acting as a refuge from marital encumbrances, and many more.

The truth is quite different. While it is true that worldwide, Freemasonry is largely an all-male pursuit, there is a vibrant branch, existing since 1893, of liberal, nondogmatic, bigender Freemasonry firmly grounded in a spiritual path, the pursuit of self-knowledge, liberty of conscience, the perfection of humankind, equality of men and women, and the erection of an edifice dedicated to the perfection of humanity, harmony and balance, tolerance, and equality.

Paramount amongst these values is self-knowledge. One of the simplest but most important symbols is the point within a circle. Self-knowledge is represented here by access to the still, small point in the interior of each human being.

Freemasonry at its richest form of expression is an esoteric pursuit, engaging both men and women in the International Order of Freemasonry for Men and Women Le Droit Humain, whose supreme council is in Paris but which is found in many countries.

This Order started in 1893 when Marie (or Maria) Deraismes (1828‒94), an ardent feminist and proponent of women in Freemasonry, was initiated into a Masonic Lodge in the town of Le Pec near Paris by male Freemasons sympathetic to her cause.

The world of Freemasonry was scandalized at this innovation and refused to accept it. But the founders persevered and initiated even more women, and in this they were supported and energized by Georges Martin. Together with prominent Theosophist Annie Besant, they founded the New Masonic Order. Besant founded the British arm of the Order, and C.W. Leadbeater, another Theosophist, also became a member.

In this Order, a person aspiring to be a Freemason is initiated using a ceremonial with echoes of the ancient Mystery traditions, such as the Mithraic and Eleusinian. Today in our tradition we define Freemasonry as “an initiatory system containing the keys to the ancient mysteries, which are experienced through a series of mystery dramas designed to open up and deepen awareness and understanding.” These mystery dramas are codified in three degrees:

            1. The first degree, that of initiation, which is a complex allegory of death of the self in order to be re-born; renewal; acquisition of spiritual light; paths leading to self-knowledge.

            2. The second degree, that of passing, incorporating an allegory of the passage through life, and development of the intellectual faculties, while emphasizing the intellect of the heart (intuition) over that of the brain.

            3. The third degree, that of raising, is an allegory of death and the human aspiration to triumph over death to be reborn. It is a development of aspects of the first degree.

 All three degrees make use of symbolism. The tradition is based on that of stonemasons, from whose symbols allegories are devised. For Freemasons, an allegory is a form of nonverbal communication. To pick a simple example, we have the first degree Freemason, who is called an Entered Apprentice, engaged in allegorically sculpting a rough cuboid stone to make of it a perfect, smooth, six-sided cube. The allegory, which the candidate is personally invited to decode, is that of the perfection of one’s own character. One will meet with many such allegories on this journey.

The First Degree

Tracing Board for 1st Degree.

But first let us begin at the beginning. Once an aspirant has met socially with many members of the lodge, she or he will be balloted for in an open lodge meeting. (Henceforth in this article, the pronoun he should be taken to mean either she or he.)  If the ballot is in his favor, he will come to the lodge on an appointed day when he will be prepared for the ceremony of initiation. This preparation consists of disarranging his clothing, removing all money and metallic objects such as jewelry, removing one shoe, placing a blindfold over his eyes, and placing a rope with a running noose about his neck. This allegory is manifold: the candidate comes spiritually devoid of light; he needs to direct his attention inwardly; he comes without material encumbrances; he is submissive; he is disoriented; he places his trust in those around him; they place their trust in him.

At the door of the lodge, the candidate is met with two dangers: one if he tries to rush forward, the other if he is reticent and holds back. This allegory teaches him to persevere steadily. Once inside the lodge, after the Master recites a prayer invoking divine aid, the candidate is led round to be verbally examined by two of the senior officers of the Lodge: the Senior Warden and the Junior Warden. During this perambulation, he is presented to the elementals of earth, air, fire, and water:

Ho! Elementals of the Earth, who guard the right side of the Second Portal. Behold! A blinded child of mortality, seeking Immortality, approacheth. Earth to Earth he gives you of your own. As he thus recognises you, so shall you henceforth always recognise him as one of the Brethren. Open your ranks, that he may come near to the Warden of your Gate.

Finally the candidate is verbally examined by the Master. He then kneels at an altar placed near the center of the lodge and swears a vow of fidelity to Freemasonry and to the lodge in particular.

The culmination of the ceremony of initiation is the presentation of the working tools, which in this degree are the twenty-four-inch gauge, the common gavel, and the chisel. Apart from their operative uses, the allegorical uses are explained to the aspirant. The common gavel represents the driving force of humanity; the chisel passively receives the blows of the gavel but is in itself capable of very fine, creative work; the gauge not only measures the work, but in a figurative sense measures the other two, by allegorically tempering the blows of the gavel and encouraging the chisel to be more assertive.

 A summary of this degree might say that the aspirant gives up physical, material freedom in order to attain for a different, greater freedom as a Freemason.

Each degree in Freemasonry uses what is called a tracing board as a means of displaying some of the allegories in a visual form and to encourage meditation on them. The first-degree tracing board shows the sun and moon and seven stars. Beneath those is what is called the Blazing Star, emblematic of the divine presence. Beneath that is Jacob’s Ladder, a conduit between the terrestrial and the celestial, displaying emblems of faith, hope, and charity. The ladder rests on the Bible or another holy book, itself resting on an altar. On the Bible are displayed the square and compasses, and on the front of the altar is the point within a circle mentioned earlier. The three pillars, of the Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian orders, represent wisdom, strength, and beauty respectively. The rough-hewn stone and the polished stone are shown, as are the working tools, the gavel, chisel, and twenty-four-inch gauge, as well as a square, level, and plumb rule, emblematic of morality, equality, and truth. The whole stands on a white and black checkered pavement, representing light and darkness, good and evil, joy and sorrow, fortune and misfortune, life and death.

 As mentioned earlier, the second degree deals with the passage through life, the aspirant increasing and developing intellectually and morally. After entering the lodge, the Apprentice passes five stages, named the senses, the arts, natural science, benefactors of humanity, and service:

1. The senses are touch, hearing, sight, taste, and smell.

2. The arts mentioned are architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry.

3. The natural sciences are mathematics, geometry, philosophy, biology, and sociology.

4. Benefactors of humanity are sages, artists, scientists, inventors, and legislators.

5. Service. The aspirant is exhorted to adopt the maxim the highest ideal of life is to serve.

Three working tools are presented to the newly created Fellow Craftsman: the square, level, and plumb rule, emblems of morality, equality, and truth respectively. 

The Second Degree

	Tracing Board for 2nd Degree.

The second degree tracing board directly reflects part of the Solomonic legend. It depicts the entrance to King Solomon’s Temple, flanked by two pillars, terrestrial and celestial. Within the Temple is a winding staircase comprising three, five, and seven or more steps: three denoting the Master of the Lodge and the two Wardens; five denoting the five senses and also the five noble orders of architecture, which are the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite; and seven denoting the liberal arts and sciences, namely grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

This staircase leads, on the upper level, to the middle chamber of the Temple, where the Fellow Craftsmen went to receive their wages, and is allegorically the halfway point towards unity with the Divine. Indeed, above the open door of the Middle Chamber we can clearly see the Tetragrammaton, the biblical four-lettered name of God: yod, heh, waw, heh (יהוה).

The staircase turns through an angle of ninety degrees, which is important on two levels. Ninety degrees is of course a square angle, and the square is an ever-present symbol in Freemasonry. Moreoever, turning through ninety degrees as the Craftsman ascends allows him to view the surrounding objects from different angles, underscoring one principal aspect of Freemasonry: to decode the allegory of a given symbol, we need to regard that symbol from different angles, physically and figuratively.

The Third Degree

Tracing Board for 3rd Degree.

The third degree is often regarded as the true initiation. At its core, it deals with emergence from darkness to light, from life through death to rebirth, from ignorance to knowledge, from chaos to order, from despair to hope and joy. It also deals with strong bonds of true fraternity, interdependency, and love.

When the aspirant—now a Fellow Craft Freemason—is admitted to the third degree, all is in darkness. Unlike the first degree, where the aspirant was the only one in darkness due to his blindfold, here all the brethren are in darkness, except for a very faint light in the east at the Master’s pedestal. This is to emphasize that all the brethren need to take part in the ceremony to come; the Fellow Craftsman will need all the energy, all the support that he can get.

Under the care and protection of the Deacon, the Fellow Craft now perambulates the lodge in the same way as in the two preceding degrees. When that has been accomplished, he finds himself standing in the west, facing the glimmering light across the floor of the lodge. He needs to progress towards the light, literally as well as symbolically. But at his feet he may be able to see that he is standing on the brink of a grave. In order to approach light, therefore, he has to traverse the very negation of light and life, namely the ultimate symbol of death. Should he not succeed in negotiating this perilous path, the light will not be attainable. The grave over which he steps is not the grave destined to contain his own dead body, but rather the one where his own lower self now lies buried, and over which he has to walk before attaining the heights toward which he is now well advanced. Self-sacrifice and self-negation are essential before the candidate can be raised to a higher plane.

The Deacon instructs the candidate to step over the grave with three steps, from one side to the other and back again. After this, still under the guidance of the Deacon, he approaches the Master and the glimmering light; he kneels and swears a further vow, after which the Master creates, receives, and constitutes him a Master Mason. He then raises the candidate up to a standing position. Remember that all is still in nearly total darkness.

A little drama is then enacted, recounting the death of Hiram Abiff, in Masonic lore the principal architect of King Solomon’s Temple, in which three disenchanted craftsmen seek to obtain the secrets of the third degree from Hiram, threatening him with death if he refuses to communicate them. Hiram exhorts them to work hard at their task of building so that in time they may earn the right to those secrets, but it is to no avail, and Hiram is slain. The newly made Master Mason in this ceremony is made to play the part of Hiram, and when he “dies,” he is laid down onto the emblem of the grave which he earlier traversed on his journey towards light. A Masonic writer, Colin Dyer, once wrote:

As the Master was present in the lodge, his light remained, as the spiritual and moral teaching which he gave would still be with a Brother at the time of death, although those grand luminaries, the sun and moon, would no longer be of use to him. By the help of this teaching, he would triumph over death and succeed to life eternal, symbolised not only by the raising itself, but by the restoration of general light to the lodge.

Two attempts, summarizing the signs and words of the first two degrees, fail to raise Hiram from his death, but the Master of the Lodge tries a third way, which is successful. The Master now addresses the new Master Mason:

Let me now beg you to observe that the Light of a Master Mason is but darkness—visible; the darkness symbolises that mysterious veil which the eye of human reason cannot penetrate unless assisted by the Light which is from above.

These words, originally written during the Age of Enlightenment, are interesting in that, although human reason was regarded by the Enlightenment as practically sacrosanct, due observance is still paid to the power of the Divine in assisting us to penetrate the veil separating us from knowledge of our own true nature: as a divine spirit which happens to inhabit a human body.

The Master continues:

Guide your reflections to that most interesting of all human studies, the inner meaning of life, the knowledge of yourself . . . continue to listen to the voice of nature, which bears witness that even in this perishable frame resides a vital and immortal principle.

The culmination of the degree is the communication by the Master to the new Master Mason of the five points of fellowship: fraternity, support, keeping another’s wants in mind;, respecting confidences, and defending another’s character. These are accomplished by an intimate embrace.

It will be remembered that in the second degree the Fellow Craft passes into the middle chamber of King Solomon’s Temple to receive his wages. From there, having been raised to the degree of Master Mason, he proceeds to the Sanctum Sanctorum, where he symbolically stands face to face with God. Therefore in the third degree tracing board, we see the porch to the Sanctum Sanctorum, the dormer window which gives it light, and the checkered pavement of the first degree.

At the top of the board we see a sprig of acacia, which was said to mark the initial burial place of Hiram Abiff, the working tools of the third degree, which are the skirret, pencil, and compasses. We see skull and crossbones as emblems of mortality, and a plumb rule, a level, and a heavy maul, which are said to be the implements with which Hiram was slain.      

Whether by accident or design, the legend and symbolism of Freemasonry owes much to the ancient Mysteries, chief amongst them the Eleusinian and Mithraic. In the Eleusinian Mystery tradition, neophytes were initiated in stages, part of which consisted in wandering in the dark, confused and disoriented. Their subsequent purification parallels the removal of money and valuables from the Masonic aspirant before his initiation. Eleusinian initiates reported that the experience transformed them and removed the fear of death. The Eleusinian initiate was also promised benefits in the afterlife.

In the Mithraic tradition, the Mithraeum bears remarkable similarity to the Masonic Temple; both are earthly representations of the cosmos through which souls pass in their process of reincarnation or evolution. Both temples have vaulted ceilings lined with stars. The space is windowless, closed to the outside, or with strategic openings. The Mithraic temple, like the Masonic Temple, is a timeless place where mysteries are performed, members of the community are initiated, earthly matters are deliberated, and, ultimately, brotherhood among the brethren is forged. Both spaces are rectangular in form.

Mithraea often contained shallow depressions, where a coffin containing the body of the symbolically deceased brother was situated. Both Masonic and Mithraic initiations are preceded by the symbolic death of the aspirant, to be reborn leaving his profane life behind. In any case, to be initiated in either tradition, moral integrity is a must.

Another point in common between the two brotherhoods is the importance given to the gesture of shaking hands. An initiate into the mysteries of Mithras is known by the Greek term syndexios, meaning one who has exchanged the handshake. This gesture represents agreement and fraternity.

In Mithraism, the initiate undertakes not to communicate the mysteries that have been revealed during an initiation—it is Mithras himself who is the guarantor of the promises. The meaning of initiation, in both traditions, lies not in a set of actions, gestures and words, but in the experience itself, in the transformative effect of the ceremony on the aspirant.

Freemasonry remains to this day the greatest representative of a tradition, based on equality and fraternity, that binds its members together in a chain that stretches from the past and reaches into the future.

Julian Rees is a member of the International Order of Freemasonry for Men and Women, formerly known as Co-Masonry. He is the author of a number of works on Freemasonry, chief among them being More Light: Today’s Freemasonry for Men and Women and Tracing Boards of the Three Degrees in Craft Freemasonry Explained.