by Christopher Hodapp
Following the statement last week from the Vatican reaffirming the Church's longstanding prohibition of Masonic membership for Catholics, the usual platoon of online anti-Masonic wing-nuts came tumbling out onto the Intertubz to post and re-post all the usual anti-Masonic tropes and conspiracy allegations. Most are easy to ignore, or simply dispense with by citing factual information, if anyone wants to bother wasting that much time and breath. (I've got a whole book dedicated to telling the true facts about this fraternity - not that the antis care to believe it.) But one person in particular on X-formerly-Twitter has generated a lot of discussion among Masons themselves — not out of offense or anger or indignation, but out of sadness, more than anything else.
Lodge tylers everywhere should be familiar with his face and background, in case he turns up in your neck of the woods. That's his profile picture, depicting him with the Arizona state flag, but looking for all the world like he's sporting a radiant, holy halo of sanctity (or more correctly, smug sanctimony).
On his various social media pages he sports an 'America first' ball cap - perhaps he missed the details that America's first president and scores of other founding luminaries who created the Declaration of Independence and hashed out the Constitution were Freemasons. But more of his absurd phobias and errors anon.
On Tuesday this week the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge F&AM of Arizona, MW George Rusk, issued a statement concerning this incident and verifying the source as an Arizona Mason:
Exposés of Masonic ritual have existed since about ten minutes after the organization of the premiere grand lodge in London in 1717. When Samuel Pritchard's Masonry Dissected was published in 1730, the printer couldn't keep it in stock, it sold so fast (likely more to Masons themselves than the general public, to be used for learning their degree work). When the Nazis goose-stepped their way into Paris and began identifying French Masons, they shot an anti-Masonic propaganda film that exposed the ritual of the Grand Orient de France. In the Internet age, videos of Masonic ritual – either photographed surreptitiously, or recreated by former Masons themselves – have been circulated before. And fully typed-out Masonic rituals themselves have been posted on the web since at least the 1980s. Masonic "secrecy" has never really been about hiding our initiatic rituals from the outside world, and the various attempts to embarrass us or somehow make us apoplectic over being "exposed" don't really give us fitful nights fretting about it.
There's a certain aspect of these incidents that's always been comical. On the one hand, many comments responding to Kyle's videos have been soaked with the usual allegations of soul-destroying spookiness, Devil-worship, Satanic symbols, along with a raft of offensively anti-Jewish rhetoric, claiming the rituals are anti-Christian blasphemies and that Masons are really just evil Jews or their willing henchmen in the whole "global domination" fantasy.
Young-shaver-me-lad and "undercover journalist" Kyle alleged in his posts, "The masonic oath & penalties are sworn over, essentially a Jewish Talmud. The 3 lamps are illuminated to mock our Holy Trinity." Such accusers believe Masons to be all-powerful, world-controlling, bald-headed, cat-stroking super villains. On the other hand, the same commenters go on to say the whole thing is a bunch of silliness, giggling over a group of middle-class guys engaging in bad acting and spouting mumbo jumbo. Puffy flyover-country Protestants who secretly pretend to be Moloch-worshiping Old Testament Hebrew priests.
So what are we – malevolent, all-powerful evildoers, moronic dupes, or suburban backyard vaudevillians? I'm confused.
Of course, Kyle himself seemed more preoccupied with the colossal prank he was pulling than in actually paying any attention to the ritual and lectures he went through when he joined. If he actually looked at the book that he took his own obligation upon, I'll bet fifty quatloos and a groat that it was a King James Version of the complete Holy Bible, and not the "Jewish Talmud" (which would be a neat trick anyway, since the last complete Talmud I saw a couple of years back filled ten large hardback volumes and about two feet of bookshelf real estate – and Masonic altars aren't usually that big). Or perhaps he mis-typed and meant the Tenach, the Hebrew origin of the Old Testament.
In any case, it appears that he never bothered to discover that his very own version of the Bible (presuming he actually owns one) also includes the Old Testament. A subsequent video he shot depicts a large family heirloom-type King James Bible on the lodge altar, customized as a gift for Freemasons with introductory pages explaining many biblical passages and unfamiliar archaic terms that appear in Masonic ritual. It's not any sort of bizarrely edited or abridged "Masonic Bible," which he would know if he had actually checked the full text and table of contents. But perhaps he's just unfamiliar with reading Biblical text. If he had, he'd know there's an awful lot it has to say about deceivers.
In light of that, who in their right mind would ever trust him now? Who'd hire him as an employee, knowing that he lies on applications, can't be trusted to keep anything private just because he was asked to do so, and makes up his own version of situational ethics? What boss would have him? What friend can ever trust him? What spouse would ever believe him?
The truth about Masonic secrecy ever since the very beginning of the fraternity is that it's about honor. In the end, everything civilized human beings do requires honor, because your word has got to be your bond. Civilization depends on it. If you say one thing but do the opposite, society will eventually get the message and turn its back on you. If you can't keep something as dumb and trivial as a handshake or a password a secret simply because someone asked you to, how can you be trusted in anything else you say or do?
Zealous people determined to tear down Freemasonry for their own religious purposes will never be convinced that quite literally millions of Masons from 1717 up to today would never voluntarily join – and stick with – anything that was evil, sacrilegious, nefarious, or remotely ‘satanic’. Among the millions of men who have become Freemasons over three centuries have been thousands of devout Christian clergymen, and possibly hundreds of Jewish rabbis, Muslim imams, and countless other priests and leaders from among the world’s major religions. To believe that those men in particular would have any desire to belong to an organization that openly or surreptitiously engages in activities that propagate the worship, glorification or veneration of Satan – or any other spiritually evil entity of any stripe – is a completely unhinged delusion. Masonic ritual encourages every man to study his own faith, to participate in his own religion's congregation, to consult the ancient texts deemed to be holy by his own religion to find his path to eternal salvation. That includes Kyle. Freemasonry is not a religion, nor are we a path to a glorious resurrection and afterlife. And we've never claimed to be.
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This is a fictional, spooky movie, boys and girls - not a Masonic meeting. |
The fraternity occasionally has attracted men who really are hunting the spooky-ooky dressing up in black robes, chanting backwards in bad schoolboy Latin, burning incense and sacrificing the big-breasted blonde virgin on the altar stuff they've seen in bad 60's Hammer horror films (usually led by Christopher Lee). If they actually get as far as going through the very real Masonic degree rituals, they're bitterly disappointed to find out that we really aren't raising the dead and worshipping some hoary old demiurge after all.
Once the dust settles, Kyle will doubtless be expeditiously expelled from the fraternity (if he hasn't already quit or been booted out by his lodge and the grand lodge). And, contrary to what his cheering "I've exposed the Masons!" audience might childishly believe, that will be the sum total of the "penalties" he will suffer. Because, as he was doubtless told during his degrees, those "bloody penalties" he was "threatened with" during the "Masonic blood oaths" are purely symbolic, and have been from the start of the fraternity. Actually, they were rooted in what began as disfiguring penalties in medieval European history which prevented a man's body from being buried in the consecrated ground of a churchyard.
Catholic churchyards, I might add.
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