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If you're in the States, don't be offended if they defer it until later at someone's home. A lot of US lodges are dry for no good reason.
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Sep 7, 2016 14:47
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Cimber posted:Why, are shriners known to bend an elbow or two? It is, in essence, their purpose for existing. That and supporting children and burn victims.
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Sep 17, 2016 02:40
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Cimber posted:Why not? Not going to argue, just wondering why they don't want code books open in lodge. The code book is a great code, almost uncrackable, because you can only read the code if you already know what it says. If you're using it to follow along, you can circumvent this. The code book is meant to ensure that people who know what it says can read it, and people who don't can't, and bringing it into open lodge breaks its encryption. Some jurisdictions, many, only do the catechism "mouth to ear," meaning a preceptor or mentor will help you memorize it. The code book is for after you've already proven proficient, so you can double check or remind yourself in 20 years. Edit: I moved from GL of OH which is F&AM to GL of MD which is AF&AM and have code books for both, but AF&AM is slightly different, different enough that I can't do it, which is rather unfortunate. I should probably go through a catechism with a crew at some point. Hell, I should probably go back to Lodge at some point. We had a WM who was extremely all about Jesus and it turned me off of it a bit, and then I got busy on lodge nights and now just haven't been for a long time even though my schedule freed up. Paramemetic fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Sep 30, 2016 |
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Sep 30, 2016 00:37
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Cimber posted:whats the difference between AF & AM and F&AM? One letter. It just has to do with whether those particular grand lodges were founded with charters from the Ancient or Premier Grand Lodge of England prior to the United Grand Lodge being formed in 1813. So in the US it's a toss up whether a given blue lodge will be Ancient Free & Accepted or just Free & Accepted. There are some minor phrasing differences in the work, but nothing substantial. Minor changes in the way the lodge is conducted but again nothing major. It just means I'd have to relearn the lectures and so on for the small changes in phrasing. The main thing that was disappointing to me is that apparently Maryland is a slideshow state, and I was fortunate to have my first degree lecture done in a very special, unique way by a real scholar of it, which cannot be done here as the lectures have to be done in a format ratified by the GL, which in MD means a very specific format that I'm' not keen on. Oh welp tho.
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Sep 30, 2016 04:49
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COOL CORN posted:I have so many questions. Are non-LA Masons welcome? Or maybe non-LA Scottish Rite Masons? With very few exceptions a Master Mason can visit any lodge being held in that degree or below, and generally just in case most grand lodges will offer a traveling papers as a letter of introduction to give to the Tyler, who after challenging appropriately will let one in. For example I've sat in lodge in Ireland for a first degree which is radically different from the US, and enjoyed it. The signs, words, and tokens are also all different, but they're aware enough of other masonry that they accepted. UGLE is the only lodge I know of that is strictly by invitation and there are understandable reasons for that. So you should be able to visit a lodge in LA is what I'm saying.
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Sep 30, 2016 14:53
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Colonial Air Force posted:Half naked, even Half!?
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Oct 3, 2016 14:38
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Those tattoos will be fine in ways you don't even know right now.
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Oct 21, 2016 01:19
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Every time I've seen a third done more than one person at a time, they do the second half individually for each one, just the obligation and lecture are done as a group. Doing the second half of the third as a group without the proper initiatic experience rather defeats the point in my opinion.
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Dec 14, 2016 16:30
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Emron posted:I have NO idea how they'd do MM with multiples. My lodge always does one at a time for all ritual sections, but we bring all the guys together for the lecture and charge. I agree with you, and spoke strongly against multiples for ritual sections in my lodge. I think it depends on how your jurisdiction handles it, also. In Ohio you do the obligation and so on then leave and come back and do the second half. So if there are multiples you just bring them back individually one at a time. There may be an abridged version that kind of rushes the stations, I'm not sure, I've only seen that in Kentucky. Regardless, I'd rather pace multiple people over multiple days than rush through a bunch. From the esoteric/psychological perspective rather than just the "yer joinin' a club!" perspective, the actual motions of the ritual are important and symbolically significant and the actual experience of it first hand is part of the experience. I would further hold, at the risk of unorthodoxy, that it is the experience of the initiation ritual, in conjunction with the obligation and oath, that makes a man a Mason, not the edict of the Lodge (in the technical sense, of course whether a man is a Mason or not is more complicated in the philosophical sense). There are certain psychological and emotional experiences that go along with initiations not just in Masonry but in all mystery traditions (and Masonry is, at its core, a mystery tradition). I suspect it would border on violating my obligation to discuss in much more detail, but as an exercise for the reader you can imagine that the fundamental elements of liminality, transition and transformation are all present. The ritual itself creates a state of liminality, and without the symbolic liminal state and the resolution of it the experience is not the same. If we are bound together as brothers based on having a shared set of experiences, based on having done it the same way since time immemorial, then I would hold that it is that experience that binds us, and not merely the recitation of oaths. For that reason, I think that anything other than the proper conveyance of the ritual with the initiate actively engaged is at best depriving of the "real experience," and at worst should not be considered legitimate. It's also, incidentally, among the reasons why I haven't pursued the Scottish Rite - watching a play does not a ritual make. That said I'm still considering otherwise, but I'm not active enough right now to really think about it so much. I'll also add that I've had the opportunity to see a third degree in the style of UGLE and it is completely different in huge ways from the US, and I find that fascinating and peculiar. Similarly I've seen an Irish first degree which I believe is done in the style of UGLE and it also was very very different. So I don't know that there is some kind of universal unity based on the exact ritual, but I will say that both of those degrees I've had the privilege to attend were comprised of the same ritual elements that make it effectual on the initiate's psyche, whereas the "one day class" "watch a movie" method does not.
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Dec 14, 2016 17:39
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I have a piece of Tungsten with a MM symbol on it. Nothing fancy, cost 20 bucks, identifies me as a Mason. I wear it when I travel abroad, through security, etc. as well as when I attend suit and tie type functions but not usually anymore (I did when I was new), and sometimes in my hometown which I happily can now recognize as regular, though not all the time. And obviously when I go to Lodge. It has led to brothers identifying me and vice versa a few times and to at least one hilarious conversation with a patient in a psych hospital who was not at all surprised to find I was part of the Illuminati - I think he was less surprised than I was about that revelation. I don't think it's tacky unless it's the kind of like 96 karat blue and gold gigantic obtrusive ring visible from low orbit of the stereotypes. Something like this ring isn't nearly as obnoxious as some, I wouldn't consider it tacky. (price is a bit high, this can be found cheaper elsewhere) In fact all of the ones on that page are okay. There are some out there that are just covered in Masonic symbols that aren't even coherent because almost all tungsten products come from China and they aren't usually brethren. But yeah, you've earned it, you certainly can wear it.
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Dec 17, 2016 15:46
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Dick Nipples posted:A lot of the steel/tungsten rings are really subtle and clean but it's important to remember that if you break your finger, you may lose it as a hospital is not always equipped to cut off those industrial metals. A hospital is always equipped for this kind of thing, it doesn't take specialist equipment. The concern is more the risk of entanglement in machinery. EMTs are also generally unequipped to handle this alone, but rescue apparatus usually can. The important thing to remember when removing tungsten is that you have to crush it, not cut it. You cannot cut it, but applying pressure to it will cause it to shatter. It can be accomplished with a vice grip. This depends on people recognizing that the ring is tungsten but we tend to be pretty good about recognizing that now. In any case with the exception of an entanglement there is rarely a scenario where we have to urgently extricate a finger so quickly that we can't take time to do it right versus amputation, which is never done in the field.
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Dec 17, 2016 17:00
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In the US there are definitely entire regions where owning your own suit is strictly reserved for the extremely wealthy. Having a strict requirement of a tuxedo essentially blocks brothers from lower social strata which is really contrary to the aims of the Order if you ask me. My mother lodge was in such a region, and so instead just requested people wear their Sunday dress. Whatever you'd wear to church. If I wore my best clothes I would've been essentially class-shaming brothers whose best clothes were a shirt with a collar and maybe a tie, so I normally opted for a sport jacket and shirt with tie and called it good. At my current lodge, officers wear tuxedos and while I understand the importance of this generally I don't care for it much. It does seem class prohibitive, sending the message "if you can't afford a tux, you can't be an officer at this lodge." Part of that, I admit, comes from my mother lodge, where if you wore a tuxedo and were anything less than a grand lodge officer, you were showing off.
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Mar 15, 2017 15:08
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Immanentized posted:See, that's what I'm concerned about, I'm a relatively well-off east coaster joining a lodge in a big(ger) midwest city with a lot of blue collar members of the older generations. If I show up in my fitted suit I might send some negative vibes and make myself into an archetype. Yeah, what your sponsors said are the way to go. Sport coat is a good bet. I think I wore a suit the first night but it doesn't matter much really, just the clean underwear bit. If you hadn't had word from your sponsors I might've suggested doing it job interview style: one step up from whatever the lodge officers wore for your interview. Let us know how it goes. Every post in this thread makes me want to start attending Lodge again.
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Mar 15, 2017 20:52
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Ohio also has weird questions on lodge applications like "have you ever been a member of or sympathetic to the communist party" which is a strange question for an apolitical body but that's America for you.
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Mar 15, 2018 16:15
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Emron posted:This is, uh, not true. Was when I went through, was part of the paperwork I filled out in my interview. If it's changed since then I'm happy. Might have also been something for the lodge itself? I'm not meaning it as a criticism so much as a "things got weird because of the cold war" comment.
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Mar 15, 2018 17:08
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I wonder how many US Grand Lodges are about to make themselves clandestine by derecognition of UGLE.
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Aug 1, 2018 15:29
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Depends, how much time has been spent talking about Propaganda Due and like all this weird fringe poo poo? I usually get off on the conspiracy theory stuff, personally, and how often P2 is brought up is a great pulse check for the real good  
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Sep 19, 2018 02:39
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Nessus posted:Much higher incident of goat-related crimes though, you have to admit. Never admit. Remember your oath!!
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Sep 26, 2018 06:32
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It's a common discussion yeah. I wonder if, for example, Oddfellows, Elks, etc. see similar declines? I'm not inclined to consider Elks or Moose or so on as the same thing, either. Oddfellows is very much similar. I suspect Masonry would contract to a situation like we see in some occult organizations, OTO, etc. which are small but very real. But of course very large grand lodges with a lot of funding and power aren't content to shrink. I'm happy for Masonry to shrink, I find the recent advertising approach and the semi-active recruiting thing a bit distasteful. The focus should be on Masons and taking care of our own, and if we slowly are dying off and shrinking and so on, that's what that is. I don't think we ever needed to be millions in number.
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Sep 27, 2018 22:35
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Ask in here I guess? There are fake lodges out there but they fall under two categories. Confusingly, both are called "clandestine" in Mason-speak. Some people set up their own fake lodges to make money on our name. These are usually small and strange, and will have extremely ridiculous long names. This is fairly common in the Southern US. The other kind of lodge is one that has been deemed irregular for whatever reason. For example, France is full of lodges that are irregular and so "fake" to the main body of Masonry. Basically if you want someone to check out a Lodge in here I'm sure someone would be happy to do. From within the organization it's a pretty straightforward affair that we can accomplish with a range of difficulty from "looking at the website" to "asking our secretary to send a letter." Not a big deal.
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Jan 28, 2019 15:58
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Essentially if they were created without a real charter or if they violate the charter by falling out of regularity or if they get in a spat with another grand lodge that declares them irregular by edict. So yeah, lodges that started changing rituals or started changing rules so that they fell out of accord or so on. In the US most irregular lodges are fraudulent, for example. Just a guy setting up a copycat operation without a charter to grift. You see this a lot in the South. In Europe you have co-masonry which liberalizes a bit (for example the making women masons thing) which is always clandestine. Then you have the political spats between a revolving door of French lodges that fall in and out of regularity with UGLE. There are also lodges that will start adding extra rules that violate the spirit of masonry (by endorsing political views, for example, or specific religions). Generally if you're traveling it's best to check with your own secretary before visiting a lodge. When in doubt and that's not possible you can ask to see the charter which should say what grand lodge is over that lodge. Grand lodges also need historic charters. In the US, for example, the difference between the F&AM and AF&AM grand lodges is about whether they got their charters from the Antient Grand Lodge of England or the Grand Lodge of Scotland. I don't think any got theirs from the Grand Lodge of Ireland. As a total aside, Grand Lodge of Ireland's degree work is wild.
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Mar 27, 2019 00:07
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Ataxerxes posted:Ah, the Prince Hall are the Africa-American lodges that were founded when many of the US lodges were white-only, if I understood correctly? I can see why that would be one heck of an issue today. Finland had a period of time (1920's-1950's) when the Grand Lodge of Sweden didn't recognize the Finnish lodges, but that is long past. The Prince Hall thing is specifically legitimate lodges chartered by the Antient Grand Lodge of England that share jurisdiction with regional grand lodges. The reason it's controversial is that grand lodges are supposed to be sovereign over territories, but Prince Hall lodges weren't chartered under the grand lodges of those areas and for a long time racism kept them separate. Now most states have mutual recognition with their Prince Hall counterparts but some southern states do not while the other states recognize both GLs. It gets a bit dicey. I'd be interested to hear about whatever story there is to tell. My understanding is Sweden is explicitly Christian and not just monotheistic, is that true? Some other bits about the monarchy get involved there too, yeah?
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Mar 28, 2019 00:59
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Emron posted:The whole thing is loving dumb and an artifact of racist social structures. Just my two cents. Agreed but the solution is integrating grand lodges which would require GLs or PHGLs to give up their sovereignty which is kind of an ask.
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Apr 3, 2019 00:11
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I wouldn't blackball an OTO member but OTO rituals haven't corresponded to Masonry in a long time. The UGLE told Crowley he had to change his first three degrees like forever ago.
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Apr 30, 2019 16:59
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To add a little bit more historical blah blah to that, Crowley was a Mason of questionable regularity, having been made a Mason in Mexico. He was at least considered regular enough to sit in Lodge in India, and he writes about it rather casually in his autobiography in the chapters related to his attempts to climb K2, if I recall correctly. In structuring the OTO, he wanted initiatic rituals. He himself had gone through the Golden Dawn rituals, which are markedly similar to the first three Masonic degrees already. When I was in Ireland I was able to effortlessly read W.B. Yeat's Golden Dawn cipher, between he Masonic degree work and just a little bit of knowledge to fill in the gaps. So Crowley wanted to be distinct from Golden Dawn, but not so distinct as to have to come up with something entirely new. He chose to go the Mormon route and basically use the first three degrees of Masonry as the basis on which OTO degrees would be built. I want to say he also attributed this use to Ascended Masters and that the basic idea, which likely would've been popular enough at the time, was that the Masonic degrees had Ascended Master provenance and represented actual things practiced at the building of the Temple. In any case, UGLE basically found out that he was conferring the first three Masonic degrees without a charter and C&D'd him. He edited the rituals substantially, if I recall correctly claiming this was out of brotherly obligation, though realistically because he would gain no favors being excommunicated, as many of his friends and associates would have been Masons as well.
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May 1, 2019 13:48
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Esoteric Masonry is out of vogue but it's certainly still a thing. Aleister Crowley's original stuff included the first three degrees until UGLE told him to knock it off. They're pretty sympatico, but it's by no means a focus of modern Masonry.
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Nov 15, 2019 05:22
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thehandtruck posted:Hey thread, got a few questions for ya: Depends on what you means by "too conservative." If you mean it in the sense of ceremonial magicians, where "we can't do this initiation because we don't have the brain of an eagle or a belt made of literal lion's skin" then no, not too conservative in that sense. The performance of the ritual must be done unerringly, though they'll just correct it rather than repeat it, since almost all the rituals are initiations. However, the materials that are mandatory are pretty common. The more pernicious kind of conservatism that is likely to bother you is the "we just do this ritual because we do it but lmao magic isn't a thing" kind. quote:I'm quite interested in hermeticism/alchemy and even looking into joining a nearby Order of The Golden Dawn temple which seem to have weirder people who I might feel more at home with. The only problem is those practices seem a bit too wild, and I don't really find myself believing in those too strongly either. I'm much more orthopractic, the ritual itself is what's useful, not what any of the ritual elements represent. In the West we tend to think of initiation as the driver's license, rather than the learner's permit, but it's worth pointing out here that you shouldn't have strong belief in initiatory rites that you haven't experienced. You don't have any information by which to judge a mystery school, so having a lot of faith in it before having even the first initiation would be a bit weird, frankly. I'm not a Golden Dawn initiate and would definitely go to some lengths to check the bona fides of such lodges simply because Golden Dawn had such a rough go in the early 1900s and essentially died off. I think most existing Golden Dawn inspired orders are just cribbing off Regardie's book. The issue here is mostly about whether or not you consider the brotherhood, the being an order, to be important to you. Freemasonry you absolutely get at least a few hundred years of connection. quote:poo poo I don't know. Neither seem to be the right fit? Maybe because I don't know where I stand. I guess I'd be fine with FMs as long as they didn't make fun of other religions or practices like hermeticism/etc. I'm just afraid it will be a bunch of old conservative people who take a super normative stance on things (as my grandfather most likely was). Freemasonry as a magical order really isn't a thing so much anymore, and probably wasn't much of a thing when your grandfather was. It's difficult to date both because of the closed nature of lodges and the unchanging nature of the ritual, but I'd say Masonry stopped being a magical order and started being more of a social fraternity or "society with secrets" in the 1930s and 1940s, when it surged in membership because of the war. This is also when its size led lodges to focus on maintaining members and why there are so many lodges now. In many ways, Masonry's dwindling membership today is a course correction, not a problem, but that's kind of an aside for brothers reading. The rituals do maintain their hermetic roots and you can absolutely go through them and pick out a ton of occult philosophy. Those parts aren't there because they are cargo-culted in, rather the opposite: Freemasonry and its rituals predate most other things. It's such a thing that when I was in Ireland and had the opportunity to visit a display of W B Yeats' personal effects, I could read his Golden Dawn cypher book as plainly as any Masonic book, with some few exceptions on keywords that were based in Golden Dawn rather than Masonic ritual. Masonry today does not do the kind of operations you're talking about. The ritual work is pretty much limited to the initiations, with the exception that "every meeting is a ritual" or so on. It's not really a magical order per se, but it is a good foundation for personal magical work, and is of interest to someone familiar with Hermeticism or Rosicrucianism. And there'd be no reason you couldn't find like minds within Freemasonry to do experiments and operations with, but it would not be something you'd likely stumble into.
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Feb 16, 2020 15:57
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thehandtruck posted:Thank you so much for the thoughtful responses everyone. Oh, in that case, heavily regional but leaning towards conservative, yes. quote:"In many ways, Masonry's dwindling membership today is a course correction, not a problem, but that's kind of an aside for brothers reading." I would be ecstatic to hear your take on this as I have my own theories but I doubt they're accurate. They are hot takes, but it's basically about history and the need groups like Freemasonry fill and the situation we find ourselves in globally. In the 1700s Freemasonry served as a structure and system in which people could experiment with ideas that would not be accepted outside. You have closed meetings that are well protected and inside those meetings people who might not be entirely loyal to a king, for example, or people with religious or philosophical ideas not entirely in accord with Rome, could share and engage with and indulge those ideas and exchange information and ideas freely. The organization had a Hermetic philosophical basis that would have been novel to many of the people being initiated therein. The system is set up to be heavily guarded - a single black ball denying membership is a safeguard not just against having some random criminal join but against people who people don't feel safe around. This changed over time, as Freemasonry became more accepted, and so on. What's the book? A Pilgrim's Path? I think that's it - it would give a much better review of the history than I can and much more knowledgeable; it's been a few years since I read it. Anyhow, in times of war Masonic connections were also useful. There are all sorts of stories of Masons helping one another out during the Civil War for example, and anecdotes of it in WW1. Masons generally makes provisions for taking care of widows, and so it's an important thing for a man being shipped off to war. In the Post-War era, it was about filling the social niche that battle buddies and squad mates would fill. Outside the structure of the military and now returned to civilian life, men still wanted to be a part of a group. This is an innate thing for people, we're not meant to be atomized. We want to be part of a group. Masonry fulfills that need. It's also nice to know I can go anywhere in the world and find the Masons and have people who in theory will take care of my as if they were my literal brother and vice versa, it certainly feels that way everywhere I've traveled in Western world, but I don't know what Masonry looks like in India for example as I never got a chance to stop at lodge there. The declining membership is mostly old people who joined during the Post-War period dying off, and not being replaced nearly as quickly. In part this is because in-group membership can be replaced largely with online interactions. In part it's because Freemasonry, for all its history of being a place where revolutionaries could meet under cover, is largely apolitical and being apolitical means assenting to a status quo that is increasingly untenable and becomes increasingly conservative, and not in the good way. There are a lot of factors in play, but the main one I was talking about was "all the post-war boomers dying off means it's becoming a small society again where the bonds between brothers will be far tighter and because it will only attract a certain type we will soon know what that type is." quote:I'm moving in a few days and driving back home from signing the lease there was a lodge across the street so maybe I'll stop by and spark up a conversation....(edit: oh wow it's a really big temple, not a lodge!) Well one of the things that happened with the huge surge in membership and Masonry becoming big enough to basically run towns with its political clout for a season is that a lot of lodges bought really ostentatious buildings that are far too much. Historical Masonry often met in the upper rooms of pubs. There isn't much secret about the giant building with a Masonic seal on it! But there are some temples that are big as hell, Scottish Rite for example has a bigass building down town in my hometown. In Ohio one lodge has their space in a giant building... the other, my mother lodge, leases its lower levels out to a NAPA. The money situation is tight because old guys dying off means less income in the form of dues. quote:Oh and I guess one more question: I started watching Lodge 49 which was mentioned in this thread and has a lot of fun Jungian archetypes and symbology which I guess are obvious to you guys. Anyway I found it really strange to see powerful spiritual imagery on the walls in their bar right next to Natty Light neon signs and such. Was that weird for anyone else or is that normal, or maybe that's part of the show where the lodge feels really run down and dead? I looked at a lodge a while back to rent their space for an event and there were a lot of carpet stains in the main room. Maybe that's an anomaly or part of the declining membership issue. *shrug* Haven't seen any of Lodge 49. Symbolism and such is workable for Masons, remember though that our ritual had been established and our order long since no longer a magical order by the time Jung was writing. He was writing about our stuff, not vice versa, basically. Having spiritual imagery next to your bar though... why not? If I were making a TV show about Hermeticists that would be a great way to juxtapose the higher and lower realms, yeah? As above, so below, and all that good stuff. Sometimes VITRIOL means going to the bar, but when do you stop being a magician, is a big question to ask when touching to this kind of thing. Sub Rosa posted:Golden Dawn isn't a fit then. OTO could be. Sub Rosa has a tremendous amount of direct experience with these organizations and where I do not, so this is probably extremely good advice, I want to say.
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Feb 17, 2020 06:54
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Solvent posted:Wait a minute, does this mean that Texas has a real claim on jurisdiction over the moon? Yep.
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Sep 26, 2021 13:03
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Probably the most direct route and the most likely to have a streamlined and easy process would be to figure out what lodge your grandpa was a member of and contact that lodge directly, identifying yourself as his grandson and telling them more or less exactly what you posted here. If you have access to his collection of masonic paraphernalia there's almost certainly something if not a lot of things with the right lodge number on it.
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Nov 15, 2022 00:36
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Lodges that upgrade to full color are not honoring our traditions and should be made clandestine. George Washington took his oath in black and white after all!!!!!!!!
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Nov 6, 2023 21:07
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I would say there's not much to gain as a hard line agnostic. Gonna agree with Sub Rosa here. I'm a Buddhist but I can make it work and there's not supposed to be an investigation into what your conception of it is, but the answer should be honest and if you're not meeting that requirement explicitly I might reconsider why you're interested in joining. I'll also say that the amputation thing is generally not going to be a problem but if you were looking into it I'd be up front about that. At the time of my initiation in a neighboring state, West Virginia explicitly forbade making a member of anyone with any sort of amputation under fairly dated interpretation of fairly niche language specific to their ritual. I am not going to launch into apologetics for this because I think it's silly and a lot of other grand lodges do too but it's a thing. Not knowing where you are, it's impossible to say that it would absolutely be fine, though it seems more likely than not that your bigger issue is whether you can honestly and without mental evasion or deception of mind answer the question of whether you believe in a creator god.
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Nov 22, 2023 08:44
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Most lodges have upgraded to CT but we're all beholden to tradition
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Nov 25, 2023 03:23
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